“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 a 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 will 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 the 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.”
She sat on the couch. Her hair was down, now, and I liked it better that way. I shut off the monitor and popped the tape, tossing it on a shelf.
“I came to apologize. I shouldn’t have blown up at you at lunch. You were trying to help me.”
“You had it coming. I imagine by now you’ve built up quite a head of steam.”
“Five years worth. I figured I’d start in the States instead of Canada. Go farther faster. Now I’m back in Toronto and I don’t think I’m going to make it here either. You’re right, Mr. Armstead—I’m too damned big. Amazons don’t dance.”
“It’s still Charlie. Listen, something I want to ask you. That last gesture, at the end of Birthing—what was that? I thought it was a beckoning, Norrey says it was a farewell, and now that I’ve run the tape it looks like a yearning, a reaching out.”
“Then it worked.”
“Pardon?”
“It seemed to me that the birth of a galaxy called for all three. They’re so close together in spirit it seemed silly to give each a separate movement.”