Paris Times Eight (18 page)

Danielle must have sensed my unease. She approached me, grinning, offering a cup of coffee. “Max is Christian, lapsed, mind you, but somewhere in his life there once was a little bit of Jesus in it,” she chortled, offering me an out. “With you here, it's settled. We're doing Christmas. We'll make it a party. Do you want to invite your friend, what's-her-name? The person you came to see?”

“Rosemarie,” I said. “And that's very generous of you.”

“Well, you did come to Paris mostly to see her, didn't you?” Danielle asked. I didn't answer. I wasn't really sure anymore why I had come. “The phone is in your room,” Danielle persisted. “Call. See if she's free. I think you said she's also on her own for Christmas?”

But when I did call, Rosemarie sounded exasperated about the invitation to dinner. “I'm so bored with Christmas,” she said with a dramatic sigh. She was trying to sound archly witty, faking a New England accent to make her sound Katharine Hepburn–esque. “I was thinking to stay in, read Proust, ignore it. But.” I heard her yawn through the phone. “My parents haven't sent me my money yet, and so I might be in the mood to eat. I mean, the larder is bare. Your friend, what's her name? She won't mind? And what does she do? Could she find me a job?” Concluding that the evening might benefit her in some way, Rosemarie agreed to arrive at Danielle's apartment at eight o'clock on Christmas Eve. “I think there's a bottle of champagne lying about somewhere,” she said before hanging up, giving me the faintest hope that we might have a festive time after all. “I'll see if I can root it out from under the chaise.”

Danielle was up early the next morning. I found her at her dining room table, writing out the next day's grocery list. Max had already gone out to jog in the park. “Husbands,” Danielle said, crinkling her button nose. She had lived in France so long that she found the North American habit of sweating in public
dégoûtant,
disgusting. I still worked out, I told her, but in the privacy of a gym.

“I just walk everywhere,” said Danielle smugly. “But I have to tell you,” she continued, giggling. “Since Max, I've dropped a couple of sizes. Effortlessly, if you know what I mean.” She'd never discussed sex with me, and I didn't really want to get into it then. I reached for the pot of coffee on the stove. “How about you?” she said. “Seeing anyone?”

“Nope,” I said, hiding my face in my cup.

“Well, you're not getting any younger,” she said.

I had come to Paris to be distracted. I had plans to go to the museums, shop, even interview someone famous for an article I would write up on my return. I wanted to keep up the illusion of a fabulous jet-set career. There was no room in my day timer for introspection. I told Danielle that I needed to get ready. But alone in my bedroom heaped with shiny new clothes, I wondered if I'd ever feel whole. I dressed with a mind to hiding all my flaws, pulling on black stockings and a dainty day suit with ruffles at the wrists. I was pretending. Playing someone I was not. A fraud.

I went back out to face Danielle. I asked if she thought I should wear the black shoes or the red.

“The black,” said Danielle. “The red ones make you look like you're trying too hard.”

I ARRIVED EARLY
at Le Voltaire, a well-known bistro on the banks of the Seine, facing the Louvre. It was fifteen minutes to the hour, and no one was yet in the restaurant, or so I thought. When the maître d' approached, I said I had a rendezvous for lunch.
“Avec Monsieur Noureev?”
he asked.
Noureev
is how the French say the name of the great dancer Rudolf Nureyev.
“Oui,”
I said. He was the one I was to have lunch with that day, as part of a prearranged interview to promote an upcoming appearance Nureyev would be making in Toronto late the following month. It would be one of the last articles I would write for
The Globe
and Mail
for five years. My swan song. But I didn't know that when I followed the maître d' to the back of the restaurant, where Nureyev was already sitting on a banquette, his back against a wall.

There, his sinewy neck wrapped round with the vibrant zigzag design of a Missoni scarf, his broad shoulders cloaked in tasselled shawls, his body erect, his nostrils flaring, his cheekbones a windswept plane, Nureyev sat like an oriental potentate, forbidding and proud.

He was reading. When I got close to the table I could see it was a heavily annotated musical score, a toccata by Bach. Nureyev folded the score away when he saw me approach. He didn't rise, but eyed me critically. I had the feeling that I stood too tall, that I ought to curtsy, something to honor his exalted presence.

