Encore (55 page)

Raising an eyebrow, he said, “Ah, Natalia.” He did not know how else to hide his embarrassment, for he had no idea why she had come, and the budding expectation was dangerous, treacherous, as past disappointments had taught him. They fenced with each other now, protecting themselves from any possible attack on their respective vulnerability. They were like two wounded warriors sheathing themselves in yet another coat of mail.

Natalia twisted her wedding ring on her finger. She had not entered of her own accord in a long time. Since Monte Carlo she had found it difficult to sleep, remembering Galina, the impenetrable quality of the girl's judgment of her as Pierre's wife. Clearly, to the younger woman, Natalia had failed, giving up her marriage in a bitter, self-pitying fashion. Was this, in fact, true? She looked at the floor, emotions sweeping with a flush over her breasts and shoulders, up into her face. He was still wearing his evening jacket, and she remembered how he had looked that night in Petersburg long ago when she had waited for him outside his door, like the Little Match Girl. He did not invite her to sit down, to stay. “You had a pleasant evening?” she asked, her voice low and tentative.

“Yes, very. Our people are finally making a mark on this city. The Pigalle area is becoming infested with Russian nightclubs. You should go some time. The Château Caucasien has a wonderful
tzigane
chorus and Caucasian dancers. I felt right at home.”

She could feel his eyes on the point between her breasts, could almost touch the challenge in his words. She looked at him fully and smiled. “You're right. I should go. You should have asked me tonight.”

He allowed the shoe to drop and leaned back on the bed, resting on his elbows. A slow smile spread across his face, and he nodded. She was such a part of his life, such a beautiful woman, that even now, at thirty-three, she surpassed any other female he knew. He had loved her forever. But then a grim line formed between his eyebrows, and he bit his upper lip with caution. “You know why I didn't, Natalia,” he said dryly.

He saw her wince, but instead of the usual flare of responsive anger, her face only registered a moment of mute hurt. “Please, Pierre,” she murmured, “not tonight. We're still so young! We have a lifetime stretching before us, don't we? You were the first man I ever loved. And I still love you. We're at the peak of our careers, we have a child we cherish. I'm trying to put the past away in a box, but you haven't let me, all these years. It's as if now that you have me, you've decided you don't need me anymore. Our lives have become so separate that we might as well not be married. Is this what you want for us?”

“I honestly don't know,” he replied, looking away, away from the pale, tender throat, from the parted lips and the large brown eyes. “Why are you speaking to me about this now? Why now?”

“Does it matter?” She sat down on the bed beside him but did not touch his hand, so close to her on the bedspread. “So much doesn't really matter! I don't care whether there ever was a Vendanova, or what truly took place between you and Boris. I do know he loved you—he loved us both. In my heart I've come to feel that he would want us to be together. As long as he lived, he wanted us apart, but now he would wish for us to merge, the two people he most loved, apart from his son. It gives me peace to think this way. I know that it would give you peace as well. We have each other, and Tamara, and Galina. Now.”

“But you've never loved Tamara,” Pierre retorted. His entire body was drawing into itself, pulling away from her nearness, which was making him tremble.

“She's never liked me,” Natalia answered. “You've always put yourself between us, so that by comparison I seemed the mean one, the dictator, the one who punished and took away privileges. You've never been a father to her, Pierre, only a kind of youthful Father Christmas, present at the good times but never at the bad. I watched Arkady die, and I shall not allow my daughter to be lost as well, through your spoiling. She is like a small animal, without conscience and responsibility!”

“Maybe so,” he answered wearily. His surge of hope was quickly dying down, like a graying ember. Nothing was different, then.

“Don't give up,” she said, and placed her hand on his. “Don't throw me away, Pierre. I love you, I want to try to make you happy. Don't tell me I'm too late.”

But to his amazement, all he could feel was a pervasive, sickening numbness. She was bending over him, her lovely face closing in, her scent erotic, making his head swim. He felt exhausted, depressed, cold, and impotent. Slowly, trying not to hurt her, hurt him, he turned on his side and sank into the coverlet, shutting his eyes. He felt tears sting his lashes, but no sound could rise from his lips, and he could not move.

