Dancing in the Light (25 page)

I got up, cursing, because I knew he was right.

In jogging togs we bounded into the crisp Parisian sunshine and headed for the Luxembourg Gardens. We talked of where we would eat brunch as we jogged.

Vassy jogged with a straight-backed stride, his head proudly peering straight ahead, his brown hair bouncing over his ears as we moved. Vassy’s face took on a gleam of determination.

“I will now jog five miles,” he announced.

“Of course,” I agreed. I knew he meant it. I wasn’t about to do that. Two or three miles, okay, but while he was doing the remainder, I would do some stretching exercises.

Vassy did not jog correctly. He used the outside of his heels too much and pounded his monstrous size eleven feet severely into the ground, causing much too much trauma to his back.

“You know, Vassy,” I began hesitantly, “you are planting your feet wrong with your stride. It’s too hard on your back that way.”

He looked over at me with disdain. “For me it is fine,” was his answer. No more discussion.

Shit. Fine. What do I care? It’s not my back.

His loping turned-in feet continued to punish him. After a while I peeled off from our stride, stopped, and put one leg after the other up on the back of a park bench and stretched. After the plane flight, I needed it. Vassy didn’t even acknowledge that I was gone.

For another hour I did some standing yoga positions and deep breathing. The thought crossed my mind then that perhaps Vassy thought physical pain was necessary to good health. If it didn’t hurt, it wasn’t doing any good, that sort of thing. I knew that feeling myself and was beginning to realize its folly.

Rounding his last turn of the gardens, Vassy
gestured that he would now jog home without breaking his stride. Jesus, I thought, this man is a glutton for discipline. He’ll probably pig out at lunch.

That’s just what happened. We showered, changed, and charged to a small bistro he knew close by. True to form, he ordered several hors d’œuvres, a bottle of red wine, lots of bread spread thick with butter, and a few desserts. I went along with him. Who needed a heavy, ponderous entrée when you could get the same effect with variety? Privately I prepared to allow myself to gain ten pounds on this trip.

Over the meal Vassy brought up the project he was interested in for the two of us—a book called
The Doctor’s Wife
by Brian Moore.

“Isn’t that funny?” I said. “That very book was suggested to me sometime back by a writer friend of mine.”

We discussed it at length. He spoke with great passion about each character. He understood their conflicts, their sorrows, their compulsions. He became each character as he spoke. He was larger than life, broadly stroked and impossible to take casually as he outlined in his passionate, husky voice, what he would do with the film.

I wondered how it would affect our relationship to work together. I knew he was watching me closely, editing in his head which of my habits and mannerisms he would use and which he would discard. I didn’t feel in the least invaded because I was doing the same thing with him.

We were adoringly fascinated with observing each other. Two professionals using life as grist for the creative mill.

“Vassy,” I said, “how would you feel if you ended up in one of my books?”

He smiled proudly. “I have been in several books,” he announced. “We are all in each other’s lives for many reasons,” he said. “Creativity is everything. And creativity comes from experience.
I love all of my characters. I know you will love all of yours.”

Back at the cell, when I came out of the bathroom, thoroughly waterpiked, Vassy was sitting on the mattress, munching on a carrot, smiling up at me like a floppy bear.

I remembered a present I had forgotten to give him and, rummaging through my suitcase, I pulled out two adorable pink rabbits with their arms entwined around each other. I dumped them on his flat tummy. Immediately he placed the rabbits on the pillow and talked to them, scolding them in rabbit language. He stood them on their heads and spanked them in Russian. He covered them up and purred a little children’s song to them. He teased them for sleeping too long with their arms around each other. With his long arms he retrieved them from under the covers and rocked them against his shoulder. Then he bounced them over to me. I lofted them back carefully, half convinced they were real. He patted their heads and got up to sit with them in his lap on the one kitchen stool the cell boasted, cradling them in his arms while I took a picture of him with my Polaroid.

I was entranced by his ability to have such childish fun. He said he loved my enchantment, that I could make a game out of anything. He said he had learned a new meaning to the word “fun.” Then we fell on the bed and made love, the pink rabbits tumbling to the floor.

