February 1973—Paris

Joan kneels in a dark box in the third loge of the Palais Garnier, the Opéra, peeping
over the red velvet railing. Six rickety chairs stand close around her, but she knows they
creak and is careful not to disturb them. The houselights are down, but the glow from
the stage picks out a profusion of gilded plasterwork: serene deities, trumpeting angels,
lyres, garlands, flowers, oak leaves, masks, Corinthian columns, all deeply shadowed,
piling up around the proscenium and among the boxes like the walls of a craggy gold
cave, climbing to Chagall’s painted round ceiling of naked angels and voluptuous
ballerinas and goats and chickens and lovers and blue Eiffel Tower and red-splotched
rendering of the Palais itself. From the center of this hangs the great sleeping
chandelier: an enormous gold and glass thistle hung upside down to dry, darkly
gleaming.

The Kirov’s orchestra noodles around in the pit, waiting. At stage left, just in from the
wings, the young star who has been the subject of so much hubbub stands in a heavy
grey sweater, white tights, and thick army-green leg warmers pulled up to his thighs.
Joan’s angle is not ideal—she is looking steeply down on him—but he seems too
delicate and too boyish to be impressive. Most of the corps girls milling around in black
leotards and white practice tutus are taller than he is. The ballerina who is his partner,
however, is tiny, like a fairy, and she stands facing away from him, smoking a cigarette
in a long white holder and absently blowing rings of smoke. Her head is wrapped in a
printed scarf. Rusakov makes one smooth turn around her and plucks the holder from
her fingers. He skips backward, puffing and making faces at her. Not taking the bait, she
watches impassively, then pivots and disappears into the wings. He tires of his own
game at once and presses the cigarette in its holder into the hand of one of the corps
girls. She appears terrified by the gift and passes it off to her neighbor, who rushes into
the wings after its owner.

Joan is not supposed to be watching the rehearsal, but she can always claim she did
not understand the remonstrations of the ballet master. Still, to be safe, she had crept in
a back door and made her way higher and higher through the gloomy backstage
passages and stairways until she emerged into the third loge, which was quiet and a
little musty without crowds of gossiping, mingling Parisians. Its balconies overlook the
bronze and marble excess of the grand escalier. There is a curved wall of closed doors,
each with a round porthole and leading to a box. She had used an usher’s key,
purloined in advance, to open the door of box 11.

Some invisible cue makes the dancers flee the stage and the orchestra collect itself.
The conductor lifts his baton, slices down- ward. After a few bars, Rusakov launches out
from the wings. He has shed the leg warmers and sweater, and his body, in tights and
T-shirt, is perfectly proportioned, muscled but not bulky. His legs appear longer than
they are; his ass is round and high. Rumor has it that the Kirov won’t cast him as a
romantic lead because he is small, preferring to use him as Ali the slave boy or the
Bluebird or the Golden Idol, but his stage presence is aggressive and masculine,
arrogant. He has arched, almost pointed eyebrows and very dark eyes that bounce
imperiously off the empty theater. At first the raked French stages had given Joan
trouble. She would migrate toward the pit on her turns, earning a few kicks from the next
girl in line. But the stages in Russia are raked, too, and Rusakov shows no discomfort
as he flutters downstage, hooking his body from side to side in a series of brisés volés.
Another rumor is that he bleaches his hair to look more Russian, less Tatar, and the
contrast of his feathered blond mop against his olive skin and black, restless eyes is
striking.

The choreography is old-fashioned, but as Rusakov circles the stage doing high, perfect
coupés jetés en tournant, his technique is not fusty but pure. His movements are quick
but unhurried, impossible in their clarity and difficulty and extraordinary in how they
seem to burst from nowhere, without any apparent effort or preparation. But the beauty
of Arslan’s dancing is not what moves Joan to cry in her red velvet aerie: it is a dream of
perfection blowing through the theater. She has been dancing since before her fifth
birthday, and she realizes that the beauty radiating from him is what she has been
chasing all along, what she has been trying to wring out of her own inadequate body.
Forgetting herself, she leans out over the railing, wanting to get closer. Étonnez-moi,
Diaghilev had said to his dancers in the Ballets Russes. Astonish me.

