I GOT THE JOB AT PLACE DES ARTS. THEY HIRED me despite my terrible English. Étienne always said that we shouldn’t bother to learn the language of colonialism. Loulou was hopeless and couldn’t speak a word of it. I would answer the phone at the theatre and say something like: “There will be evening-time presentations down the line in the season that comes just after winter … with the blossoms in it?” But surprisingly, people didn’t let on that my incompetence bothered them.
I really liked the job. I was always busy and having to figure out something new. I would completely lose myself in the task at hand. I hadn’t known how great this could feel. Since I had grown up around so many unemployed people, there was never anyone to tell me how awesome work was.
In the evenings, when I left, the hallways were always still filled with girls from the corps de ballet. They sat on the floor with dour expressions on their little faces and their eye makeup smudged. Their skirts looked like they had toilet paper sticking out of their tights, and their toes stuck out of holes in the feet of their stockings. Their spines poked out of their backs, like great lizards. There was a girl in a tutu smoking a cigarette by the fire exit. Her knees were all bandaged up, as if she was a porcelain doll that had been shoddily repaired by a child.
In the café, the devil was sitting at the counter sipping an espresso and making notes in his ledger book. He was a good-looking guy of about forty. He had flecks of grey in his hair, which had the effect of making him look rather distinguished. This was where he did his best business. All the ballerinas wanted to sell their souls. There was a nineteen-year-old girl with bandages all over her toes who had sold her soul that afternoon, just to get out of the corps. She wanted to execute a perfect pas de chat.
They thought fame would make them happy. They wouldn’t have to feel bad about having been teased in Grade One. No one would ever break up with them. When they rode a metro packed with people, they would be different. When they brought their clothes to the laundromat, their underwear would be special. There is nothing so wretched as being human. It’s inevitable that you would, at some point, try to be something a tiny bit more. The trick is to come away from fame unscathed.
One of the artistic directors of the theatre caught up with me as I was walking through the building. She had very straight blond hair and was wearing a gorgeous black power suit. Her high heels made a deafening roar as we walked down the corridor together.
“Nouschka, you seem to be fitting in very well here.”
“Thank you,” I answered. I was so pleased that this sophisticated lady liked me.
“You and your husband should come over for dinner sometime. You can meet my kids.”
“Okay. I guess so. I’m not sure if we can do it soon; my husband’s on tour.”
“What does he do?”
“He’s on tour with the Ice Capades.”
“Wow! C’est le fun! C’est incroyable ça! Well you’ll have to bring him over when he comes back!”
We were turning in opposite directions. I was going toward the metro and she was going toward the underground parking lot. We kissed each other on both cheeks. Then we put our hands on each other’s shoulders and smiled at one another for a couple seconds. I was starting to pick up a lot of ritzy mannerisms from her.
Of course I had lied about Raphaël being in the Ice Capades. There was no way that I could bring Raphaël to a dinner party. He could never just put on some regular clothes and act in a superficial way and make small talk at a dinner. He would sit there in a tank top with all his crazy tattoos showing. And if he said anything at all it would probably be something vaguely audible about the illusion of linear time. Nicolas was the same damn way. He always had to act in an obnoxiously idiosyncratic way.
I realized that I was capable of things that Raphaël and Nicolas were not. They were too committed to the personas that they had created when they were fourteen years old. Because they had both felt that they had been taken advantage of and exploited. When they were teenagers, these personas gave them an aura of toughness and of being unapproachable. Now they made them seem sort of mad.
What would the ballerinas think if they got a glimpse of us all at home? If they saw what your actual quality of life was like after you sold your soul to the devil for a little fame: Raphaël in the bathroom underlining passages in Cujo, Nicolas having trouble with a tie while getting ready for a court date, Étienne lecturing at a café to a twenty-one-year-old fan.
I was worried about going home. I stopped at a movie theatre and sat in the darkness, just watching the images, not really following the story. I was in hiding from the world. It was an American film. I had seen the actor in another movie. In the other movie he had been a spy in the Cold War and the Russians were on to him. Now he was in a dystopian world. He was reading the newspaper and drinking a coffee while people all around him got arrested. Look how easy it was for him! Surely Raphaël could role-play for dinner parties! But I knew that he could not.