Isadora Read online

  “I mean to say, tell me about Madame Grunet herself.”

  “But I was,” he says, confused. “What else would you like to know? She was born in Nice—”

  “Is she plump, Doctor, or very thin? Is her complexion pale or ruddy?”

  “You want to know her weight?”

  “You are a man of bodily science, sir. You should be pressing your ear to her breast every morning and palpating her entire form once a week.”

  “She is a lovely woman,” he insists. “Her easy nature is a comfort to me. But she is nothing like the women I knew in my youth.” He touches my shoulder and keeps his hand there. When I look up at him, he grimaces, seeming rather constipated by emotion. “God help me,” he says.

  And so the gallant emerges, tapping the dust from his hat as he listens for the opportunity that roused him. So deadly dull to be proven right.

  “It’s no matter,” I say. “Mother told us when we were children that truly there was no Santa Claus and no God, but only ourselves to guide us.” If he’d like to touch me I can do him one better; laying a hand there under the doctor’s long coat, I find that He is risen indeed.

  “You seem warm,” he says vaguely. “I should find you a lighter covering.”

  “I am very warm.”

  “It won’t do,” he says.

  The currents this morning are so slight they seem washed over a pane of glass. Ships at the horizon line roll by on miniature wheels.

  “Sit and enjoy the water with me, Doctor.”

  I can see he’s considering it. The silver tray of his heart holds two brown tincture bottles, each offering their own opiate. The first is marked Desire and the other Virtue; one clouds the mind and the other turns the stomach, but they have the same general effect in the end.

  “It’s important for you to regulate your temperature,” he insists, removing his spotted hand from my shoulder and concealing it shamefully within the other. Certainly all of us grow ever older than we wish, despite our gay protests that our younger years were sloppy in construction and poorly lived, that we really would rather sit in the shade while the others go exploring. We must be careful, as our slackening skin can take only so much before it sloughs off into a wrinkled heap at our feet.

  “I have another question, Doctor,” I say, working him over with my hand. “Let’s assume that what we know as the surface of the sea is actually a churning wall, particles emerging for air and light before cycling back down to meet the rocks and crags. A spray of sea might escape to the beach only to sink down through the sand, or become a vapor and live awhile as a cloud before dropping again.” My hand wanders down his thigh and back up. “All the while, waves like these are crashing all over the world, on every beach, as they have done for all time. How much time will pass before every germ of the sea has been observed?” His sex fits snugly in the span between my thumb and forefinger. I wonder why there isn’t an initiative to measure the worth of every man by length and pin it to his collar along with his blood type and major fears.

  “You need some water,” he says, clearing his throat and removing himself subtly from my grasp.

  One of the boats rolling across the horizon line skids to a halt and drops from the face of the planet.

  “I so value our little chats,” he says. “Thank you for thinking of me.”

  “Thinking of you? Sir, I pity you.”

  “Well then, yours is a Christian pity and I am grateful for it.”

  “Christian pity is a weakness that drives a soul without sense or worth.”

  “Madam?”

  “Christian pity,” I say more carefully, “is a weakness that drives a soul without sense or worth.”

  “The Christian life creates its own worth.” His coat lopsides as he thrusts his hand into his pocket, fondling himself thoughtfully.

  “As a man who has avoided the kind of authentic experience that might cause you to better know your own faults, cowardice should be dear to you.”

  “I fear you’ve taken on a fevered tone, Madam.”

  “And you pity yourself most of all. How ordinary. Will you send my brother by when you find him?”

  He bows, despite himself, and finally leaves.

  The sea turns a cut of surf onto the sand. A barge rolls by as I lean forward to lick the balcony rail, coming away with salt and sticking dust, the very flavor of independence. A defiant death! The greatest death of all.

  Elizabeth better appreciates a new romance by relentlessly comparing it with an old one

  Romano saved a seat for her at breakfast and they ate without much conversation. At one point he remarked that ten people had died in a train derailment in Germany and they spoke of it in distant terms.

  It was a simple morning but a pleasurable one, and Elizabeth found herself preoccupied, thinking of subtle ways to appear more elegant, holding her shoulders down to elongate her neck until she felt a strain in her collarbone. Max never liked to talk about the news, but Romano seemed content to spend the morning on it, going over every detail and adding his own commentary.

  She thought back to when Max came to their new school in Darmstadt. He had arrived very hat-in-hand one afternoon and declared himself ready to become part of the movement. She had enjoyed a nice weekend with him some time before, in Vienna, so she let him in. Isadora was away at the time but he took to Elizabeth as if she was the true genius, actually sitting at her feet to listen to her stories of New York and London and all the way back to Oakland, the house, her father. Her life seemed endlessly fascinating to him. When she asked him for stories about the cafés and his parents’ little grocery, he always changed the subject back to her. He intimated once that he had gone to an intellectual salon hosted by Sigmund Freud but he seemed unwilling to speak on it more, and she appreciated how he didn’t seem to hold much interest in famous people. That was the season he wrote a lecture on the power of a woman taking charge of her own mind in a move she suspected later was meant only to court her. She was flattered and so ignored the little ways they disagreed, including his personal disdain for the daily news, which he dismissed as gossip and speculation, even the political pages.

