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In Quest of the Absolute
One remarks of many people that the image they've formed of themselves has very little to do with their outward conduct. To an extent this is true of all of us. In certain cases the chasm between thought and behavior is so immense that one speaks of a pathology. Such persons appear driven by psychological imperatives that, by and large, are unconscious.
On occasion close associates , such as friends , relatives or counselors will take it upon themselves to penetrate this grey area, where spiritual need completely overshadows the mind. Generally, such well-meaning action comes up against an impenetrable wall; placing an ear upon it may, with luck, enable us to overhear the echoes of mysteries which , lodged deep within the heart, resist our strongest efforts at decipherment. Ultimately the phenomenon can only be understood through the evocation of some kind of exterior frame , fixed in the cosmos and outside of time, relative to which our frail notions of personal freedom, individuality or will seem like ephemeral streaks of paint dripped by the movement of a trembling brush across the universal canvas.
In June of 1970 Diane Evans, recent graduate of dance academies in San Francisco and other places on the West Coast was greeted by her cousins and aunt as she stepped off the train at Manhattan’s Grand Central Station . Then in her early 20s , her enthusiasm for her choice of vocation was at its height. By the end of the first week in New York she had lined up engagements for chorus lines and dance ensembles in several Broadway musicals. After that there was never a day when she was out of work .Soon she was enrolled in advanced classes in ballet and modern dance. Her timing could not have been better, only a few years before the great blossoming of dance in America. She was quickly swept up in the confluence of ideas coming from Martha Graham and Hanya Holm, the avant-garde experimentation of Merce Cunningham , the inventiveness of Twyla Thwarp and Alwin Nikolais and the other forces set in motion during in this burgeoning period of a new indigenous art form.
In 1976 she auditioned for and was accepted by an established troupe known as the Terpsichore Ensemble. Eventually she would become one of its principal dancers and teachers. The Terpsichore Ensemble possessed its own school and rehearsal studios at 72nd Street and Amsterdam Avenue, slightly north of the area around Lincoln Square on the Upper West Side. Its directors and choreographers catered to avant-garde fashion; in those days this went by the name of Minimalism. Among its composers were Phillip Glass, John Adams, Lamont Young, Franz Kamen and Terry Riley.
When its members accepted outside engagements they danced in the styles in which they'd been trained. For Diane this meant virtually all of them, although she’d pulled out of the Broadway circuit after about 3 years. It was hurting her technique and she could now found herself in a position to support herself without having to hustle in Show Business’s barnyards.
By the mid-80's Terpsichore's local, national and international reputation was secure . It participated in dance festivals at home and abroad on a regular basis ; at least once each year it toured and gave master classes at colleges across the country.
This account begins when Diane Evans had been with the Terpsichore Ensemble about twelve years. She had aged dramatically , though the electricity of youth still emanated from an athletic physique. She had always been a bit more stocky than the stereotype of a dancer, though never plump and certainly not fat. Her pale reddish skin was dry ; from the stage it glinted like cut glass or a shower of sequins. Jet black hair, powerful limbs and a supple frame gave her a commanding presence. on stage or off.
She’d always been slightly near-sighted. Her experiments with contact lenses had never been too successful, and she wore no other corrective other than reading glasses when needed . She had never been pretty, though when she danced she was beautiful. Her breasts were large without being vulgar. A broad skull rested on a strong neck.
Not all of her features were so appealing. Her brow was thick with furrows , as if from continual brooding or obsession. It might suddenly appear as if her face had been invaded by a dark cloud, or overcast by a deathly pallor. Her mouth were exceptionally hard, almost set in a grimace that was accentuated by her high cheekbones. This was not the only evidence of some residue of accumulated bitterness, or of an occupation demanding daily intimacy with physical and psychic pain.
She was intelligent though not intellectual. Her serious gaze indicated high artistic sensitivity but little verbal ability. Altogether mysterious to her friends, she aroused sympathy by virtue of a charm that could not be traced to its source. Her moods were unpredictable, going in wide arcs from giddy elation to sudden depression. Throughout all the years of career, there was not one day on which she’d allowed her emotions to stand in the way of her work. To say that she was driven would be an understatement: she was her calling, she simply could not imagine herself otherwise.
