Nijinsky danced his last dance, “World War I,”
in January of 1919. He then suffered an
irreparable breakdown.
Nijinsky’s dog, if he had one, died last August.
She was a beautiful animal
with all that was rational
beaten out of her strong
cleanly chiseled head.
We’d circle each other,
lonely, in the heat
of the late summer nights,
both of us waiting for you—
for some crumb of attention.
When I didn’t finish the dinner
you’d sometimes offer,
you’d slip it into her bowl
and she’d spring toward you,
more starved for love than food.
I’d watch her from my chair,
passing the time until you’d turn yourself
toward me—remember (O please)
I was there. Out on the ledge
she’d sit, elegant and damaged—
her scars buried in her dense gnarled
fur. Since I’ve come up here I twist
and now I have a bald spot
that my barrettes can barely cover. You
almost seemed to cry
when you told me that she died.
But as I came closer I saw
your eyes completely
dry. You left her
on that hot August roof—
the tar blistering
her dog feet. She couldn’t stand
to touch the surface
so she sat and sat
on that asphalt edge,
her mind on fire with memory
of how you once took care
with her, gave her a yard
to play in, rolled with her
in cool green grass.
She’d dream of that
and want it back, before
the war that destroyed her world:
your wife’s shrieks take the goddamn
dog if you leave
me. And the dog
in her dog mind thought and thought
it was all her fault.
I wish I’d been there
when she took her leap
into the too blue, parched
air, over the anchored
reaching toward the idle sky,
to see her resolve—the pause,
then the quick
amazing move—the elevation, the gift
of rising, her thick mane ablaze
against the dazed noonday sun.
How she broke
free in that grand jeté,
sailing in holy
madness past her dog life,
her soul bounding out
of her sad dog eyes
while her ragged body hit
a barren patch of earth.
AFTER THE MISERABLE lunch with Deidre, Cecilia returned even more so to thinking about the disastrous dinner with Herr M and the all-encompassing consequences of it—of the damage it had done to her, both internally and externally—her broken spirit and the wretched gossip. The debris—the scum—from it something she feels she can never clean up.
He forbade her to publish the poems. Said he would ruin her career. He said people would know it was his futon in one of the poems—its urine smell, the urine of his child. She had shown three new ones to a friend and her so-called friend had shown them to him. He was particularly paranoid because he was fighting for joint custody of his two year old daughter and in a pit-bull rage he snarled predatorily at her over the phone that the poems—these poems—if read by his wife’s lawyer or worse, the judge, would cause irreparable damage to his chances. As if a lawyer or judge would read a poem and, even if they did, care. Poems as evidence? Not in this country. Never. She sent them out anyway and they did get published. Even though she could not seem to take good care with her body, she felt she could with her art—or at least try.
In addition, the poems seemed the only way to relieve her humiliation over what had happened. Yet the deadness she felt—a sick bulb twisting into itself, lost in its path of which way was up and out—seemed to be expanding faster than the speed of her writing. This is not to say she did not want to master the art of forgiveness for both him and for herself, but she could not. She read as many self-help book sas she could tolerate—some with religious overtones—and several on the practice of Zen, but none of what she read on forbearance, self-acceptance, and grace could reach the chaos going on so deep inside her. She even taped little sayings on the rim of the radiator cover next to her writing chair, but all they did was fall to the floor when the heat was turned on.
How she wanted to tell Celie right after it happened. But it was a bad time in her life, too. Emotional. She had just come out of the hospital and was trying to get back to normal. Back to her job at the fancy dress shop. She called her absence an “exhaustion.” The doctors recorded it as a “breakdown.”
Everyone was told when visiting her there to speak of nothing serious—only things “as light as air,” as one too-perky nurse had put it—so as soon as she was in the car with Celie, driving her home—six days after it happened—Celie wanted to know all the important things she had missed these past couple of months. Cecilia took a breath and sputtered out “Herr” and stopped. When Celie said, “What?” she said, “I meant to say weather—that the weather has been just awful.” Then she smiled and continued, “You picked a good time to be inside.”
She drove her to her modest apartment and then went to the pharmacy with a fistful of prescriptions, returning to the fragile Celie with a bag filled with vials of pills. At that moment Celie most definitely was not the right person to tell.
How she wanted to tell her mother. But every time she tried it was clear her mother did not want to hear any detail—let alone the whole of it. Her mother, too, had become fragile. Physical. She did persist for a couple of weeks. One day when she mentioned Herr M, her mother just called him a “rascal,” took her hand and said, “Cecilia, I too have had a few rascals in my life.” She could not tell if her mother was being ironic, sarcastic, or her memory had momentarily gone into hiding from her body’s sickness.
