SOON AFTER I returned to Toronto, The Globe and Mail hired me as its full-time dance critic, then the newspaper’s highest-ranking writing category. It was a job I adored. I loved the challenge—criticism is hard, dance criticism harder still. Often I felt like an astronomer with a telescope, focusing on faraway detail through the narrowest of lenses, seeking out the last twinkle of phenomena no longer existing in real time. Dancers as exploding stars, gone in a twinkle of an eye, their incendiary presence more a memory of experience than experience itself. My task was to reconstruct the energy that had pushed them into being in the first place, to make their trajectories through space clear to the readers. After a performance I would pull away for the wider view, looking to connect a single source of starlight with the other brilliant dots studding the dance universe. I was also always looking for a narrative, a structure with which to tell their ephemeral stories.
You could say I was good at it. In any event, my professional peers acknowledged in me a talent for dance writing when in 1989 they nominated me for a National Newspaper Award in the category of feature writing. This category was normally the preserve of foreign correspondents and war reporters, writers of so-called hard stories. My nominated article was a piece of investigative reporting on the National Ballet of Canada. My editor at that time commended me, saying arts writing, considered soft—especially dance writing—had never before been so highly recognized. I didn’t win, but went home with a citation of excellence that my mother proudly framed to hang on her wall. It was my last moment of glory. Shortly afterward, the newspaper experienced a change of guard, and with that came a sharp reversal in my fortunes.
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-and-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.
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 vegetable 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.
He looked at Danielle, then at me, then at Danielle.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
Danielle shot him a narrow-eyed look that said, we’ll talk about it later. Married only months, and already they had a shorthand. I told Danielle I needed a peeler for the potatoes and retreated to the kitchen.
I worked quickly and quietly. I cut the tops off the green beans. I washed the lettuce. Danielle put the meat in the oven. We were civil with each other, saying please and thank-you and excuse me as we worked like two chefs in a very small kitchen, an efficient cooking team, to get the grandiose meal ready in time. When I announced that I really had to take that bath—I needed to wash away the day’s worries—Danielle shrugged and said, “Go ahead then.”
The doorbell rang. I was wrapped in a towel in my makeshift room. I reached for a dress and chose the emerald-green satin, thinking it right for the occasion. I poked a wet head of hair out my door to ask Danielle to fasten me. “You’re incorrigible,” Danielle said to me as she zipped me quickly. “But anyway, Merry Christmas,” she said. “Merry Christmas,” I replied, as together we opened the door to a beribboned bottle of champagne.
Rosemarie and I embraced. I introduced her to Danielle and Max. They all embraced each other in turn, acting very cosmopolitan, very French. Rosemarie had dressed up for the party in a sparkling blouse and shoulder-length earrings. I told her she looked nice. “Nice dress,” she said to me after sitting down on a chair in the living room. The edges of her mouth rode up and down, her eyes darted left and right, just like a puppet’s. “You look like one of those Christmas presents you get wrapped at the mall for free.” Her comment made Danielle laugh. Max laughed, too. I smiled and offered to pour the champagne.
Rosemarie’s long and naturally wavy hair was already streaked with silver, despite her being just thirty-four years old. When she talked she played with it, wrapping it around her fingers and piling it on top of her head before letting it drop over one shoulder and then the other. She asked Max how long they had had the apartment, how much they paid for it, did they know of any places in the neighborhood coming up for rent. She said she liked the location. Max told her about the renovation. Rosemarie touched his knee and nodded. Danielle and I went into the kitchen to begin bringing out the evening’s various courses.
I ladled the oxtail soup, on top of which Danielle had sprinkled freshly chopped parsley, and thought, I won’t last the evening.
Rosemarie had now tied her hair to the back of her head in a loose knot, tendrils falling at the side of each ear. She flirted with everyone at the table. Her liveliness was what prevented the party from becoming an utter disaster. Danielle always had a soft spot for eccentrics, and she seemed to like Rosemarie. That night she laughed at Rosemarie’s naughty jokes and encouraged her to tell of her Paris adventures at Willi’s, an American wine bar near the Bourse where she worked part-time as a waitress. Max leaned in as Rosemarie described the so-called expats, financiers like him, in their suits and ties. The literary scene had long ago decamped for New York. “To hear them talk,” Rosemarie said, tucking into the white blood sausage that squirted transparent juices and a fragrant smell of fennel, “Money is the new poetry. Seeing how expensive it is to live in Paris, I think they’re right.”
