Dancer

1 NEW YORK 1975

It is one of those heartless streets you find in parts of the city where the light is still tense with yesterday’s darkness and even in the late afternoon it already feels like curfew and the spent trash of the day goes skidding along and pigeons sit gray on chain-link fences and the traffic is stalled and fume-blowing and the storefronts are dark and shadowy with filth and grime, Eleventh Street and C, Lower East, all smack and suicide, but Victor breaks it simply by moving down the sidewalk, making walking a form of dancing, beginning in the shoulders with a symmetrical roll not even the blacks have perfected, one oblong shrug of a shoulder and then the other, as if connected by synaptical cogs, first the left and then the right, but not just the shoulders, the roll moves down into his chest, into his rib cage, through the rest of his body, down to his toes—god made me short so I can blow basketball players without ruining my knees! — then up again to rest for a moment in his hips, nothing flagrant, no need to bring attention, the walk alone pays homage to his crotch, so if you are sitting on a brownstone stoop, high or hungover or both, you look up through the shit and the grime and the thousand other everyday torments too deep to mention and you see Victor coming along — looking like he’s the first man ever to whistle — in his tight black pants and his neon orange shirt, his black hair swept back, his teeth white underneath his dark mustache and his body in a roll that isn’t jazz or funk or fox-trot or disco, it’s just pure Victor from head to toe, an art he must have managed since birth, laughing as he walks, a chuckle that rises high and ends low, a Victor laugh, on impulse, like his body just told him a little joke about himself, and the whole day slips away while you watch him, the clocks stop, the guitars tune themselves in unison, the air conditioners hum like violins, the garbage trucks sound like flutes, and you sit rooted to the steps as Victor waves to the other queens hanging out the windows, wigs and feathers and lust, while he crushes a cigarette or ties a shoelace or raps on a windowpane, using a silver dollar so it sounds out, and there are whistles and catcalls

Victor having become even more famous six years ago, after the ’69 riots in Sheridan Square when he was arrested for violence and nudity—nude violence! — but then managed a hand job from a tall blond cop in the Sixth Precinct station, so Victor was talked about, laughed about, cheered in the bars baths backrooms of the city

and he moves on, in the empire of himself, taking a bow in front of the windowsills, Victor having learned every inch of the bow from his good friend Rudi Never-Off, holding the bend, arching his back, sweeping his arm to the sky, frozen for a second, grinning, then walking again, in the sequence of sun and shadow, down to the corner smoke shop, where he hauls deep on a joint with the pretty Puerto Rican boys who polish Victor’s shoes with a white bandanna while he goes inside barefoot to tell the shop owner, Man they should arrest the mass murderer who gave you that haircut, his own hair so thick and slick that it shines under the shop neon, buying himself a packet of Lucky Strikes, his whole life a string of lucky strikes, from the streets of Caracas to the cockcrow of the new world, beginning as a carpenter, then a waiter, then a hustler, then a house painter, and, after Stonewall, an interior designer, Yes, I’ll design your interior! taking only enough business to live the way he wants, knowing that the less a man works the more he is paid, one of the simple rules of New York City, and Victor has over the years proved many such simple rules to himself, his favorite being that if you live your life without falling in love you’ll be loved by everyone — one of the great laws of love and fuckery — you take what you get and you move swiftly away, no looking back, so that even the Puerto Rican boys on the stoop can’t hold him after sharing half their joint, he is gone once more, brightening the next street, and the next, hailed while shimmying along, the dealers reaching into their tight yellow trousers for a couple of quaaludes, free of charge, saying, Victor my man you tell those bluebloods where the real shit is at, all the dealers hoping for Victor business later that night, since Victor business is good business, Victor might well guide a large troupe to your stoop, so you can wake up tomorrow slung alongside your sweetheart with your heart singing and a fat roll of twenties under your pillow, and Victor smiles as he takes the pills, saying Gracias—one of the two Spanish words he uses, gracias and cojones, both of them pronounced in three long syllables — like he’s chewing for a moment on the childhood memory of Venezuela, the filth, the dogs, the soccer balls rolling towards the sewer pipes

when Victor was eight there was a statue said to have been sunk in the harbor at La Guaira near Caracas, a Virgin Mary, a story so vital to the townspeople that they brought pearl divers in, to no avail, they believed the Virgin would appear in a year of goodness and plenty, so when Victor was dragged out of the water, gasping for air, clutching the old and grimy statue, he was showered with money and gifts, and he took his mother and brothers to America, leaving a quarter of the money with the craftsman who had chiseled the statue for him, a perfect fake, so even then Victor knew that desire was just a stepping-stone to more desire

and he heads farther west through the Village, past a whore in hot pants wiggling her hips as if her body is on hinges, past the bums in bandannas selling the last of their Occidental Death! T-shirts, past the wheelchair beggars, past the black hipsters up against the railings on St. Mark’s Place, past the farm boys high on their first taste of amphetamines, all the flotsam and jetsam of America, and on Second Avenue Victor drops some money in the cup of a young addict, she looks up to tell him she has never seen a groovier shirt, her eyes two puddles of mascara, and he drops another dollar in her smack cup, then skips around the spray from a fire hydrant, crosses Third Avenue, down the stairs at Astor Place, no logic to his skipping, two steps one step two steps three, waving to the clerk in the booth then jumping the turnstile while the clerk shouts, Hey man, pay your goddamn fare! and Victor nods to the passengers when he gets on the train, smiling, winking, never a lonely part of the city for Victor, not even on the subway, which he rides without sitting, without touching the metal bars or hanging straps, his legs spread wide for balance, as if preparing for the night in advance, jumping off the 6 train at Grand Central for four cigarettes and a cocktail in the Oak Room, vodka and grapefruit juice, a two-dollar tip to the bartender, money is to roll that’s why they made it round, and then he weaves through the station against the rush of commuters, turning, zigging, zagging, down the litter-strewn steps to the Grand Central bathrooms — no place too nice for Victor and no place too nasty — already the rank smell of piss wafting through the t-room air, Victor announcing himself with the sort of composure that comes from a magazine, his lips pursed, his cigarette held high between his fingers, past the rectangular mirrors where a dozen men line up like a row of appetizers, Victor giving a nod to a pale-faced boy and a black man, tentative looks on their faces, unsure, he might be a cop or a queer-basher or a slicer, there’ve been some stabbings in recent years, but Victor reaches in his pockets, hands them each a quaalude, they relax and smile, down the pills, and all three dip into a stall, and soon they are laughing, touching, kissing, spooning, unspooning, until twenty minutes later Victor emerges to rinse his face and his neck and his armpits, other men watching, the rumor of Victor rippling among them, longing and jealousy in the row of mirrors since a blow job from Victor is currency in the city, a badge, an autograph, a nightclub rope suddenly lifted, hey I’m a friend of Victor Pareci’s, but if you look around for Victor he is always gone, the sort of man you need precisely because he isn’t there, always off somewhere else, his heart strung out on helium and all the valves have opened and he has been propelled elsewhere, out of your reach

to the underground room at the Anvil perhaps, or the Iranian consulate, where the great coke parties take place, or the rear basement in the Snake Pit, or a park-facing room at the Plaza, or the dark elevator to the Toilet, or the Algonquin for tea, or the pig parlor in the Triangle, or a table at Clyde’s, or the rotten piers off the West Side Highway, the city in all its squalor and opulence belongs to Victor, he knows its streets, its avenues, its doormen, its bartenders, its bouncers, the distance it takes to walk from one joint to the other, and when it should be done, Victor never wears a watch but he knows the time of day anyway, down to the minute, no matter where he is, who he’s fucking, what he’s drinking, however stoned, however tired, however famous the company, because it may be time to move on, the cobwebs grow on you, who knows what might be happening down the block, the center of the world shifts and changes, and it is Victor’s job to be there, I’m the Greenwich Mean Time of Queerdom!

and he is off on the express, the number 4, to Fifty-ninth and Lex, walking through the Upper East Side, the Jewish ladies with their poodles, or the poodles with their Jewish ladies, he can never tell which, Victor swinging his ass outrageously when he passes them on the sidewalk, hitting the leaves hanging from the curbside trees—how bucolic! — the light fading, streedamps flickering into life, and he smokes with furious rolls and pulls, sending out plumes above him, another cigarette behind his ear for immediate firing, he smiles at the doormen in their white gloves, thinking there might be a new fashion in their regalia — Victor the door-whore, Victor the foot-man, Victor the man who invites you in! — and he skips across a marbled hallway, rather gauche he thinks, takes the elevator to the penthouse where the first cocktail party of the evening is in swing, a preballet affair, not exactly Victor’s gig, he is seldom even out this early, but this is the house of a prospective client, he has been recommended by Rudi, and he has already given them a price, so he sashays into the mahoganied room where for an instant he stands beneath the giant chandelier and tries to announce himself with silence, but the room doesn’t ripple towards him, there’s no whispering over the rims of glasses, no awe, no clamor, how disappointing! so he pitches his bright shirt in among the dark dresses and the bow ties, leans over to deliver an exaggerated air-kiss, shakes a hand, picks a handful of hors d’oeuvres from a silver tray, the waiters slightly baffled by the sight of him, wondering if Victor is a gate-crasher or a celebrity — the sort of man who might pull the scaffold out from under the party or be the scaffold itself — but as Victor cruises the room a few heads turn in his direction, and, encouraged, he bounces on the soles of his feet towards the hostess, who surprises even herself by the size of her shriek, Darling! she snaps her fingers over the heads of three bow-tied men, the drink produced with startling speed, vodka and grapefruit, plenty of ice, and she takes his arm and brings him through the crowd, introducing him, the great Victor Pareci, a friend of Rudi’s, delighting everyone he meets, just in the way he catches their eye or shakes their hand or touches their shoulder, a greeting that is genuine but fleeting, so his friendliness has no responsibility, nobody is forced to talk to him, yet they do

at least thirty invitations arrive each week to his Lower East Side apartment, and even the postwoman — with her hard Harlem accent, her tough beauty — arranges her shift so her lunchtime coincides with bringing Victor his mail, she likes to sit with him in his bright kitchen, opening envelopes together, regarding and discarding, Victor honey you get more letters than Santa Claus! she says, and Victor smiles and replies, Ah yes, but that’s because I know where all the bad boys live

and Victor, more interested in the maverick corners of the party, where he knows there’ll be a little outrage, breaks away from the hostess, kissing her hand as he leaves, and advances on a small group — an aging writer, a bored young artist, a fattening ballerina — who nod and smile as he sits on the floor beside a low glass table and says, Excuse me while I practice a little resurrection! and from his pocket he produces a small bag, which he opens carefully, spilling the contents out on the glass, and then he chops out two lines with the blade of a tiny pocketknife, rolls a fifty-dollar bill, snorts the lines deeply, looks up at the ceiling, Gracias! and then doles out six more lines, places the rolled-up bill in the center of the table, Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines! and the young artist immediately leans across to scoop up the first line, then the writer, then the ballerina, who is somewhat coy but manages to snort more than anyone else, while the party swells with chatter, the hostess looking over and saying, Oh that Victor! and soon most of the room is looking in his direction, such delicious notoriety, he stands on the metal edge of the table and takes a bow, his throat tingling with joy, the small immediate hammer of energy through his body, he is just about able to balance on the table, a grin splayed across his face, finally jumping down to the floor to a little round of applause, knowing he has loosened the party enough so the myth will continue on the strength of this display alone, although Victor wishes Rudi were here, for nobody in the world can make an entrance quite like Rudi, everything quickly tense with possibility, charged, electric, Rudi ratcheting up his volume so he is twice as loud as anyone else, the night Rudi suspended himself naked from a million-dollar chandelier, the party where Rudi shaved his genitals with Andy Warhol’s razor, Warhol later selling it to the highest bidder, the day Rudi prepared a meal for his friends and mixed a little semen into the hollandaise sauce and called it a secret Russian recipe, the gallery opening after which Rudi made love with three boys in a bathtub filled with lotion-slickened marbles

everyone with a Rudi story and each one more outrageous than the next — and probably untrue — so that Rudi is a living myth, not unlike Victor, cared for and coddled and protected by the mythmakers, a life not lived with any reason in mind, just an obeyance to light, or the lack of it, like a seed swelling in its own husk, both of them needing constant motion, since if they stay in one place too long they will become rooted like the rest, so that sometimes Victor thinks he too is dancing, always tapping his foot or shaking his head from side to side, his fingers twirling the end of his black mustache—the reason I wear a mustache, gentlemen, is so I can smell last night’s sins! — and before you know it he has moved on, Victor ahead of himself, as if to say, Oh look at me over there, and no one can fill in the jigsaw, although there are rumors he learned all his movements from Rudi himself, that he sits in on rehearsal, watches constantly, which is another lie but one that Victor allows since it means people are talking about him, want to chat with him, own his recklessness for the night, and Victor obliges, half-listening but all the time watching the door until he sees the fur coats unfurled by the servants, hears the glasses clink, the excuses made, and Victor knows it is time to go, his rule, always be among the first to leave, down the stairs, not waiting for the elevator, and outside in the humid evening Victor follows a couple into their black limousine, the couple startled as he slides in behind them, chops out a line on the bar table, the woman is horrified, the man attempts cool, Good evening, are you on your way to the Nureyev? to which Victor winks, Of course not, ballet bores me to tears, and the man gives a smug grin, Ah yes, but this is modern dance, to which Victor responds, Still faggots and divas, aren’t they? and the man recoils, wondering what sort of creature has crawled into his life, what faggot, what diva, and Victor, magnanimous to the end, offers the lady the first line, but she stares at him, her husband also refusing though not without a small wince, so Victor snorts the coke himself, grins, puts some on a handheld mirror, and shunts himself along the leather seat, leans forward to offer it to the driver, who shakes his head in bemused thanks, no, and Victor slaps a palm theatrically to his head and cries, Oh! I’m so alone! but then he kicks off his shoes and puts his feet on the opposite seat, saying, But if you see Rudi; please say hi from me, which the man thinks is a joke and he gives an extended chuckle, causing Victor to stare him down, until the man is so uncomfortable that he says, This is our car you know, and Victor says, Of course it is! and then turns to the driver, Kind man! Drop me off in the Black Hills! and the driver, clueless, is finally directed to the Dakota apartments overlooking the park and the couple are stunned not so much by the famous address as by Victor, the aura, the taste he leaves in the air, and he passes the driver a ten-dollar bill, hops out, feeling the charge of cocaine through his body, jumped up, sprung, loaded, waves good-bye to the limousine, and he heads straight to the gold-plated entrance

the first time he came to the Dakota, years ago, the doormen in their uniforms and epaulets directed him to the service entrance and Victor caused a fuss, until Rudi got on the intercom and shouted at the doormen to let his guest up immediately, but the next day, when Victor visited a second time, the doormen nodded austerely and allowed him to pass, so he went straight to the service entrance, his head hanging low, baffling the doormen, part of Victor’s style, for, as Rudi says, remaining unknowable is the only true way to be known

and when he arrives upstairs in Rudi’s apartment the preparations are under way, this is the first night of Rudi’s run in Lucifer and a surprise party will be given in the seven-room spread, the last place Rudi would expect it, and Victor has offered his services free of charge, to choreograph the evening, to bend the flowers so they bow from their vases, to place the bowl of caviar at the just-reachable centerspot, to change the wattage in the lightbulbs, to scatter the chairs so there’ll be no bunching, to smooth the creases in the velvet sofas, to adjust the drapes for the view to Central Park, to fold the napkins near the scented candles in the bathroom, to illuminate subtly the hand-painted Chinese wallpaper, all the etiquette of the evening, so the party will run like a drug or a dream or both, and Victor casts a quick look over the hired crew dressed in formal wear, then makes his way towards another group, the organizers, all society women, bejeweled, middle-aged, wealthy, powerful, reminiscent of beauty, skin tanned to tobacco color — oh what a row of elegant Lucky Strikes — and they are huddled, gravely going over arrangements, and when Victor breaks their ranks their faces change, both dislike and relief, the women are concerned, deeply so, since reputations are on the line, and it is exactly Victor’s insouciance they can never achieve, although they try to draw it from him, while he shouts to nobody in particular, Somebody please direct these beauties to the Valium! and the women laugh, but Victor knows they are not just laughing, their laughter has another intelligence, the women have just relinquished control, and they lean in to Victor, having become his foot soldiers — he must use them like royalty and pieces of shit at the very same time — so he directs them to the kitchen, where the fridge has been liberally stocked with champagne, bids them to make a pyramid of glasses for him, fills the glasses with a flourish, says, Let the bacchanalia begin! and the women are forced to clink glasses, to forget all the crimes of the past, who threw a bigger party, who sat closest to the orchestra pit, whose hand got kissed by Oscar de la Renta, none of it matters now that Victor is in charge and, using his power, he tells them how wonderful they look in their Halston dresses, their sparkling Tiffany jewelry, their perfect maquillage, I’d burn a thousand ships just to be around you! and then he instructs them to watch the hired help, keep an eye on the waiters, be vigilant with the silverware, and — leaning so close now that they can see the dark outline of Victor’s pupils — he seems as if he is about to reveal some fabulous secret, but pauses and says, Ladies! the banquet table is in serious need of a face-lift!

