23 Quai de Voltaire

                         Walking east along the left bankof the dirty, brown-green Seine, I look up and see on the gray-    yellow                         wall of a five-story

limestone apartment building a small, black-lettered plaque.                         It's easy to translate."Rudolf Nureyev, 1938–1993, dancer and choreographer, Director

                         of the Paris OpéraBallet, lived in this house during the last years of his life." One    life,                         a little less

than fifty-five years, gets condensed into one short declarative                         sentence, completewith parenthetical dates, its three-item appositive, and two    prepositional phrases,

                         one of place,the other of time. No sinewy syntax, no elegant period                         can contain

Nureyev's body. Nor hope to imitate his grands jetés, those    pinwheeling                         leaps in Le Corsairewhere, wearing a gold chain around his bare chest and over

                         his right shoulder,plus golden harem pants, love's slave in high art's bondage,    Nureyev                         circled the stage

in eight great bounds—"that young lion," as Margot Fonteyn, his    favorite partner,                         liked to call him.Watching him and his Danish ex-boyfriend, Erik Bruhn, dance    together

                         in the film versionof Romeo and Juliet when I was ten taught me desire, though I    didn't                         know it then. I couldn't

look away from the bulge in his unjockstrapped crotch. In New    York City bathhouses,                         in the back roomsof London tearooms and Paris gay bars, Nureyev fucked and got    fucked by

                         his "butch boys"while all the clientele watched. When he wanted to upstage    another dancer, he would                         "turn his back to the audience

and flex his butt. It worked every time," claimed one    balletomane.                         Yet he neveracknowledged publicly he was gay, though he told Mike Wallace    in an interview

                         "I know what it isto make love as a man and a woman." Death outed him. hiv-    positive                         for his last twelve years, he kept

dancing through weight loss, fevers, night sweats, pneumonia,    hepatitis,                         injections of hpa-23,azt, good days, bad days. Danseur noble, he never

                         mentioned aidsor age. His technique deteriorated. The audience booed. He    directed the final dress                         rehearsals of La Bayadère, the only

classic ballet he'd never danced in a full-length production in the    West,                         lying down."La machine est cassée," he remarked to a friend. The machine is

                         broken. On opening nighthe lay on a couch in a gilded box on the left-hand side of the    Garnier's stage, dressed                         in scarlet satin.

He sipped champagne. Afterward, backstage, they gave him the    Legion of Honor.                         Its green and white banneraround his neck made his face gaunter, more haunted. He did not    weep.

                         He had alreadywept. "Can you imagine," he said, sweeping one arm diagonally    from the footlights                         to the upper balconies

as he used to do in his grand bows encore after encore, "I am    going                         to have to say good-byeto all this!" He was no sentimentalist. But it was, of course,

                         curtains—"Ciao, bellissimo!" "See you later, alligator." "Tassie-la-la."                         Good-bye

to 23 Quai de Voltaire, to the view from his overheated apartment                         of the south side of the Louvre,its black roofs with round windows like portholes. Good-bye to    the Seine

                         flowing slowlywith its cargo of litter, its bateaux-mouches full of drunk Americans    every August.                         Good-bye to the plane trees

wearing only ragged bark and diaphanous green leaves. Their    white arms sway                         in the light breeze,the street's corps de ballet. Good-bye to the booksellers shutting

                         their green vending stalls,locking up at dusk the books of dangerous perverted French    poets, Verlaine, Rimbaud,                         and Jacques Prévert,

along with cheap posters of Moulin Rouge dancers, collector's    editions                         of the first Playboystill sheathed in plastic, and reproductions of sepia

                         pornographic postcards,Rubenesque beauties with unretouched lush pubic muffs. Who    would have thought in 1894                         that pornography could become

nostalgic? Good-bye to the boulevard boys on rollerblades,    whose tight shorts                         barely covertheir muscled asses. Nureyev still wanted to fondle that    rapturous

                         flesh. Good-bye...