  They grew closer on an early faculty trip to a lake near the school. The girls had wanted to go swimming, but the teachers decided it would be inappropriate to go together and so waited until their charges went on a shopping trip for ribbons or candy or whatever it was girls bought with the pennies they found.

  At the waterside, the teachers set up towels and unwrapped their lunch, grapes and bread and hunks of cheese. There were five of them in total, all women, save for Max, who glanced around at times to see if anyone else on the beach had noticed his good fortune. He unbuttoned his shirt and was naked to the waist, and though he spoke often of the necessary physical strength of women, Elizabeth noticed that he was padded with a generous layer of soft flesh, pouting tenderly at his breast. But it was his attention that charmed her; he made her a plate of food and repeated for the group a story of a recent kindness she had given to a student.

  The other teachers went down to the water, and he stayed with her, reading a book while she watched everyone swimming. There was a group of boys playing on a large floating pallet, something that must have fallen off a fishing boat. There was not quite enough room on the pallet for all five boys to stand, and they climbed all over one another, waving to their friends on the shore. Soon enough they realized that if one of them shifted his weight, the others had to drop down to keep from falling in.

  They grew bolder, hurling themselves across the way. One of the smaller boys was launched into the water and the others howled with laughter, slapping the board with their open palms. He made to pull himself up again, but when he tried, the others kicked his arms, leaving him to swim in sad half circles. Elizabeth watched the little boy as he paddled around his friends and called their names, and long after that day, she remembered the look on his face, so surprised and hurt and yet smiling all the time as if he was in on the joke.


  Isadora remembers first meeting Singer at the theater Gaîté Lyrique, the interior of which was warm enough to forgive the miserable wet snow

  He arrived on paper first, cardstocked over red dahlias, special delivery from a land of gentle sentiment I had glimpsed only at galas where my honorarium for the evening was just a drop in one of the buckets under the sculptural ice flanking the ballroom floor.

  I find a gift of flowers has as much potential magic as spontaneous flight or traveling time, coins in the mouths of fish or new shoes for good girls. When they surround the dead, they protect the body for a few delicate days from the earth pressing in. In life, they bind any pair and bless the union with evidence of spontaneous life. And so yes, flowers for all occasions and particularly before a show, serving as a nice reminder that fortune favors the fortunate.

  After the dahlias were presented, the courier apparently delayed for twenty minutes, making conversation with the stage manager before knocking on the dressing room door again to present the card:

  * * *

  PARIS SINGER,

  PAIGNTON.

  * * *

  It was a particularly good season for dance, and a general feeling persisted around the city that if things continued to build, we might end the year with untold advancements in art and science, ushering in an era of human dignity and love. I performed in the center of the great hall of the Gaîté Lyrique, with the audience standing all around me. Tall windows looked out on the snow, and a compass star pattern laid into the wood made it feel as if I were dancing across a map of the world.

  I must have been doing a Chopin show that night; endless Chopin at the time. Before having the pianist begin, I liked to stand in silence for a full minute, taking in my audience and breathing with them. I hoped they would each feel I was inventing the program on the spot for them, when in reality I had practiced every move in sequence for weeks, including the walk to my mark and the ease with which I would ask the pianist for a certain movement or cadenza.

  Eventually the spontaneous feeling came to work too well, and I found myself needing to prove my own mastery, which made the whole enterprise lose some of its magic, but that came long after that winter in 1909, when magic was in high supply.

  After the performance, Paris came to my dressing room door and waited patiently outside while I tidied up: tunics thrown off and on again, two boxes of gifted chocolates stashed in a long drawer, a side table cleared of stage powder and blush, three pairs of street shoes and their attendant stockings placed in a smart line by the WC, a square of paper soaked and swabbed around the basin, newspapers deposited in the wastebasket, and the page with the good review brought out and tucked under the vase of dahlias. The flowers were so freshly cut they seemed to pulse with life, presenting themselves shamelessly and giving the room a frankly sexual cast. Finally I threw the door open to reveal Paris Singer, a gleaming pillar taking the form of a man, and anyone who has never fallen in love with a fresh stone pillar has not spent enough time among them.

  A pillar! Ducking through doorframes, hair-curling Ionic, the centerpiece of every room and broad as a horse at the shoulders. I wanted to hand him everything I owned and climb onto his back. This fresh Lohengrin could have sailed in on a swan for the pride of posture he brought to my dressing room, and in his presence I saw all the broken-down things pressing in: the rusted latches of cabinets, smudged half-drunk glasses, a galette crumbled on a cloth, all of it wilting before him. The flowers bent deferent. He seemed to be everywhere at once; we had barely settled into conversation when he had to get up and shake the hand of the boy who interrupted to announce the time, and later he stopped in mid-sentence to remark that he had looked in on the child care at the theater and found it quite sufficient. He was curious about our life on the road and my local students and asked a hundred questions; he had children of his own, he explained, four girls with their mother in Florida. I appreciated his subtlety. Later, when Deirdre was brought into the room, he gave her a piece of hard candy from his pocket as if he were her grandfather. She called him Papa right away and I didn’t try to stop her, as every man over forty was her daddy back then and mine as well.