As Rusakov executes a final leap offstage and the music abruptly ends, the silence that
follows is an injustice. Someone starts shouting in Russian. It is the artistic director. He
leaps from his seat and charges up the aisle, bellowing. Rusakov reappears, his face
blank. He listens to the harangue but does not nod, only stares at his slip- pers. Without
waiting for the other man to finish, he stalks to the back of the stage, and with no music
except the lone, rising, furious voice, comes whirling forward in the fastest chain of
steps Joan has ever seen. Each step leads inexorably and precisely into the next.
Nearly in the pit, he stops and holds an arabesque, all his momentum falling away,
leaving a flawless statue. Then he spits and walks offstage. A deeper silence than
before follows. Joan looks up at Chagall’s angels. Their fleshy wings are like those of
penguins, more like fins than tools of flight. As she gets to her feet, she bumps into the
chairs, making a clatter, but she doesn’t look back to see if anyone has heard.

Behind a curtain, the box has a small antechamber with crimson damask walls, coat
hooks, a mirror with a wooden shelf beneath it, and a small velvet fainting couch, also
red. She sits on this couch in the dark and snuffles, wiping her face with her hands.
After two years in San Francisco, she had come to Europe to dance in a new
competition in Switzerland and was spotted there by the director of the Paris Opéra
Ballet, who offered to take her on as a quadrille, the lowest rank in the company. There
was something about her he liked, he told her. Not everything, but something. He can
make her better, if she will work. And so she had come to Paris and rented a room in
Montmartre from a sullen girl in the company who does not speak to her. She had a
short affair with a violinist who liked to hold her feet, tracing his fingers over the bloody
patches and rough calluses. Then she had a slightly longer fling with a dancer, a sujet,
as they call soloists, and she has learned enough French to get by. Every morning she
goes to the opera house for class in the huge, round studio that hangs like an unpopped
bubble between the auditorium and the Opéra’s green dome. Instructions come to her
mostly as the names of steps, which she only knows in French anyway, and as eight
counts and clapping and singing—bum BA BA, bum BA BA—and rapid bursts of
elaborate description she can’t follow and, sometimes, to her, comme ça, comme ça
with a demonstration she imitates as best she can. If she succeeds, she earns a voilà,
simple, voilà, c’est tout. If she fails, there is a small grimace, a twitch of the head, a
resigned smile, a retreat.

For Joan, Paris has the feeling of waiting. All the elegance, the light and water and
stone and refined bits of greenery, must be for something, something more than simple
habitation and aggressive driving of Renaults and exuberant besmearing with dog shit.
The city seems like an offering that has not been claimed. Its beauty is suspenseful.
Joan has walked the boulevards and bridges and embankments, sat in the
uncomfortable green metal chairs in the Tuileries, puttered down the Seine on a tourist
barge, been to the top of the Eiffel Tower, stared politely at countless paintings, been
leered at and kissed at by so many men, stood in patches of harlequin light in a dozen
chilly naves, bought a scarf she couldn’t afford, surreptitiously stroked the neatly
stacked skulls in the catacombs, listened to jazz, gotten drunk on wine, ridden on the
back of scooters, done everything she thinks she should in Paris, and still there has
always been the feeling of something still to come, a purpose as yet unmet, an
expectation.

But, now, in the dark, on the red velvet couch where fashionable Parisian ladies used to
retire from the scrutiny of the opera house, Joan finds herself unexpectedly atop a
moment that feels significant. Her life, unbeknownst to her, was narrowing around this
point, funneling her toward it. The city was never waiting. She was waiting. For Arslan.
Already she has started to think of him by his first name. If the beauty of Paris is
suspenseful, the beauty of his dancing is almost terrible. It harrows her. Her throat is
tight with fear. She is afraid of how this man, this stranger, has already changed the
sensation of being alive. She is afraid he will slip away. All the things she has felt for
months—the mundane loneliness, the frustration with language, the nagging anxiety,
the gratitude for the opportunity to dance—all that is gone, replaced with brutal need.
She should leave. She should go home and then to class tomorrow and the next day
and the day after that. But her need is too powerful to ignore. She must see it through.