The last thing he heard was the door opening and shutting. The next morning she had left again for Monte Carlo, leaving him a note that read: “I've decided to go to the new house, which needs renovation. The owners are causing some small problems, and I want to talk to them in person. I've taken Tamara with me. It's time she got to know her own mother. Take good care of Galina.”

He crumpled the piece of vellum into a small ball, and hurled it to the floor with a hoarse cry that Galina, who was walking quietly past, interpreted as one of pain and fury. Later, when he had gone, she went into the room and found the remnants of the note, worried lest the servants discover it first. She had heard him and seen his face, and now concern overrode common ethics in her mind, and she smoothed out the paper to see what it said. Her smooth oval face set in grim lines, and, tearing the note into tiny pieces, she said aloud, her voice trembling slightly: “Damn Natalia.”

Several days later, Pierre received a letter from Serge Pavlovitch in Monte Carlo:

“Dear Pierre,” the letter said,

I have given
Les Noces
careful consideration this past year, and have been thinking over Natalia's suggestions. Perhaps her ideas are more on target after all. Stravinsky seems to believe that they are. A ballet that pulls and tugs, with the same sort of ponderous ritual as the
Song of the Volga

Boatmen.
And for this, she's right, we'd need stark costumes and a sparsely furnished set, something rather
functional.
For at heart this wedding is functional. One can almost feel the fathers discussing the dowry of two heads of cattle.

Therefore, I have invited Natalia once again to participate in this project. She seems delighted. I hope you will be pleased to be collaborating once again—you worked so well together on
Renard.
When I return to Paris, I shall expect your reworked sketches.

Pierre's hand began to tremble slightly, but he stilled it with the strong fingers of his other hand. He was tired, so very tired.

Sometimes Galina felt caught on a precipice between two worlds, in a no-man's-land where she would begin to wonder who, in fact, she was. There was the world of the Riazhins: bright, artistic, unpredictable, and temperamental, with immense riches in the background. These people were the geniuses of the world. They created colorful new worlds of their own, which defied measure and containment. These were the gods of today's society: Natalia, Pierre, Diaghilev, Stravinsky, and their cohorts. They were never conventional or dependent on society. Then there was a cruder world, that of the strugglers, the mediocre. She had lived among them in Tbilis and in Constantinople, and, in many respects, still believed that she was one of them rather than a part of that other, more unique realm governed by her step-family. Among this other set the
tziganes
and the less talented painters' models had achieved success—while the rest of them were still anonymous, still barely surviving. Yet Galina had been born into neither of these worlds. She had participated in both, but had been reared in yet another environment, altogether different in its values and precepts: that of the most elite Russian aristocracy, with its Christian Orthodox outlook and its arrogant sense of self-sufficient
noblesse oblige.

No wonder then that Galina did not always feel at home within her own skin. Her experience, and her observant mind that weighed and judged carefully before reaching a decision, allowed her to see good and bad in each segment of society with which she had been in contact. She hesitated most about judging herself. Galina thought that she could learn to become a stage designer, but that she lacked the special gift that might otherwise have propelled her to become a great one, like Pierre or Gontcharova. She had come to respect the Moldavian
tziganes,
with their particular, inimitable brand of music. If she had found herself unable to sing well among them, it had been because of her upbringing, she thought. As a well-controlled young princess from St. Petersburg, she had been taught to tame the wilderness from her heart—and it was precisely this wilderness, voiced in snatches of song and in the twang of violins, that the
tziganes
expressed to their listeners, reaching inside themselves to connect with other men and women through a common, basic humanity, animal and divine at once. Galina found herself healed by their music, although she could not have explained why.

