WHEN A NEW editor arrived on the scene, I was inexplicably deemed unworthy of the dance-critic title. This new hire, a woman with no prior newspaper experience, called me an incompetent writer to my face. Merit? The idea appeared ludicrous to her. She thought me wholly unprofessional.
The newspaper was unionized, so she couldn’t get rid of me just because, as she told me one day during a par- ticularly memorable tête-à-tête in her office, “she hate[d] that insipid smile of yours.” She could only fire me for cause. At first she just made life miserable for me. She axed my weekly national arts column, telling me she couldn’t abide my picture logo. She got the music critic to write on dance without my knowledge, and published our articles side by side in the newspaper to let the readers, she expalined to me, see who did the better job. A colleague, then the paper’s books editor, told me that she stuck her fingers down her throat when he put forward my name for writing a new column. Soon other colleagues were siding with her against me behind my back. She scrutinized my expenses. She got me to write on subjects in which I had no expertise or interest, seemingly in hopes of seeing me fail. Such punishing tactics continued for about a year, and then she believed she got me.
A month before Christmas 1990 she accused me of plagiarism.
She organized a disciplinary meeting at which I was asked to explain my repetition of a sentence from the press kit given me by the physician I had interviewed for a recent article on arts medicine, an assignment she had chosen for me several weeks before. The sentence described the role musician Leon Fleisher had played in getting arts medicine legitimized. As it was a subject I knew nothing about, I had relied on the press kit for background. At the time, arts medicine was a burgeoning field, and little else had been written on it. I said what I had done was research, not plagiarism. But none of my protests mattered.
I was suspended for almost a month without pay, and a disciplinary letter was put in my employment file warning me that any future acts of misconduct would result in instant termination. I was devastated. I had never been in trouble before. I had never even gone to the principal’s office as a kid. So much was at stake—my dignity, my honor, my sense of pride. I felt branded a thief and a liar. The shame was terrible.
To make matters worse, my mother had booked herself a sunny vacation away with friends for the upcoming Christmas holidays and hadn’t invited me. “You’re thirty years old!” she said irritably when I asked why she had to go away.
I was left pondering her meaning. Was I too old, already, to need my mother? Not yet hardened enough to bear Christmas alone as an alienated modern-day existential entity? If not, why not? Was I that weak? My mother departed before I could come up with an answer. I felt her absence acutely.
The day she left, I sat glumly at my desk inside my downtown Toronto apartment, willing myself to write. But I had difficulty composing myself, let alone a sentence. I had been crying since morning, tears of self-pity, I admit. I felt friendless, motherless, utterly alone. Picking up my pen, I aimed it within striking range of the sheet of paper in front of me, but no words came. The lines on the page were the same tepid blue as the veins in my wrist. Lines. Veins. Lines. Veins. I put the ballpoint to my flesh. I pressed down. I made a tiny O on the inside of my left wrist. I pressed again, and again. My arm soon ulcerated zeroes. I was the zero. I stabbed faster, harder. The Os became ringed with blood. I had hurt myself. I wondered if could I die this way, poisoned by my pen? Yes. No. I was shouting at myself. My voice bounced thinly off the bedroom walls, crowding in on me.
I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to cope. I didn’t know if I could survive the disappearance from my life of the one thing that had long defined me, sustained me, and given me hope: my writing, irrevocably blemished.
That’s when I remembered the letter. It was easy to find amid the papers on my desk: a wafer-thin envelope with a crooked line of oxblood stamps depicting Marianne, the bare-breasted apotheosis of the French Revolution. In the weeks that it had been in my possession, I had been using it as a makeshift coaster. It had grown stained with the rings of coffee cups. I had not taken it seriously. It was a chatty missive from Rosemarie, more acquaintance than friend, who months earlier had moved to Paris. Despite being fluently bilingual, she had had difficulty landing a job in her field of public relations. In her large loping writing style, she wrote that Paris was shutting her out, making her feel homesick and desirous of company. Any company, it had seemed when I first read her letter, as long as it was from home.
We didn’t know each other well. Mainly we knew some of the same people, frequented the same parties. Essentially we were strangers, but strangers who sensed a similarly desperate need for companionship. And so I read the letter again, this time ignoring what I knew in my gut were words of insincerity: “Why don’t you come to Paris for the holidays? We’ll have champagne and oysters for New Year’s. I know the perfect place.”
I held onto that letter as if it were a lifeline. Why not? I was alone; she was, too. Together we could fill the void that was Christmas. I would tell her nothing of my troubles at work. I would act free as a bird, flying on the wings of spontaneity. The only problem was, I was broke. I had been without a salary for the last three weeks—I would barely be able to pay the rent, let alone buy an airline ticket. But maybe I had enough air miles.
I wiped away my tears and dialled Air Canada. It turned out that I did have enough points to get a last-minute ticket, business class, all that was left, to Paris. I hung up the phone, feeling already in flight, determined to leave my worries behind.
Rosemarie had probably asked everyone in her address book to make the trip over. I dialled her next, hoping I was the first desperado to have answered her call.
She answered on the seventh ring. “I hope you’re not coming just to see me,” she said. “I don’t even have a bedroom. I sleep on the floor. I’d have nowhere to put you.” I said I’d ring her right back.
