I'm Trying to Reach You Read online

  And then, on July 11, I spotted him. It was that creepy quothballetcarper again! He was commenting on the Água video. “Nice, Pina, very elagant, good job! Quick exit to! Need a samba lesson though, hatchatchatcha.” The guy was really pissing me off. “Quick exit”? Was that any way to be talking about the catastrophe of her untimely death? And what kind of moment was this to be carping about Pina’s samba, as though this were some kind of folklore show? Despite my own mixed feelings about her geographically framed pieces, I hardly thought we should be getting nit-picky about the authenticity of her dancers’ footwork. falserebelmoth, however, had immediately made one of her stinging comebacks: “The Mighty Merchant sneered – Brazil? He twirled a Button…” Hm. That was eccentric. But there was a note of hostility, or at least of challenge – now I was sure of it.

  I can’t deny the small thrill I felt at seeing the moth’s rebelliousness. Still, I was also having a vague sense of foreboding. She hadn’t seen that look in his eye in Zagreb. There were those comments he’d made about the axe… And wasn’t it a little suspect that he kept on popping up just at the moment a brilliant dancer had died? MJ, the vids, now Pina…

  Furthermore, I kept thinking about that tiny tennis racquet. During that visit in April, Sven and I had also watched Dial M for Murder and Strangers on a Train. What is it with tennis pros and murder?

  Joan Acocella had published a piece in The New Yorker that week about Christian Comte, a French artist who had constructed animated digital videos out of still photographs of Nijinsky so it looked like he’d uncovered actual film footage from 1912. He posted the clips on YouTube, of course. This was something of a succès de scandale in the dance world: a few people seemed buffaloed (“SUPERBE! MERCI!” “tro cool je ne savais pas ke le film existait”), others outraged (“fake fake fake”), and a third group, which Acocella dubbed “the postmodernists,” didn’t care if the posted clips were simulacra. They seemed to feel that Nijinsky was a master of fantasy and illusion himself, so why shouldn’t that impulse be extended? Comte himself played dumb. That is, his descriptive language seemed to be intentionally vague. When asked, he acknowledged that no film representations of Nijinsky actually existed, and that he’d animated still photographs. But the titles preceding the animations were period-appropriate and artificially aged, as if to add to their apparent authenticity. Also, there was no explanation of Comte’s process on his YouTube postings – just brief phrases like, “Quelques pas de Nijinsky dans ‘Petrouchka’ ” or “film Nijinski dans l’après-midi d’un faune.”

  Acocella concluded her article: “For many, Nijinsky is not so much a dancer as an icon: of the misunderstood artist, of the mad genius, of the sacrificial homosexual. (He was Diaghilev’s lover.) People will take just about anything they can get of him. They want gold, but fool’s gold is O.K., too.”

  I thought of this as I thought about my interpretation of Pina’s interpretation of “The Man I Love.” Maybe “the postmodernists”’ desire for the non-existent, fakey Nijinsky was also the desire for desire. Loving his absence. Loving his impossibility.

  So, in the days that followed Pina’s passing, I allowed myself a little period of mourning, a brief reprieve from my manuscript revisions to process the loss. I let myself go back and back again to the counterfeit footage of Nijinsky, to Lutz Forster’s melancholy signage, and to the two videos of the rebel moth. That first one to Satie’s Gnossienne was continuing to clock a few hits every day. Obviously mine were among them, and I imagine some random searchers who typed in “michael jackson moonwalk” or just “satie” were landing there. But I also suspected her subscribers of the same kind of periodic viewing I found myself doing. The carper had some pretty obvious stalkerish tendencies. But on July 16, GoFreeVassals left another comment: “I am to wait… I am to see to it that I do not lose you.”

  That was weird. I realized he was articulating what I was feeling – which was why I kept returning to the moth’s dance. The comment underscored my own sense that she needed protection, but it was also kind of reassuring that GoFreeVassals was on the case.

  The painting of MJ in Degas’s La classe de danse arrived in the mail. I found a big gilt frame at the Salvation Army on 4th and 12th. I framed it myself. I propped it against the wall next to my desk. I didn’t want to put a nail in the wall because it was a sublet.