Once, she even brought up Diaghilev—Nijinsky’s mentor—so that she could then segue into Herr M. She told her mother how he took the young Nijinsky from poverty straight to the Ballets Russes. How he tormented him, forced him into unwanted sexual acts. How he threw him out when Nijinsky finally asserted himself and how this contributed to Nijinsky’s eventual collapse—that after he danced his dance, World War I, which he had choreographed so as to capture all the cruelties of war, he suffered an irreparable breakdown.
No matter that she was dying, Aunt Lettie’s response was sharp and fast, “Art choreograph a war, capture a war—a real war with all its cruelties? Never!” No, her mother did not want to listen to any of this. So they went on to speak only about Nijinsky’s genius. His use of straight lines and angles as opposed to the serpentine and spiral. How he allowed only essential steps into his dance and how this made every move more powerful.
Then her mother would return to her story of her own mother going to see Nijinksy dance. Aunt Lettie described in detail Nijinsky’s costume as the Faun, just like she had to the relatives, when Cecilia in her room had struggled to hear her mother’s words. Outwardly, Cecilia was enthusiastic with the repetition, because she saw how much this brought her mother an authentic happiness—that this pleasure, gleaned from the long lost past, lit her up and anchored her. Inwardly, after it happened, Cecilia felt completely untethered and lost.
She could not tell her father. Since his retirement he only liked to concern himself with the smallest of things. Crossword puzzles, the sports section of the newspaper—never the front page. He especially liked to read about golf—the putt, putt, putt into that tiny hole. As for his wife, all he wanted was to take her out of the hospital and put her in hospice. “Yes, close the door on this room,” her mother would say to Cecilia, pointing to herself. Cecilia found those the saddest words she ever heard her mother say about her father.
It was clear her father certainly did not need or want more grief—or problems—especially from her. They had never spoken about anything important. To him she was pretty much irrelevant, as if her birth was created only by—and for—her mother. Her relationship with him was always formal—lacking any depth of emotion—so, at best, all she would get from Samuel Slaughter was some amount of fluster, like when he heard her read her poetry.
She could not bring herself to tell Michael. She did not know what he would do—how he would react. He seemed exactly the wrong person to tell, that his response would only add to her own rattled confusion, her shame, her—at the time—amorphous rage.
So she told no one—at least for a long while—what had happened that night. How, afterward, she could not catch her breath. It was a Sunday—the beginning of the second week of January. That Monday he called to apologize. How he kept saying sorry, sorry over the phone as he had done the night before—after it happened—and repeating his excuse, “I just got carried away,” and his warning, “You cannot tell anyone. Do you understand this? You do understand this? Do you not?”
It seemed to her she must have had a seizure—her legs and arms started moving uncontrollably, she started gagging and she was having trouble breathing when he was almost finished with her. She remembers her naked body shivering on the bare, hardwood floor, almost quaking, and hearing the same sorry, sorry litany and the same excuse and warning.
He then sat down naked next to her and said, “Can I make you some tea? Some tea? Some tea?” As if begging. Finally, she agreed to some tea. Much more for him than for her—as if by drinking it, that meant forgiveness.
Monday she went to the doctor, because of her breath. She still could not catch it and she had a poetry reading in two weeks. She needed her breath and her composure back. Dr. Astrich questioned her about the bruises that were beginning to swell on her inner thighs, her breasts, and the upper areas of her inner arms. He asked, “Did someone hit you, knock you down, pin you to the ground—beat you?” However, because he was becoming increasingly nervous, he made a joke of it and added, “Have you taken up boxing?” She quietly replied, “No, I fell.” She thought, “Like Eve. Naive Eve, naive me, both of us fallen to earth.”
She kept repeating to him, “I’ve lost my breath and you have to help me find it. I need to get it back.” It did sound odd, the way she put it, but he knew she was a poet and he liked how she expressed herself so he just smiled and did not question her further. Just told her if her breathing was still giving her trouble in a week to come back for an X-ray, which she did. It was walking pneumonia, for which he gave her a prescription for an antibiotic, saying, “This will cure it quickly.” She would, in fact, walk with it—a lodestone on her chest—for six months.
Then, “Nijinsky’s Dog”—a poem he had never seen—a poem she knew would enrage him even more, was published a little over a year later. The poem existed as a kind of telling—a metaphor—an inaccurate, yet good enough record of how she felt afterward.