Max said more money could easily be made in the States. “But I’m in Paris because you can’t put a price on beauty, and Paris is one beautiful town.”
I went to the kitchen to get the red-wine cabbage, glad to leave the table. We were a small group, strangers really, celebrating Christmas in a city not our own, eating food we didn’t normally eat, far away from our own families, pretending, each of us, that we were having a marvellous time.
I brought out the goose that before going into the oven had been dressed like a courtier, with sliced olives as buttons down its puffed-out chest and red pepper as trim. The color had burned away in the oven, and it was now just a regulation Christmas goose. Still, it cut a dashing figure when placed on the table. When I sliced into it, steam rising from the incision, Max and Rosemarie raised a glass to Danielle and me. We had actually pulled it off, a real French dinner.
As we were eating our bûche, a chocolaty confection resembling a Christmas log, Danielle broached the topic of the nativity. “Like most Jews,” she said, “I’ve never understood how you Christians can buy into this idea of an immaculate conception. I mean, that’s the biggest cuckolding story around, right?”
Rosemarie laughed. Her family had been Catholic, but she hadn’t been to church in years. “I can think of better things to do while sitting on the floor on my knees,” she said saucily.
Max blushed.
“I was an illegitimate birth,” I blurted. I had finished the champagne and was into my third glass of wine.
The table went silent.
“My mother said she got pregnant with me on purpose. She wanted someone to love her.”
“What a bunch of bullshit,” said Rosemarie.
“I don’t think so,” I said, taken aback. “It means she wanted me.”
Rosemarie rolled her eyes. She didn’t know of my work troubles, had never met my mother, didn’t know I was feeling vulnerable. “That’s a lot of pressure to put on a kid, don’t you think? Jeez, and I thought my Polack mother was a piece of work.”
“Yes, I think my friend here is more Jewish than I am,” quipped Danielle. “She’s a sucker for guilt.” Danielle winked at me. I smiled faintly back.
“I know!” I suddenly shouted. The others looked at me, startled. “I propose midnight mass at Notre Dame.”
“That would just give me the creeps,” replied Danielle.
“Sorry,” Max said. “I haven’t been to mass in years.”
“I’m not saying you have to go to confession,” I said. “Let’s just go. All of us. Come on. It’s a Paris tradition. We’ll light a candle.”
All eyes landed on Rosemarie.
“Please,” I said. I no longer cared if it sounded like begging. Danielle left the room, but soon reappeared with a cache of gifts.
“Speaking of Paris traditions,” she said. “I did some research and found out that on Christmas Eve, you are supposed to give gifts.”
I gasped. I hadn’t bought her anything.
Danielle put a wrapped parcel in front of me. Inside was a strangely shaped backpack, narrow at the top, wide at the bottom. It looked like it was made to carry a violin. “It’s the Eiffel Tower,” said Danielle, grinning. “I hope you like it.” She was a kind soul, and at that moment I was sorry we had fought. For Rosemarie she had bought a ballpoint pen with a pink feather at the top. “I heard you like to write.”
“Now get thee to a nunnery,” she scolded. “Leave me and my husband alone.”
Rosemarie stood up from the table. The gift giving had turned her suddenly charitable. She reluctantly agreed to join me on my journey to Notre Dame. “But I’m warning you,” she said. “The crowds will be awful.”
I WOKE LATE on Christmas Day, past noon, to find myself alone in Danielle’s apartment. She and Max had left early in the morning to catch their flight to the Bahamas. She had left me a note on the table, which still bore signs of the party from the night before, saying good-bye. I wandered from room to room, not sure what to do with myself. I watched French television. I tried to read a book, but couldn’t concentrate. I browsed through a pile of old newspapers. I made café au lait, and put on some music. I looked out the window at all the other windows closing in on the apartment and saw the old man across the way. He was looking out his window. He caught me looking at him and, in a huff, slammed his shutters closed. I reached for the telephone. I had one number in Paris, the number belonging to a stranger, but a famous stranger. I dialled it—I had nothing to lose, I thought.
“Yes!”
Nureyev himself answered the phone with a terrifying monosyllable, tossed like a grenade, as if the ringing had been a great nuisance to him.
I reminded him who I was, the Canadian who had been with him three days earlier.
“Yes! Yes!” he said again, impatient.
“Why you not wait?”
“Pardon?”