The score, I could see, was worn from where he had been tracing the notes with his fingers, as if willing the baroque-era music to come alive at his touch. An idiosyncratic script crowded the margins. It was part Russian, part English, and augmented by nonverbal symbols borrowed from a system of dance notation known as choreology. More circles, spirals, and other signifiers of movement decorated spaces between octaves. Soon after I sat down in front of him, Nureyev said he was studying the score in hopes of becoming good enough to conduct the Bach piece for an audience. “An audience of friends,” he hastened to add. “Who else would be polite enough to listen?” Nureyev's way of drawing out his vowels made you feel as if he was speaking in slow motion, as if each sentence might fill the long hours of a Russian White Night. I already had my pen and notebook out, recording everything he said. And he was saying he was getting ready to leave dance and reinvent himself as a conductor.

It was a stunning admission. Until then Nureyev had been defiant about not quitting dance before he, and he alone, felt ready. He was then fifty-three, well beyond the age when most dancers can still hope to perform. His landings had lately grown soft and wobbly. His once-powerful legs sometimes buckled under him from the strain. He was a ghost of what he once was, a dancer who since his defection to the West in
1963
had been universally celebrated for his magnetism and sensuality, second only to Vaslav Nijinsky. A story was circulating at that time concerning a woman in London who sued after seeing Nureyev in one of his recent performances, claiming that the dancer's decline had so shocked her senses that she became ill.

I asked him why he had persisted. The question was relevant to my story. After all, he was supposed to be dancing again in just over a month's time, and before a paying audience. But I wasn't sure how he'd react; his temper was legendary. Incidents in which he slapped his partners were widely reported. The Russian ballerina Natalia Makarova once accused him of deliberately dropping her on the stage in Paris. I felt the flash of his green eyes penetrate my soul, but then he answered without further hesitation. “You have talent, and it dictates your life,” he said with a Tartar shrug. “It possesses. It's what people want to see in theater. People obsessed by what they do.”

He leaned his body across the table, coming within inches of my face. “You like Giselle,” he pronounced, referring to the title character in the French ballet, who dies of a broken heart. “That good,” he said, banging a hand on the table. I didn't know what he meant and didn't ask him to explain. I was hoping he was referring to the ballet's white-on-white ending, when Giselle comes back to life, resurrected by love as symbolized by a neverending ghostly dance.

We continued talking about dance, the classics, the difference between dancers today and dancers in the past. Our conversation veered in the direction of the Opéra de Paris, the original, not the Bastille. Nureyev had lately been artistic director of the Paris Opera Ballet there. His autocratic management style had brought him into conflict with the executive director, Pierre Bergé. At that time, Nureyev had been demoted to the position of artist in residence. We all have our workplace challenges I thought to myself. Nureyev described the ballet he had recently staged for the company, a production of
Don Quixote
that would be performed at the Palais Garnier the day after Christmas. He asked me if I was planning on going. I wasn't, but instead of saying that, I told him I had never seen a ballet at the Palais Garnier. It was my turn to make the stunning admission. Nureyev looked at me as if I had just said I'd never been kissed.

“You come to ballet. Now! I take you. Come!” His eyes blazed, not at me, but at our hovering waiter who scurried over with the bill.

As Nureyev was my guest, I would pay the tab—or rather, my newspaper would. The amount was almost a thousand French francs, a princely sum for a meal that had consisted of deliberately undercooked lamb—bloody meat for the tiger, tiger, burning bright before me—and raw vegetables.

I fumbled for my credit card. To my horror, it was rejected. Not this time for lack of funds.
“On n'accepte pas
les cartes,”
the waiter said. I had forgotten that the credit card, whose status is ubiquitous on my side of the Atlantic, has little or no value in Paris. Restaurants commonly reject plastic in favor of cash or checks. But I had no cash to speak of. I was as good as dead.

Nureyev leaned back into the banquette, looking very much like Prince Siegfried in
Swan Lake
when he is forced to wait out the coquettish dances of the princesses all vying for his hand in marriage. He raised an eyebrow.