when Victor first moved in Rudi’s circle he was surprised at the older women who crowded around, willing to do everything and anything, some of them even sporting boyish haircuts in the vague hope that Rudi would find them attractive, which he never did, but they continued to hope, although now that age is spoiling their bodies they are in search of a son to spoil instead, which makes Victor think of his own late mother, his one regret being that he wasn’t with her when she succumbed, in the depths of the Bronx, to a strange liver disease, Victor at the time being so broke that he was unable to take her back to Venezuela, until years later he was on a trip with Rudi and they stopped off in Caracas for an afternoon, took a taxi to the hills, and spread her ashes at the foot of Mount Avila, watched her dust scatter, and it was one of the few times Victor cried publicly, he sat on the ground, put his head to his knees, wept quietly, then let out a howl, stood up and bid her good-bye, and it had shocked Rudi — this brute intimacy of grief — and the following night Rudi dedicated his dance in Caracas to her memory, stumbling once, but rising again in an elegant rage, which Victor, at the back of the opera house, thought a beautiful replica of his mother’s life, the dance, the stumble, the anger, the applause, the encore, the curtain falling before she could limp to the wings

and Victor steps mock-angrily out of the kitchen, clicking his fingers at the hired help in their bad tuxedos, ordering them to assemble, it is a thin line he walks, for although he likes them, empathizes with them, respects them even, he knows what he must say, and soon the help are assembled in the kitchen, all twelve of them, high hair and bracelets, tattoos hidden beneath their sleeves, and Victor doesn’t lean close but draws back for authority, speaking of the ladies, saying, Those bitches have us over a barrel, not a hint of a Venezuelan accent but still a sort of barrio bravado in his voice, as if this is the most important job they will ever do, and if they don’t do it properly he will fire them even before Rudi comes back, since he knows what they want, everyone wants it, just to be near Rudi, just to say they touched him, but for good measure Victor turns up the heat a few notches, takes a deep breath, looks them each in the eye, says that if the work is not done well he will take every last man and string him up from the ceiling by his puny little cock and beat him like a fat white piñata—you doubt me? — and then he’ll take every woman and thread the sleeve of his orange shirt through her orifices and swing her mercilessly over the trees into Central Park, where there’ll be a dozen black boys waiting to gang-bang her, and the hired help are suddenly wide-eyed, until Victor breaks the tension with a long laugh, which becomes gentle, kind, full of tenderness, and he says if they do well there’s an extra twenty-five bucks each, maybe even some nose candy, and now Victor is aware they are so thoroughly confused that he has them under his thumb, that the evening has firmly settled into place like a good carpentry job, the pegs snug, the legs squared off, thinking in fact that he has performed such a great job he might have time to dash into the park for fifteen minutes or so, make his way up towards the Rambles

oh the Rambles! all the scraddlelegged boys strung out in silhouette! all the tramping of weeds! all the faces shoved into brambles! all the bandannas in back pockets! all the drugs fermenting in all the bodies! what a human candy store! all the horsewhips and cockrings and lubricants and other chewable delights! all the winding paths! the soil indented with the patterns of knees! the moon out behind a dozen different trees! Johnnie Ramon with his shadow long on the grass and oh so tautly bowed! yes! Victor and the Rambles know each other well, and not just for nature walks, once or twice he has even accompanied Rudi there, because Rudi sometimes likes the tough boys, the raucous ones, the hot tamales who come down from the Bronx and Harlem

but instead of the Rambles Victor opts for an alternative dose of resurrection, ducks into the bathroom, cleans the top of the tank with pieces of wet tissue, chops out a line, snorts with great gusto, shakes his head and stomps one foot, and he is out once more, answering a sharp buzz from the intercom, saying, Send them up! and within moments the caterers are at the door with dozens of trays of food, some of which he guides to the kitchen and the rest he has lined up on the banquet table, all manner of delicacies, much of it Russian, sliced sturgeon, beluga caviar in chilled bowls, horsemeat pâté, krendeli, pirozhki, Black Sea oysters, meat salads, Stroganoff, the women beside him fussing and fretting, he calms them by taking just a tiny taste of the caviar on the tip of his finger, Good enough for a Queen! then spends the next hour checking on the work of his charges, the women watching the hired help, the hired help watching the women, coordinated now like a song, so that Victor can do the things he needs to do, tilting the paintings in the living room just the tiniest bit off angle, especially the Meynier, his own little joke, Wisdom Defending Youth Against Love, and he turns the divan from the window so that it will not be commandeered by some sad slouch, arranges the ashtrays at a distance from the fine couches, adjusts the dimmer on the lights, fans the tassels on the Persian rugs, lines up Beethoven on the stereo to be followed by James Brown—a little musical anarchy please! — all the time watching the clock, the evening descending to the smallest details, the folds in the napkins, the position of the candelabra, the angle of the piano, the temperature of the mushroom sauce, so that Victor becomes impatient, tapping his foot, trying to figure out at what stage the dance is, if Rudi is finished yet, how long the ovation will take, until the intercom buzzes and the first guests of the evening announce themselves, so Victor bows generously to the organizing ladies, allowing them their kudos, barks one final time at the bartender who has not polished the glasses to satisfaction, Beware, I will return! for that is another rule of Victor’s, never be first at a party, even if he’s in charge, and instead of taking the elevator down he walks the stairwell, briefly pensive, almost sad, Victor spending a moment alone with Victor, leaning his head against the mustard-colored wall, breathing deeply, feeling the relaxation seep into his body, down to his toes, time for a quiet cocktail, somewhere dark and anonymous, not a gay bar, not a club, and not a Rambles cocktail either! somewhere he can rest temporarily, save his energy for the remains of the evening, and he finds a seedy little joint on Seventy-fourth and Amsterdam, checks out the jukebox, wonders how Rudi will react to the invasion

it was way back in ’68 when Victor was taken to the ballet by an elderly matron whom he was escorting, he sat in the best seats for Romeo and Juliet, bored at first, fidgeting in his pricey jacket, crossing and recrossing his legs, wondering how long it would last, how soon he could escape, but then something happened, Fonteyn gave Rudi one of those glances that seemed to change everything, Rudi lifted her, Fonteyn’s face was glorious in the light, and the two dancers seemed to melt into each other, and Victor realized this was more than ballet, more than theater, more than spectacle, it was a love affair, a public love affair where the lovers did not love each other beyond the stage, which made Victor want to rise from his seat and perform, not ballet, but to move his body wildly and freely, and it was painful to watch such beauty without being part of it, he resented the look on Rudi’s face, his energy, his control, so when the curtain fell Victor felt an inexplicable hatred, he wanted to go up to the stage and shove Rudi into the pit, but he stayed motionless, shocked that the world could reveal such surprises — this was ballet, ballet! for crying out loud! — and it made Victor wonder what else he was missing, what else was lacking in his life, and in the foyer afterwards while he waited in line to collect his escort’s fur coat, Victor felt flush with heat and cold so that he shivered and sweated simultaneously, he had to go out into the night air, where a great swell of girls in wide-bottomed jeans shouted, Rudi in the nudi! Rudi in the nudi! We want Rudi in the nudi! some of the fans clutching photos of Rudi to their chests, clamoring for position, hoping for autographs, and Victor had to abandon his aging escortee, he jumped into a taxi and went downtown to dance and forget, to a club on the eighth floor of an old factory, lights blazing, boys on drugs, famous actors sniffing rags soaked in ethyl chloride, the smell of poppers, men in front of mirrors with their eyes closed, wearing pirate shirts, headbands, winklepicker boots, whistles around their necks, the music so loud that some boys walked around with blood leaking from their eardrums, and Victor felt better after an hour, having come home to himself, sweat-soaked and mobbed by men who desired him, but later, when he sat sharing champagne with a wealthy fashion designer, Rudi suddenly joined the table—hey Rudi, this is Victor Pareci—and Victor felt a pit of despair in his stomach as Rudi looked at him, they detested each other immediately, they could see the cockiness but they could also see the doubt, that volatile mixture, fire and vacuum, both men knowing that they were similar, and their similarities galled them, having stepped out of the dirty shanties of the world into the drawing rooms of the rich, that they were the edge of a coin and no matter how many times the coin was flipped they would always remain the edge, that the rich didn’t understand this, but neither did the poor, and all this made their hatred palpable, and relief came only when they stepped away to opposite ends of the dance floor, but after a while they began dueling across the floor, seeing how many boys they could attract, and only Victor could live in a duel with Rudolf Nureyev, for this was Victor’s turf even though Victor was short and dark and unfashionably Venezuelan—short in stature, yes, but large everywhere else! — he had been worshiped on the floor long before he was worshiped in bed, his hip roll exaggerated so his legs seemed detached from his body, his shirt twisted and knotted to show off his flat dark stomach, and it became a strange war between them, beneath the revolving lights, the air heated, a great caisson of drums and guitar and voice, until there was a blackout, not even a fizzle of electricity but a sudden plunge into darkness, the other patrons thinking it might be part of the routine — often the lights were shut off so the men could have sex — but Victor waited out the blackout, wrung the sweat from the flaps of his shirt, feeling whole and complete and invulnerable in the dark, hearing the fumbling and laughing and thrusting all around, and Victor felt proud of his abstention, flushed with a sort of ascetic glory as the room filled with grunts and shrieks, until the lights came on again, blazing, riotous, and who was there across the floor but Rudi, still and majestic, and as the music jumped back into life they grinned at each other and recognized at that moment that they had somehow crossed a chasm, they were standing on the same side of the divide, knowing with a deep certainty that they would never touch each other, never fuck or suck or finger or rim, and certainly never kiss, and the realization was a balm, a salve, an unspoken pact, they had no need for each other’s bodies, but still they were inextricably tied, bound not by money or sex or work or fame but by their pasts and now, having met in a crosswind, they would duck out of it for shelter, and it was Victor who set out for the other side of the floor, staring at Rudi all the way, and the dancer put out his hand and they shook, laughed in unison, went to a table where they ordered a bottle of vodka and spent the hours talking, not about the world around them but the worlds they had come from, Ufa and Caracas, finding suddenly that they were talking about things they hadn’t talked about in years, the corrugated roofs, the factories, the forests, the smell of air at dusk—My street had a river of sewage running down the middle! My street wasn’t even a street! My street smelled like two wet dogs fucking! — and they could have been talking to mirrors, finding each other by finding themselves, the nightclub was forgotten, pure scenery, and they left at six in the morning, to the glare and envy of others, down the street for breakfast together at Clyde’s, Victor rolling his shoulders, Rudi clicking his heels, the sun struggling up full and red over the warehouses and abattoirs of Manhattan’s west side

and by the time Victor leaves the bar and returns to the Dakota, singing, Take me back to the Black Hills, the party is in full swing, he enters to a swirl of bodies — ambassadors balletomanes choreographers doctors engineers filmstars globetrotters highbrows image-makers junkies kingpins leeches millionaires nighthawks oddballs producers quacks royals sexsymbols thespians underlings vamps wall-crawlers xenophiles yesmen zealots — all hyped up on the show, or the rumor of the show, a huge crowd in the corner around Martha Graham, telling her how wonderful! how provocative! how imaginative! how daring! how nouveau! how marvelous! how utterly groundbreaking! a look on Graham’s face as if to say that if she swung a cat she would hit a hundred assholes, and Victor charges on, leaning over to kiss Margot Fonteyn, radiant, calm, precise, always friendly to Victor although she doesn’t quite understand him, a ghostly quality to her goodness, he tells her she looks Delicious! to which she grins as if pained by the ongoing overload of compliments, and Victor spins away and hails Jagger in the corner, pinned to the world by his lips, chatting with a blond woman whose hair seems to totter on her head, and next to him Roland Petit gesturing to a group of young dancers, and across from Petit towers Vitas Gerulaitis, the tennis player, energetic and expansive, with a group of gorgeous young men—Wash yourselves down, shouts Victor, and come to my tent! — then he nods and winks liberally at everyone who’s anyone, the Fords of the world, the Halstons, the Avedons, the Von Fürstenbergs, the Radziwills, the Guinnesses, the Allens, the Rubells, the Capotes, everyone, Victor flashing his high-wattage smile all around the apartment, but where the hell is Rudi? Victor casts his eyes quickly over the room, the designer rags and champagne glasses, where the hell is he? and he shakes more hands and air-kisses, all the time looking for Rudi, where the fuck is he? Victor has a tight sense of foreboding as he makes his way to the rear bedroom, where the party organizers are stationed outside like diplomats, talking seriously and guardedly, and Victor intuits the nature of the problem and barrels right through, although the women try to hold him back, to no success, and he snaps down on the gold-plated door handle, slams the door shut behind him, locks it, takes a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dark room, and Victor says, Rudi? but there is no answer, and Victor says this time, Hey Rudi! with a thrust of anger, and he hears a rustle, then a shout, Get the fuck out! a bedroom slipper coming for Victor’s head, which he ducks, and then he spies a ball of disconsolate fury on the bed, Victor tries to figure what to do, where to stand, how to say things, but Rudi is suddenly off the bed and on his feet, screaming, They say to me well done? Well done? Shit! They talk shit! Well done is for steak! They fuck up the music! They fuck up the curtains! They fuck up everything! Don’t talk to me about well done! Leave me alone! This is the morgue! Get out! Who makes this party? I have never seen so ridiculous! Cunt! Out! and Victor receives the tirade with a concealed smile, but he knows it’s too early to laugh, he tries to look calm, not to reveal that his mind is whirling, going over all the endless permutations, the pulls and the sways of the evening, the quarrels, the ovations, the mistakes, the critiques, the depth of the manifold possible wounds, and in the end he says to Rudi, Yeah, I heard you were dreadful tonight, to which Rudi turns on him and screams What? and Victor shrugs, keeps tapping his feet on the floor, says, Well, Rudi, I heard you were a piece of shit tonight, I heard your performance was really bad, and Rudi says, Who said that? and Victor says, Everyone! and Rudi says, Everyone? and Victor replies Every-fucking-one, and Rudi twists his face savagely but doesn’t say a word, yet his mouth reveals the hint of a grin, so Victor knows it’s working, that the tide will turn, and he doesn’t even wait, he just unlocks the door, shuts it gently, goes back out to the party, whispers to the women organizers, No mortal wounds darlings! Back to battle stations! and then he sees a man emerging from a doorway with his hand to his nose and his jaw grinding in the familiar way and soon he and Victor are tucked away sharing liberal amounts of cocaine

he once saw a doctor who was amazed Victor was alive let alone healthy, he should have been dead years ago, and Victor said to him, A man’s life, if it’s a good life, is older than himself, a saying the doctor liked so much he tacked it on the wall of his Park Avenue practice and gave Victor two hundred blank prescription sheets free of charge

and soon Victor is out of the bathroom and Rudi appears also, emerging from his bedroom as if nothing has happened, gliding through the living room in a beautiful white long-collared shirt, tight white jeans, snakeskin shoes, without even so much as a smile for Victor, but Victor doesn’t care, he knows anything can happen now, all the heads are following Rudi’s progress, and Rudi looks like a man who has just conceived the very notion of happiness, flicking his hair back from his eyes with a snap of his head, there is a sudden sense of magnetism in the room, Rudi seems attached to everyone, and Victor is one of the few who stands outside the performance, he settles instead into a moment of quietness, watching as Rudi gathers a group around himself, launching into some diatribe about dance as an experiment, all its impulses going to the creation of an adventure and the end of each adventure being a new impulse towards further creation, If a dancer, he is good, says Rudi, he has to straddle the time! He must drag the old forward into the new! to which his listeners nod and agree, charmed by what Rudi says, his accent, his mispronunciations, and Victor has seen this many times before, the way Rudi controls a crowd even off the stage, the way he swings from inanity to profundity and back again, Good God he’s not only beautiful but he’s smart too! and Victor loves to watch faces when Rudi is in full stride, it is one of the few stillnesses in Victor’s life — to watch Rudi in his flux — and sure enough, without missing a beat, Rudi smashes six glasses in the fireplace in a row and then begins to play Chopin on the grand piano, an étude, the whole room hushed and tethered to him, and when he is finished he shouts, Stop the clapping! for everyone knows Rudi needs the praise but he hates it also, to him life is an ongoing series of failures, the only way to continue is to believe that you’ve never done your best, for Rudi has said before, It’s not so much that I love difficulty, no, difficulty loves me

