Dancing in the Light (34 page)

Yet there were times when our joy and playfulness together left me astonished with happiness. To him our happiness was “like music that I am afraid will not last.” Our laughter was color and our physical harmony like a pastel Impressionist painting. Like a child, Vassy marveled at the prosperity of America and the tolerance the Americans had for each other, whether in traffic jams or the crush of a rock concert. He adored the fresh fruits and vegetables abounding in the markets and the “health” life of his “beloved Malibu.” We continued to walk strenuously in the Calabasas Mountains and Vassy swam in the Pacific. We continued to work on developing a picture together, and several of the great Hollywood screenwriters were anxious to meet and know Vassy—his talent was known already to many of them.-People teased us about the explosiveness of our relationship and looked on in amusement whenever we went at each other.

Sometimes after-dinner conversation was heated and free flowing, with the Americans judging and evaluating Russian attitudes—although many of them had never even been there. And whenever Vassy launched into his now familiar Love-versus-Respect theories, he rendered the living rooms dumbstruck. They couldn’t understand, they said. We in America were working to harmonize the two. Vassy said they were fundamentally separate.

Then there were the times when Vassy, compulsively yet touchingly, would get very drunk and break down in great heaving sobs when we got home. No one else could possibly understand what it meant to be a “fucking Russian in America,” he sobbed. “My fucking country, my beloved Russia,” he would cry. “No one here understands my country. You judge us, you condemn us, you believe we have swords in our teeth. You’re so conditioned, so brainwashed, even more than we are. At least Russians
know about America, not only bad things. And you here imagine Russia as a concentration camp! You don’t like Commies! That’s your problem. Now I hear Americans think ‘Russian’ is the same as evil, stupidity, idleness. That’s dangerous! What about our culture, our music, our ingenuity, our patience, endurance—these are qualities, not drawbacks! Yes, we are fucking different, why not? Why should we all be the same? Instead of trying to change each other, why don’t we simply tolerate our differences and enjoy similarities?”

His sobs would leave me speechless, useless and even more non-comprehending. I felt stranded on a bridge between two cultures. I knew only one thing. Here was a man I loved and was trying to understand who was genuinely pleading for comprehension—almost a plea to help him comprehend himself. I thought many times that if I had understood myself better I would have been able to understand Vassy.

Often we made trips to Paris and New York. Vassy said he would never be able to see New York through anyone’s eyes but mine. Paris, of course, was different; he had had a great deal of previous experience there.

Sometimes friends of Vassy’s would pass through either New York or California. One friend was an American who had lived in Russia for three years and still traveled there three times a year for his company. In the privacy of a dinner just between the two of us, I asked him what he thought about Vassy’s traveling in and out of the Soviet Union. Vassy’s birthday was coming up and he wanted to celebrate it with his family in their dacha outside of Moscow. His papers were duly forthcoming, and after some hassle with the Soviet authorities in Paris, he had received permission. Jack said he knew the Medvedjatnikov family quite well. He said Vassy was known to have no political interests whatever, but that he would do anything to succeed in his
ambition to freely travel the world outside of Russia, and to be a free artist in the West.

“Would do anything?” I asked.

“Well,” replied Jack. “You know. I can’t say for him specifically. But many Russians consider marriage to a foreigner a vehicle to get out of Russia. There used to be a saying after the revolution in the ’30s; ‘The car is not an object of luxury but a means of transportation.’ Now they say the foreign woman is not an object of luxury but a means of transportation. Many Russians do marry foreigners in order to freely travel. The system forces them to do many things to become free.”

“Are you saying,” I asked, “that he married his French wire to get out?”

Jack shrugged. “I don’t know. Many do.”

“So, is he using me, too, then?” I asked.

“Using you? I’m not sure I’d put it that way,” Jack replied. “I know how grateful he is to you. He’s told me you have made so much possible for him. But he also loves you. You really
are
the woman of his life, as he says, regardless of how long it will last.”