By the early 80’s she’d become famous in her own right. Talent, hard work and the indispensable element of luck had all worked in her favor. In 1982 she'd appeared in a PBS television series entitled " Classics of Great Art: The Dance" . It showed on Channel 13 for 6 consecutive Saturday nights. In order of appearance the series mounted productions of Coppelia, Swan Lake, Giselle, Les Sylphides and Prokoffief's Romeo and Juliet , culminating in the inevitable Nutcracker Suite at Christmas .
In none of these did she star as première ballerina : ballet had never been her specialization . Despite this , she was the only soloist to appear in all six of them . She more or less stole the show in the Nutcracker Suite with a dazzling display of virtuosity in the Spanish duo . Never destined to become a household word like “Nureyev” or “Baryshnikoff” or “Margot Fonteyn” her name was frequently mentioned in the dance reviews of major American newspapers, while her photograph appeared fairly often in the pages, and sometimes on the cover of, Dance Magazine. It seems scarcely necessary to add that, long before the projection of her profile onto public consciousness, she'd achieved a far more meaningful recognition from the world of the dance itself.
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Friends and colleagues had more or less reached the conclusion that she was simply too busy for love affairs and other such attachments. None of them could recall anyone, male or female, with whom she'd ever been involved. What was not generally known was that she had worked out her own solutions for gratifying those carnal appetites which, in one form or another ( barring a few isolated saints ( whose existence should not (despite the judgment of the psychiatric profession) be denied. ) ) inhabit ordinary souls. Those rare interludes of liberty granted to her between the round of classes, teaching, rehearsals and performances, were sometimes put to use in a most unusual way. Heading back to her elegant Central Park West apartment suite, her conventional dresses would be rapidly discarded to be replaced by carefully selected combinations of gaudy or chintzy items of clothing, all in very expensive and very bad taste.
Powdered facial skin, rouged cheeks and lipstick applied like cake, transformed her most appealing facial features into crude billboards advertising the most lurid suggestion. To these might be added thickly applied mascara penciling around the eyes , imbuing them with penetration and allure, beauty spots, gold dust and other glitter, sharp points in bangs and eyebrows, whatever would enhance her presence on the street. Her hair still wet and dripping with henna dyes, shrouded in imitation furs and garlanded by flashy jewelry, she would then travel downtown to the streets adjoining and abutting on Times Square. There, like the hundreds, perhaps thousands of prostitutes roaming that neighborhood, Diane Evans peddled her body.
It is unlikely that she herself, if asked , would have been able to recollect the specifics of her initiation into this bizarre genre of private entertainment. It began as an experiment during her early years in the City, then soon became a habitual vice . It was a way of finding relief from the overwork which frequently left her in a state near collapse, in the chorus lines of musicals, commercials and other professional entertainment engagements. Narrowly interpreted, such activities could be understood as a way, fairly successful at that, of using the means available in the proximity of Broadway to bring her down from a state of overwrought tension. At the same time it got her off the work site. This was important, for there the propositions were many and the maneuverability for rejecting them limited. Who can say when she’d made the discovery that , simply by walking a few blocks south of the theater district, she could achieve anonymity by standing in the street and selling herself for money? While avoiding the unwanted, when not outright insulting, advances of managers, stage crews, drunk businessmen and macho dancers, she would also be touching base with a kind of raw experience that was absent from her professional life.
In this avocation, as in her committed vocation, she remained the seasoned professional : her clients received not an inch beyond what they’d contracted for. It was natural that, in the course of events, many of the johns would try to take advantage of her, demanding indulgences of perverse appetites, visits lasting beyond the agreed time periods and, how should we put it - free - “consolations ?” - over and above those provided at the stipulated prices. Her clients were in the market for love; and is it not in the very nature of love that it be given freely? Yet her long struggle to become an exemplary artist had instilled habits and attitudes which inevitably spilled over into all her other activities. It was only to be expected that, if she were to be a prostitute, her theory of love would be dramatically at variance with the more generous, yet perhaps a trifle self-serving, notions of psychologists and theologians. In the regulations of her profession it is stated that love is a transaction mediated by money: where the money stops, so does the transaction.
Nor had she ever found much reason to fear the possibility of capricious outbursts of violence from some of the unduly lecherous, ill-tempered, frustrated or mentally diseased customers, those who imagined they could force services from her that she'd no intention of providing. Her basic intellectual level was pitched so far above that of the denizens of flesh trade that, of those who approached her with the intention of causing trouble all but a handful were quickly cowed to states of speechless awe. The very small number of nut cases that persisted were speedily tossed to the madams, pimps and corrupt local cops, for their never-to-be-forgotten lessons in civilization.