Lovemaking with Vassy was one of the most pleasant shared experiences of my life. We laughed, cried, shouted, and nibbled at each other. Every now and then when abandonment seized him completely, a surging rush of Russian passion flowed forth. He was never rough, but he wasn’t delicately gentle either. He certainly knew what he was doing, but I sensed a deep-seated conventional Christian morality in him.

I asked him if he got involved with his actresses during filming. He said during filming he was never interested in sex. His work was his life. He had no time to concentrate on anything else. But yes, his actresses usually fell in love with him. Humility was not his strong suit.

Our days in Paris revolved around the small “cell”—sharing stories of life experiences, laughing until our sides ached, making a mess of cooking in the Pullman kitchenette, sleeping with garlic and onions lying unattended next to the floor mattress, and fantasizing about working together. He directed me to use the Water Pik every night until, not to my surprise, my gums were fine. I asked him when he expected to get his medical degree.

He never laughed when I teased him. He took himself extremely seriously, which, of course, was grounds for my teasing him even more.

Sometimes he’d pout when he saw that he couldn’t really dominate me, but our childlike play and kidding saved us every time. I had never before encountered a man who could joyously throw himself into such wondrous and magical games. Maybe it was because he was Russian or maybe it was just Vassy. It doesn’t matter. His capacity to give himself totally to zany make-believe was the source of much tenderness and loving laughter between us.

He told me a story from his childhood, of how he had overturned a beehive and gotten plastered with honey.

“My honeybear,” I said, laughing as he finished his story. “You are my Russian honeybear.”

“And you are my sunshine Nif-Nif.”

We rolled over in each other’s arms. I couldn’t remember when I had been so happy.

We played at everything. I lived delightedly from day to day, reveling in my Honeybear’s capacity for laughter. We made the ancient city our playground, the pink rabbits going everywhere with us. The world looked on, smiling. But we were oblivious. Eventually,
Honeybear took me away to a small island in Bretagne.

When we arrived, it was dark. But Honeybear had made reservations at a small hotel whose proprietor had waited up for us. With each new night and each new place, life was an adventure for us. An adventure maybe more real than the reality we would experience later.

We unpacked our bags in the small hotel room. There was one tiny closet, two twin beds which we promptly pushed together, and a small shuttered window through which the wind howled.

There was no shower in the cold bathroom, but the tub was sufficient. We each took a quick hot bath, because the heated water was scarce, and crawled into the quilt-covered beds. As we began to make love, I found myself relating to him in a maternal frame of mind. Words came to my mouth that expressed how I felt.

“My honeybear, my baby honeybear,” I heard myself murmuring as I curled my fingers in his hair. “Yes, you are my baby, my baby, aren’t you?”

Vassy sat up in bed, his face like stone. He took his arms away from me.

“I am not your son,” he announced, and there was real anger in his voice.

I sat up too. “My son?” I asked. “Of course you’re not my son. I was just fantasizing because I felt so maternal with you and I wanted to express myself and maybe make love with that expression. What’s wrong with that?”

“Sometimes you are a radio in bed,” he said. “You talk too much.”

I stared at him, stunned. His hostility was so total, so sudden, I couldn’t take it in.

“A radio in bed?” I repeated.

“Of course,” he answered.

Oh my God, I thought, now feeling crushed with humiliation. Obviously I had said or done something that threatened him in a deep-seated way. My
hand flew to my throat, where I wore the religious medal, blessed by the Russian archbishop, that had belonged to his mother.

“Vassy, wait a minute,” I said. “What’s upsetting you so much? What is wrong with some maternal fantasy in bed? It’s not real incest, you know.”

His eyes blazed. He got up and walked around the room.

“Such a thing is not necessary to you, is it?” he demanded.

“No,” I answered confusedly. “Not necessary. Of course not. It just occurred to me, that’s all. I was just feeling that way, so that’s what came out of my mouth.”

He sat down on the bed. “You talk too much. Talk not necessary.”

He was hurting me deeply. I felt completely humiliated. The trust implicit in my free expression of fantasy had been thrown in my teeth.