Sometimes, when she felt betwixt and between, unsure and prey to nagging doubts, a scorching loneliness would set in. It was particularly bad that spring of 73, with Natalia and Tamara gone. Galina was a practical girl and had often occupied herself with projects that turned her away from herself, from her concern with her own mental state. For Galina the best outlet was being with Tamara, playing with her or showing her how to do things. Now, with the small girl gone, the gray moments came more frequently and proved more difficult to chase away.

The house was empty most of the time, except for the servants. Uneasily, Galina prowled from room to room, wondering about Pierre. Whenever she thought of Natalia's note, a hot flush would rise within her, and something inside her constricted for Pierre. She worried about him. He was gone so often, without explanation. True, he was master of the house and of his own life, and he owed her nothing. But there was an abstraction about him when he was with her that bothered her, an abstraction compounded with fierceness that kept her from approaching him for fear of intruding on a personal sadness. Then she would silently curse Natalia again, blaming her for what she saw as Pierre's unhappiness.

Galina missed Pierre. If anyone could have understood her vague feelings of alienation, surely he could have. She longed to sit with him in the comfortable semidarkness of a late afternoon, to tell him quietly what she felt and thought. She had sensed in him a dichotomy of self similar to her own. She understood his Caucasian pride, his flares of sudden temper, his passionate nature, for she had lived among people like him long enough to grasp their essence. She also saw his need for beauty, his struggle as an artist to wrench from himself the vague ideas that were born every minute of every day, seeking expression incoherently. On top of that was the sense of style that Boris Kussov had given him, the final polish that had turned him from an elemental painter into a master of universal scope, a pace setter as well as an unabashed explorer. He was a primitive who had risen above himself without denying his own uniqueness.

After all these months she had discovered that Natalia was not the only one who had found it impossible to put Boris safely away in the past. Galina had methodically pieced together certain inferences about Pierre, certain bits of information provided by Natalia, and other odds and ends that had wafted her way, and reached the conclusion that Pierre had resented his mentor for the control that he had exerted over Pierre's life and career, while at the same time grudgingly admitting that no man had so thoroughly touched his soul and influenced his art. Sometimes the young girl actually caught a glimpse of Boris in Pierre: his love of opaline lamps from China, for example, or a particular way of nonchalantly crossing his legs. She could understand how such a man such as her uncle might have branded the lives of others who had intimately known him.

At first Pierre had taken her to the cafes of Montparnasse and the Île-St.-Louis, but, beginning the preceding fall, he had introduced her to something quite different: the Russian cabarets. There were several of them, modeled on the all-night restaurants that had abounded on the outskirts of Moscow and St. Petersburg, each with its chorus of
tziganes,
with its atmosphere of outrageous risk, where vast, limitless fortunes could be lost in an evening. She had found it fascinating to watch Pierre's face, especially at the Château Caucasien where Tcherkess tribesmen would perform the
lezhinka
of his youth, the dance of the daggers. There had been something almost sexual in the rapt attention that Pierre gave to these fierce Cossacks, as if they had unlocked his heart in front of a room full of strangers. Yet she had also thought of her Uncle Boris in his costume of the Division Sauvage. She'd seen him in Petersburg before he had been sent to the Caucasus, resplendent in his black and silver uniform, and had found this image of him the most compelling one of all.

Now, wandering through the magnificent house where only the maids crossed her path, Galina felt a powerful urge to find something familiar, something to draw her out of her gloom. She had come home from the Académie des Beaux-Arts, swinging her portfolio in the balmy spring air, raising dust on the bridges and the quays as she stopped to peer into the open bookstalls by the banks of the Seine. She was tired but felt revived by the sun, by this city that she had grown to love, by the beauty of her fellow students' work. It was evening now, and still she was alone. When Chaillou came to ask her if she cared to have supper, she shook her head with sudden impatience. Tonight she would not be the genteel young princess, controlled and wise. “I'll just take a bite before I leave.” she told the startled old man and smiled warmly to dispel his shock. Then she threw off her afternoon's clothes and put on a cool cotton middy blouse and a pleated skirt. Before leaving, she seized a long strand of colored beads.