  My post-doc was pretty hands-off. I probably shouldn’t complain about my penury that year, because honestly, I hardly had any responsibilities. I was supposed to give one public talk in the fall semester at the Department of Performance Studies, and another in the spring. I was invited to attend various other public lectures and performances, but it quickly became apparent that the faculty was happy to leave me to my own devices. Of course I felt honored that André Lepecki had agreed to sponsor me as a “visiting scholar” – I admired his work, and he must have liked something about the chapters I sent him when I was applying for the post-doc. But when I actually showed up at his office hours, I think we both felt a little shy. It’s kind of hard to speak casually about things like the choreopolitical effort to transcend the condemnation of the symbolic order by resolutely moving into the quivering ground of being.

  There were some awkward pauses.

  Still, the connection to the department did give me a semblance of a social life. I was on the list-serve and I’d already established a couple of low-key friendships, like with Dan Ferguson, and Fang Li. Perhaps you’ve heard of her. She was that controversial Stanford undergrad whose senior art project involved the ostensible use of marmoset stem cells and an elective surgical procedure. They nicknamed her “monkey tail girl” on the Internet. She’d had to field a lot of sexist and racist responses to that one. She was now working on her PhD. She was writing about abjection. Despite her evident willingness to be provocative artistically, personally, she was really sweet. She and Dan and I would sometimes get a coffee together. I never asked her about that tail project. I figured she was tired of talking about it. But we did talk about some new things she was planning, like the intentional cultivation of the world’s longest filiform wart on her eyelid. Apparently this was medically possible. We also talked about Dan’s flea circus project. They asked me if I was still interested in performing, but I said now I preferred to watch other people dance. Of course I still took class once in a while, when I had the cash. I already told you about my barre exercises at home – I did those almost every day.

  I guess you could call those “performances” if in fact any of my neighbors were actually watching.

  I was preparing for my July trip to Stockholm. I was taking a week (July 20-27), which was our usual. There were a couple of things Sven wanted me to pick up for him: Gold Bond Medicated Powder, Burt’s Bees Toothpaste, a couple of little rice paper notebooks they sell at Pearl River. I also sorted out which books I wanted to take: Eve Sedgwick, Brian Massumi, and my dog-eared copy of A Lover’s Discourse.

  My Zagreb trip had just been for four days so I hadn’t worried about watering the plants, but this was a little longer, so I needed some help. I gave a set of keys to Fang and asked if she could come by once in the middle of the week.

  It had occurred to me to approach Bugs Bunny’s sister, since she was just down the hall, but I thought what with the walker, a watering can might be a bit much. She’d begun to ask me for occasional favors. Once she rang the doorbell and asked me if I could read the expiration date on her milk (it was long spoiled). Another time when I came up in the elevator she was standing in the hallway waiting to flag me down. She wanted help calling Access-a-Ride, the NYC transportation service for elderly and disabled people. They make you go through a surprising amount of rigmarole to use this service. Apparently her Access-a-Ride card (like her milk) had expired, and the new one hadn’t yet arrived in the mail. Because she’s hard of hearing, she was having a hard time understanding the automated messages she was reaching at the Access-a-Ride number. Actually, I couldn’t understand them either. The line was full of static
and the message kept getting cut off. We tried on her landline, and then my cell phone, which was even worse. When I finally got a real person, I couldn’t hear her either.

  The bad connection was exacerbated by the fact that Bugs Bunny’s sister kept screaming, “WHAT’S SHE SAYIN’? CAN YA JUST TELL HUH I NEED MY NEW CAHD? I GOTTA DOCTAH’S APPOYMENT. CAN YOU HEAH HUH? I CYAN HEAH A TING, MY EAHS AH SHOT! WHAT? YA GOTTA SPEAK LOUDAH!”

  Even when I was able to make out what this woman was saying, it didn’t make a lot of sense. It seemed like you needed to have some identification number in order to get temporary service before your new card arrived, but the number could only be determined from the new card itself. Meaning basically that this hypothetical temporary waiver was actually impossible. It took several explanations for me to get this into my thick skull.