“But all the games are play, Vassy. They’re not necessary or real either. You love to do that, don’t you?”

“Yes,” he answered, “because you love it.”

The roller coaster started.

“Because I love it? What do you mean? You love those games, too, and you know it.”

“I play them because you love them.”

I began to cry. He had shattered our playful, fragile fantasies, apparently without a thought and clearly without caring at all.

“You are really mean,” I heard myself say, tears choking my throat. “You are mean and uncaring and insensitive in hurting the feelings of others. How could you be so mean?”

I was crying hard now.

Vassy blanched slightly but I could see him decide to refuse to give any emotional ground.

“I am not mean,” he answered finally. “You are being influenced by evil.”

“Evil?”
I choked on the word. It was from so farout
in left field that it stopped my crying. “What the
hell
has evil got to do with this?”

“That was evil thought you spoke of in bed. I cannot go along with that.”

“Well, fuck you,” I shouted. “Who gives a fuck? I’m glad I’m not your goddamned mother. She’s really raised some cruel character in you, hasn’t she?”

His eyes flashed. I thought I saw a hint of violence as he raised his hand to his hair and pulled his fingers through it.

“You are the evil one,” I yelled and cried at the same time. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I was only pretending. Why are you doing this?”

He sat down on the side of the bed, flushed with anger. Then, very quietly, he said, “Stop it, Sheerlee. You are feeling satanic forces. They are evil.”

I couldn’t seem to break through to him, and the frustration triggered something in me that was primitive and fundamental.

“Vassy!!” I shouted. “There is no such thing as evil. Evil is fear and uncertainty. Evil is what you
think
it is.
Listen
to me, goddammit!”

He leaned over me and with gentle strength held me by my shoulders.

“Sheerlee, stop it,” he said strongly. “Stop the evil.”

My brain tumbled over in confusion. What was he talking about? I had simply wanted to fantasize about being his mother while making love and to him this was some kind of fundamental evil? I cried and cried.

Vassy put his arms around me. I didn’t resist. I wasn’t angry at him anymore, or even insulted. This business of “evil” and “satan” was a ridiculous concept to me. I couldn’t really understand why such images would be evoked by my simple fantasy, but what he had done was thoroughly snocking and sad to me.

Something snapped shut in my head. I remembered
the intuition I had had that he might be restrictively, conventionally Christian. Could that be the nerve I had just struck? Had I triggered some unconscious incestual fantasy that had actually attracted me to him in the first place? Was that what had been going on with him for twelve years? Or was Vassy, the boy-man, more involved with “Mummy” than he knew, to the point where the actual verbalization of such a fantasy was totally unacceptable to him?

Then, as I was sorting out my tumbled confusion, I had another flash. If we really had had a past-life experience together, could it have been as mother and son?
That thought
, I knew, I shouldn’t raise with him.

I stopped crying. “I’m sorry I said what I did about your mother,” I apologized.

Vassy said nothing. He neither acknowledged my apology nor rejected it. He just crawled back into bed. He turned out the light. In the quiet darkness, punctuated only by my residual sniffles, he said, “Nif-Nif, there is evil in the world. I don’t like to see it touch you.”

My mind went white-blank. There was nothing more for me to say. How could one argue good and evil where sexual fantasies that hurt no one were concerned? But I think I began to understand a little bit more about Vassy’s relationship to his own sexuality. And it was disturbing to me that his personal hang-ups could succeed in getting me so upset.

When, oh when, I thought, will I ever learn to be mature enough not to allow the problems of others to become an even bigger problem for me? I rolled over toward Vassy and fell into an exhausted sleep. I wasn’t sure what had really happened. But one thing was certain. I would no longer be a “radio” in bed.

Chapter 10

I
suppose when one is in the throes of a newly developing relationship, it is necessary to overlook accumulating obstacles, putting them on the back burner of the mind, until they can be examined in the clear, objective light of a later day. That, I believe, is what Vassy and I did. Or maybe he never felt those obstacles were necessarily serious. I couldn’t have either, not then, because after our “evil-incest” night, the subject never came up again. Why would it though? We had so many other areas to explore in one another.