Victor once saw Rudi in his Paris dressing room before Corsaire, getting a warm-up rub from his masseur, Emilio, and Rudi was spread out on the massage table, the body perfectly sculpted, tough, white, coiled, a body that might make you stare unwittingly at your own, but what surprised Victor was not just the physique, but that Rudi had a special stand set up in front of the massage table and was reading a book by Samuel Beckett, signed for Rudi — For Rudolf, all good wishes, Sam — and Rudi was learning whole chunks of the book by heart, and later that night, at a dinner party in the Austrian embassy, he stood and performed a routine about stones in his pocket and stones in his mouth, quoted perfectly, syllable for syllable, to great applause and later still, while walking home, he quickened his pace towards the Seine and talked about how he had begun to believe that there should be no unity in art, never, that perfection embalms it, there has to be some tearing, a fracturing, like a Persian carpet with a wrongly tied knot, for that is what makes life interesting — Nothing’s perfect, not even you, Victor — and at the wall of the river Rudi scooped up a number of pebbles, borrowed Victor’s overcoat and stood precariously on the wall, launched into the speech once again, arms stretched wide, and Victor wondered what might happen if Rudi toppled into the water, if the Seine itself would dance

and Victor is delighted to see the party oiled smoothly now, everyone eating and drinking, a great buzz in the apartment, Rudi playing the perfect host, rounding the tables, chatting with guests, proposing a series of toasts, to his fellow dancers, to Martha, to Margot — To dance itself! — and Victor knows he must maintain the party’s thrust so he hops quickly across the floor and pulls a Temptations record from its sleeve, arranges it on the turntable, drops the stylus, adjusts the controls, and then darts into the kitchen where he barks at the help — I want every single plate back here in five minutes! Clean the whole fucking place! Get Rudi a drink! Get me a drink! Get everyone a drink! — and the music spills into the room, jackets get tossed onto the backs of the couches, feet slip out from shoes, shirts are unbuttoned, there’s a melting of reticence aided by the alcohol, a fat man in a fedora jiggles his flab near the stereo, a pretty actress raises the sight-lines of her skirt, Mick Jagger twists on the piano stool for a better view, Fonteyn throws her head back in laughter, Ted Kennedy shrugs off his tie, Andy Warhol enters in bright red pants, John Lennon comes down from his upstairs apartment with Yoko Ono on his arm, and Victor can feel the electricity of the night, bodies sweating, drinks shared, ends of cigars suggestively licked, and soon a whisper of sex on the air—Well, thank God for that! — as if the place has been somehow laced with Spanish fly, strangers leaning closer, women clandestinely touching each other on the inside of the arm, men rubbing shoulders, and the moment stabs Victor with energy as he watches Rudi flit among the groups, charging them with eroticism, man or woman, it doesn’t matter, Rudi sees it all as calisthenics for the hours ahead

eighteen months ago on vacation in Paris, at a club called Le Trap, in the upstairs room, lit only by red bulbs, Victor watched Rudi blow six Frenchmen in a row, stopping for a glass of vodka between each, only to hear that Victor had bettered him by two, Such fine French cuisine! So deliciously tender! so Rudi dragged the first three men he could find, lined them against the wall, A veritable firing squad! and went at them in the same way he danced, all elegance and ferocity, his sexual fame nearly equaling the renown of his dancing, Rudi was even known to take a break during performances for a quickie, and once in London he left the theater at intermission, pulled his overcoat over his dancing clothes, changed his shoes, ran down the street to the public toilets, where he entered a stall and was arrested for soliciting a policeman, But you can’t arrest me I have to perform in ten minutes, to which the policeman sniggered and said, Perform indeed, and the intermission stretched out over forty-five minutes until Rudi was found by his manager, Gillian, who shouted at the cop that the whole of England was waiting, and the cop laughed at her histrionics but allowed Rudi out of the handcuffs, and Rudi dashed back up the street, burst through the side entrance, bounded onstage, fired up by it all, and danced brilliantly, the newspapers said it was one of his finest performances ever, and during encores Rudi noticed the cop standing near the rear of the hall, grinning and laughing while Gillian tenderly stroked his lapel

and the night bends itself further towards lust as Rudi nods across the room at Victor, and Victor nods back, a secret language, so Rudi begins to make a round of the party, thanking the guests, effusive, benevolent, whispering in ears, closing business deals, shaking hands, sashaying back and forth, kissing Lennon on the cheek, Yoko on the lips, slapping Warhol on the ass, doting on Fonteyn, kissing Graham’s hand — Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye! — saying he has a late-night appointment at the Russian Tea Room, sorry, he must run, Please excuse me, a lie of course, but precisely calculated to begin to scatter the revelers, and Victor tidies behind the scenes, tips the hired help an extra thirty dollars each — Buy yourself something pretty, boys and girls! — and the party begins to splinter, on to other parties, nightclubs, even the Russian Tea Room, where the guests hope to dine once again on the vision of Rudi, but they won’t, because he and Victor have something else in mind, they descend by the stairs and whistle for a cab — the night air pinning them momentarily with its humidity — and soon find themselves in new territory, jumping out of the taxi on Twenty-eighth and Broadway where they step on the word BATH engraved in the sidewalk outside, Rudi adjusts the brim of his well-worn leather hat, Victor rattles the door four times like a code, then shouts Greetings! to the young man who opens the door, and they slide their money across the counter, get their towels, head along the pine-paneled corridor, through the indefinite light, towards the lockers, where they change out of their clothes as the noise of the place begins to engulf them, the slap of bare feet, the dripping water, the hiss of steam, the distant shouts and giggles, and, wrapped only in their towels, with their locker keys around their ankles, Rudi and Victor head to the heart of the Everard, which is in its very own way a ballet — some of the greatest ass mechanics in the city plying their trade here — guys in earrings, guys in heels, guys with eyeshadow, guys in dresses looking as if they just stepped off the set of Gone With the Wind, guys still in their Vietnam undershirts, guys in aviator glasses, guys smeared with oil, guys who look like girls, guys who want to be girls, some at half-mast, some at full mast, some unfortunates at no mast at all, some squatting over the water jets for a quick enema, a shriek coming from the shower rooms, and everyone fucking, flesh sandwiches, fucking in the rooms and fucking by the water fountain and fucking in the shower stalls and fucking in the sauna room and fucking in the boiler room and fucking in the broom closet and fucking in the rest rooms and fucking in the baths, fist-fucking, toe-fucking, finger-fucking, cluster-fucking, not to mention rimming, a regular fuckfest, as if Victor and Rudi put the lust pill in the water, hallelujah and hail to the fuck tablet! come on down! join in! no matter who you are! short and fat! tall and thin! rich or poor! small or large! (preferably large!) come to the Ever-Hard! and Victor spies one man, all loaded up on adrenaline and amphetamines, wearing only a boxing glove, the palm filled with lubricant, yelling Come and get it, come and get it, I’m a southpaw! and another quiet in the corner, just watching, his wedding ring on, a different class of asshole altogether, Victor hates the married ones, their sly effrontery before they return home to their wives, but who cares, who needs them, who wants them, there is more than enough to go round, and he turns to Rudi and says, All yours! because they never operate together, they remain apart, different ends of the spectrum, and within moments Rudi is off to the other end of the corridor while Victor roams his own turf, testing the atmosphere, scanning the faces, the first ten minutes always a ritualized staking out, intent and serious, Victor never quite sure where to begin, a fact-finding mission — it is impossible, he knows, to dive right into the fray — and he washes his face in the drip from a pipe, then cuts through the steam, all the time carrying his towel at his hip, a gunslinger, lowering his eyelids to say, No I don’t want you, I will never want you, not even if you were the second last man on earth, or holding them steady to say, Perhaps, or widening them to say, Yes yes yes, Victor darts his attention to an ass in the shower, or the hollow of a back, or the curve of a chestbone, or the arc of a mouth, or the turn of a hip, and he wanders until he feels his body revving up, blood boiling, desire rising, the steam shrouded over him now, yes yes yes yes, he gives a nod to a tall bearded blond boy who stands alone by the doorway to one of the rooms, blue-eyed, serious, and within moments they are meshed beneath the red lights, ignoring the sad sack of mattress on the floor, they go up against the wall instead, the slide of skin and the slap of desire, Victor allowing control, the man’s breath hot on his neck, reaching back to tickle his paramour’s balls, a rather pedestrian fuck, he thinks, choosers should never be beggars, and Victor composes himself when the man is finished, Gracias! and is off for more, deciding that he will be in the driving seat for the rest of the night, since that is the position he likes best, maximum locomotion, Gracias! Gracias! Gracias! a great incoming tide of fuckery, ruthless and merciless, first a boy, then a man, then another boy, with surely the most beautiful shoulder blades Victor has ever seen, he adores shoulder blades, he loves running his tongue along the high hollows in backs, then moving his mouth up along necks as the men shudder and moan, or running his teeth down the length of their spines, Victor never tires of fucking, he hopes he never will — the few straight friends he has, especially the married ones, don’t believe he can actually fuck all day long and continue fucking the day after that, they assume he is lying when he says he has had more men than hot dinners, but it’s the truth, the bare truth, Hot dinners, my friend, are vastly overrated, and he continues moving from body to body until finally he decides to take a small break, a temporary rest, and he approaches the baths, satisfied, happy, the hunt temporarily interrupted, he steps through the steam into the comfort of the water and soaks while the gymnastics around him continue — once upon a time the baths belonged to the Italians and the Irish, but since the late sixties, those glorious late sixties when flesh became fashion, the baths have belonged to the Victors of the world, the victorious, a risky business, raided occasionally by the cops, and Victor has spent nights in jail, where indeed the bathhouse tradition persists, such camaraderie! such affability! such jailhouse rocking! — and submerging himself now in the soothing warmth, Victor wonders how Rudi is getting on, but he knows there’s no need to worry, Rudi is human flypaper, the men stay suspended on the mid-air of him, stuck to the memory of the moment, and they will whisper about it for years to come, Well, I did my thing for the Cold War, yes, I got fucked by Rudolf Nureyev! And, let me tell you, he just hammered his sickle! and the story will be appropriated and reappropriated, the size of Rudi’s cock, the tap of his heartbeat, the feel of his fingers, the aroma left by his tongue, the sweat of his thighs, the imprint of his lips, and maybe even the sound of their own hearts breaking beneath their rib cages as he moved away

Victor has often said to Rudi that to love one man is impossible, for he must love all men, though at times Rudi has grieved and fulminated over lost love, which is not Victor’s style at all, Victor believes in the roll and the spin, the gamble, and he can’t quite understand how Rudi has been in love, in the past, how he can actually fall for one man, dedicate his heart to him, like Rudi did with Erik Bruhn for many years, the two greatest dancers in the world in love with each other, it seemed impossible, and it galled Victor the way his friend talked, as if a million tuning forks had all been struck at once in Rudi’s chest, and Victor detested hearing about the dancers’ small moments together all over the world, on yachts and in drawing rooms and fancy hotel suites and health spas high in the Danish countryside, Victor couldn’t understand it, Bruhn seemed to him the antithesis of life, tall and blond and brooding, coldhearted, meticulous, that fucking Viking! it wasn’t so much jealousy on Victor’s part, or so he insisted, it was more that he feared Rudi being brokenhearted, that Rudi would get torn up by love, that he would lose everything in the same way married men disappear into the floorboards of their wives and children, and Victor dreaded being one of those people suddenly left by Rudi, forced to carry the sheer weight of having once been his friend, but he needn’t have worried because in the end it was Rudi who left Bruhn, and Victor remembers well the night they finished — it was not the first time but it was the final time — Rudi on the telephone weeping in great heaving sobs that racked even Victor, and finally it transpired that Rudi was in Copenhagen—it’s so fucking cold here—but was on his way back to Paris, he had broken up with Bruhn and wanted Victor to come over, and Victor packed immediately, went to the airport where a first-class ticket was waiting, and Victor couldn’t help smiling a little at the quality of the journey, despite Rudi’s heartache, and he laid back in the comfortable seat and wondered what he’d say to Rudi, what answers he could conjure, but when he got to the apartment on the quai Voltaire there was nobody there except the French housekeeper, and Victor sat by the window, momentarily happy for Rudi’s misery since it meant another drama, but when Rudi walked through the door, his face long and haggard and carved by grief, Victor felt a huge stab of remorse, he could see the black lines of tears on Rudi’s face, and Victor hugged his friend close, which he didn’t often do, made tea with six sugars, then brought out a bottle of vodka, closed the curtains, and the two men sat in the darkness, drinking, talking not about Erik — which surprised Victor — not about the breakup or the misery or the loss, but about their mothers, feeling curiously like clichés at first, two grown men settling back into maternal solace, but after a while the yearning for their mothers became terribly real, and Rudi said to Victor, Sometimes, Victor, my heart it feels as if it is under house arrest, which sent a shiver through Victor, he knew that for years Rudi had been trying desperately to get a visa for her, even just for a day, so Farida could see him dance just one more time, share his world however briefly, sometimes it was harder for Rudi to be away than to be happy, he thought about her constantly, and Rudi had been in touch with everyone, presidents, ambassadors, prime ministers, queens, senators, congressmen, princes, princesses, but to no avail, the authorities wouldn’t budge, they’d never give his mother a visa, and they certainly wouldn’t give Rudi a visa, and Rudi was afraid Farida would die, and there was nothing in the world he wouldn’t give just to see her one more time, and Victor downed another vodka and said he too spent his life wishing he could see his mother, resurrect her somehow, simply go back to Caracas to say that he had loved her, just to squeeze those three words together in tribute, and the conversation drew them so close that Rudi and Victor were able to sit in silence for an hour, more intimate than sex, without fraudulence, without mimicry, deep and soulful and necessary, never once mentioning Erik, instead recalling happier times, and finally both men fell asleep by the window to be awoken by the housekeeper, Odile, who brought coffee then left them alone, and Victor said to Rudi, Perhaps you should phone Erik, maybe you need to talk to him, but Rudi shook his head, no, and Victor knew then that it was definitely over, that Bruhn would become another milestone, and before they launched themselves into the day Rudi went to the mantelpiece to get a picture of Farida, she was standing in a factory with a white hat on her head, a wry sadness to her, the photo seeming incongruous among the fine art and furniture in the apartment, and Rudi held the photo close to his chest, as if tilted to the past, and later when the two men stepped out into the clean day they were slightly embarrassed, in the sunlight, by what had transpired in the dark, Look at us Rudi, we’re soaked in tears! and yet they knew, even as the morning traffic threw its fumes along the Seine, that they had somehow arrived at the elemental litter of their hearts

