The Stardance Trilogy (2 page)

I know, on an intellectual and academic level, just about all there is to know about dance, and I could not categorize or classify or even really comprehend the dance she danced that afternoon. I saw it, I even appreciated it, but I was not equipped to understand it. My camera dangled from the end of my arm, next to my jaw. Dancers speak of their “center,” the place their motion centers around, often quite near the physical center of gravity. You strive to “dance from your center,” and the “contraction-and-release” idea which underlies so much of Modern dance depends on the center for its focus of energy. Shara’s center seemed to move about the room under its own power, trailing limbs that attached to it by choice rather than necessity. What’s the word for the outermost part of the sun, the part that still shows in an eclipse? Corona? That’s what her limbs were: four lengthy tongues of flame that followed the center in its eccentric, whirling orbit, writhing fluidly around its surface. That the lower two frequently contacted the floor seemed coincidental—indeed the other two touched the floor nearly as regularly.

There were other students dancing. I know this because the two automatic videocameras, unlike me, did their job and recorded the piece as a whole. It was called
Birthing
, and depicted the formation of a galaxy that ended up resembling Andromeda. It was not an accurate literal portrayal, but it wasn’t intended to be. Symbolically, it felt like the birth of a galaxy.

In retrospect. At the time I was aware only of the galaxy’s heart: Shara. Students occluded her from time to time, and I simply never noticed. It hurt to watch her.

If you know anything about dance, this must all sound horrid to you. A dance about a nebula? I know, I know. It’s a ridiculous notion. And it worked. In the most gut-level, cellular way it worked—save only that Shara was too good for those around her. She did not belong in that eager crew of awkward, half-trained apprentices. It was like listening to the late Steveland Wonder trying to work with a pickup band in a Montreal bar.

But that wasn’t what hurt.

Le Maintenant was Shabby, but the food was good and the house brand of grass was excellent. Show a Diner’s Club card in there and Fat Humphrey’d show you a galley full of dirty dishes. It’s gone now. Norrey and Shara declined a toke, but in my line of work it helps. Besides, I needed a few hits. How to tell a lovely lady her dearest dream is hopeless?

I didn’t need to ask Shara to know that her dearest dream was to dance. More: to dance professionally. I have often speculated on the motives of the professional artist. Some seek the narcissistic assurance that others will actually pay cash to watch or hear them. Some are so incompetent or disorganized that they can support themselves in no other way. Some have a message which they feel needs expressing. I suppose most artists combine aspects of all three. This is not complaint—what they do for us is necessary. We should be grateful that there
are
motives.

But Shara was one of the rare ones. She danced because she simply needed to. She needed to say things which could be said in no other way, and she needed to take her meaning and her living from the saying of them. Anything else would have demeaned and devalued the essential statement of her dance. I knew this, from watching that one dance.

Between toking up and keeping my mouth full and then toking again (a mild amount to offset the slight down that eating brings), it was over half an hour before I was required to say anything beyond an occasional grunted response to the luncheon chatter of the ladies. As the coffee arrived, Shara looked me square in the eye and said, “Do you talk, Charlie?”

She was Norrey’s sister, all right.

“Only inanities.”

“No such thing. Inane people, maybe.”

“Do you enjoy dancing, Ms. Drummond?”

She answered seriously. “Define enjoy.”

I opened my mouth and closed it, perhaps three times. You try it.

“And for God’s sake tell me why you’re so intent on not talking to me. You’ve got me worried.”

“Shara!” Norrey looked dismayed.

“Hush. I want to know.”

I took a crack at it. “Shara, before he died I had the privilege of meeting Bertram Ross. I had just seen him dance. A producer who knew and liked me took me backstage, the way you take a kid to see Santa Claus. I had expected him to look older offstage, at rest. He looked younger, as if that incredible motion of his was barely in check. He talked to me. After a while I stopped opening my mouth, because nothing ever came out.”

She waited, expecting more. Only gradually did she comprehend the compliment and its dimension. I had assumed it would be obvious. Most artists
expect
to be complimented. When she did twig, she did not blush or simper. She did not cock her head and say, “Oh, come on.” She did not say, “You flatter me.” She did not look away.