  Finally Bugs Bunny’s sister just said, “AW, FUHGET IT, I’LL TAKE A TAXI.”

  She didn’t even seem that upset. This whole pointless telephone negotiation had taken about forty minutes, including the time on hold listening to staticky Muzak. I felt there was something outrageous about old and disabled people being run through this kind of gauntlet for undeliverable social services, but she seemed perfectly happy to throw in the towel.

  She said, “MY BWUDDA USE’ TA SAY, I GETS IN AHGUMENTS WIT PEOPLE, BUT I DON’ LIKE TA HOL’ A GWUDGE. YA KNOW WHY? ’CAUSE WHILE YAW BUSY HOL’IN’ A GWUDGE, DEAH OUT DEAH DANCIN’.”

  That’s actually true.

  Anyway, my point was, I’d asked Fang to water the plants. She was already planning to be on campus so it was no big deal for her to swing by. She’s so nice.

  The night before my trip, I checked in again on falserebelmoth’s YouTube channel. She’d posted another video! It was called “lent satie,” and the description just said, “for pina.” It was the same background as the first one, with that kooky Bruce Lee painting on the wall, but it was shot in black and white – or actually, maybe in night vision. It had that weird greenish glow of surveillance footage. The moth was dressed in what appeared to be a slightly transparent leotard, and black ballet slippers.

  The music was another of Satie’s beautiful Gnossiennes – lent, naturally. As the left hand arpeggiated the introductory chords, she kept her head tipped down, holding a kind of quiet, introverted fifth position. But when the right hand of the pianist began to tap out the repetitive single note of the opening phrase, she slowly and demurely swiveled her feet and hips into a syncopated little trip step: a weirdly abstracted, minimalist, and quickly abandoned gesturing of the samba!

  I understood immediately: it was her sly rejoinder to the insensitive and demanding ballet carper! If he wanted a samba lesson, he was going to get one!

  As Satie’s arpeggios skipped up and down, she marked out corresponding gestures with her mudra-like hands, pointing to her sex, umbilicus, nipples, and eyes. These gestures should have looked dirty – especially with that semi-transparent leotard – but in fact they seemed entirely pure. The only really licentious thing about the whole dance was its most balletic move: when she rose up on demi-pointe and waggled there with her hands draped before her eyes, her pubis rocked just slightly back and forth. It was utterly obscene.

  I thought of that essay by Susan Foster.

  She must have just posted this. Mine was only the second viewing. Of course I watched it again, and again. I was looking for more clues. There were no comments. I’d never left a comment – anywhere on YouTube. I didn’t even have a moniker. I just lurked. I’m not sure what I would have said, anyway.

  I watched it one more time, and went to bed.

  In the morning I had my coffee, read the Times, and straightened up. My flight wasn’t until the early evening, out of Newark. I did my barre exercises, and took a shower. Sven had told me he was going to a “smokefest” at Rålambshovsparken – they were trying to promote legalization of medical marijuana. Sweden is surprisingly behind the times on this issue.

  When I’d done pretty much everything I could do to prepare for my trip, I got back on YouTube and looked again at the moth’s new dance. Fourteen views, and, no surprise, the carper had almost immediately made his critique: “Nice one, little lady. Need some work on ur turn-out though. Also the colors wierd.”

  I got in a taxi to Newark. I texted Sven: “Jag är på väg.” Well, “Jag ar pa vag.” He forgave me the accents. I’m on my way.

  DRY YOUR EYES, BABY. IT’S OUT OF CHARACTER.

  I took the express train from Arlanda, switched to the T-bana, got out at Mariatorget and walked four blocks to Sven’s house. It was sunny out, and still pretty early.

  It was a Monday so the museum was closed. Sven was waiting for me. I thought he looked handsome. His hair was longer. We hugged. I whispered into his ear, “Hur mår du?”

  “Inte så bra.” Not so good.

