Lucking Out - James Wolcott [115]
When I think of what was waiting on the other side of the dance boom’s soaring crest, the darker afterwash and long plateau, another matinee comes to mind, one quite different from my first at New York City Ballet, one separated by a decade. (By then, I had moved to a smaller mouse-hole in the East Village, just in time for the crack era.) This was the NYCB matinee when the principal dancer Darci Kistler was scheduled to perform after a long absence due to injury, a layoff that had seeded suspicion and resentment, rumors that Darci might be a perfectionistic head case like Gelsey. Her appearances had been sporadic even before this extended recoup, her name dropped from the cast abruptly like the scheduled 3:10 train from New Haven removed from the station board due to track failure. Darci was getting a George Jones reputation as a reliably unreliable no-show, though of course nobody imagined her knocking back Johnnie Walker Red in the back of a trailer. But her elusive butterfly dartings had become vexatious to those who loved her. So much had ridden on Darci’s shoulders since she had first emerged from the stable that her absences were a deprivation, a denial of a great dancer in her prime. She had been the last of the Balanchine ballerinas, appearing first onstage at the age of sixteen in major roles and revealing a coltish, unself-conscious transparent cursiveness that had many reaching for the word “preternatural.” She was the heiress of the Balanchine ideal and ballet’s torchbearer for the future, a future that looked precarious after the death of Balanchine in 1983, whose last works were solos choreographed for Farrell, who would retire from the company in 1989. Without Balanchine as presiding, animating spirit, NYCB, ballet itself, was in danger of ossifying into a preservation society. Whatever doubts and irritation over the long gaps between performances, everyone wanted Darci’s return to be triumphal, a faith-restorer, not so much a comeback (she was too young for that) as a coming home.
Everybody was there that sunny, light-spilling day. Arlene Croce and assorted other dance critics, forming clots. Susan Sontag and whatever scary person she was with. Regular faces whose names I didn’t know, and a face whose name I did know who was a friend of both Arlene’s and Pauline’s, a literary critic who looked like Lytton Strachey when he held a cigarette aloft, the smoke chimneying upward as if leaving cares behind. He had a slight stammer too, as I recall, the fitful effort it took to insert a word into the loading chamber when he sensed his vocal mechanism about to jam, which also made me think of Bloomsbury, Oxbridge dons, the tapping of cigarette ashes. Though given that he had been born and raised in the Deep South, Tennessee Williams on the veranda would have been a closer invocation, but Williams didn’t send off the scent of the library stacks; A. did. He was in a bad way, his uneven shoulders holding him up like a bent clothes hanger. He had lost noticeable weight, something had wrung out of him. It was difficult for him to stand, even more painful to sit, so much fleshy padding had been skimped from his bones. He said that he had come from his sickbed—adding, “Don’t worry, I’m not contagious”—and knew that he shouldn’t have, “but I couldn’t miss this.