It might appear strange, perhaps, that Diane Evans would bring such scrupulous notions of principle to a pursuit one is tempted to dismiss as no more than a perverse hobby or some rare sexual pathology. Yet it would be a grave error to think that she thought of her subsidiary profession as a species of diversion. For her the traffic of the streets was tragic destiny, fulfillment in obliteration , life itself.
The shadow cast by this secondary existence, the reverse image of a too visible presence on the stage of the world, did not for the most part intersect with her role as a public figure. There were a small number of exceptions, including some close friends. In any metropolis celebrated for its concentration of cultural institutions there is always be found a certain percentage of dissolute culture vultures who, though of exquisite and refined sensibilities , are so thoroughly jaded in their higher pursuits that they must periodically seek new thrills via spontaneous bingings in debauchery. They can be compared to a classical type of glutton who, weary of his unrelieved consummation of haute cuisine , will suddenly gratify a desire to pig out on junk food destined to be vomited out in the bathrooms of McDonalds , Jack-in-the-Box, Hardees and the like .
So it did happen from time to time that Diane Evans would agree to “turn a trick” with a customer drawn from this class of individuals, who had recognized her from the boards of the NY State Theater or the Brooklyn Academy of Music. These transactions involved a trip out to seedy motels on the New Jersey coast, far from the City and out of the reach of prying gossip columnists and the police.
Given the perverse personal gratification she enjoyed from these special occasions , she might just as well have paid her clientele . It sent thrills to the deepest recesses of her vanity to imbibe their ravings, to hear them spill their lewd fantasies at the moments of climax, to learn from their own lips how they'd lusted for the supernatural creature they'd witnessed dancing on the boards, to receive, like some high priestess of the religion of love, their confessions, to relish the knowledge that they’d believed the attainment of their dreams permanently out of reach.
She might say things to them like " I have developed a perfect body" , whispering between laughter and tears, " Why should it not be used to give pleasure to others?"
Such facile rationales were more than sufficient for her needs. Self-analysis didn't interest her; indeed she resisted it. Dance is the art of inarticulates . The great dancer Anna Pavlova, herself more verbal than most, might have been stating the case for her entire profession when she said : " I do not think in words. My medium of expression is movement. " Whatever realization Diane had of the harm she might be doing to herself would never reach the stage of verbalization . In this respect she was not far different from the rest of us . Most of our gratifications are destructive of something in ourselves ; does that mean that we haven't got the right to enjoy ourselves? That her unorthodox habits might ultimately inflict injuries on mind and body far greater than those induced by excessive smoking or drinking seems never to have entered her mind. Otherwise she had comparatively few vices. She had never smoked, and could not over-eat : her profession took care of that. Social drinking had been something of a problem for the past few years, though never to the point of going out of control.
There were a few close friends who, because she'd taken them into her confidence, or who had somehow divined her secrets, were overcome with horror at the spectacle of her ferocious appetite for self-destruction. Who could divine from what buried sources of childhood trauma arose this urge to desecrate the monument of stoic will and bodily discipline that had been achieved at the cost of so many years of sacrifice ?
Following the surges of New York’s political tempest, the NYPD would sporadically launch surprise raids on the Times Square hookers. Diane easily slipped through the dragnets. There were always advance warning signs and , unlike most of the girls she did not depend on street-walking for a living. In the course of her 15 year dabbling in prostitution she was caught only once. She was picked up in December of 1980 during a campaign mounted by downtown merchants to "clean up the Square for Christmas ". The paddy wagon into which she was pushed took her and a dozen of her co-workers to the Woman's House of Detention, at that time still located on the corner of 6th Avenue and Greenwich Avenue in the West Village.
The incident almost ruined her career. Once again her luck held . That very morning a dance review had appeared in the New York Times in which her name was prominently mentioned . There are some cultivated people among the police, as there are in every profession. One of the woman officers in the booking office was a police sergeant who recognized her name. By leading her to safety through a side door of the jail, she saw to it that Diane avoided publicity. For reward she received a season ticket to the performances of the Terpsichore Ensemble, and a night's use of Diane’s body.
The police sergeant tried to persuade her to take her up to her plush Central Park West apartment. She wanted to experience the unheard of thrill of making love amidst the pulchritude associated with the rich and famous. Her suggestion was rejected, firmly yet not unkindly:
" I cannot mingle the two aspects of my existence " , she explained,