  You may think I showed up speaking Swedish because of that new law. It’s true that linguistic incompetence often made me feel like an Ugly American, even when I was living in Stockholm, but I didn’t really think a little thing like an official proclamation was going to change people’s attitudes very much about my language, or theirs. As soon as I got off the plane I was greeted with that familiar old sign welcoming me to “Stockholm – The Capital of Scandinavia.” In English.

  There were just certain things that Sven and I had a tendency to say to each other in Swedish – the ones we wouldn’t really dwell on, like, “I’ll be there in five minutes.” Or “Ta mig nu.” That means, “Take me now.” It’s a pretty dramatic thing to say in a sexual situation, and Sven understood I was being a little ironic. Still, when I said something like that, it made him smile. :)

  We took the day pretty easy. After breakfast and a shower, we had a cuddle. Sven ended up falling asleep. I guess he hadn’t slept so well the night before. While he dozed I straightened up the kitchen. I looked over his meds, which he had on the table, along with some materials he’d printed out regarding a clinical trial. He’d gone over these with a highlighter.

  He’d told me his doctor thought it would be okay for him to try going FOTO with the Viraday – five days on, two off – to see if it might diminish the side effects (sporadic queasiness, periodic depression, bad dreams). I thought if the doctor thought it was okay, it probably was, but Sven was a little scared.

  When he woke up we took a walk. We picked up some takeout at Ming Palace. When we got home we watched Notorious.

  I’m a little embarrassed to say I’d never seen it before. Neither had Sven. We couldn’t believe how good it was. We both loved the Ingrid Bergman character, Alicia Huberman, the ethical slut. There was a moving scene in which Cary Grant defended Alicia’s honor to his spy bosses. They were basically willing to throw her to the Nazi wolves in their attempts to secure military secrets because she was so slutty. Actually, Cary Grant had also been psychologically pummeling her for sleeping around, but he finally seemed to have a moment of clarity about the relationship between sex and ethics. He snapped at the big spy boss: “She may be risking her life, but when it comes to being a lady, she doesn’t hold a candle to your wife, sir, sitting in Washington playing bridge with three other ladies of great honor and virtue.”

  Alicia Huberman had so many great lines! Like, “What this party needs is a little gland treatment.” We had to pause the DVD and go back to hear that one again. Or, “What a little pal you are.” Or, “When do I go to work for Uncle Sam?”

  It didn’t seem fair that she got all the good lines, because as a Swede she was the one Sven identified with. That would of course make me Cary Grant. When Grant said, “I’ve always been scared of women. But I get over it,” Sven poked me and smiled. It was kind of funny but it was also a little uncomfortable.

  The next day Sven had to go back to work. I stayed in and worked a little on my book revisions. That is, I fine-tuned some of the punctuation in the intro, and switched and then switched back again two paragraphs near the end, but then I wanted to check the IMDB for some informat
ion on Notorious. There were some interesting facts regarding the “MacGuffin” – the uranium stashed in a wine bottle. Apparently that got thrown in at the last minute, because it wasn’t really common knowledge at the time that uranium was used to make atomic bombs. Hitchcock was convinced that the FBI was following him around for a while after that.

  MacGuffin was a new word for me. Wikipedia said it was coined by a Scottish friend of Hitchcock’s, but Hitchcock was the one who popularized it, and exploited it most successfully in his films. It refers to a plot device that hooks the viewer. According to Hitchcock, it came from a story about two guys on a train. One says, “What’s that thing up there on the baggage rack?”

  The other one answers, “Oh that’s a MacGuffin.”

  “What’s a MacGuffin?”

  “Oh it’s something we use to trap lions in the Scottish Highlands.”

  “But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands!”

  “Oh then that’s not a MacGuffin.”

  In other words, it’s a thing that’s of vital importance and central interest, but it may not make any sense, and in fact it may not even exist.

  I found that interesting.

  After reading the Wikipedia article on the MacGuffin, I felt compelled to return to the rebel moth’s YouTube page. I was thinking maybe this MacGuffin business would clarify some things for me.

  As you will perhaps recall, the last comment posted before my departure was that mysterious one left by GoFreeVassals. It had apparently flummoxed the carper as much as it had me.