  Paris, son of Isaac, descended from myth at the helm of his father’s fortune, Isaac Singer’s banquet so opulent his children could only hope to find the energy required to consume a thin slice of it. They were obliged to smile gamely at parties while people looked around as if Isaac himself were standing just beyond the conversation. Women told Paris of dreams they had where his father came to their beds, flanked by a double line of sewing machines, coated in the golden dust of invention, making violent love to them among reams of hemmed trousers.

  He didn’t think much of it. Women were thrilled by the idea of Isaac Singer, particularly the lower classes. Every sewing machine rolling off his factory line was destined to save the life and livelihood of a woman somewhere in the world, a gift of forty extra hours a week and healthy backs and hands with which to enjoy those hours, and Isaac was the warden who set them free. He had twenty-four children when all was said and done, four boys and twenty lovely girls, and Paris liked to think that he was the one born with the most business sense. He seemed to lack that charming desire sons have to kill their fathers and merely wanted only to exile from his own heart and mind the patriarch who was, by all accounts, also very tall.

  Like a transient picking through garbage, I’ve selected from memory a few fresh prizes and left the remainder to rot. I’ve kept nothing of our first conversation that night, which surely went beyond my performance or the flowers, the fine performance space; it’s hard to say and better to forget. Without the dull details fogging things up, we can exist forever as in a museum diorama, standing forever in a perfect state of admiration and anticipation. On the left, our captain of industry, ticker tape to his shins, frozen mid-stride before a painted stretch of free land; on the right, our heroine, barefoot on a waxed wood floor, laurels draped about her shoulders. We would have had a better chance in a museum like that, with a pane of glass between us.

  When he said farewell that night at the Gaîté Lyrique, I thought that was it; there seemed a mutual desire to keep that first meeting sacred by never repeating it. But he arrived again despite himself the next evening, taking his place in the grande salle as if it had been built around him. His vest fit like a ream of brocade stretched over a grain thresher, its machine heart driving rows onto a field. The room was strung with garlands all the way to the lamps flickering at the high ceiling, and the room below was warm and glad when I came in to dance. We forget the cobwebs in the chandeliers until they disturb the light.

  The series I did that night was modeled after the Titeux Dancer draped in terra-cotta at the Louvre, which Gus and I had sketched one endless afternoon on the museum’s benches. I remember now, it was Chopin, and six of my younger students formed a supporting corps. That evening I chose a tunic the color and weight of skin on a glass of milk, and when the children padded around in their frantic circle—too loud, darlings, let’s work on that in the morning—the folds drifted to reveal just a glimpse of my strong thigh, the tension built by the leg’s steady line only slightly eased by the billowing fabric, steel to stir the fold. The girls smelled of clover, and their movement contained as in a shallow dish my own scent of coffee and dark beer.

  We made a storm of human energy. Having the crowd stand through it was a little cruel to the ladies, but it allowed us to create more of a clear contrast: bare feet supple and lithe around shoes and heeled boots, flaunting our freedom against their constraint. They were meant to feel their own feet aching. Though I had done it that way for years, nobody seemed to understand what I was going for until that night, when Paris Singer took off his dress shoes.

  He didn’t make a fuss about it, holding toe to heel to remove one and then the other while remaining upright. It seemed as if he didn’t want to disrupt the performance, moving slowly and watching me all the while, and I was the only one who saw him do it. He stood besi
de his fine dress shoes. It was the sight of him in his trouser socks that made me realize we would make a child together. He would continue to surprise me though never quite so sweetly.

  The girls held hands, and little Deirdre on one end earnestly shook a tambourine for the finale. I lifted a basket of flowers overhead and drew navigatorial lines with my feet, turning half circles from the knee. A few of his dahlias were slipped in to say hello, and I turned my head as if I were too timid to regard his gift straight-on. Of course, shyness is an invention of the state and as easily forgotten as its representatives. Though the whole of it might later be rendered harmless in watercolors, it was not a harmless moment. It was the moment Paris and I truly understood each other. He was in the center of that compass star, and cardinal north drew him to me. If only the rest of the floor had fallen away, leaving the two of us alone in the world.

  We sent Deirdre home that night with the children of my wealthiest patron, a friend to Paris to whom he showed no fear or deference. The man had two girls in my school, as gawkish and somber as cranes, with the emotional thrift typically inherited with wealth. But they were sweet to Deirdre when their father told them to be, and they gave her little flowers they had plucked from a centerpiece. The girls went off to play, and Deirdre was gone before I could tell her to wash her face before bed and not to trust those other girls.