No way could I afford a hotel. But I was Paris obsessed; nothing would deter me. I rang up Danielle, my old friend. She had lived in Brussels for the last few years but was back in Paris, recently married. I was in luck: she and her new American husband were going on a Caribbean vacation just after Christmas. I’d have their apartment all to myself.
“You are always welcome, you know,” Danielle said, which made me feel like crying again.
I called Rosemarie back to tell her I had somewhere else to stay. It was done. I had found a way out of my misery. If Toronto wanted to ostracize me, Paris would be my refuge.
DANIELLE, DEAR DANIELLE, was waiting for me when I exited the doors of Charles de Gaulle loaded down with luggage. She smiled as soon as she saw me, her cheeks dimpling. I hadn’t seen her in years. She was still pretty, in a plump sort of way, still radiated jollity. But as I moved toward her, I heard her gasp. Was it my appearance, haggard after months of distress? Or the number of bags I had brought for a relatively short ten-day visit? I had wanted to return to Paris in style, but more urgently, I had wanted to hide my shame, so I had stuffed suitcases full of fancy dresses and imitation Chanel suits that I had gotten a Toronto seamstress to knock off for me from the pages of fashion magazines.
Her newly expanded apartment was on the fifth floor of a corner building in the neighborhood named for its central landmark, the Bastille, the notorious prison. A once-seedy area, consisting of narrow laneways and squat buildings, this was where the mob, immortalized by Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities, had knitted their plot to behead the king.
The rabble had long since moved away. Yuppies like Danielle and her new husband, Max, had now taken over, buying up dilapidated apartments and transforming them into upscale lofts. The new inhabitants with their seemingly limitless spending power had brought with them a push toward gentrification.
When we drove up the Rue de la Roquette, I noticed a spate of new cafés and restaurants, contemporary art galleries, and freshly painted fashion boutiques. Where the prison had been, a new steel-an
d-glass opera house had opened its doors just the year before, on July 14, 1989, the two hundredth anniversary of the Bastille’s storming.
Still, by Canadian standards the apartment was small. The kitchen was about the length of a bicycle. But Danielle’s recent renovation had yielded a second bathroom as well as an extra bedroom, a home office, a reading room, and the downstairs living room where we sat mulling over our meal. Each room was small like a cell, though equipped with such modern amenities as a Minitel computer cataloging the millions of listings in the Paris phone book, a French invention. You typed in the name of a restaurant and it gave you the address, the telephone number, and a brief description. I had never seen anything like it. This was the new Paris, building itself up from the past.
“You couldn’t get this much space anywhere else in Paris,” Danielle boasted. She tucked into the salad she had made with frisée lettuce and crumbled goat cheese. “In Paris, to get this kind of space you’d either have to inherit an apartment of this size or else murder someone,” she said, licking her knife. She was being facetious. But her point was that Paris real estate was at a premium.
I looked past her, out the window at her back. Space was as tight on the outside of the apartment as on the inside. Her building was practically squeezed up against another, located across the street. If I had had a broom in my hand, I could probably have toppled the pots of desiccated geraniums on the across-the-way neighbor’s windowsill. As Danielle continued to chew and contentedly swallow, I watched as a middle-aged man moved gingerly about his apartment, setting his own table for lunch. He poured himself a glass of red wine and turned on the television. He seemed to live alone. I sat for a moment, transfixed, as I watched other strangers engaged in a variety of private but perfectly banal acts straight through Danielle’s winter-stained windows—people combing their hair, washing dishes, singing to a pet canary, reading a book. The impression was that Paris was a city of beehives, closely stacked together and buzzing with activity. I secretly coveted the honey inside, the sweet humanity that I hoped would soon nurture me and satisfy a growing longing for acts of kindness and shared intimacy.
I turned my attention back to Danielle. “Come on,” she said. “You have to eat. Really, you’ve grown too thin. You’re not on some kind of weird diet are you?” I thought to fess up. I was a guest in her home, after all. I started at the beginning: the changes at work, the name-calling, the reprimands, the recent three-week suspension. I spoke for a long time. Danielle sat quietly, listening. She was just then in the throes of turning herself into an independent business consultant for some of France’s biggest corporations. She was business minded, sharp as a pin. I had almost flunked grade 9 math. She had always liked me regardless, calling me her artsy friend. A flake whom she found irresistible. I hoped she’d embrace me still. But she had already gotten up from the table to clear the dishes. “People don’t just attack you for no reason,” she said, turning to look at me from her place in the munchkin kitchen. “What did you do to piss them off?”
I tried to change the subject. I asked her what she wanted to do about Christmas, just a few days off. “La Veille de Noël,” she called it, referring to the night the French traditionally celebrate the holiday, December 24, Christmas Eve. “I’ve never done it before.” Of course. Of course. She was Jewish. I had almost forgotten. She hardly raised the topic of her religion, perhaps because she didn’t come from a practicing family. Her mother was from Paris, and during the war had been in Drancy, the internment camp that held French Jews until they were deported for extermination. She had survived, moving eventually to Toronto, where Danielle had been born. She was dour where Danielle was gregarious, never smiling at me, perhaps because she caught me staring at the prisoner serial number tattooed on her arm.
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.
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