the steam rising up around Victor now, thinking to himself that he shouldn’t hit the pause button, that it rips him up too much, these memories, and he calls on a fellow bather for a cigarette and lighter, draws in the satisfaction of it, hears a murmur and sees Rudi settling down beside him in the water, a line of his hair from his belly button, his waist tiny and hammered into shape, no coyness at all, his cock with a sort of long satisfactory limpness like a traveler on a journey, and this amuses Victor, he needs amusement, thinking of all the cocks in the world being on journeys, some on package holidays, some in English gardens, some in stuffy Mediterranean rooms, others on Siberian Expresses, but some indeed, oh yes indeed, some would be Bedouin gypsies, ha! having been everywhere and back again to no peculiar purpose but the fulfillment of life itself—Hey Rudi! You and me! We’re Bedouin boys! — and he explains the joke to Rudi and the two men lie back in the enjoyment of the moment, laughing, chatting about the party in the Dakota, about who wore what, who was with whom, and for half an hour they allow the water to surround them, the silence, the closeness, until Victor says with a grin, Hey Rudi, what’ll we do with the rest of our lives? and Rudi shuts his eyes and replies that he should leave soon, he has to be up early, he has rehearsal piling up upon rehearsal, his life is like a never-ending practice for the real thing, that he has a series of big events coming up, all important, two charity galas, five photo shoots, a dozen television interviews, a trip to Sydney, to London, to Vienna, not to mention a screen test for a movie, it never seems to end, Rudi wishes sometimes he could just freeze it and temporarily step outside his life, there is so much to do, it takes away from the dance, he wishes he could just perform and not worry about a single other thing, and Victor stands up, sighs, raises one arm in the air and shouts, Oh drown me in martinis! Buy me a Tiffany gallows! Prepare my last meal at Maxim’s! Electrocute me in my Jacuzzi! Throw my platinum hand dryer in the bathtub! and Rudi smiles, he knows he cannot play these sorts of games with Victor, and he nods to Victor who is now standing on the edge of the bath, taking a bow, so Rudi grabs him by the leg, pulls him back into the water, plunges his head down, Watch my hairstyle! and they laugh until they are exhausted, breathing hard, hanging on to the rim of the bath, two little boys charmed by each other, and suddenly another wicked gleam shines in Rudi’s eye, he is out of the water, his towel draped around his neck, his body replenished, saying he is off for one final round, that William Blake would have approved—The road of excess, Victor, leads to the palace of wisdom—and there is another murmur through the baths, and Victor checks his own mental clock, thinking where to go next, where the best drugs might be, the best music, where another round of spontaneous sex might fuel the inner need, and he too rises from the water but steps in the opposite direction, ignoring a couple of handsome advances, a sacrifice indeed, and returns to his locker, sits on the wooden bench, pulls on his black pants and orange shirt, out of view of Rudi—Time for another dose of resurrection! — and after snorting the line he slips into his shoes, nods to the men in the corridors, walks around, looking for Rudi, but Rudi is nowhere to be found, perhaps he is shuttered away in some corner or is hiding or has left without saying good-bye, not unusual of course, just one of those things, Rudi owns the world so why say good-bye to any one part of it? and after checking the baths thoroughly Victor still finds no sign, so he steps out on the street, looks right and left, even jogs to the corner, but the avenue is curiously quiet and sinister, not a soul breaking its shadows, dangerous times, there have been beatings of gay men, but you live your life only as long as it lives you, so Victor starts to walk, rolling his shoulders once more, onwards and upwards—Whoever brought me here, my friends, is going to have to pay the price! — and he hails a cab driven by a handsome young Mexican man, Victor flirting with the idea of inviting him out for a drink at one of the downtown clubs, deciding against it when he sees the plastic Jesus bobbing on the dashboard, religion being nothing more to Victor than a worldly suppository, and he winds down the window to watch Manhattan glide by, its violence and gaudy neon, the West Side, flashing red yellow orange green wonderland, hustlers johns grifters whores, boys and girls ground down by the chemicals, Victor waves at them and they flip him off, so he waves some more as the taxi moves south to the Anvil, which is alive and throbbing now, especially alive at three-thirty in the morning, disco lights spinning, men in leathers and studs, men in denim jeans with the asses scissored out, men in country and western gear, men with steel nuts and bolts for zippers, a drag queen on a small stage performing with a six-foot boa constrictor, a group of go-go boys hanging from ropes, and Victor checks the bar just in case Rudi is here, but he’s not, and as he looks around Victor realizes there’s hardly a man in the bar he hasn’t fucked, let alone a man’s brother, and a good few of their uncles for crying out loud! not one of them ever holding a grudge against Victor, since fucking is as necessary as breathing here, maybe even more so, fucking is the bread and water of existence, and this bar is one of the hotter hot spots, tongues flicking into ears, hands wandering beneath waistbands, fingers circling nipples, the air itself smelling like sex, and before Victor knows it half a dozen vodkas with grapefruit have crossed the bar towards him, in grimy glasses, from different sources, like nighttime artillery, and he accepts them all with a bow, More ice, gentlemen, please! and he doles out the last of the free quaaludes, but still keeps a little powder for himself, a man has to be a little greedy, and he begins to dance, followed by a brood of admirers, all the anthems of summer moving through them, Victor resurrected again, like a migratory bird on the last leg of its journey, fighting on through whatever head wind the night might give him, wondering where in the world Rudi might have gotten to, if he really went home, when the two of them will get together again, and there is one final place, Victor knows it well, not too far from here, which may well be the night’s resting point, the trucks! the infamous trucks! those dark rooms on sixteen-wheel axes! ah yes! the trucks!

a place that Rudi also likes, dark, anonymous, dangerous, a ditch of desire

and Victor debates it, whether to go down there or not, to the nightly row of vehicles in the meatpacking district, yes indeed, a lot of meat being packed, the last stage of the evening, and Victor — looking out over the dance floor — notices the drift has already begun, and he ponders that he does not want to become one of the hot-flush queens of New York, lamenting that he’s now fucking boys half his age, no, not that, not ever that—I have signed the charter of life! I will continue! I will roll on! Indeed I’ll roll over! — and with a wave of his hand and a few deft whispers, Bring only five thousand of my most intimate friends! he gathers up a flock, boys so far strung out that this may be the very end of their elastic, their eyes in the depths of their sockets, but a mania still there, traipsing behind the great Victor, a flotilla of yellow taxicabs waiting in the street, one of the few places in Manhattan at this hour where a cabby is guaranteed a fare, and Victor clicks his fingers while also kissing the bouncers good-night, and he and his cohorts hop into the taxis, some of them leaning from the windows, like cowboys on a urban drive, down the West Side, Out with the lassos, girls! telling the drivers they’ve just come in from Texas, that they’re looking for a place to lay their saddles, Cowboys make better lovers, my friend, just ask any bull! the smells from the Hudson wafting in the open windows, the cobblestones shining from a recent rain, fires burning in oil drums where bums share cigarettes, the night air still chill with possibility, the taxis negotiating corners, until the trucks appear like mirages, silver and huge and shiny, a mill of activity, men in various states of elation and annihilation, some laughing, some sobbing, a couple attempting a waltz on the sidewalk, everyone so close to being broke that they are finally generous with the very last of their drugs, pills and poppers and powders they’ve been hoarding away for the dregs of the evening, names being called from truck to truck, small cups of Crisco and jars of Vaseline being passed along, a man roaring about a pickpocket, a drag queen screaming at a lover, young boys jumping down from the back tailgates, older queens being shunted upwards, all of it like a magical war zone, a human hide-and-seek, but Victor stands outside the commotion for a moment, holds the end hairs of his mustache between his teeth, scans the crowd, all sorts of familiar faces, and — just before Victor climbs into the rear of a truck, Who knows, the world might very well end before sunrise! — he looks up the cobblestoned street and sees a lone man walking towards the trucks, disturbing the globes of lamplight, moving with certainty and grace, the volume of the walk turned up so that Victor’s attention is arrested, and instantly he knows, because he recognizes the leather hat, the bend of the brim, the lean of the body, and Victor feels a rush of emotion like wind over grass, causing the hairs on his arms to tingle, and Rudi shouts, You Venezuelan turd! You left me there! and he is laughing, his whole face worked into happiness, showing his fine white teeth, and a tremor runs through Victor’s spine as he watches Rudi approach, thinking here comes loneliness applauding itself all the way down the street.

2 LENINGRAD 1975–76

In the winter of 1975 I walked around Leningrad, fretting over poems that were only half-translated. After divorcing Iosif I had moved to a communal apartment just off Kazanskaya. It was a bare, unadorned room with a linoleum floor, close enough to the Fontanka River to connect me to my old life. I rose early each morning to walk and work. The poets were socialist leftovers who still managed to rally and cry — in the beauty and space of the Spanish language — against the horrors of Franco. They had written to preserve what would have been forgotten, to give it a longer lease on life, and their words consumed me.

It used to be that I had gone to the countryside to think, to wade in rivers, but somehow Leningrad was a balm to me now. Barges moved slowly on the dark waters of the canals. Birds swooped above the boats. I still felt warmed by my father’s notebook from years before, which I kept inside my coat pocket and read while I sat on park benches. My display of seeming leisure was questionable to some — another pedestrian would look too long in my direction, or a car would slow and the driver gaze suspiciously. Leningrad was not a city in which to be seen idle.

I began to carry a shawl and held an imaginary bundle in the crook of my arm, reached in to touch the emptiness, pretending there was a child there.

I spent my fiftieth birthday working on a single verse, a highly antifascist tract about a thunderstorm where small countries of light and dark rushed headlong over fields and gullies. It had obvious political resonance, but I began to think the poem related directly to me, having imagined a child of sorts for myself. My interpretation wasn’t so much a wish fulfillment as a blatant mockery of how I had lived my early years with Iosif. Even after the two miscarriages it had been possible, when young, to be ambitious, for the Party, for the People, for science, for literature. But those ambitions had long been shut off, and the light that penetrated me now was the notion that I might become the sculptor of something human.

A child! I had to laugh at myself. Not only was I half a century in the world, but I had not met anyone since the divorce. I paced my room from wall to wall, mirror to mirror. I bought a box of clementines in the market as a birthday treat, but even peeling back the soft skin of the orange seemed to relate, however absurdly, to my desire. My father had once told me the story of how, when he was in the work camp, a truckload of giant logs was brought in to be chopped. He was on ax duty with a gang of twelve. It was a dreadfully hot summer and each swing of the blade was torture. He hacked at a log and there was the unmistakable sound of metal hitting metal. He bent down and found a mushroom-shaped chunk of lead embedded in the trunk. A bullet. He counted the rings from the perimeter to the bullet and found that they matched his age exactly.

We never escape ourselves, he said to me years later.

One spring morning I took a tram to the outskirts of Leningrad, where an acquaintance of mine, Galina, worked in a state orphanage. When I sat in her dark office she raised an eyebrow, frowned. I told her that I was beginning to look for other work in addition to my translations. She hardly seemed convinced. The desire to be around orphan children was considered strange. Mostly they were idiots or chronically disabled. To work with them was a social embarrassment. On the wall above Galina’s desk there was a print of an old saying she said came from Finland: The crack of a falling branch is its own apology to the tree for having broken. I had convinced myself that going there, even for an afternoon, was simply to get away from the poems. But I had also heard of certain women — women my age — who had opened foster homes, adjuncts to the dyetskii dom, the baby houses. The women were allowed to operate on a small scale, sometimes as many as six children, and they got a desultory pension from the state.

Are you no longer in the university? asked Galina.

I’m divorced now.

I see, she said.

In the background I could hear wailing voices. When we left the office a group of boys crowded around us, hair shaved, tunics gray, red sores around their mouths.

Galina showed me the grounds. The building was an old armory, brightly repainted, with a chimney stack that pierced the air. Prefabricated classrooms were propped on cinder blocks. Inside, the children sang paeans to a good life. A single set of swings stood in the garden where each child was allowed half an hour during the day. In their spare time the maintenance men were attempting to build a slide and the unfinished structure stood like a skeleton beside the swings. Still, three children had found a way to climb it anyway.

Hello! one of them shouted. He looked about four years old. He ran over and made a gesture to rub his soft fuzzy head, where his hair had begun to grow. The skull seemed too large for his tiny body. His eyes were huge and strange, lopsided, his face terribly thin. I asked his name.

Kolya, he said.

Go back to the swing, Nikolai, Galina said.

We continued through the grounds. Over my shoulder I saw Kolya climb the makeshift slide once again. The sunlight caught the dark stubble on his head.

Where’s he from? I asked.

Galina touched my shoulder. Perhaps you shouldn’t draw so much attention to yourself, she said.

I’m just curious.

You really must be careful.

Galina had been assigned the work in the orphanage after failing at university. The seasons had passed through her face and it struck me that they had now conjured themselves into one which had become bland and nondescript, not unlike myself.

But at a copse of trees Galina stopped, coughed then half-smiled.

It turned out that Kolya’s parents were intellectuals from the far eastern stretches of Russia. They had been posted to a university in Leningrad where they’d been killed when their car smashed into a tram on Nevsky. There had never been any contact made with other relatives and Kolya, three months old at the time, had spent his first few years not saying a single word.

He’s a clever child but ruthlessly lonely, said Galina. And he has certain behaviors.

What kind of behaviors?

He hoards his food and then waits until it’s stale or moldy to digest it. And toilet things as well. He’s not yet trained himself for the toilet.

We rounded a corner where a group of boys and girls were chopping wood, their breath steaming in the cold. Their axes glinted momentarily in the light as they raised them above their shoulders.

But he shows some promise as a chess player, she said.

Temporarily stunned by a vision of my father pulling a bullet from a core of wood, I said: Who?

Kolya! she said. He’s already carved his own chess set from the slats of his bed. We discovered it one evening when he crashed to the floor. The pieces were tucked in his pillowcase.

I stopped on the path. An oil tanker had pulled up to the main building and Galina checked her watch. She sighed and said: I must go.

In the background I could hear the children laughing.

I suppose I can help arrange a job for you here if you desire, she said.

She shook her head and began to leave, jangling her keys.

Thank you, I replied.

She didn’t turn. I knew what I wanted, perhaps what I had always wanted since a young age. Before I left I stood watching Kolya swinging from a monkey bar. A shrill whistle blew, calling the children in, while a guard swept a dozen more kids out into the grounds.

I returned to my room, to my dictionaries, my clementines.

At the Ministry of Education the following week I was told that all adoptions had been curtailed, and I concurred with the official that custody by the People was a far better thing, but then I plied her gently on the question of wardship. She gave me a fierce look and said: Wait here please. She came back carting a file and was rifling through it when suddenly she asked: Do you like dance?

There was only one possible reason that she could have asked the question. Rudi had been gone for over a decade. Talk about him had softened somewhat in recent years and there had been other high-profile defections that had taken the spotlight away from him. There had even been a review in Izvestiya of a tour in Germany that quoted Western newspapers saying how Rudi’s touch had all but faded from the firmament. When Alexsandr Pushkin died in the early seventies the papers had mentioned Rudi briefly, but they had written that it was exclusively the teacher’s genius, not Rudi’s, which had made him an interesting dancer.

I tightened my fingers and waited for the official to clarify herself. She was looking closely at the particulars of my file. I felt that in my feverish haste I had dug myself a pit. Nothing had ever been stamped in my identity papers about the problem of having known Rudi, but obviously the files went deeper. I tried to mumble an apology, but the woman adjusted her glasses, peered over the half lenses.

She said sternly that she had seen a certain dance in the Kirov in the late fifties. The performer had danced beautifully, she said, but in later years he had disappointed her terribly. She was talking in half words, but it felt as if we had taken an irreversible journey together. She scanned my file further. I allowed myself a breath. She did not mention Rudi’s name, but he lay in the space between us.

The truth was that I didn’t really want Rudi in my life anymore, or at least not the sort of Rudi I had known years before. I wanted a Nikolai, a Kolya, someone I could help up from the slats of my own existence.

I may be able to help, Comrade, the official said.

I wondered what exactly I had allowed myself into. She said there was a provision under Article 123 of the Family Code for wardship, and there was a further provision under another law for Party members to have access to children of talent. I had been a member of the Party, but since leaving Iosif I had hidden low, afraid he might hunt me down. The thought even occurred that the woman at the Ministry was somehow connected to him, that she would betray me. And yet there was something about her that seemed honest, a display of simplicity that blended a sharp intelligence.