“Why you not wait at Opéra? To eat with me. Eat salmon. Come to my apartment!”
I felt the blood drain from my face. I hadn’t realized his intentions.
“Well, um, sorry, I didn’t know,” I said. “So, um, you got it then, the salmon?”
“Yes. Divine. Too bad you not wait. But you come again. To Opéra. Don Quixote. You come backstage, after. Come see me!”
Nureyev abruptly hung up, and for a long while I sat there, holding my end of the phone, stupefied by his suggestion that I was to have had dinner with him. I couldn’t believe that I had misunderstood and lost what would have been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have dined with Nureyev, chez lui.
I reflected again on the rarity of him as I dressed the following night to go to the ballet. The evening’s performers were Nureyev’s protégés, the long-limbed Sylvie Guillem and the dashing Patrick Dupond, rival to the throne at the Paris Opera and, indeed, its then-new artistic director. They constituted ballet royalty. I inwardly thrilled at the mere mention of their names. I took a taxi to the theater and entered through the front doors this time. Where backstage was a dark labyrinth housing mysteries, front of house was bright, expansive, and palatial. Everything was so luxurious, it could have been Versailles. Outside Paris was gloomy, but there, at the ballet, it was eternal summer I thought as I admired the mosaic ceiling, the golden chandeliers, the walls of gilt-edged mirrors. I climbed the grand staircase made of marble, already feeling uplifted. I handed a uniformed usher my ticket and was shown to my seat. And not just any seat. Nureyev had put me in the box reserved for dignitaries. It was front and center, where a person of great distinction was supposed to sit. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. But more, I couldn’t get over Nureyev’s generosity, his desire to please encompassing every detail and extending to me, someone relatively unfamiliar to him.
The curtain rose on a performance that, from start to finish, was a blistering, fast-paced romp through Cervantes’ castanets-clacking Spain. It was raucous, robust, a pyrotechnic showcase for the unsurpassed talents of the Paris Opera dancers. I sat on the edge of my seat throughout, thrilled to have been a part of it, each step, each twirl, each jump and unshakeable balance forever seared on my memory.
When the last of the ballet’s three acts was over, I rushed backstage, eager to see Nureyev again and to thank him for making my first experience of the Paris ballet so extraordinary and wonderful. He was there, waiting for me. Initially I had breezed right past him; I had hardly recognized him. He seemed oddly diminished in comparison to the magnificence of the evening. His clothes hung loosely on his withered frame. They looked slept in. Their drabness accentuated the forlornness of his solitary figure. I felt sad to see him like this. He was the artist whose trailblazing dancing had set the standard for the young dancers who had impressed us that night with their iron-clad technique, their sparkling presence. They were, like all the dancers who have come after him and benefited from his gifts, Nureyev’s disciples. He watched them from the sidelines, as if tacitly acknowledging his glory days to be over.
I approached, and when he saw me, he flashed me a ready smile. “Not bad, huh?” He winked at me, and leading me by the elbow, took me over to meet his principal dancers. He called them mes enfants.
I was aware of the background story. Relations between him and Guillem were reportedly stormy. She had lately announced her decision to leave Paris for the Royal Ballet in London. Dupond, meanwhile, was being portrayed in press reports as the usurper of Nureyev’s throne. The mercurial Pierre Bergé had recently appointed him artistic director of the Paris Opera after demoting Nureyev to artist in residence. That was the gossip, and the journalist in me wanted to see how things would play out. Would there be a scene? Would I have a scoop? Yet when the two principal dancers saw Nureyev walking in their direction, they shook off the backstage admirers asking for their autographs and focused all their attention anxiously on him. They were like schoolchildren waiting for the verdict—pass or fail. Both still had on their costumes and were in full makeup. Perspiration had dampened their eager-looking faces. I stood aside to watch as Nureyev took each by the hand. Looking them in the eyes, he told them they had made him proud. “Je suis très fier,” he said. “Très fier.” Both dancers emitted loud exhalations of relief. Guillem leaned toward him to lay her head on his chest. Her tiara got caught on his scarf. He untangled her, and then she limped away, eager, I thought, to get out of her pointe shoes.
The dancers had done their job: they had satisfied him. That was all that mattered. They were free to go to their dressing rooms and wash away the face paint, become mere mortals again.