Her only witness to what had happened had died. The dog. His dog. When he left his wife, he took the dog and moved into an attic apartment with her. She remembers going up the winding outside flight of stairs of that house and seeing all the lovely furniture inside, the gleaming crystal fixtures through the large, sparkling panes of glass trimmed with swags of creamy silk. She thought how much she would like to be going there. It was so unlike the narrowing space where she was heading—a place the owner had rented out and seemed to care nothing about—its two small windows bare and filthy. When he greeted her at the door with the dog, the first thing she noticed about her were her large, sad eyes. Then, her fur—so matted and knotted, so uncared for.
She jumped off his roof in late August of that year. He told everyone she had fallen. “Like Eve? Like me?” Over and over, she thought this. She listened to others talk about it with both outrage and relish. “He left her on that hot August roof to teach a class!” She wanted to scream at them, “She just couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t stand any of it, anymore. Just couldn’t. So she jumped.” “A grand jeté, sailing in holy madness,” is how she wrote it. “A suicide,” is what she thought.
Right after she took off her coat he handed her something wrapped in bright colored tissue paper—robin’s-egg blue—and with delight said, “A gift!” When she unwrapped it she found a bracelet. She was surprised—completely caught off guard—and flattered and she could feel the blood rush to her face. All she could think to say was a strong, but flustered, “Thank you.”
“Silver and obsidian,” he replied with great pride. “I bought it for you. It reminded me so much of your heightened, compelling intensity.”
She put the bracelet down on his desk, then carefully folded the crisp tissue and placed it inside her purse. She wanted so much to appear organized and calm. In fact, she was all excitement inside. Then, she picked the bracelet up and touched the rounded blade edges of the stones and thought of the burning lava from which they had been born and the lustrous, thick, octagonal silver nuggets that linked the irregular chunks of deep blue obsidian—a rare color for this stone. She loved how the clasp was made of round silver magnets and how easily they met, snapped together, and held tight. She put it on her left wrist.
He was polite and spoke slowly of how pleased he was to see her and complimented her not on her face or body, but rather on the delicate necklace that hung over the turtleneck of her sweater—a plain silver chain from which a tiny, turquoise enameled starfish dangled—and how well it blended with her new bracelet. He had a good eye for detail.
On his worn couch he lead the conversation. First he asked about her mother. There was always a great concern in both his facial expressions and his voice when he spoke of her mother. When she lowered her head and said, “Not good, not good at all,” he shook his and replied, “Too bad, too bad.” It was clear she did not want to talk about her mother’s illness anymore—she was just too close to death—and he immediately picked up on this, changing the subject to that of the intellect, for which she was relieved.
He talked about how important the role of the poet-critic was in the analysis of contemporary poetry, not just that of the academic, whom he felt sometimes drained all moisture from the topic. This, too, was unexpected—given that he was an academic and a critic, but not a poet.
He asked her what she thought of several poets and listened intently to her opinions. When she finished, he suggested she consider writing an essay about what she had just said. That he would be pleased to read it. And beyond all this, he continued, smiling, “Maybe we could collaborate on a series of such essays for a book.” She had never thought of herself as a poet-critic, but she very much liked the idea of it, the possibilities of it—another positive invention of herself. At that moment she felt so focused on, and included unlike all her childhood exclusions, especially the insults directed at her from my parents—sometimes subtle, sometimes not—how they always gave her the role of the Wicked Son at the Passover Seder and their labeling of her to the others as the “dandelion.”
She loved the way he shared his mind with her and she loved her new bracelet. Toward the end of their conversation—right before dinner—he talked about a book he was writing on film noir—why these films continued to be popular. How he believed they still spoke to contemporary audiences about trust-relationships—“To see things in the dark as they truly are,” was how he put it. He then added, “Perhaps after dinner we’ll watch the movie I am writing about right now—The Postman Always Rings Twice—so you can tell me what you think.” She felt so safe with all this talk until she mentioned, “These movies always seem to inevitably involve the betrayal of the most unsuspecting.”
He erupted into a laugh that seemed sinister, making her feel terribly uncomfortable, and then he glared at her—his eyes suddenly so absolutely empty. At that indelible moment she was not sure she was seeing things as they truly were. Instinctively, she looked the bracelet, and it occurred to her that it was an out-of-the-ordinary gesture for their relationship as it existed in the present and she became nervous. She thought of a starfish out of its element, flopping on the dry sand, fighting for its life, and she held tight to the charm on her necklace. He saw this and suggested they eat.