Does this boy show any particular talents? she asked.

He’s a chess player.

At the age of four?

She made a note on a piece of paper and said: Come back next week.

I had often believed, to that point in my life, that friendships among women were fickle things, dependent on circumstances other than the heart, but Olga Vecheslova, as I got to know her, was extraordinary. She was younger than I and insecure behind her gold-rimmed spectacles. Dark brown hair. Dark eyes, almost black. She herself had been a dancer although there was no whisper of it in her body anymore — her hips were wide and her carriage bent, unlike my mother, who, even when sick, had walked as if balancing china on her head. Olga was unnerved but pleased by the notion of me having known Rudi. She disliked him of course, for betraying our nation. She also disliked him for his betrayal of the very thing we ultimately wanted for our own lives, the realization of desire. And in that hatred there was a need. It was a disease of sorts; we couldn’t shake Rudi from our minds. Olga and I began to meet once a week, to walk along the canals together, aware that our actions could draw the wrong attention, but we forged on regardless.

Olga arranged that I be allowed to visit Kolya at the orphanage. Nearing the end of summer he seemed undernourished, his legs thin and spindly in his shorts. Terrible sores had erupted on his face. He had been punished for incontinence and there were welts on his back. At Galina’s office I learned that he was actually six years old, not four, that his growth was stunted. I began to doubt myself, started biting my nails for the first time since I was sixteen. I cannot handle a child like this, I thought.

Even the bureaucracy of having a child would be a strategic nightmare, waiting in lines for schools, name changes, apartment applications, vaccinations, identity cards.

Still, I bought paint, a brush, a secondhand set of lace curtains for the one window, decorated the corner of the room blue, copied out pictures of chess pieces from a book, sketched them around the sill. On the shelves I placed knickknacks. The shelves themselves were made from orange crates. The main problem was that I had no bed for Kolya. There was a four-month waiting list in the government department stores for a new one and though I was translating more and more, money was still an anguish. Finally Olga managed to find a mattress which, when cleaned and patched, was quite presentable.

I looked around the room. It was still functional and drab. There were always plenty of birdcages to be found in Leningrad and so I hung one from the ceiling and inside I placed a porcelain canary, tasteless but delightful. At the market I managed to find a beautiful hand-crafted music box, which, when wound, played an Arcangelo Corelli concerto. It was an odd item which cost the price of many poems but, like the china plate my father had given to me, it seemed to resonate into both past and future.

When Olga was finally able to institute wardship, in late September of that year, nothing in my life, absolutely nothing, was better than that moment.

Kolya stood in my room and wailed so much that his nose bled. He scratched himself and an array of fresh cuts appeared on his arms and legs. I prepared a poultice, wrapped the wounds, and later that evening gave him a chocolate bar. He didn’t know what it was, just stared at it, began unwrapping. He nibbled then looked up, bit a whole chunk, and tucked half of it under his pillow. I stayed up all night, nursing him through a series of nightmares, and even put some of the foul poultice on my own fingers to stop myself from biting my nails.

When he woke in the morning Kolya kicked out in fright but, finally exhausted, he asked for the other half of the chocolate bar. It was one of those simple gestures that, for no obvious reason, shores up the heart.

After a month I wrote to Rudi, telling him how life had quickened and veered. I never sent the letter. There was no need. I was a mother now. I gladly accepted the gray at the roots of my hair. I went down to the Fontanka with Kolya. He rode a bicycle we had found in the rubbish dump and he stayed close by my side, wobbling on the bike. We were on our way to the Ministry to file a report on his progress.

3 PARIS, LONDON, CARACAS 1980s

Monsieur was still sleeping and the city was quiet in the way I had loved since I was young. I stood by the window and took in the smell of the Seine, which was occasionally foul but on that morning quite fresh. The pastries were baking in the kitchen and the two scents merged together in the air.

At nine in the morning the bells from Saint Thomas d’Aquin were carried on the wind along the quays. The kettle boiled for the fourth time as I waited for Monsieur to wake. He generally did not sleep in beyond nine, no matter how late he arrived home. I always knew whether he had a companion with him since there would be jackets and other clothes strewn on the chairs. On that morning, however, there were no guests.

I took the kettle from the stove top and heard Monsieur rumbling as Chopin came to life on the record player in his bedroom.

When I first began my duties, years earlier, it was Monsieur’s custom to come out from his room wearing only his undershorts, but I had bought him a white bathrobe for one of his birthdays, which, in appreciation, he had begun to wear every morning. (He had dozens of silk pajamas and many fine Tibetan robes, none of which he ever used, but he gave them to house guests who had not expected to stay over.)

I rinsed the teapot with a little hot water, spooned the tea, and put the kettle back on the stove over a low heat. Monsieur appeared and greeted me in his customary manner, grinning broadly. The simple things in life still pleased him, and there was seldom a morning when he didn’t go to the window and take a deep breath.

I always thought that, for a young man of infinite means — he was forty-two years old at the time — there should be nothing but happiness, but he had days when the sky was indeed upon him and I would leave him alone to brood.

That morning, he yawned and stretched. I put the tea and pastries on the table, and Monsieur announced that he would be leaving the apartment later than usual. He said he had a visitor, a shoemaker from London, who he wanted to keep a secret as there were other dancers in Paris who might steal his time.

It was unusual to have morning visitors and I worried that perhaps there were not enough pastries or fruit, but Monsieur said he had met the shoemaker many times before, he was a plain man who would desire nothing more than tea and toast.

I knew about Englishmen since my aunt had for twelve years after the War kept house in Montmartre for a celebrated theater actor. The English had always struck me as polite, but I had grown to prefer the Russian way, demand and apology, which Monsieur displayed quite openly. He would, for example, raise his voice significantly over a meat dish that was overcooked and then afterwards express sorrow for his ill humor. I had even grown to enjoy Monsieur’s tantrums, plentiful as they were.

Monsieur had laid a number of his old dancing shoes out on the floor when the shoemaker arrived. I answered the door to a small bald man who carried his overcoat draped over his arm, a suitcase in his other hand. He was about a decade older than me, in his late fifties at least.

— Tom Ashworth, he said.

He bowed and said he was here on instructions. I reached for his overcoat but he did not seem to want to part with it. He smiled apologetically and hung the coat on the stand himself. Monsieur paced across the floor and embraced the shoemaker who stepped back in embarrassment. His suitcase hit the coat stand and it rocked on its legs. I managed to suppress a laugh.

The visitor had a ruddy face, his eyebrows were full and bushy, and he wore crooked spectacles.

I retreated to the kitchen, leaving the door slightly ajar so I could see into the living room, where Monsieur and the shoemaker had taken their seats. The visitor fumbled with the lock on his suitcase and then opened it to an array of shoes. His demeanor loosened as he took the shoes out one by one.

I had guessed that, as an Englishman, he would take his tea with milk and perhaps sugar. I carried a tray out into the living room. I had forgone my own breakfast pastries in case he might want one, but he hardly looked up, so engaged was he by the shoes. They chatted in English, each leaning forward to hear the other. Monsieur had, it seemed, formed a deep attachment to certain older shoes and the tenor of the conversation was such that he wanted the old shoes to be repatched.

— They live on my feet, said Monsieur, they are alive.

Mister Ashworth said he would be delighted to repatch them to the best of his ability. I closed the kitchen door, began making an inventory of what I would need for the evening’s dinner party: capon, spices, carrots, asparagus, butter, milk, eggs, hazelnuts for pudding. Monsieur had invited twelve guests and I would have to check the stock of champagnes and liqueurs. I generally cooked with a country flavor that had been passed down through my family. It had been for this reason that Monsieur had hired me, preferring, as he did, strong hearty meals. (Four generations on my mother’s side had cooked in a country inn in Voutenay, outside Paris, but the inn was a victim of the victory in 1944, burned by the Germans in retreat.)

It was always my pleasure to travel to the markets around Paris in search of the finest ingredients. In general the freshest vegetables were found on rue du Bac. There was a butcher on rue de Buci whom I always visited for the best meats — he spoke a guttural Parisian that reminded me at times of Monsieur. For spices and condiments I had made the acquaintance of a Bangladeshi man in the Tenth Arrondisement who ran a tiny store in an alleyway off passage Brady.

I normally went on foot but that particular morning — since Monsieur was with the shoemaker — I asked whether I could use the car, which he had crashed and dented often. (He was a terrible driver and one of his crude New York friends, Victor Pareci, often made unpleasant comments about Monsieur’s penchant for rear-ending.)

I accomplished my chores without difficulty.

Arriving back at the apartment with the provisions, I was surprised to see the shoemaker sitting alone. He had spread newspaper on the carpet so as not to soil it with glue. I greeted him in my faltering English. He explained that Monsieur had already left for rehearsal.

The shoemaker had arrived on an early flight from London, and, thinking he might be hungry, I offered an early lunch. He politely declined.

From the kitchen, preparing the evening’s meal, I watched as he went about his work. He fitted the shoes on his hand like a glove and used a sharp knife to cut them. It seemed as if he were gutting a wildfowl. His stitching was confident and fast. At one stage, while waiting for glue to dry, he peered over his spectacles around the room. Monsieur was a connoisseur of fine art with a penchant for nineteenth-century male nudes. They appeared to disturb the shoemaker. He stood and examined the marble torso in the middle of the room. He tapped it with his fingers and was startled when he looked up and caught my gaze.

— Monsieur has a wonderful eye for art, I said.

The shoemaker stammered and retreated to his work. Thereafter he did not look up, but by mid-afternoon he was having some difficulty with one of the shoes. He grit his teeth and shook his head. I brought him some tea and asked if he were troubled. He looked at a watch which he kept in the pocket of his waistcoat.

— I’ve a lot to do, he said.

He had an odd smile which, as it spread across his face, seemed to relax him completely. He sat back and sipped his tea, consulted his pocket watch once more, then sighed and said he feared he would not get his work done before his flight.

— I don’t suppose you know of an agreeable hotel? he asked.

— Monsieur will insist that you stay here.

— Oh I couldn’t do that.

— There are two spare bedrooms.

He seemed quite undone by the notion of staying. He rubbed the back of his neck and repeated that he would prefer to stay in a small hotel, that he didn’t want to intrude on Monsieur’s privacy. He closed his suitcase and left for Montmartre where I had told him of a small pension.

Monsieur arrived home from rehearsal at five o’clock in the afternoon. I drew his bath for him. He adored it piping hot.

While changing out of his dance clothes, Monsieur asked about the shoemaker. He was unperturbed when I explained the situation and just went about his business.

While he bathed I cooked him a steak, almost raw, which he always ate a few hours before each night of dancing.

Halfway through his steak, he lifted his knife and pointed it at me.

— Phone Mister Ashworth’s hotel and tell him that I will leave a ticket for the performance tonight and later he should join us for dinner.

It flashed across my mind that there would be thirteen people at the table. Monsieur had grown increasingly superstitious since I had known him, something he had acquired from Madame Fonteyn. I opted against saying anything since I knew it was quite likely that, as the evening went on, Monsieur would invite others to join him also. (I had providently bought enough capon to feed seventeen people.)

I made the call. The hotel clerk grumpily informed me that there were no phones in the rooms and that he could only take a message, since he was the sole person on duty. I beseeched him to go to the room, even invoking the name of Monsieur, but the clerk was unimpressed. There was nothing to do but go to the hotel myself.

I hurried through the last of the dinner’s preparations, made a flask of hot tea with honey for Monsieur, took a taxi to Montmartre. It was summer and the day was still bright. A tiny park sat opposite the hotel and I glimpsed the shoemaker working in solitary comfort on the grass. I was a little taken aback, since he wore a hat and seemed very much younger than before. I crossed the street. He flushed crimson when he saw me approach and began gathering the shoes into a pile, stuffing the pair of scissors into his jacket pocket.

— Mister Ashworth.

— Tom, he replied.

— Monsieur has asked me to give you a message.

He flushed a further shade of red when I told him of the invitation.

— Oh, he said.

He removed the scissors from his pocket, took off his jacket, spread it on the grass, motioning for me to sit down. The fashion of the day was still towards short skirts but I was thankful that I wore a longer housedress, since nothing could be more embarrassing than sitting on the grass, on a man’s jacket, wearing a short skirt, and trying to maintain good posture.

He stammered that he was honored I had come all this way to bring the invitation, that he would be delighted, if his attire was suitable, to attend the dinner, but for personal reasons he never went to the ballet.

— It has to do with a rule of my father’s, he said.

I waited but he said nothing more. He stood up from the grass and extended his hand to help me up.

I returned to the quai Voltaire to prepare for the evening.

Capon is an exceedingly delicious bird when cooked correctly. I had learned the art as a young girl. To season it properly one needs nothing more than rosemary, thyme, and the juice of a lemon. One simply lifts the skin away from the breast, applies the seasoning, and allows the bird to do its work in the oven. To complement the dish I made scalloped potatoes and prepared asparagus to be lightly steamed.

The dinner was not due to begin until near midnight, but Tom arrived early. A crooked crease had been ironed in his trousers and his tie was knotted tightly on his neck.

— I am so sorry, but I didn’t catch your name, he said.

— Odile, I replied.

He held out a bunch of daffodils for me and said: Well, Odile. It is already beyond my bedtime so you must forgive me if I appear a bit giddy.

If I am to speak honestly, I must say that at the time I simply thought him a nice man, free of pretension, not attractive in any traditional sense, but certainly interesting. I took the flowers, thanked him, and asked him to make himself comfortable until the other guests arrived.

While standing in the kitchen I kept the door ajar and watched him perch awkwardly on the couch. He said he was unaccustomed to wine and he held the glass as if it might damage him.

The usual two waiters, Pierre and Alain, arrived at eleven-thirty. They were aspiring actors. They took one look at Tom and, in their rudeness, discounted him immediately. They performed the last of the preparations, polished the candelabra, set the silverware, rinsed the wine goblets, while I put the finishing touches to the appetizers and dessert.

When the guests began to arrive I was disturbed to see that Monsieur was not among them. It was not unusual — often Monsieur arrived late to his own dinner parties — but my feelings were for Tom, who was distinctly ill at ease in the presence of the guests. The party was composed of a number of dancers, an Argentinean dance critic, a film star of some sort, a business manager, and a couple of society ladies, including Mrs. Godstalk, a New York woman who made sure she was quite a regular at Monsieur’s parties. She was in her mid-fifties but she dressed in the provocative manner of a young woman, her bosom always spilling out from her gowns. She was, as far as I knew, married, but I had never heard her mention her husband.

She remarked on a painting she had bought for Monsieur, saying something about its formal balances. She mentioned the price and Tom shifted uncomfortably in his seat. The Argentinean critic agreed that the painting in question had perfect tonal components.

I watched poor Tom become the chair.

At midnight I decided to go ahead with dinner, even without Monsieur. The guests took their seats grudgingly. However, Tom, without my noticing, had grown terribly drunk. I had thought originally that he was nursing the one glass of wine all evening, but it seemed that the waiters in their petty spitefulness had been topping up his glass. Unused to the wine, Tom remained on the couch and proceeded to loudly regale the table with tales of a London soccer team nobody else was interested in. Mrs. Godstalk snorted while the men attempted to drown him out. Only the dancers seemed vaguely interested.

I suggested to Tom that he take a seat at the table and I guided him across. The only available chair was next to Mrs. Godstalk. I tried to take his glass of wine but he held on to it and spilled a little on the leg of his trousers. He tucked a napkin into his shirt collar with great difficulty and one of the ballerinas giggled.

I returned to the kitchen to serve the first courses.

As the dinner went on Tom’s English accent grew stronger and louder as he waved his fork in the air, a piece of capon attached.

I watched from a crack in the kitchen door and finally decided that I’d need to take action. Tom had reached a point in his anecdote where his team was about to take a penalty kick. I waited for the appropriate moment to come out from the kitchen saying: Mister Ashworth! Mister Ashworth!

I quickly rattled off that the dishwasher had broken and, since Tom was a handyman, I would need his help, could the guests please excuse him from the table?