I turned to look at the former god of the dance standing before me. He was also a mere mortal, flawed like the rest of us. We were soon sandwiched between sycophants and other hangers-on as fans started to crowd him. I said my good-byes. I mentioned that I would be at his upcoming performance in Toronto, but even as I said it, I knew there was no chance for a repeat encounter. This had been a rare occasion. It had been like ballet itself—beautiful, but gone in an instant.
When I got back to Danielle’s empty apartment, I was still high with excitement. I had no one to tell my story to, so I wrote a postcard to my mother. I quoted Théophile Gautier, a pioneer of dance criticism and a Parisian, who had written on the rise of the Romantic ballet: “All things turn to dust/Save beauty fashioned well.” I hoped that my mother would understand me. Ballet was my tree house in the wilderness, where no one else in my family went save me. It was an art form known for escapism, but it brought me face to face with myself. My dreams.
I looked out the window, Paris twinkling in the darkness. In that moment I was aware of myself as being one of the millions of stars in the universe that together create the light by which we can see the heavens. I was part of the constellation called humanity. I thought of my newspaper, the reason I had come to Paris, the reason I had connected with Nureyev. “Please God, don’t let me lose my job.” The words popped out of me before I even knew what I was doing. “I will go back to Toronto. I will eat crow. I will submit. Please, I love writing. I love art. Don’t take them away from me.”
I had finally said the prayer that had gotten stuck in my throat at the tourist parade that had been Notre Dame. I fell asleep, fully clothed, on top of the upstairs marital bed.
LIFE ISN’T A ballet. In reality, the curtain doesn’t fall on a tidy ending. I did return to Toronto. I did try to be humble. I found a skating show to review, something I thought I could tackle with some competence, thinking it to be dance on ice.
The leads were Katarina Witt and Brian Boitano, she from Germany, he from the United States. My thesis was that by pushing the limits of their own sport, these dynamos on blades were transporting skating out of the arena and into the world of art. An editor with knowledge of figure skating looked over my shoulder. I had asked him for advice. I hadn’t wanted to make any mistakes.
In the final minutes before the deadline, he suggested I Canadianize the content. “Isn’t Kurt Browning now at the top of his game?” he asked me. “He is famous for something. What is it?” I had at my disposal the skating show press kit, and I quickly opened it. People were screaming for my copy. I flipped rapidly through the pages. Aha! There it was: “A quadruple toe-loop completed three-quarters of a second before landing.” Browning had just performed the maneuver at the Winter Olympics. I showed the phrase to the editor. “That it?” I asked. “That’s it,” he said.
With seconds to go before deadline, I typed the phrase into my story. I copied it verbatim, and deliberately so. I thought it was an accurate description of what had made Browning special. The article was edited and published, and that seemed to be the end of that.
But a few days later, a letter of complaint arrived at the paper. The writer said in his letter that I had “parroted” an expression that had originally appeared in a magazine article on Browning. Included in my press kit, it was what I had relied on to nail the technical description. It ended up nailing me. Siding with this letter-writer 100 percent, management seized on the article as evidence that I was a plagiarist, tried and true. I had not learned my lesson. On February 15, 1991, I was fired. A security guard escorted me to my desk. I was ordered to pack up my things and immediately leave the building.
The assumption was that I would never return, but I knew I had done nothing wrong. I had to fight back. I launched a grievance, backed by the newspaper’s union. It was while fighting for my reputation—really, my life—that I experienced a sea change. I grew from being fixated on the outside of me to caring for the inside. I grew to value kindness above all other human traits. It was part of learning to be kind to myself. For a long time I had hated myself, and that self-loathing continued for the first few years following my expulsion. As soon as I lost my job, I cut off all my long hair. I thought often of killing myself. I stopped going to the theater. I stopped going out.
I contemplated abandoning writing altogether and eventually went back to university, the only place where I had previously felt blameless, where I had succeeded on my own merits. I contemplated a life as a scholar in the remote field of Medieval Studies. Where that idea came from, I still don’t know.
But ultimately I came around to the fact that I was a writer. It was what I did. It was what I wanted to do and, more importantly, needed to do. Writing was my identity.