Carefully, she eases the door of the box shut behind her. The loge and escalier are
deserted. The orchestra kicks up again, muted and distant. She has left the door to the
back staircase propped open, and she passes into the convoluted innards of the Palais,
making a few navigational flourishes to avoid spots where she might encounter Opéra
stage crew or where the Kirov would be likely to have stationed security guards. She
goes up through a stairwell and along a catwalk through the fly tower, where the painted
backdrops fall silently through space like huge blades, and then she descends and
descends. He will not be in the best dressing room; she guesses he will be in one of the
second best, and she must cross the width of the theater to get there, something most
covertly done through one of the basements. Her loneliness within the company has
made her an expert in the geography of the opera house. Between rehearsals, when
the others go out together for espresso or climb to the roof to gaze across the city and
smoke with patina-green Apollo and his upraised lyre, she wanders the corridors and
staircases, seeks out corners where she can sit invisibly and read a book. Some doors
are locked but not as many as should be. The concierge is lazy.

The cryptlike basement is dark, but she finds a switch. Harsh fluorescence lights its
stone vaults and the piles of miscellaneous stage junk underneath them. There are plain
black cases for delicate things—lights, perhaps—in neat, anonymous stacks, but then
there are loose assemblages of props: foam boulders, tables and chairs, floppy velvet
stags, crates of fake fruit, canopy beds in pieces, an elaborate tomb, thrones, swords,
scepters, a guillotine, carriages, muskets, angels’ wings, donkeys’ heads, trees, a
magnificent rubber boa constrictor, Corinthian columns, and heaps of other jumbled
objects under plastic sheeting or canvas tarps from the gas-lamp days. Joan hurries
through, pausing only to lift the drape from an oval mirror and look at herself. She sees
a flushed face, lank hair, eyes dilated in the gloom, a floral dress too thin for the season,
tight in the waist like Parisian women wear. She draws herself up. She tells herself she
is ethereal, mysterious. She will simply appear, like the fairy in the window in La
Sylphide. She reaches under her skirt and pulls off her ratty underwear, dropping the
scrap of cloth into an enormous urn, three feet tall, dusty and black, that stands beside
a pile of wooden gravestones.

His name is written on a piece of tape stuck on a door. She is waiting when he comes
in, his sodden T-shirt already stripped off and balled up in his hand. He pauses and
glances back out into the hallway, looking both ways before he shuts the door. For a
moment, he studies her. Then he touches her cheek and says, “Très belle.” He shows
her the tears that come away on his fingers. “Mais pourquoi triste?”

“Je ne suis pas triste. Je suis très heureuse parce que je suis avec le meilleur danseur
du monde.”

He does not seem especially flattered or surprised to find a strange girl speaking
schoolgirl French in his dressing room, calling him the best dancer in the world. Nor
does he appear impressed by how she managed to evade the Kirov security men or
confused about what to do with her. Ordinarily, her love affairs are entered into
skittishly, sometimes reluctantly. She doesn’t dive into bed but flutters in like a wayward
moth. But now she strips off Arslan’s damp tights almost violently, as though she were
skinning an animal. On the floor, his black eyes flick to her—amused, not especially
surprised— when he discovers she is naked under her dress. The glance reminds her
of how he had looked spotting his turns, arrogant, tapping his gaze briefly, indifferently
against the empty theater, needing nothing from it.

Clutching this Russian stranger, smelling his sweat, feeling the oddly remote pressure
of him inside her, she wants some piece of the fearsome beauty he has onstage. She
wants to take some of his perfection for herself. He buries his face in her neck, as
though flattening himself against a bomb blast. Even as his body presses on her, chest
to chest, the outsides of his legs against the insides of hers, he seems hidden.
She pries his face up with both hands, makes him look at her. Still, she isn’t satisfied.
She cranes her neck so their faces are as close as they can be without touching.
“Regarde-moi,” she whispers. “Tu m’étonnes.” He tries to twist his head away, but she
holds on. “Regarde-moi,” she says again.

Something travels through the dark eyes, some obscure disturbance. And then he looks
at her the way she wants. He sees her; she knows he does. She releases his face, but
he doesn’t look away, not until he is done and closes his eyes.

Before she leaves, she writes her name and her mother’s address in Virginia on a slip of
paper with a kohl pencil. She does not expect to hear from him.