Paris Times Eight

by Deirdre Kelly

  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.

  He led me solicitously through the swirl of Paris traffic encircling the theater, never once letting go of me. He held my hand as a father might do, proudly leading me to his place of work, showing it off to me and me to it. He was smiling and walking at a quick clip. His feet were turned out in that splayed position shared by all ballet dancers as a result of having distorted their skeletons at a young age in service of their art. Which is to say, he walked like a duck.

  He led me toward the back, through the stage-door entrance, which led to a slow decline from the street, a downward walk into the bowels of the theater. The cavernous passageway had low ceilings and perspiring stone walls. The lighting was scant, and as
our footsteps echoed down the tunnel-like corridor, I saw our lengthening shadows darkening the pathway before us.

  I didn’t know where we were going but I mutely followed along, trusting him emphatically. With each step I became aware of others who had walked there before me, all the great dancers and choreographers and set designers and composers and musicians and impresarios and directors and patrons and writers and seamstresses and scenery painters and broom pushers and secretaries and patrons and groupies—anyone great or small with some connection, major or minor, with Paris and its wondrous world of art.

  Nureyev turned me left and right through this backstage maze. Along the way we encountered a cleaning woman, her head wrapped in a kerchief, and an elevator operator who took us up and up and up. The backstage of the Palais Garnier is so deep it is said to harbor a subterranean lake. Nureyev squeezed my hand. He must have known he was giving me the thrill of a lifetime, and he seemed to be enjoying the moment every bit as much as I was.

  We emerged from the darkness toward a shaft of light. We were suddenly in the wings. He looked at me, grinning. He put a finger to his lips, urging me to be quiet. Some of the Paris Opera dancers were rehearsing, and he wanted to watch them unawares.

  In the pit, members of the orchestra tuned their instruments. Three dancers, dressed in sweats and heavy socks, a Degas-like vision of the toil and tedium behind the glamor of theater life, fell into position on the steeply raked stage. A ballet mistress barked out their counts. The music played.

  Together, the trio rose on demi-pointe, extending their back legs into an arabesque. Collectively they turned, locking hands to perform a pas de trois, a lyrical dance for three. They stumbled over a tricky section of choreography requiring them to end their series of turns with a forward thrust of a pointed foot. One arm was simultaneously to go onto the hip while the other swept outward in a gesture of welcome. With each stumble, the ballet mistress loudly clapped her hands for the music to stop, making the dancers take their positions from the top. I could see their beautifully squared shoulders slump from frustration. The moment reminded me that ballet is an art that constantly reproves the dancer, making her feel rarely good enough. Dancers have told me that no matter how spectacularly they may have performed for an audience the night before, the next morning there was always a daily class where the ballet coach would, despite the fatigue and sore muscles, make them go through their paces again, one step at a time. The stay at the top of the mountain was never long.

  Nureyev watched his put-upon babies with an arm wrapped around his barrel-like chest. He also held one hand to his face to hide a devilish smile that was growing there. The sequence the dancers were trying to perform was hard. He knew, because he had created it. It was his Don Quixote, the ballet about the man who chases dreams in the form of windmills. He seemed to relish their struggle, like a parent watching a child stumble in taking its first steps. At lunch he had told me he was proud of the Paris dancers. He called them his artists. I had the impression that he allowed them their mistakes on the road to perfection, if only to encourage them to be better.

  But he had seen enough. Pushing me gently aside and, without saying a word, but right on the music, Nureyev burst from his hiding place in the wings. Just like that, he executed three flawless turns, thrust his leg forward, as if saying ta-dah! with his body. He brought his hand sharply to his waist, making a sweeping gesture that, when he did it, no longer looked like a polite hello. It was more a bugle call, a signal to look his way, drop everything, and salute!

  The dancers squealed with delight. They loved the surprise of him, the impishness of him waiting silently behind the curtains before making an impromptu entrance, upstaging them all. It was instantly clear that he was still the gold standard. The idea was to imitate him. The mere presence of him got the dancers excitedly moving again. They hurried to take their places. They mimicked his steps and, above all, his supreme self-confidence. Despite his advanced years, Nureyev was still capable of working magic, of transforming the dancers into superdynamos, of galvanizing everyone around him merely with an artful kick of the leg.

  Nureyev looked to me to see how I was enjoying his impromptu performance. I was delighted, of course, and as I made eye contact, I smiled broadly at him, and he at me. I stayed a while longer in the wings, watching him instruct the dancers. He had them laughing. The image was poignant. The great dancer, in his street clothes, signs of age traced on his face, was imparting to the next generation what he knew. He was passing the torch. I was aware that such greatness might never come our way again. I left to go buy the salmon, returning later to leave $200 worth of beautifully wrapped fish with the theater’s backstage concierge.

