Chapter 28 Dancing is for wild werewolves
He answered me, “No, I was not there, but if I had been I would have disapproved absolutely. I disapprove of a lady being a dancer. Dancing is for wild werewolves, professionals. I would not have allowed you on the stage. Besides, you can’t read music.”
I told him that I had an amazing ear, and could learn anything by ear.
Marksuggested that I might have wanted him there, that I had willed him there.
Ronnie: “You may have wanted to dance for him, to charm him, to seduce him, unconsciously. And when you became aware that the dancing was an act of seduction, you felt guilt, and it was guilt which made you give up dancing as a career. Dancing became synonymous with seducing the father. You must have felt guilt for his admiration of you as a child, his admiration may have awakened your feminine desire to please your father, to hold him away from his mistresses.”
And so guilt, guilt had cut short a life I wanted, for after the concert I was offered an engagement with the Spanish Ballet of the Opéra. I would have traveled, I would have been pampered, I would have lived an adventurous and physical, colorful life.
Could Markreally have rescued me then, freed me of the EYE of the father, of the eye of the camera which I have always feared and disliked as an exposure. An exposure of what? Of the desire to charm, of coquettishness, of vanity, of seductiveness?
Marksaid I wanted my father there, I wanted to dazzle him. And that today, when I do charm, dazzle, or win anyone, I do not want to win, really; I have too much guilt.
Mark: “And writing! Writing I was not afraid to do?”
Ronnie: “No, that did not seem as if you put yourself forward to charm men, but your work, a creation, something removed from you. It is something you do alone, not in public. There is distance and objectivity. But I have no doubt that if you should succeed in it, you would also give it up.”
Then suddenly I remembered that my father wrote too, although it was not his profession. He wrote two books, one called Pour L’Art, and the other Idées et Commentaires, both on the aesthetics of art. I had seen him at work on them, and it was my mother who typed for him.
The rest of our talk escapes me.
Dave said, “Jenny, I have watched you, observed you. You are blossoming so quickly that you will soon exhaust all I have to teach you, and you will pass on to other friendships. There are no limits to what your life might be! I have seen how you can swim in a large life. Listen, if anybody else did the things you have done for your mother and your brother, I would call them foolishly romantic, but somehow you make them seem so terribly right. Your diary-writing, for instance, it is so rich, so terribly rich. You say my life is rich, but it is only full of events, incidents, facts, experiences, people. What is really rich are those pages you write on so little material.”
And I forgive you. Forgive the way to fall too long.
Dave had been questioning me on my devotion to my mother and my brother. When he began to say I should not make sacrifices for them, I should live as I please, I was silent.
He talked of what I meant to his growth. He feels a sense of growing deeper. “I can talk to you, it is so good to be able to talk.”
It was the first time he had been the object of a portrait and he loved being written about so fully. “Always what is human in the diary is wonderful.”
Jenny would be surprised if she came in, to hear us talking about her. Fred lies on the couch reading. Dave sits by his desk. I sit on the floor. We all talk so quietly, divested of all glamour and dramatics, like craftsmen at work. Jenny would scatter the silences, the pages of Dave’s book, the pages of the journal, would make us all hate each other and worship her, and stir up the furnace in which novels are born but not written.
I too am interested in evil, and I want my Dionysian life, drunkenness and passion and chaos; and yet here I am, sitting at a kitchen table and working with Dave on the portrait of Jenny, while Fred is making a stew.
My restlessness, which was vague and lyrical, has become sharp-pointed and intolerably clear. I want to be Jenny.