She nodded slowly and said, “Thank you, Charlie. That’s worth a lot more than idle chatter.” There was a suggestion of sadness in her smile, as if we shared a bitter joke.

“You’re welcome.”

“For heaven’s sake, Norrey, what are you looking so upset about?”

The cat now had Norrey’s tongue.

“She’s disappointed in me,” I said. “I said the wrong thing.”

“That was the wrong thing?”

“It should have been ‘Ms. Drummond, I think you ought to give up dancing.’”

“It should have been ‘Shara, I think you ought’…what?”

“Charlie—” Norrey began.

“I was supposed to tell you that we can’t all be professional dancers, that they also surf who only sand and wade. Shara, I was supposed to tell you to dump the dance—before it dumps you.”

In my need to be honest with her, I had been more brutal than was necessary, I thought. I was to learn that bluntness never dismayed Shara Drummond. She demanded it.

“Why you?” was all she said.

“We’re inhabiting the same vessel, you and I. We’ve both got an itch that our bodies just won’t let us scratch.”

Her eyes softened. “What’s your itch?”

“The same as yours.”

“Eh?”

“The man was supposed to come and fix the phone on Thursday. My roommate Karen and I had an all-day rehearsal. We left a note. Mister telephone man, we had to go out, and we sure couldn’t call you, heh heh. Please get the key from the concierge and come on in; the phone’s in the bedroom. The phone man never showed up. They never do.” My hands seemed to be shaking. “We came up the back stairs from the alley. The phone was still dead, but I never thought to take down the note on the front door. I got sick the next morning. Cramps. Vomiting. Karen and I were just friends, but she stayed home to take care of me. I suppose on a Friday night the note seemed even more plausible. He slipped the lock with a piece of plastic, and Karen came out of the kitchen as he was unplugging the stereo. He was so indignant he shot her. Twice. The noise scared him; by the time I got there he was halfway out the door. He just had time to put a slug though my hip joint, and then he was gone. They never got him. They never even came to fix the phone.” My hands were under control now. “Karen was a damned good dancer, but I was better. In my head I still am.”

Her eyes were round. “You’re not Charlie…Charles
Armstead
.”

I nodded.

“Oh my God. So that’s where you went.”

I was shocked by how shocked she looked. It brought me back from the cold and windy border of self-pity. I began a little to pity her again. I should have guessed the depth of her empathy. And in the way that really mattered, we were too damned alike—we
did
share the same bitter joke. I wondered why I had wanted to shock her.

“They couldn’t repair the joint?” she asked softly.

“I can walk splendidly if asymmetrically. Given a strong enough motivation, I can even run short distances. I can’t dance worth a damn.”

“So you became a video man.”

“Three years ago. People who know both video and dance are about as common as hen’s teeth these days. Oh, they’ve been taping dance since the ’70s—usually with the imagination of a network news cameraman. If you film a stage play with two cameras in the orchestra pit, is it a movie?”

“You try to do for dance what the movie camera did for drama?”

“It’s a pretty fair analogy. Where it breaks down is that dance is more analogous to music than to drama. You can’t stop and start it easily, or go back and retake a scene that didn’t go in the can right, or reverse the chronology to get a tidy shooting schedule. The event happens and you record it. What I am is what the record industry pays top dollar for: a mix-man with savvy enough to know which ax is wailing at the moment and mike it high—and the sense to have given the heaviest dudes the best mikes. There are few others like me. I’m the best.”

She took it the way she had the compliment to herself—at face value. Usually when I say things like that, I don’t give a damn what reaction I get, or I’m being salty and hoping for outrage. But I was pleased at her acceptance, pleased enough to bother me. A faint irritation made me go brutal again,
knowing
it wouldn’t work. “So what all this leads to is that Norrey was hoping I’d suggest some similar form of sublimation for you. Because I’ll make it in dance before you will.”

She stubborned up. “I don’t buy that, Charlie. I know what you’re talking about, I’m not a fool, but I think I can beat it.”

“Sure you will. You’re too damned big, lady. You’ve got tits like both halves of a prize honeydew melon and an ass that any actress in Hollywood would sell her parents for and in Modern dance that makes you d-e-d dead, you haven’t got a chance. Beat it? You’ll beat your head in first, how’m I doing, Norrey?”