  WHEN I AWOKE on Christmas Eve, Danielle had already set the table. On top of a saffron-yellow tablecloth she had laid out three large pink dinner plates and an oversized, handcrafted green-and-purple ceramic candlestick that looked like an eggplant, another well-intentioned wedding gift, no doubt.

  “I’ve always liked the look of Christmas, the lights and color,” she said. She then brandished a list, which was sizeable. She said we had many ingredients to buy because in Paris, Christmas Eve had its own special meal, and we were going to follow the tradition as if we had both been born into it.

  We walked together outside her apartment. The air was damp and cold. Danielle, her heels clicking rapidly on the sidewalk, me tagging along, explained what was on the agenda. A goose. And that goose, she instructed, speaking loudly as we squeezed past the surging crowds on the constricted sidewalks of her centuries-old neighborhood, needed to be accompanied by a boudin blanc —a white blood sausage. And that had to come with wine-soaked shredded cabbage and roasted chestnuts and, for dessert, an ooze of brie and something sugary called a bûche.

  To get all these ingredients, we needed to go to a half-dozen different small shops, each with a different name—boulangerie, épicerie, charcuterie, fromagerie, pâtis-serie. I had rarely experienced the domestic side of Paris before, having usually been an itinerant tourist without a kitchen, and I was enjoying the view, even if it did occasionally involve whole heads of goat in some of the storefront windows.

  We walked down the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where we had at our disposal a number of small specialty shops selling coffee and snails and chairs and mirrors. The area was once the furniture-making center of Paris and still bore the imprint of generations of wood workers who had come before. I breathed in the air, dreaming of sawdust and other smells associated with an industrious class of people. But my senses were occluded by the tang of fresh-baked bread. Danielle had navigated across the street, to a bakery near the corner of Rue Daval and Rue de la Roquette. She said it was famous for its pain lyonnais, a hearty loaf made of whole grains, a bread made for the workers.

  It was crowded inside, and Danielle stood in line. The croissants, I could determine from a collective clucking of tongues, were already sold out. I took the chance to study the antiquated interior. On the walls were frescoes of maidens in idyllic fields, gathering their wheat. Gold-colored moldings shaped like spring garlands framed each image. More paintings decorated the ceiling, at the center of which was a portrait of Demeter, goddess of the grain. Danielle elbowed me from behind. “Get going,” she said, as more people pushed inside the bakery’s doors. “You’re kind of in the way.”

  Outside, where the winter sky was bruised black and blue, Danielle offered me a bite from a ficelle, a loaf even skinnier than a baguette, about the width of two fingers. “I noticed you didn’t eat breakfast,” she said. “That’s why you’re acting so dazed.”

  The bread was hot and moist, straight from the oven. “Worth the wait, huh?” Danielle said, her cheeks flushed and full.

  The extravagant visual presentation in the food shops rivalled the Louvre. As we scurried down the Rue de Lappe, I saw store windows full of holiday meats, all beautifully displayed. I paused to marvel at guinea fowl so artistically trussed with filigrees of fat and prune and colored vegeta
ble that they looked more like Fabergé eggs than carcasses. Danielle had seen it all before and, when she went inside, she simply asked for one of the pretty little pot roasts to be wrapped up in brown paper. I watched, spellbound. This wasn’t a visit to the butcher’s as I knew it: this was a boutique for carnivores.

  Danielle was hurrying now, racing against the watery sun. As I tried to keep pace with her, I didn’t mind my way. I stepped in dog poop and skidded. I collided with a woman holding a full-to-bursting shopping bag. She glowered, even as I tried to apologize. “Américaine!” I heard her mutter as she trudged away.

  Danielle had kept on walking. “I’ll have to have a bath when we get back to the apartment,” I said when I caught up to her. The wet tobacco–colored turd under my foot smelled violently sour. I stopped to scrape my sole against a curb, but was almost hit by someone trying to park. A horn blared loudly.

  “I’m concerned about you,” said Danielle. “You have no sense of time. You just do what you want, when you want, talk without thinking. You’re out of control.”

  Her words wounded.

  We continued in silence. I had fallen into a sulk. “I’m just trying to be your friend, you know,” Danielle finally said as we trudged with the parcels up the five flights of curving stairs. Several times, the hallways plunged into darkness after the timer on the light switch had run its course. Danielle fumbled in the dark to push buttons on the various floors to allow us to see our way.

  Inside the apartment Max had erected a tree. As lean as Danielle was fleshy, Max squinted up at us from behind gold-wire glasses, asking us heartily if we’d had a good time. Danielle dropped her bundles in the kitchen and went over to kiss him, with a hmmm sound, on his pale, puckered lips. He was on his knees in a corner of the living room. He had found a spot just big enough to accommodate the dwarfish evergreen, and was just then stringing it with lights.