“How
long?
What do you mean?”

“Well,” said Jack, a wary look crossing his cherubic face, “have you ever been involved with a Russian before?”

There it was again.

“I see,” I said. Somehow this question was always supposed to be the answer. “And how about promises? Do Russian men keep their promises?”

Jack laughed out loud.

“There is no such thing,” he replied, amused at my naïveté. “There is no such thing as a deal. They are too emotional for that, too much of the moment. In passion they’ll promise anything. Then later their feelings might change, the passion shifts. And then they accuse you of being stupid when it comes to honoring their promise.”

I tried to absorb what Jack was saying with a
quiet stomach. But none of what he said was reassuring. And I knew, in my mind, that my relationship with Vassy was in big trouble.

Not too long after that Vassy and I were back in California and on one of our walks. The sun was hot. It was about one and a half years after we had met. We had succeeded in adjusting reasonably well to one another. We were deep in the throes of developing a picture which he would direct me in. He had worked with several writers and found that none of them had touched what he really wanted to say in the picture.

He knew what he wanted. Such definitive certainty was commonplace and admired in really good directors. After overhearing some of his creative sessions, though, I began to wonder whether Vassy might not be erecting obstacle courses which weren’t necessary. Whenever I mentioned it, he again explained that only through the pain of the creative process could wonderful art be born. It was a theory he knew I didn’t subscribe to. Whenever his anguish in collaboration became severe, I knew he was either getting close to what he wanted, or the relationship with the writer would fall apart. Lately, the latter seemed to be happening. He tossed and turned during the night and seemed to be stretching the possibility of success too thin. I almost had the feeling that at the core there was a self-destruct mechanism at work in him. But maybe not. Maybe it was just his way of working.

The sun was hot on our faces as we climbed the fire trail. I had smoked a lot the night before, but not enough to interfere with my breathing. In fact, I never inhaled anyway and told myself the smoke never reached my lungs. But Vassy zeroed in on my smoking as we walked. He walked faster and faster. When I asked him to slow down, he said, “If you would stop the cigarettes, perhaps you could keep up.” I felt a flash of irritation. Why was he ruining a beautiful walk, focusing on something that was my
business to stop. We began to argue. The argument escalated until smoking became an irrelevant issue. In a swift fifteen minutes, we were discussing the defects of our relationship in detail, with Vassy entrenched in his point of view and I in mine. We both became so angry that again I felt like striking him. I controlled myself and said, “Let’s call a moratorium for fifteen minutes, okay?”

He glanced at his watch. “Fifteen minutes?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Agreed.”

We continued to walk in silence. After about five minutes, a particularly cogent point came to my mind, but I resisted the urge to make it, remembering our agreement. We walked on. I was proud of my control. Suddenly Vassy blurted out a stream of intelligent points of his own. I pointed to his watch. “The fifteen minutes is not up yet,” I said.

“Fifteen minutes,” he answered. “So what? I have something to say.”

I stopped and glared at him, “But we made a deal,” I reminded him strongly.

“A deal? What deal?” he asked.

I said slowly and very, very distinctly, “We made an agreement five minutes ago. An agreement
not
to continue our argument until
fifteen
minutes had passed.”

Vassy actually chuckled. “You are stupid to believe that I considered that an agreement. You are naïve.”

I saw red. I wound up my arm and with full preparation I hauled off and swung at him. I didn’t connect. He blocked my arm and I missed. He laughed at me. I was thoroughly humiliated, outraged … all those familiar feelings that he was capable of provoking in me. I turned and bolted down the mountain.

“But Nif-Nif,” he called after me, adding insult to outrage, “I love you.”

I ran and ran down the mountain. He sauntered after me. I didn’t know what I was thinking. It was dreadful. All my emotional horizons were blurred. I felt completely out of touch with my own positive instincts. For the second time, I felt danger.

When I reached the bottom of the mountain, I lurched toward our car. I could have turned the key, stepped on the accelerator, and left Vassy with no transportation home. But I didn’t. I sat fuming and helpless until he arrived.