— At your service, said Tom, knocking his knee against the edge of the table, almost dragging the cloth with him.

He stumbled and I took his arm, sat him at the kitchen table, close to the wall in case he fell over.

— Odile, he said, slightly slurring my name.

Just then I heard the sound of Monsieur at the front door. Within moments there was some kind of altercation at the dinner table. Voices were being raised, Monsieur’s loudest of all. Someone shouted back at him. I knew trouble was imminent — it was always so when Monsieur was confronted. I told Tom to stay where he was and I left the kitchen. All the guests were standing, fingers were being pointed, nails being chewed, cuffs being buttoned, and Monsieur, in the middle of the fray, was dispatching them one by one.

— Late? he was shouting. Me, late? Out! Out!

Some were dawdling, trying to ingratiate themselves with Monsieur, but he was having none of it. Mrs. Godstalk whispered in his ear but he brushed her away. Horrified, she kept saying his name over and over again. She tried to touch his forearm but he shouted: Out! The Argentinean critic was muttering at the door and he even managed to get in a complaint about the capon, but I was too caught up with thoughts of poor Tom to be annoyed. I wanted to get back to the kitchen before he too suffered Monsieur’s wrath. I simply couldn’t imagine what might happen if Monsieur found Tom sitting there, drunk — the furies of Hades would surely be let loose.

I hurried to get the guests’ hands through the armholes of their coats, straightened their collars, all the time straining to hear sounds from the kitchen.

I finally shooed Mrs. Godstalk, the last of the guests, away.

Imagine my surprise when I found Tom and Monsieur in the kitchen, both liberally sipping from large glasses of red wine. Tom was telling Monsieur about a special pair of shoes he had made for himself for his soccer games. Tom was explaining that he had put platforms in his shoes to see over the heads of fellow supporters. But he had built the shoes so the platforms were unnoticeable and his landlady had never figured out why he was taller on days when there were soccer matches.

— My friend Victor could do with a pair of those, said Monsieur.

They spent the next hour in laughter. Monsieur took out some photographs that he kept in his wallet, one of his mother and one of his young niece, Nuriya, who had been born a few years previously to his sister in Russia. Tom held back a belch and said they were wonderful photographs, that he’d always liked Russian women.

He looked at me: Odile, even though you’re not Russian, you’re beautiful too.

His body finally gave in to the alcohol and he fell asleep at the kitchen table, his head resting against a slab of cheese.

Monsieur helped me move him into the spare bedroom. He even took off Tom’s shoes and socks and wished him a good night’s sleep. I rolled Tom over to his side and put a bucket beside him in case he should vomit.

For some reason I was inspired to kiss him, very gently, on his forehead. And then I went to bed.

The next morning broke with raindrops. I crawled from under the covers and went down the corridor. I was surprised to see the door of the guest room slightly open. I peeked inside. Tom was hunched over, trying to tie his shoelaces. His face was flush and his hair was askew.

— Good morning, Tom, I said.

He looked up, startled. His suit jacket hung precariously on the chair and his shirt was creased.

— I’d be delighted to press your clothes for you, I said.

— Thank you, but I really must be leaving.

— It would be no trouble.

— Many thanks, but no.

There was a catch in his throat. I left him alone since he seemed embarrassed. In the kitchen I prepared tea and coffee and set the table. I was cleaning up the remnants of the night before when out of the corner of my eye I saw Tom trying to leave the apartment on tiptoe.

— Mister Ashworth! I called out but he didn’t reply.

— Tom! I said and he turned around.

Never before have I seen such fear on a grown man’s face. His eyes were hooded and red, his lids were swollen, and he looked as if he was carrying the weight of an awful injury. He didn’t say a word, just fingered the buttons of his jacket. When he was sideways to the door I could see that his eyes were glassy with tears. I ran up to him but he was already stepping slowly down the curving staircase.

I went after him. At the front door he hung his head, looked at his feet.

— I shamed myself, he said. Shoemakers in my family for many hundreds of years and I shamed them.

— There’s nothing to be ashamed of.

— I made a fool of myself.

— No no no. Monsieur had a wonderful time.

— I’m a clown.

— Of course not.

— I have made my last shoe.

— Pardon me? I asked.

— Please give Mister Nureyev my apologies.

With this Tom bowed slightly and was gone, out the front door, along the quays. I watched as he moved through the rain. He pulled his suit jacket up over his head and rounded the corner.

Monsieur woke half an hour later and asked after Mister Ashworth. I told him what had happened. Monsieur stared into his tea and munched on a croissant. I stood at the sink and washed the last of the glasses. I couldn’t help but feel empty. Monsieur must have intuited something because he asked me to face him, he wanted to see my eyes. I couldn’t do it. I heard him rise from the table and then he came and touched my elbow. I stopped myself from crying or falling into his arms, but he took hold of my chin and tilted my face upwards. Monsieur had the kindest eyes.

— Wait, he said.

He went to his bedroom and came out, stuffing something into the pocket of his bathrobe, dangling his keys in the other hand.

Monsieur said: Let’s go.

— But you’re still in your bathrobe, Monsieur.

— It’ll be a new fashion! he said.

Before I knew it we were driving the wrong way down a one-way street, with Monsieur shouting some crazy Russian love song at the top of his lungs.

Ten minutes later we pulled up outside Tom’s hotel. Cars behind us hooted loudly. Monsieur jumped out and gave the drivers a rude gesture, then ran into the hotel but came out shaking his head.

— We’ll try the airport, said Monsieur.

He put the car in gear and just then Tom appeared. He saw us, stopped, hesitated, then buried his hands in his jacket pockets and proceeded to the hotel entrance.

Monsieur shoved something down in the pocket of his bathrobe, jumped from the car and, at the bottom of the hotel steps, caught Tom’s arm. A porter came out of the hotel to hold an umbrella above Monsieur’s head.

Tom’s eyes darted away from Monsieur. He cleared his throat as if about to say something, but Monsieur shook his head emphatically before Tom could say a word. From the bathrobe pocket Monsieur produced a pair of old dancing slippers. He flourished them in the air.

— Fix these, he said to Tom.

Tom’s eyes locked with Monsieur’s.

— Fix them, said Monsieur.

— Pardon me? said Tom.

— I want you to fix them. Since when do you not understand English?

Tom stood fidgeting, his face raw and red.

— Yes sir, he finally stammered, taking the shoes from Monsieur’s hands. He held them a moment, and then said: You must forgive my foolishness of last night.

Monsieur hesitated: If you ever resign again I will kick you in the ass! Do you understand me?

— Sir?

— Nobody resigns on me! I fire them!

Tom bowed again, not a full bow, more a deep nod of the head. When he was upright he peered at me, his spectacles halfway down his nose.

She had practiced her smile all through the years, her stage smile, the perfect smile, the smile that said, I am in control, I am regal, I am ballet. And she was smiling it now, Margot, across the table at Rudi. Indeed, everywhere the wedding guests were smiling. Still, Margot could sense there was something wrong with the day, mismatched, out of sync, she just couldn’t put her finger on it.

Rudi, directly facing her, had his head thrown back in laughter, creased lines on his face, wrinkles around his eyes. Beside him was his friend, Victor, with his dumb mustache and a multicolored cummerbund. Margot wished she could seize Rudi’s arm and shake him, say something to him, but what would she say? There was a thought at the back of her mind that she desperately wanted to communicate, yet she was only aware of its existence, not its content. So many days felt like this now. She had retired. Tito had passed on. She brought flowers to his gravestone in Panama City like a character from some nineteenth-century novel. She often stood at the edge of the field near the graveyard and found herself watching the wind move the grass. Or she found herself caught at a traffic light in London wondering just what sorts of lives were being carried in the cars that passed her. Or she would read a book and suddenly forget what it was all about. As a child, nobody had told her how the life of a dancer would be, and even had she known she never would have understood, how it could be so full and empty at the same time, seen in one manner from the outside but experienced differently on the inside, so that two completely dissimilar ways of living had to be held in unison, juggled, acknowledged.

Rudi had once told her they were hand in glove. She had wondered who was what, was she hand or glove, and now was she neither? Rudi was forty-three, maybe forty-four now, she couldn’t remember. Yet he was still performing. And why not? She had gone on until she was sixty.

She watched the bride and groom begin their first dance. Tom with his old stiff body. Odile in her white shoes made especially for the occasion by her new husband. White satin rimmed with lace, no heels. Her thin legs. Her small hands. Tom lifted the train of Odile’s veil and draped it over his forearm. Surely that must be the key, Margot thought, to live your life freely and honestly and with love. Her love had been dance. Rudi’s also. It wasn’t that they had been denied access to the other kind of love, no, that wasn’t it at all, not at all — but theirs was a love of a different thing, bruising and public. Love had never quite happened to her in the way it happened to others. Tito, yes. But Tito was an impossible person until he became an impossible body. Tito saw her as an elegant armpiece. Tito had warmed other beds. And then Tito had been shot and became everything he had never been before, useless and good-hearted. Oh, she had loved him, yes, but not love in the sense that it hollowed her out whenever she saw him. Margot often wondered if she were naïve, but she had caught glimpses of real love and was catching one now, she was sure of it, Tom and Odile, the awkward way they handled each other’s bodies, their shy courtesy, the sheer beauty of their homeliness.

Rudi had a champagne glass at his mouth. She had heard that he’d paid for the wedding ceremony, yet had not told anyone. His hidden generosity. Still, he seemed distant as the couple dragged themselves across the floor. People spoke of it as loneliness but Margot knew it was not loneliness. Loneliness, she thought, caused a certain madness. It was more a search for that thing beyond dance, a desire for the human. But what could be better, what could top the never-ending ovations, was there anything in life that had ever crested them? And then she knew. The thought had never struck her quite so clearly. She had danced until her body gave out and now she was loveless. The doctor had told her she had cancer. She would probably last quite a few years but it was cancer, yes, cancer, that was the full stop toward which her life was heading. She had not told anyone. She would not even tell Rudi for a while. But, still, there was something else she had to tell him, and she was searching her mind for the words. Dance. Cures. Pills. Sleeping pills and diet pills and pain pills and pills for life itself, pills for every illness, jealousy to bronchitis, pills in the drafty hallways where young girls sweated and wept for the roles they never got, pills for ruptured bank accounts, pills for backstabbings, pills for betrayals, pills for the broken way in which you walked, pills for the pills themselves. Margot herself had never taken the pills, but she often swept little white imaginary tablets through her mind to cure the pain. And now ovarian cancer. No pills to cure that. She felt the room closing in. She watched dancers on either side of her, tucking into their food, as they always did. Later the girls would throw up in the bathrooms. And the shoemakers were raucous at the other end of the room. Beer glasses swaying in the air. Toasts. Later Rudi would sing his Vladivostok love song, his party piece. She could feel the evening creeping to its end, the inevitable farewell to the newly married couple, the envy she might feel. It was nothing she would ever make public. If anything, she was diplomacy itself. She had always been. And she was happy for Tom, happy he had found something beyond his craft. But what had she found, what had she discovered? A dark tumor in her body. She was not bitter, it wasn’t that, she was just shocked to have been dealt such a hand. Surely she deserved more. Or perhaps not. Her life had been fuller than any other she had known. Death would probably arrive in a yacht, or a drawing room, or on a sandy beach.

What was it that she needed to tell Rudi? What was it in his grin, in his laughter, in his leaning towards Victor, in his consumption of the world that she needed to arrest, if only for a moment? What an exquisite life. They had, she knew, enjoyed the greatest years dancers could have. People thought they had slept together but they had not. They were too close for that. Yet they had thought of it, contemplated an attachment beyond dance. To make love to him. It would have destroyed them. Dancing was more intimate, anyway. It was a mitosis, they became one. They had seldom argued. If anything she had been a mother to him, increasingly so over the years. But what Margot wanted to say had nothing to do with mothers or countries or other manifold myths. It had nothing to do with love or its attendant despairs. Nothing to do with dance. Or did it? Did it? She could feel her fingers trembling. Soon the bridal dance would be over and she would be forced to talk pleasantries, to bring out the Margot in her, to hold her chin high, to clap politely, perhaps even stand as if the married couple were to take an encore. She watched Victor whisper something in Rudi’s ear. And then, with a wave of relief, Margot knew what it was. She knew she had to interrupt, she had to say this before she let it go, that it was the most important thing she could tell Rudi, the greatest piece of advice he would receive. She hesitated, laid her fork politely at the side of her plate, and reached for a glass of water to quench her thirst. She tried to catch Rudi’s eye, but he was in another world. She would have to say this. She would have to tell him to give it up. It was that simple. He should pack it in and concentrate on his other gifts, choreography, teaching. Before he grew too old. She needed so desperately to say this to him. Retire. Retire. Retire. Before it’s too late. She picked up the fork again. How to get his attention? She reached across and gently touched his outstretched fingers with the silver prongs of the fork. He felt the tapping and looked at her and smiled. Victor also smiled, but then Victor again whispered something to Rudi, and Rudi held up his hand to Margot as if to say: Wait. She leaned back in her chair and waited and the song ended, and she rose from the table to share her applause for Tom and Odile, and in the middle of the clapping, Rudi reached across the table to take her hand and say: Yes? She hesitated and grinned and then said simply: Aren’t they beautiful, Tom and Odile? Aren’t they a wonderful couple?

Transcribed from interview with David Furlong on May 23rd, 1987, in Holborn, London. Interview by Shane F. Harrington, student of ethnography from Edinburgh University. Due to technical difficulties with recording device/microphone the interviewer’s questions were inaudible:

Well, yeah, he wasn’t a diamond cutter or nothing but he knew what he wanted and took all he could get. So he pretty much got his money’s worth, yeah. You charged him more because of who he was, seventy-five quid was a good kill in those days.

You’d have to keep your mouth shut, no Daily Mirror, Sun, no News of the fucking World.

He was always doing this exam, like, checking out your arms and taking a look at your fucking neck, even between your toes, he was scared of junkies I s’pose.

You had to be fresh-faced, you know, with sleeveless shirts and tight trousers. But he didn’t mind the smell of cigarettes, some of the trade didn’t like cigarettes, but he wasn’t like that, at least you were allowed a smoke afterwards.

He’d pick you up on Kings Road or around Picadilly. Sometimes you’d go to the clubs with him if his mood was right.

Heaven over there in Charing Cross. Or the Colherne. But most of the time he’d go to the normal places, you know. The Roxy, the Perennial, Tramps, Annabel’s, the Palais.

Everybody was right fucked up on coke and booze. People were shagging in the leather booths.

He was fucking weird, he’d take you to his table and he’d sit you down with his mates, all fancy pants and groupies. But then he wouldn’t take you home, didn’t want to be seen walking with you out the club.

Couldn’t fucking figure him out. But he was Russian and I s’pose if you shag your cousins for a hundred thousand years that’s what happens, ain’t it?

Sometimes he got his manager to drive you back, or a friend of his, or he’d get you a taxi through the club owner, they’d do anything for him they would. So you’d be waiting outside his place, right? By the gate, just waiting. And all the neighbors could see if they wanted. But he didn’t care about that. Figure that one out, then.

I was only there four times, he never remembered me or even asked my name.

I think I told him Damian or something. You never give your real name. Besides, I had a girlfriend and she had no fucking idea. She liked the money but.

I heard him on the telly one night. He was tossing on about dancing, some shit like, I don’t know, like ruining your body for the pleasure of strangers, some shit like that. And what the fuck did he think I was up to? Christ. For the pleasure of strangers.

He had his pleasure yeah, and then he had it again, and then he just rolled over and went to sleep and you’d think, fuck me, I should case this fucking place, I should nick all his weird fucking paintings, with lords and hounds and bugles and shit, just fucking skive out of there.

But five minutes down the road you’d be nicked.

One time I crawled out of bed and the housekeeper was awake, she made breakfast, scones and fruit, she kept looking over her shoulder at me.

Eerie little froggie chick, checking me out, making sure I wasn’t running off with the silver. She’d rather put her head in the oven than talk to me.

I sat there quiet as could be and then she called a taxi.