In the final year of my litigation battle, writing assignments from other magazines and newspapers started trickling my way, after the stink of being accused of plagiarism had left me blackballed from my own industry for a very long time. One editor at a rival newspaper told me that he had been “warned” off me by people at the Globe, but then relented after listening to my side of the story. Another, employed at a different publication, reported to me that she too had been told by members of Globe management to stay clear of me. “But I made up my own mind when I saw how long and hard you were fighting,” she said. “I thought, she must not be guilty as they say she is, at all.” I was back writing, but not especially because some of these people still considered me good at it, but more because they were kind and willing to form their own opinions about me, instead of following, like sheep, the status quo. To them I was David battling the Goliath of all Canadian newspapers. Said one, “I want to publish you in my pages because politically, journalistically, it feels the right thing to do.” These odd-job writing assignments didn’t end up paying much, but it didn’t matter. I had streamlined my life. I had moved to a low-rent apartment and learned to cook modest meals. I was, in my small, day-by-day way, learning how to be content with not very much at all.
Nureyev had called me “Giselle.” But in those days I felt more like Cinderella, happy as long as I was quietly toiling away. For a long time he remained my secret. I told no one, least of all my mother, what the legendary dancer had done for me. I didn’t want her to spoil the magic of that time in Paris with some flippant remark about how I needed to stop, once and for all, mooning over the ballet. She had never understood what she called my “obsession.”
Nureyev died of AIDS on January 6, 1993, almost exactly two years after my cherished encounter with him. I watched his funeral on a scratchy television in my new, threadbare Toronto digs. He lay in state in the very place to which he had once taken me, hand in hand.
As I watched the international dignitaries streaming past his body, I recalled how Nureyev had put me in a seat reserved for luminaries, how he had granted me a rare glimpse into his world of hard work and beauty. I remembered also the warmth and strength of his hand as he led me through Paris in search of a mutually cherished dream—the transcendent power of art. I cried for the loss of him, the loss of my dream.
But, and I guess this is the happily ever after part, I won. I got my job back, my reputation restored. A thirteen-word technical term describing a skating maneuver did not constitute plagiarism, an arbitrator ruled in a precedent-setting, sixty-eight-page judgment. As for the merits of the previous charge, the article involving arts medicine used by management to establish a pattern of behavior, it was considered so weak that it was thrown out of court.
I was, to my surprise, awarded almost four years of back pay, then equivalent to the cost of a decent downtown Toronto house. The Globe had early on offered me a small cash settlement, likely hoping I would go away quietly. But I wasn’t fighting for the money. All I had ever wanted was what I prayed for that night in Paris—my job and, through it, my connection to the world of art left intact.
This was a huge win, a trailblazing case that made national headlines. But the accusations had turned some colleagues against me, perhaps because they were frightened that they could be next. There was one notable exception. One colleague had early on volunteered to assist in fighting the charge against me. He said that what I was being accused of, lifting a description of a fact from a press kit, was par for the course in daily journalism. “If this charge is allowed to stand,” he had said, first in a passionate letter announcing his interest in defending me and later on the stand, “then all journalists stand on a gallows trapdoor.” It is said that it takes just one good man in a room of a hundred to make a difference. He was my one good man.
But there was another accomplice: my mother. While she was, through most of my tear-stained battle, struggling with her own financial ups and downs, and was eventually forced to declare bankruptcy herself (like mother, like daughter), her advice to me to document events at work proved invaluable. My prodigious memory combined with my equally prodigious note-taking had the opposition so tongue-tied that at one point the company’s counsel, trying to discredit me, accused me of having doctored my notes after the fact, inserting self-serving lies in them. To which I replied that it had been my mother who had advised me, my mother who had smelled the rat, my mother who had properly instructed me as to what to do. “And,” I said, my voice rising with genuine feeling for the first time in the trial (I was meant to seem cool and unflustered, at a remove from the maelstrom raging around me), “my mother is always right!” As soon as I said it, I knew I would probably never live it down.
The evening of my win, though, the first call I made was to her. I was sobbing and hyperventilating as if I had just been told of the death of a loved one (and in a way it was a death: the death of the old me, the end of my life on trial, the demise of my sullied reputation). To celebrate the news, she spent the last money in her purse on a large bouquet of roses and a bottle of champagne, which we drank that night in my tiny apartment. I hadn’t any champagne glasses, so we drank from coffee mugs.
I got through that long, cold, isolating period by reflecting often on Nureyev. His lesson to me was to have faith in deliverance. It had worked for him, leading him out of the darkness of Communism and into the brightness of the world’s stage. He seemed instinctively to know that it would work for me, too. I took that as his undying gift to me, his power to restore in me the belief that the creative life is the route to self-liberty.
And so I had been right all along to believe that Paris would come to my rescue. “You have a talent and it dictates your life. It possesses…”