“For Christ’s sake, Charlie!”

I softened. I can’t work Norrey into a tantrum—I like her too much. It almost kept us living together, once. “I’m sorry, hon. My leg’s giving me the mischief, and I’m stinkin’ mad. She ought to make it—and she won’t. She’s your sister, and so it saddens you. Well I’m a total stranger, and it enrages me.”

“How do you think it makes me feel?” Shara blazed, startling us both. I hadn’t known she had so much voice. “So you want me to pack it in and rent me a camera, huh, Charlie? Or maybe sell apples outside the studio?” A ripple ran up her jaw. “Well I’ll be damned by all the gods in southern California before I’ll pack it in. God gave me the large economy size, but there is not a surplus pound on it and it fits me like a glove and I can by Jesus dance it and I will. You may be right—I may beat my head in first. But I will get it done.” She took a deep breath. “Now I thank you for your kind intentions, Char…Mister Armst…oh shit.” The tears came and she left hastily, spilling a quarter-cup of cold coffee on Norrey’s lap.

“Charlie,” Norrey said through clenched teeth, “why do I like you so much?”

“Dancers are dumb.” I gave her my handkerchief.

“Oh.” She patted at her lap awhile. “How come you like me?”

“Video men are smart.”

“Oh.”

I spent the afternoon in my apartment, reviewing the footage I’d shot that morning, and the more I watched, the madder I got.

Dance requires intense motivation at an extraordinarily early age—a blind devotion, a gamble on the as-yet-unrealized potentials of heredity and nutrition. The risk used to be higher in ballet, but by the late ’80s Modern had gotten just as bad. You can begin, say, classical ballet training at age six—and at fourteen find yourself broad-shouldered, the years of total effort utterly wasted. Shara had set her childhood sights on Modern dance—and found out too late that God had dealt her the body of a woman.

She was not fat—you have seen her. She was tall, big-boned tall, and on that great frame was built a rich, ripely female body. As I ran and reran the tapes of
Birthing
, the pain grew in me until I even forgot the ever present aching of my own legs. It was like watching a supremely gifted basketball player who stood four feet tall.

To make it in Modern dance nowadays, it is essential to get into a big company. You cannot be seen unless you are visible. (Government subsidy operates on the principle that Big Is Better—a sadly self-fulfilling prophecy. The smaller companies and independents have always had to knife each other for pennies—but since the early ’80s there haven’t
been
any pennies.)

“Merce
Cunningham
saw her dance, Charlie. Martha Graham saw her dance, just before she died. Both of them praised her warmly, for her choreography as much as for her technique. Neither offered her a position. I’m not even sure I blame them—I can sort of understand, is the hell of it.”

Norrey could understand all right. It was her own defect magnified a hundredfold: uniqueness. A company member must be capable of excellent solo work—but she must also be able to blend into group effort, in ensemble work. Shara’s very uniqueness made her virtually useless as a company member. She could not help but draw the eye.

And once drawn, the male eye at least would never leave. Modern dancers must sometimes work nude these days, and it is therefore meet that they have the bodies of fourteen-year-old boys. We may have ladies dancing with few or no clothes on up here, but by God it is Art. An actress or a musician or a singer or a painter may be lushly endowed, deliciously rounded—but a dancer must be nearly as sexless as a high fashion model. Perhaps God knows why. Shara could not have purged her dance of her sexuality even if she had been interested in trying, and as I watched her dance on my monitor and in my mind’s eye, I knew she was not.

Why did her genius have to lie in the only occupation besides model and nun in which sexiness is a liability? It broke my heart, by empathic analogy.

“It’s no good at all, is it?”

I whirled and barked. “Dammit, you made me bite my tongue.”

“I’m sorry.” She came from the doorway into my living room. “Norrey told me how to find the place. The door was ajar.”

“I forgot to shut it when I came home.”

“You leave it open?”

“I’ve learned the lesson of history. No junkie, no matter how strung out he is, will enter an apartment with the door ajar and the radio on. Obviously there’s someone home. And you’re right, it’s no damn good at all. Sit down.”