He had made a chicken dish. It did not smell quite right, because it was not fully cooked. She could see blood spots on the meat, and as she delicately tried to separate it from the bone—the cooked parts from the raw—with the dog quietly sitting next to her, it happened. The dog was as startled as she when he sprang from his chair and yanked her from hers. His hands were already on her breasts. Then she felt the dog’s paws at her waist. She could feel the dog shudder. “Is the dog trying to protect me or is the dog wanting me to protect her?” she wondered in a thought-panic. At that moment the dog seemed half-human, half-animal and she, Cecilia, seemed half-animal, half-human. Her mind was whirling as she wondered, “Are we one and the same being?” She even thought of Nijinsky as the Faun and his becoming half-animal, half-human—her associations all a dervish dance.
He screamed at the dog and she ran under the table—hid there. Cecilia saw the dog under it as he pulled her to the futon. And yes, she could smell the urine from when his daughter had napped there earlier.
The more she cried for him to stop, the more he ripped at her clothes. Her hair went flying all over her face, her now bare skin, her breasts, while the dog stayed huddled, almost frozen in her own mountain of fur, except for the chewing, that unrelenting chewing, her unrelenting chewing on herself, her eyes crazed from the chaos. She and the dog stared at each other after it was over as Cecilia cowered on the soiled, hardwood floor. Now, the dog is dead—dead in the unrelenting heat of that August. The tarred roof burning her dog feet.
Driving herself home that night so badly bruised and mind-broken all she could think to do was to make up lines for a poem. A poem to distract her, to help her get home. Doing this did keep the headlights from the cars coming toward her and the taillights from the cars speeding past her from completely smearing into each other, as she kept wiping away the tears that would not stop arriving. Over and over the lines repeating in her head:
He bought me
a bracelet
of silver and obsidian
and after he broke the bread,
devoured it
he could not stop
saying
“Sorry, Sorry”
over and over again
“Sorry, Sorry”
circling like a vulture
over me over
a bracelet of silver and obsidian.
After the “dog poem” was published he called at least twice a week, his number popping up on her Caller ID, but he only spoke the first time, saying, “Now I am going ruin your career. I have the power.” After that he would just bash the phone down, as if to make sure she would hear the crash—to frighten her further, which it did. Still does, although the calls stopped a couple of months ago.
So she sits in her chair, worrying as to what he might do next and now also with her own, fully shaped, knife-sharp rage, thinking about all of it, thinking he was the last person inside her, which makes her sick—makes her feel polluted and that she will go to her death with this fact.
Everywhere she goes she imagines, “Someone is going to come along and throw me to the ground, drag me deeper into that dark forest where the archdemons await—Lucifer, Mammon, Asmodeus, Satan, Beelzebub, Leviathan. The German.”
She checks her body for marks every day, as if he had left something in her which she can never get rid of, something that will rise up. Some stain that eventually will make itself visible—that the cells in the deep layers of her body are mutating into some hideous blossom. Which they are. The heart’s melanoma—a fury spreading with its pronged-in, black, ragged edges and its forever festering red center.
She keeps all men, except Michael—who spends much of his time with her as if they were the closest brother and sister—at a friendly, but measured distance. When she does go out it is usually with someone she knows well, mostly a relative, or to a place she regards as “safe”—like the dress shop. If she does go somewhere alone, she disguises herself with layers of clothes, plus scarves or hats—tucking her distinctive hair inside them. She stays at home a lot in her chair writing such lines as “in my corner shrinking from any vibration that could allow the delicate poised snow to be shaken to avalanche.” Then, she signs her name, “Cecilia Slaughter—still poet,” and thinks, “Funny, those words—their double meaning.”
She thinks about her mother, gone, the dog, gone, even her father with a quick, clean heart attack six months after her mother’s death—“Each with their leap, or fall, it doesn’t matter, out of here.” She remembers how well over a year ago she buried her mother’s diary—with the stem of the bald flower pressed between its pages—next to the bracelet of silver and obsidian and how they now lie beside each other with their separate, wild, silent screams.
And she does wonder if Cecily has written a play using what she has heard, however much it might be in error. Half of her now cowers in the corner of her own room, thinking about this and the further trouble it could cause, while the other half continuously lifts off this planet into that hot noonday sun—her mind ablaze—into the clear, blister of that August air.
Then, in her chair, she contemplates: “Perhaps it’s time. Time to tell someone. Time to tell everyone. Time to tell at least some of it. To find out how the telling feels so as to possibly save myself from my own considered leap into the atmosphere.”