The next night I was out in the Roxy again and he passed me in the club without a glance. I’d already spent fifty of the seventy-five quid on a new shirt. It turned everyone else’s head, but not his. He had someone else in his booth all serious and close. And then he got up and walked past me. He didn’t even say a word. Cocksucker.

We landed later than scheduled so Monsieur was furious. He stormed out of the baggage area. We passed the line of armored guards and got into a taxi. Monsieur negotiated with the driver in broken Spanish. The afternoon heat was just as I had imagined. The green mountains rose in the distance but the city was full of smog.

I kept thinking of poor Tom at home alone in London.

The taxi swerved around potholes until we reached the older colonial district where we got stuck in traffic. There were white brick houses with laundry strung up between the windows. Old men were on the street in collarless shirts. Children played in front of cars and ran off when the traffic moved. A woman at a flower stall caught Monsieur’s eye and he jumped out of the taxi to buy flowers. She wore a dress of yellows and reds. Monsieur gave her ten American dollars and kissed her on both cheeks and, when we pulled away, she caught my eye as if begging to live my life, sitting as I was in the backseat of a taxi with Monsieur. In truth, she could have had it. Monsieur was well aware that I was not happy to be accompanying him. To be away from Tom was very difficult, but Monsieur had pleaded with me to come, if only for a week or two.

— We need champagne, Monsieur said as the taxi inched forward.

The driver turned and grinned. With a complicated series of hand gestures he said he would be delighted to purchase champagne, that he knew a fine store. The driver swerved the car down a narrow laneway and pulled to a halt in front of a warehouse. Monsieur gave him money and he came out, moments later, carrying two large bottles. It was growing dim but the heat was still heavy and it made me sleepy, not to mention that the flight had been long and arduous. I had heard that Monsieur had made a fuss in first class, but now he touched my hand, thanked me once again for making the journey, apologized he wasn’t able to get me a seat beside him on the plane.

— What would I do without you, Odile? he said.

At the house Monsieur tipped the driver generously, then walked up the driveway, pulled the bell rope. The ringing pierced the quiet but nothing happened. Monsieur banged on the tall wooden door. He was sweating and two ovals had appeared at his underarms. He let out a string of curses and said: I should have told him I was coming.

Between us we had a single fountain pen but no paper. Monsieur ran his fingernail under the label of the champagne bottle. Old trick, he said. He peeled the label off. It tore midway. He leaned against the wall of the house, sighed, and wrote: Victor, I will find a hotel and come back. Rudi. I folded the label, bent down to slip it in beneath the doorway, nudged it forward with my fingers. I stood and adjusted my dress, which had begun to cling in the heat.

A sudden blast of music came from the house. In fact, the whole place jumped to life. I went to the gate and called for Monsieur, who was already some way down the street. The door behind me opened.

A small figure stood in a silk dressing gown. His face was thin, a pair of headphones covered his ears, and the coiled black cord dangled down by his knees. He must have ripped the cord from the stereo when I pushed the note under the door.

— Mister Pareci? I asked.

He squinted at the torn champagne label. I had met him many times before, but he looked so different.

— Mister Pareci? I asked again.

He shuffled out onto the doorstep in an enormous pair of yellow slippers. He used the jamb to support himself, coughed once and looked down the street.

— Oh my God, it’s Rudi, he said.

He stumbled back inside while I waved at Monsieur to return. He seemed annoyed at first but then pushed past me into the house.

— Victor! he shouted. Victor!

The house was a dreadful mess. Clothes were strewn all over the floor. Plates of half-eaten food had been left on the couch. Light trickled through the faded blue curtains. A ceiling fan spun. The mirrors were ornate but cracked. Vinyl records lay on the floor and Monsieur moved to lower the volume of the stereo.

— Victor! he shouted again.

The red light of the video player was blinking. A pornographic film was frozen on the television screen. I stepped over to turn it off.

— Look at you! shouted Monsieur.

At the top of the stairs Victor was trying to step into a pair of trousers. He had discarded the dressing gown. He had put on a bright red shirt, unbuttoned. His chest was thin and his skin pale. He coughed hard when his foot went into the trouser leg and he almost toppled over, but just managed to steady himself with his hand against the banisters. I felt a sadness for Victor but not enough to change my mind as to his true nature — I had seen him play the jester far too often.

Monsieur skipped up the stairs and kissed Victor on both cheeks. Victor let out a string of vile obscenities, saying: Where did you steal the flowers, Rudi? Where have you been? Tell me everything!

He sounded happy and tired at the same time, as if the happiness were trying to catch up with the exhaustion. They came down the stairs together, arms around each other.

— You remember Odile? Monsieur said.

— Oh yes, said Victor. Wasn’t I at your wedding?

— Yes.

— Oh I apologize, I apologize.

At my wedding there’d been an altercation in one of the bathrooms with one of Tom’s fellow shoemakers.

— You’re forgiven, Mister Pareci.

— All I did was ask him to tie his lace, said Victor. I just couldn’t resist.

He put his head to his shoulder like a naughty child, awaited my reply.

— Mister Parceci.

— Oh please don’t call me that, I feel like such an old fart.

— Victor, I said, you are forgiven.

He kissed my hand. I told him it was my intention to make him comfortable and set him on the road to recovery while Monsieur found another housekeeper, a local woman, to take my position. I explained that it was not my desire to remain in Caracas forever. He blushed then, ashamed, and I cursed myself for my bluntness. He buttoned up his red shirt. Two more of him would have fit inside. He slipped his feet back into the yellow slippers and moved to a chair in the living room, flopped down, short of breath. He lit a long thin cigarette and blew the smoke to the ceiling as I made my way into the kitchen.

— Rudi, he shouted, come hug me.

Then, to include me, he added: You know, Odile, I’m the only person in the world who can order Rudi around!

I commenced cleaning, first the champagne flutes. There was no soap. Victor was living without scourers or washcloths or domestic cleaning appliances of any sort. I began to make a mental note of all the things I would need. I washed the glasses and placed the bottle of champagne on a tray, brought it out to the gentlemen.

— Oh, I’m so in love with you! shouted Victor.

Monsieur popped the bottle and I poured.

— Marry me this instant, Odile!

Monsieur began rifling through the records on the floor, looking for classical music. He looked up and said: You’re a philistine, Victor.

— I’m all salsa these days.

— Salsa?

Victor began a dance, which winded him quickly, and he sat back down.

— Maybe you shouldn’t have too much champagne, said Monsieur.

— Oh, shut up! said Victor. I have a cold, that’s all.

— A cold?

— Yes, a cold. Tell me, Rudi. Will you spend the rest of your life here with me?

— I dance in São Paulo on Friday. Odile will be with you until I help you find someone local.

— São Paulo?

— Yes.

— Oh bring me with you.

— Maybe you should rest, Victor, take it easy.

— Rest?

— Yes.

— I’m dying! he shouted. Who wants to rest? Let’s drink champagne! For God’s sake let me see the label. I bet it’s piss! He always buys piss, Odile! He’s the world’s richest cheap man.

Monsieur covered the half-label with his hand. Victor got to his feet unsteadily and went searching for the half that had been written on. He found it finally in his dressing gown pocket and sighed theatrically. He licked the back of the label and pasted it over his heart.

— Oh you’ve always been so cheap! said Victor.

I ran the tap to drown out the voices and cleaned the remaining glasses, held them up to the last of the sunlight. A vision of Tom flitted across my mind. He would be at home, watching television, repairing shoes. I missed him already. In the back courtyard the long-leafed plants were shivering in the breeze.

— Oh let’s not talk shit, I heard Victor shout. You didn’t come here to talk shit, did you? Tell me, Rudi. Are you in love?

— I am always in love.

— Love loves me, said Victor, in a voice that sounded curiously like Monsieur.

They laughed. The bottle was emptying fast. Victor held it in the air and read the half-label again.

— It’s cat piss, he said in a fake French accent. They milk the strays on Boulevard Saint-Michel just for this.

Victor turned up the South American music on the stereo and in the room they danced briefly while I continued to clean. The dusk had fallen and the cool breeze of the evening brought some relief. I could hear Victor recovering from the exertion and finally, when I finished my chores, I excused myself to bed.

I was terribly surprised, after waking the next morning, to see Monsieur on the living room couch, sleeping, with Victor in a chair beside him, mopping Monsieur’s brow with a white cloth. I had been sure it would be the other way around. Monsieur was suffering from a fever, it seemed. When he got up, however, he took some pills and the fever dissipated. He performed his morning stretches, said he had some phone calls to make.

— Reverse the charges, said Victor.

Monsieur had friends in every part of the world, including Caracas, and I was convinced he would find a housekeeper within a couple of days. The house was brighter with this knowledge and I managed to find enough food in the kitchen to prepare a breakfast of fruit and toast.

When the breakfast was finished, however, Monsieur announced that he and Victor would take a day-trip to the beach, and in the evening they would both go to São Paulo for the ballet.

— Please have our bags ready, said Monsieur.

To my surprise it was Victor who noted my sadness. He put his arm around my shoulder. He kindly drew a small map of the various marketplaces in the city and the location of a chemist shop where I could buy migraine tablets since I had forgotten mine. He stressed that I should not carry a lot of money. Then he rattled on about a delinquent boy who had long fingernails.

When they left I washed the sheets, hung them out on the branches of the pomegranate trees in the courtyard.

They returned after three days. Monsieur looked very tired, not his usual self. He instructed me that we would stay in Caracas for another week, until everything was sorted out for Victor. The thought of another whole week disturbed me greatly, but Monsieur said he genuinely needed my help. I continued to clean and cook. In the afternoons, while Victor slept, Monsieur was driven to the opera house since he wanted to work with the local dancers. Each evening he brought students, boys and girls, back to the house where they sat around, chatting and laughing. Victor was happy with all the clamor. In particular he latched on to a dancer named Davida, a very dark and handsome young man. In the evenings they took walks together. Later, while Monsieur slept, Victor and Davida curled up on the couch and watched videos. (The videos were shocking. I kept a stern face when I walked past the television set, though I must admit that on occasion I peeked.)

The time passed quickly and I didn’t dwell on Tom’s absence as much as I had expected.

At the end of the second week, just before our planned return, the three of us — Monsieur, Victor and I — were alone in the house. Monsieur had not yet found a new housekeeper and I had grown nervous that he had forgotten all about his promise. I began to fear the unthinkable, that I might even have to resign. I went to bed with a terrible migraine.

The following night I was cooking a local dish — empanadas — and Victor was instructing me on its intricacies, how to fry the corn-meal, how to spice the beans. He sat in the middle of the living room, directing from a distance, having taken his huge array of medicines. Despite the obvious toll the sickness was taking on his body, Victor was quite energetic, having slept most of the afternoon.

Afterwards they began drinking wine and telling stories but Monsieur seemed slightly more introspective than usual. I had noticed that Monsieur himself was almost at the end of his medicine but could find no other reason for the cloud that seemed to have descended upon him. He stood by the window, stretched, his head to his knee. He took his foot from the windowsill, tucked his hands between his elbows and his rib cage. Then, for some reason, he began recalling a moment long ago when he had received a letter from a lady friend in Russia. The story was long and detailed and Monsieur looked out the window as he spoke, until he was interrupted.

— You’re not in love with women now, are you, Rudi?

— Of course not.

— You were about to disappoint me!

Victor poured himself another glass of wine. He coughed and said: Oh this cold. I guess I won’t shake it until August at least.

— Will I continue the story or not? asked Monsieur.

— Oh, yes please, continue, please please.

— He died.

— Who died?

— Her father.

— Oh no! Not another story about death! said Victor.

— Wait, said Monsieur, his voice catching in his throat. When he died he was wearing a hat.

— Who was wearing a hat?

— Sergei! He always wore a hat but never indoors. In Russia that is rude.

— Oh! And Russians aren’t rude?

— You’re not listening to me.

— Of course I am.

— Let me tell you the story, then!

— The stage is yours, said Victor, and he blew Monsieur a kiss.

— Well, said Monsieur, the reason he wore the hat was he believed he was going to meet his wife.

— But you said she was dead.

— In the afterlife, said Monsieur.

— Oh God, said Victor, the afterlife!

— He was found in his house with a hat on his head. He was writing to his daughter. In the letter he asked her to say hello to me. But that’s not the story. That’s not the point of my story. It’s something different. Because, you see, in his last words he wrote …

— What? said Victor. He wrote what?

Monsieur stuttered and said: Whatever loneliness we have had in this world will only make sense when we are no longer lonely.

— And what sort of bullshit is that? said Victor.

— It’s not bullshit, said Monsieur.

— Oh it’s bullshit, said Victor.

They were silent and then Victor’s head drooped. He was like a balloon that had lost its air. He reached for a new packet of cigarettes and his fingers shook while he fumbled with the wrapping. He opened the package and took a cigarette out, got a lighter from his shirt pocket, flicked it into life.

— Why are you telling me this story? said Victor.

Monsieur didn’t reply.

— Why are you telling me this story, Rudi?

Victor cursed, but then Monsieur knelt at the foot of Victor’s chair. I had never seen Monsieur kneel to anyone before. He put his arms around Victor’s knees, laid his head against the crook of his arm. Victor said nothing. His hand went to the back of Monsieur’s neck. There was a muffled heave and I was sure Monsieur was crying.

Victor looked down at Monsieur’s head and began to mention something about a bald spot, but the comment fell away, and then he gripped the back of Monsieur’s neck even tighter.

Victor must have remembered me in the kitchen since he looked up and caught my eye. I closed the door and let them be. I had never before heard Monsieur cry in such a way. It made my hands tremble. I went to the courtyard where Monsieur’s dance clothes were drying on the washing line. I could still see their silhouettes inside the house. They had their arms around each other and their shadows made them look like one person.

The following morning began bright and smog-free. I cleaned the house thoroughly and then arranged for the young dancer, Davida, to come over. He arrived in a pair of clogs and greeted me with a kiss. His hair was nicely combed back. He seemed to be an honest young man, so I took him aside.

— Would you look after him? I asked.

— I have a cousin who’s a doctor, said Davida.

— No, I think you should look after him.

— Who will pay me?

— Monsieur will pay you, I said.

Over the next two days I prepared a week’s worth of meals, crammed them in the small freezer for Victor and Davida. Everything was in order — Monsieur had promised to pay Davida and also to bring him to the Paris Opera House, in future years, where he could have classes and develop his talents.

Everything was kept secret from Victor but I had a feeling he knew what was going on. He walked around the house wearing his earphones even though they were unplugged.

On our last morning I packed Monsieur’s bag and arranged a taxi to take us back to the airport. We sat around for a long time, waiting for the car to arrive. Victor talked a lot about the weather, what a great day it was going to be for the beach. He said he couldn’t wait to put on a new pair of swimming trunks he’d bought in São Paulo.

— I’ll look like I’m smuggling grapes, he said.

When the taxi drew up Monsieur and Victor shook hands and hugged at the doorway. As Monsieur walked down the driveway Victor reached into his dressing gown pocket. I heard the flick of a cigarette lighter. Monsieur turned around.

— You should stop that, said Monsieur.

— Stop what?

— Smoking, you asshole.

— This? said Victor, and he puffed on the cigarette, blew a big cloud of smoke in the air.

— Yes.

— Oh what the hell, said Victor, I haven’t got my cough right yet.

4 LONDON, BRIGHTON 1991

Moderate rolling in of right foot on deep plié, severe on left. Mild right tibio talor and sub-talor, severe on left. Acute knocking of knee. Left lateral tipping of the hip. Arch in lower back, head dips forward. At the bottom of the plié the line is completely gone. Giveaway is the white knuckles on the barre. By twelfth plié he has overcome the pain. On examination, severe tension and contraction in left quadriceps, moderate in right. Acute fraying of the meniscus. Work in arnica to lessen inflammation. Cross fiber friction and twenty-minute effleurage at least. Lengthen quadriceps to allow bend. Rolling and broadening, hip extension, torso twist, scapula stretch etc. Bandage between rehearsal and performance. Figure-eight wrapping with cross on side to push left knee straight.

I had no idea who to tell. It was impossible to think of anyone who might understand. I had not made many friends since moving to Monsieur’s home in London. There had always been Tom, but now he was gone.

