Paris Times Eight (17 page)

My falling, and the resulting shock, the reason for my temporary descent into deafness, had rocked her to the core, she said. It was as if I had dropped a bomb on her. “Look at you,” she sniffed, struggling to compose herself. “So elegant. And then you fall flat on your face.”

It was a strange way to discover that she did love me, after all, in return. Paris was my witness.

FIVE

Miss
Lonelyhearts
·
1990
·

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.