I saw myself washing the dishes in the back room, the sleeves of my faux-Chanel suit rolled up over the elbows. I thought of Nureyev slapping me, kicking the furniture on his way out. I saw the gendarmes. I wondered if the Canadian embassy took on sad cases like mine.

“I can't pay the bill,” I finally admitted.

Nureyev regarded me in silence. “I pay. You pay back.” He slapped his book of personal checks on the table. In France they are as big as lamb chops. They were linen-colored with his name, address, and phone number in black cursive letters in the far upper-right-hand corner. He pushed them my way. “Write. Go.”

I opened his checkbook carefully, as if it were the
Book
of Hours,
Nureyev nodding his head in encouragement. I wrote out the day's date, the sum, and the name of the receiver of Nureyev's money, Le Voltaire. I stopped at the blank space where his signature would go. I looked at him questioningly. He thrust his chin out at me, nudging me to hurry along, finish the task.

I inhaled deeply and, steadying my hand, I wrote in letters appropriately large and stately the exalted name “Rudolf Nureyev” as if it were my own. I was now guilty of impersonating a famous Russian dancer, truly culpable of fraud.

He was pleased. He explained that he didn't want cash as payback. He wanted the equivalent in smoked salmon, which he said he would have for Christmas. He would be spending the day with the Rothschilds, he said. I assumed he meant the salmon would be for them. He told me that I would go to Fauchon to get it. This was the stupendously expensive
épicerie
near the Madeleine, where fur-wrapped patrons didn't bat an eye when buying $
35
pots of jam.

“But first we go.” He grabbed my hand, commanding,
“Vas-y!”

I didn't question. I didn't want to let go. I let him run me out the door and toward gallery-laden Rue du Bac, the street I used to walk en route to the Louvre when I lived as a babysitter on Rue de l'Université, just steps from where we then were standing.

He hurried. The number
68
bus was at that moment slamming to a stop at the corner. Still holding my hand, Nureyev jumped inside first, executing a facsimile of the gravity-defying leaps he had performed on the world stage. I, by necessity, leapt after him—the nymph following the faun. He threw a fistful of change into the box and led me to the back. There were no vacant seats, so we were forced to stand. Nureyev put my hand on the chrome pole to steady my balance on the bumpy ride taking us across the bridge over the Seine. He held on tightly himself and turned to face me. We were standing chest to chest, eye to eye.

Standing, I could see how short he was. On stage he looked like a giant. That is true of most dancers. They have the ability to lengthen their limbs, their torsos, their necks, to appear larger than life, superhuman, as if unfettered by physical limitations. Inwardly I pinched myself and told myself not to blink, not to miss a second, never to forget.

It was one thing to interview a celebrity, quite another to be pulled into the everyday life of one. I felt I had become part of the Nureyev story. He had been born on a moving train. I was now with him on a moving bus, rocking back and forth into his body, locked in a pedestrian pas de deux. I held my breath. I had become tied to a star.

Everyone on the bus did a double take. I imagined it was like suddenly noticing a Beatle in your midst. People stared, gasped, looked away, stared again, not knowing what to do or say. Nureyev ignored it all, imperiously. He was standing in ballet's widely spaced second position to keep from rolling with the rollicking momentum of the bus. Forbidding and proud.

Just when it seemed that I would burst from holding my breath, Nureyev, without warning, suddenly grabbed my hand again and pushed me out the back door onto the street. Cars whizzed by; bodies jostled for space on the sidewalk. I was temporarily lost, and then Nureyev turned me around to face Mecca.

We were on the Place de l'Opéra, just outside the Palais Garnier, home of the Paris Opera Ballet. One of the world's largest theaters, it rose from the square in a swirl of rose-colored marble columns and sculptured friezes. It looked like a wedding cake, elaborately decorated with an enormous sweeping staircase out front and topped by an undulating roof weathered to a beautiful green patina. A gilded statue was on the roof. It depicted Apollo, god of music, holding his lyre to the heavens. Nureyev had paused for a moment to let me fill my eyes. Taking hold of my hand again, he said, “Come!” and pulled me deeper into his world.