It came out of the blue, like one of those winter showers that chills you to the bone. One day you’re content and the next day it is all swept from beneath your feet. I looked around but couldn’t recognize even the simplest items, the oven, the clock, the small porcelain vase Tom had bought for me. There was a note explaining his actions, but I could not bring myself to read beyond the first two lines. He seemed to be still present, as if I might turn around and find him sitting in his chair, reading a newspaper, yet another hole apparent in his socks. But he had taken his shoemaking equipment and a suitcase. For hours I cried. It was as if he had sent my whole life supperless to bed.

When I was a schoolgirl in Voutenay I was called Petit oiseau. I was small and thin, and adults always remarked on my hooked nose. I used to sit and watch my mother cooking in the kitchen, where we both took refuge in the simplicity of recipes and food. But there was nobody to care for. Monsieur was away and not even the gardener was around.

In the quarters Tom and I shared, he had kept a box near his side of the bed. Tom had been contemplating retirement and was making a final pair of shoes for Monsieur. For the presentation box he had used mahogany and nailed a brass plate on the front, although it had not yet been inscribed. I opened the box, took out the shoes and carefully snipped them apart with a pair of scissors. The satin cut easily and then I placed the pieces back in the box. I knew my senses were derailed but I hardly cared.

Monsieur always kept money in the bottom drawer of his bedroom cupboard. He used it to give to visitors who had run out of cash and were in need of a taxi home. I left a slip of paper saying I was taking an advance on my salary. My hands were shaking. I phoned the usual number for a taxi, checked the house to make sure all the lights were out, the windows were shut tight, the appliances turned off. Soon a loud beeping sounded outside the house. I tucked Tom’s box under my arm, set the burglar alarm, and went out the front door.

I recognized the driver, a young man who wore an earring and a goatee. He rolled down his window and said: Who’s the victim today then, eh?

He was a little surprised when I opened the door and slid into the backseat alone, placed the mahogany box on the floor. I had often escorted Monsieur’s guests to their taxis but rarely took one myself. The driver tilted his rearview mirror, looked at me, and then turned in his seat and slid the glass panel open.

— Covent Garden, I said.

— You all right, love?

From my handbag I took a handkerchief monogrammed with Monsieur’s initials. I dabbed at my eyes and told the driver I was fine, that I just needed to get to Covent Garden as soon as possible.

— Right-y-o, love, he said. You sure you’re okay?

It was not rudeness that caused me to switch seats so he could no longer see me in the mirror, but that I simply couldn’t bear the notion of the young driver watching me cry.

He drove quickly but the journey seemed endless. It was summertime. On the street girls wore tiny skirts and young men sported tattoos. The taxi lurched from side to side. Drivers behind us tooted their horns, furious they had been cut off. A motorcycle driver even kicked the side panel of the door.

By the time we got to Covent Garden the fare was in double digits.

I had recovered sufficient composure to ask the driver to wait for me outside the shoe factory. He shrugged. I stepped out of the car and was about to go inside when the thought of seeing Tom made my legs wobble. I had not felt this way since my graduation dance in Paris years before. What had I become? I was sixty years old and had just ripped up my husband’s present to Monsieur. Surely, I thought, I was just suffering through a terrible dream.

I heard the whoop of a siren and turned around to see a police car instructing the taxi to move on. The driver was gesturing at me. Everything was happening in far too much of a hurry. I walked quickly along the outside wall to Tom’s window and, without looking in, I left the box on the windowsill, turned around and climbed back in the taxi.

— Brighton, I said to the driver.

I could see the surprise on his face. Brighton? he said.

Behind us the police car siren whooped a second time.

— Brighton by the sea, I said.

— You got to be kidding, love.

He began driving slowly down the street.

— I’ll take you to Victoria Station, you can get a train from there.

I opened my handbag and passed forward one hundred and fifty pounds. The driver whistled and stroked his goatee. I added another fifty and he pulled the taxi over to the curb. I had never before spent so much money so needlessly.

— You going for a little flutter then, love? asked the driver.

— Please, I said in my sternest voice.

He straightened up and got on his radio, talked to his dispatcher and within fifteen minutes we were on the main carriageway. I rolled down the window and, quite inexplicably, felt calm. The breeze drowned out the noise of a cricket match on the driver’s radio. It seemed that I had carelessly stepped into a day not meant for me and soon it would be over.

In Brighton posters of Monsieur were tied to the lampposts all along the promenade.

Monsieur looked young in the photograph. His hair was long and he had an impish grin on his face. I wanted to walk up to the poster and embrace him. A young lady on the promenade held a stapling gun and was readjusting a few of the posters that had slid down the posts. It was Monsieur’s final performance in England and there were rumors it might be his last.

I had asked the driver to find a nice bed-and-breakfast facing the sea. He stopped outside an old Victorian house and kindly offered to go inside to inquire whether there was a vacancy. I was glad to see that not all young Englishmen had lost their manners. He came out smiling and, after he had taken my hand to guide me from the taxi, he offered to return some of the money.

— You paid too much, dear.

I surprised even myself when I shoved yet another twenty-pound note into his hand.

— What I’ll do is I’ll buy the missus a nice dinner, he said.

He beeped his horn as he left.

It was certainly not his fault but I burst into tears.

The room was elegant, with a picture window that looked out to the sea. Children were laughing and kicking in the surf and I could hear a distant brass band playing in one of the pavilions. Still I was reminded of Tom, even in the simplest of items: the twin beds, the ornate vase, the painting of the piers. I had no explanation as to what had happened. Tom had, over the years, been mildly unhappy at having to live in Monsieur’s house, but we had furnished our quarters to Tom’s liking and he had seemed to settle in. He was not perturbed by the few occasions when I had traveled with Monsieur to other countries, nor even by the fact that I was sometimes called upon to look after Monsieur’s needs in Paris. Indeed, Tom said he liked the time alone, he could get his work done. And while it was true that we were perhaps not as intimate as other married couples, there had certainly never been a time when I had called into question our devotion to each other.

I stood in the room. Perhaps the only word for my emotion was raw: I felt raw. I closed the curtains and lay down on the bed and, although it is not in my nature, I continued to weep aloud even while I heard other guests in the corridor.

I awoke thinking not of Tom, but of Monsieur’s posters fluttering in the wind by the sea.

Monsieur was not due to dance in The Moor’s Pavane until the following night. I thought about going to see him at his hotel but didn’t want to compound his problems with my own. In recent times I had been angered by what the newspapers were writing about him. He had an ingrown toenail and a problem with his knees, but the newspapers never wrote about that. At one show some members of the audience had asked for their money back when his leg muscles cramped. In Wembley the music had stopped in the middle and they said Monsieur had frozen, waiting for the orchestra, but there was none since the music was taped. In Glasgow there was nobody to meet him at the stage door and a photographer had taken a picture of Monsieur alone and dejected, when, of course, that wasn’t true to his spirit at all. Some of his steadfast admirers now refused to go to his performances, but his shows still sold out and the ovations were plentiful, even if the newspapers said they were addressed to the past. People liked to make sly comments behind Monsieur’s back but the truth is that he was as dignified as ever.

The next morning I decided that, despite the circumstances, I would make the best of my day. I ordered breakfast in one of the seafront establishments. The waiter, a young man from Burgundy, made a strong café-crème especially for me. He whispered that the English may have helped win two world wars but they knew nothing of the coffee bean. I laughed and found myself doubling the tip. I felt strangely giddy when I thought about my rapidly disappearing money. Even so, I bought a sun hat and rented a deckchair, carried it to the strand, put the hat on in order to obscure my eyes.

Late in the morning I noticed a young woman standing near the water’s edge. She was holding her skirt and dipping a toe in the surf. Her legs were long and beautiful. She went farther into the sea and stopped when the water reached to her thigh. Then she bent forward, whipped her long shining hair over her shoulder and soaked it briefly in the sea.

Then, much to my surprise I caught sight of Monsieur standing near the young woman. The waves were rolling up to him. I wondered who she could possibly be. Emilio sat close by on the beach, cross-legged, watching the proceedings.

I rose quickly to leave, but Emilio spied me and called my name. He stood up and his long ponytail swung. He greeted me with a kiss on either cheek and expressed his pleasure on seeing me in Brighton.

— Oh, I just wanted to see Monsieur’s show, I said.

— I’m glad someone wants to, replied Emilio.

At that moment Monsieur spotted me and waved at me to join him. Emilio made a comment about the king summoning his courtiers and I had to smile a little. Emilio had resigned so many times from Monsieur’s service that he had even put another masseur on call to work on those days between resigning and being rehired.

I bit my lip and went down to the water, where Monsieur was standing with the young lady.

— Let me introduce you to Marguerite, he said.

I realized then that she was one of Monsieur’s dancing partners. She pushed her sunglasses up onto her head and smiled. Her eyes were a beautiful blue. I thought how wonderful it must be for her, at such a young age, to dance with Monsieur in the twilight of his career, but then I felt a sudden surge of anger since Monsieur had not even inquired after the reason for my appearance in Brighton.

— Odile will help solve your problem, I heard Monsieur say.

— Oh no, said the young dancer. I’ll be able to arrange something.

There were children playing by the sea, using their shoes to scoop up water for sandcastles and moats.

— Odile wouldn’t mind, would you?

Monsieur was staring at me. I mentioned that I had been distracted by the bright sunlight. He sighed and said the problem was quite simple. Marguerite, he explained, had invited some family members to the performance that evening. They were driving down from London. Her sister had an eighteen-month-old child and no-one to baby-sit.

I nodded and said: I understand.

— There, said Monsieur. Problem solved.

I flushed but stammered that it would be my honor to help.

— Six o’clock, said Monsieur.

Years ago an uncle told me that if I were to be a little bird, it would always be the one with the broken wing. That evening I had prepared a meal for a table of twelve and, even though I say so myself, the food was exquisite. The only variation was for my uncle’s dish — I had laced it with spice and he spent the evening teary-eyed and coughing.

I wished at that moment to lace Monsieur’s dish, to say something that would make him stand back and sputter. But he appeared sicker than usual. With his foot problems and other ailments, he was having difficulty walking, and the thought of him stepping onstage to dance, upset, was distressing.

— I’d be delighted to help, I said.

Monsieur nodded and hobbled away down the beach. The young dancer looked back over her shoulder, smiled, and mouthed her thanks. Monsieur whistled at Emilio, who rose and followed them.

The water lapped at my toes and I felt a migraine coming on. Beyond the promenade I dipped into a café to order a glass of water for my tablets. Only moments later did I realize I had also ordered a slice of Battenberg cake, Tom’s favorite.

I left the cake untouched and returned to my room.

The sound of seagulls woke me and I saw on the bedside clock that it was almost six. I hurried to the hotel and pushed through the groups of admirers in the lobby waiting for Monsieur. I approached the front desk where, after a series of phone calls, I was directed to the penthouse floor.

Obviously there had been a mistake because when I knocked gently on the door it was Monsieur’s voice I heard, loud and impatient, saying: What?

Emilio opened the door and I glimpsed Monsieur on the massage table. Emilio was wearing thin rubber gloves. I noticed even from a distance that there were welts on Monsieur’s body and there was a little blood on the table’s paper sheet, near Monsieur’s feet. I stammered my apology, turned away, and the door closed quickly behind me.

I heard Monsieur curse.

— Lock the door! he shouted.

Downstairs, I was redirected to the young dancer’s room. The child was sleeping, bottles of milk had been prepared, a change of clothes neatly laid out, and there was even a pram in the room so I could rock him back and forth if he woke. He was a beautiful little boy with thin wisps of dark hair.

I bade good-bye to the family and settled in one of the easy chairs.

I have always detested hotel rooms. I had no desire to watch television, nor to tune in the radio. I found myself thinking of Tom, how I had shredded the shoes and how he might feel when he opened the box. It was impossible to stop the tears. Feeling claustrophobic, I bundled the baby in a light blanket, put him in the pram and brought him downstairs in the elevator.

It was still bright outside. Many young lovers were on the promenade and some clairvoyants had set up along the beachfront. A few people stopped and cooed at the baby in the pram, but when someone asked me the child’s name I realized that I didn’t know. I hurried along with my thoughts of Tom.

I was convinced that there were no other women, although his old landlady still sent him Christmas cards. And there had been no alcohol involved. Maybe there was another explanation. I wished I had taken his letter with me and perhaps, I thought, my actions had been far too rash.

Down the promenade I heard some loud swear words. When I looked I found myself just yards from a gang of young troublemakers leaning against the seafront wall. Their heads were shaved and they wore Union Jack suspenders and red boots up to their ankles.

I considered turning the pram around and walking quickly back to the hotel but I feared they might see my panic and try to steal my handbag. I pushed the pram through but curiously they didn’t seem to pay much attention. A few stars were out now and the sea was darkening. The baby woke and began to cry. I tried to soothe him and by the time he fell asleep again the darkness had descended.

I turned to see one of the young skinheads shimmying up a lamppost. He reached into his rear pocket and I caught the flash of a knife as he began to cut the poster of Monsieur down. He was shouting something terrible about homosexuals while his friends laughed and pushed each other around. My heart beat fast. I looked for the sort of people I’d seen earlier in the day — men in boating hats and middle-aged women in sandals — but there were none in sight. There was no way to take the baby carriage along the pebbled beach, and to get up to the town there were a number of steps I would be forced to climb.

There was nothing else to do but walk back through. My legs trembled, my mouth felt dry, but I held my carriage erect and sang a nursery rhyme to the child.

The skinheads parted a little to allow me a passage. But the one who had torn the poster was jumping up and down and pretending to wipe his backside with Monsieur’s image. I could hardly control myself. I felt my knees buckling. I pushed on until the pram got caught on a gap in the concrete and the wheel stuck. I wrenched the pram out from the crack but my feet tangled and I fell back on the ground, grazing my knee. The skinhead started laughing and dropped the torn poster near the wheel of the pram. I caught sight of half of Monsieur’s face, his ease, his happiness. I scrambled to rise as one of the troublemakers called me a particularly nasty name. I was trembling, yet I grabbed the torn poster and stuffed it in the pram beside the child.

The skinheads shouted after me as I ran and ran down the promenade away from them. I stopped only when I could no longer hear their foul mouths. Then I leaned against the railing and tried to soothe the child who was screaming now, loud wrenching cries.

At that moment I knew that I hated my husband Tom more than any other person I had ever met in my life.

Two days later, when I got back to London, I found Tom dozing in a chair in our quarters with his hands in his lap. He looked wretched. His shirt was sloppy with stains and I could smell beer off his breath.

I ignored him and began to change into my night clothes, sat on the edge of my bed to remove my tights. Tom woke groggily and looked around as if unsure of where he was. But then he straightened when he saw the grazed cut on my knee. He didn’t say a word, just went to the bathroom and came out with a damp tissue. He sat beside me on the bed and raised the edge of my nightdress and started to clean the cut. Little bits of the tissue tore off where the scab had begun to form.

— What happened, love? he asked.

I got into my bed and pulled the covers high, turned my face away. My knee stung from where he had tried to clean it.

Later I could hear Tom rummaging in the bathroom cabinet and then the kitchen. He came back into the bedroom with what smelled like a poultice. I pretended to sleep while he lifted the covers and applied the pungent mixture to my knee. I remembered then something Monsieur had said to me just after his fiftieth birthday — he had seen a photograph of himself standing alone onstage after receiving a curtain call, looking tired, and he had murmured: Some day this hideous moment will be the sweetest memory.

When he was finished, Tom pulled up the covers carefully and patted the edge of my bed. He said good night in a whisper, but I didn’t stir. I could hear him removing his shirt and taking off his shoes, then lying down on his bed. The odor of his socks began to mix with that of the poultice. I smiled then, thinking to myself that, no matter what, his socks would have to be washed.

Ronde de jambe par terre to see range of motion of joints. Severe restriction. Erratic rolling. Hop is acutely pronounced and bones are jammed. Left foot can hardly brush the floor. Acute pain when metatarsals are touched, even when foot is held at central shaft. Key is to move metatarsals like fan, twist from side to side, effleurage gently between rays. Drain blood blisters and immediately remove welt between second and third digit on left foot.