Casually Vassy climbed into the car and said, “Nif-Nif, why were you so upset?”

I wanted to slug him again.

“Why?” I pounded the steering wheel. “Dammit, we made an agreement not to argue and you violated it. But then you called me stupid for believing you. What the hell kind of shit-assed attitude do you think that is? Do you want me
not
to believe you?”

“You were stupid,” he answered simply. “That’s all. I needed to talk sooner. That’s all.”

“But so did I,” I answered. “And I controlled it because of our agreement.”

Vassy thought a moment. “I see,” he said. “Well, there is no harm done. So let’s forget about it. Look at this beautiful sunshine. Look at the bluebirds. Smell this sweet day.”

I was flummoxed … paralyzed with helplessness at the reality of
his
truth—
his
point of view—
his
way of relating to life—and my inability to penetrate his reality in any way.

We drove home in silence. I knew I wasn’t going to let it go.

I didn’t know it until sometime later, but Vassy was as disturbed at my behavior on the mountain as I was at his. He wrote a long letter to his brother in Moscow relating the incident, asking what it was he had done wrong. When I asked him why he had solicited help from another Russian rather than an
American, he said it was because his brother knew him better.

I saw Jack again sometime later and told him what had happened.

“From Vassy’s point of view,” said Jack, “he meant what he said when he said it. But a Russian has a different concept of time than we do. That is the basic difference. The passion of the moment is just that—the passion of the moment. When the moment passes, life is a new ballgame. When he said you were naïve to believe him, he could just as easily have meant you still believed in Santa Claus. The Russian doesn’t live past the moment. That’s why they seem to us to be so passionately self-destructive. Who knows, maybe living in the moment is the most fulfilling way to live. Their expressive arts, after all, speak to the depths of the soul. So who knows?”

I thought about what Jack said for days after that. Were the differences between Vassy and me based predominantly on how we related to the immediacy of the moment? I had to admit that the intensity of our fun and joy together was a miracle of moments. He never held back or considered the consequences of the future. I did. His happy moments were total when they were happy. Mine were not. Was I in my American way living too much in the future? Was that, in fact, what “deals” were all about? Protecting the future? Vassy seemed to throw the future to the wind. It wasn’t there until it was there. On the face of it, I wished I could do the same. And yet …

And yet I had the continual gnawing feeling that to Vassy the future meant probable
suffering.
It was then that I realized that the danger I felt from him was not really about the future, but more about
destiny.
His destiny.

He spoke often of destiny. It was a word that heretofore had smacked of melodrama to me. Yet somehow when
he
used it, it was emotionally viable.
He seemed to be feeling that his destiny had been preplanned. He had felt destined to be with me. He had felt destined to leave Russia and travel freely.

A few weeks later, I began to feel the communication between us break down on many levels. Work on the movie project was becoming discordant. Vassy and his co-writer couldn’t come up with a satisfactory script. The more I encouraged him, the more depressed and dissatisfied he became. The more I made suggestions, the more he resented it. Our arguments became intense until one evening our relationship exploded.

We had been sullen and moody with each other for about three days. Even physical communication was breaking down as our emotional differences expressed themselves in dissatisfaction with each other sexually.

Two friends of ours (a couple we knew very well) were visiting and staying with us. They were Americans who lived in Paris. They were aware of some of our problems. I was scheduled to make a quick trip to New York, which I casually mentioned to Vassy. He seemed to accept it, but I noticed a dark hostility wipe quickly across his face. We went for a hike and he was uncommunicative. When we returned, he went into his office to write and I brooded about how I could break the mood. I fixed him his favorite tea and cakes and brought the tray in to him. I set the tray on the desk and leaned over and hugged him. He smiled involuntarily and then quickly wiped it away. A flash of dread shot through me.

“I must tell you, my dear,” he began, “I have been to see a doctor about your problem.”

My mouth dropped open. “What problem?” I asked.