Strip (26 page)

Why had I turned away from the easy life? If I'd listened to my father, I could be cozy in a university residence right now with the promise of a couple of years more education before the guarantee of transferring—feet never touching the ground—to a secure life that rewarded its devotees with endless distractions: vacations, cars, sound systems and alcoholic downtime. Or if I had been really clever, I would have figured a way into that Sainte-Foy penthouse, no matter what.

The blanket of quiet had turned the Old Town into a ghost town and my heart leapt when the buzzer went. But the even thudding up the stairs was too heavy to be Kent's, and I opened the door to a bundled Bertrand. He'd taken the early ferry from Lévis and since there was no class, he decided to pay a visit.

“
Je peux vous offrir un boisson?
”

“
Bière?
”

“
Le matin?
”

“
Comme tu veux.
”

Beer before nine—he had come over to the dark side—meanwhile I made some tea.

“'ow are you?”

“Fine. Your English is better.”

“Louise.”

I gathered that meant she was teaching him. We hadn't actually spoken much for the last couple of months. All I'd done was lift him, and almost crush a few vertebrae in the process.

“Chantal, Maryse no more dance. Is finished.”

“
Pourquoi?
”

He laughed out loud and a big smile came across his face like I had never seen. “You,” he said. “You burlesque. You said Madame and Jean-Marc…”

“Ah.”

“Louise. Me. Maybe we will go. I am sorry for that. I bring Louise to tell you about this.” He swigged his beer. “I go to see Louise now.” At least he had something good to do instead of class this morning, I thought as I watched him disappear down Sainte-Ursule into the blowing snow.

The phone rang, which it rarely did since Kent had moved in, and it was one of the bankers from Toronto. “We're coming down for Carnival. Is the offer still open? It's just for a night or two.”

“Sure, just call before you get here. How many?”

“About five.” Simple as that.

By the afternoon, the blowing had settled and left the Old Town looking like an overgrown Pavlova—not the dancer, the dessert; lots of stiff peaks of meringue with me as the fruit centre. I had some time to myself in my place and I took it as a chance to leaf through Kent's porn, mixed in with his
New Yorker
s,
Saturday Night
s and
L'actualité
. Kent liked to read, and to look at naughty pictures. It was funny to look at these guys, from the sublime (posed and beyond perfection) to the ridiculous (not posed, bad lighting, bad skin and pretty unflattering). I was a little bemused; Kent had set the bar way too high in terms of sexual gratification.

Bichon and Sugar came by, hesitantly clumping up the stairs. I was sure it was a couple of drunks. I opened the door to pseudo-drag—though if you saw them you would think there go two lovely, tall women—and we all headed out into the winter wonderland. We rendezvoused with Marcel and François after their meeting with the hair show people, and drank champagne at the Clarendon. There was some levity, and for a moment I felt like I could have a little community here, and some security. From there we split up, and the girls and I stumbled into the snow, giggling and tipsy. In a consignment store in some ancient cellar they convinced me to buy a used
rat sauvage
fur coat for three hundred dollars, a good week's tips. The girls lived like stars and spent that way, too.

“Marcel hates me,” I said. “Ever since I got back from down south, he's had a big goddamned hate on for me.”

“Sweetie pie, you are teen beat-me-off property,” Bichon started in her rocky French Canadian. “No one could possibly 'ate you—more than I do, anyway. God, I 'ate you. You're so cute.” She hollered, “I 'ate him!”

“You ate him?” said Sugar.

“No I 'ate 'im,” said Bichon.

“Did you mean dat you did eat 'im. Dat's what I want to know.”

“Oh shaddup, you big old bitch.”

“You bitch in stitches.”

“More like d' opposite,” Sugar said. “I think Marcel 'as da 'ots for you.”

“He's in love with me?”

“Not love for Christ sake. Did I say love?
Tabarnak
.” We all tittered at the same time because it sounded so damn stupid. Although, it wouldn't have been that bad. I could still carve out a comfortable, if dull, life in that penthouse. The mom would have to go, and François would have to stay. “There's something you should know,” Sugar went on.

“François knows about the audition?” I said.

“What audition? What the 'ell are you talking about now? I'm not so sure I like you no more.”

“Nothing. Go on. What were you saying?”

“Louis told Marcel it's curtains for certain. Marcel says its da Mafia want to run the place, dey say too many dancers getting in da way—not enough
t
and
a
. 'e's pissed off. That's why we're here—we came as a favour. Wanted to help him go out wit' a bang. 'e's always been so good to us.”

“You're doing him a favour? But you just said tits and ass.”

“Is this not an ass, you twat? Anyway, 'e's always been good to us. 'e's always kept us working, between our Montreal gigs.”

“Why the silent treatment?”

“He didn't want to hurt you. He likes you. We all do. 'e's confused.”

“Merci. Je vous aime aussi.”

Bichon turned to Sugar and wagged his finger. “I told you 'e speaks French. Now he knows all da shit we said about 'im.”

“Marcel is sad?”

“'e knows you won't stay. So yeah, I guess he likes 'aving you around.”

 

And that night, after
our run-through, and before I put on my eyeliner, our cozy life went sequined-pasties-on-your-nipples up. Marcel, his eyes glistening, told us, “This will be it. Enjoy your last few weeks, it's all we've got. From now on, it's strippers,
les étoiles
and Patrice. Maybe we should have applied for a Canada Council grant.” But no one laughed. Meanwhile the rest of the girls—the strippers—kept raking it in and the club paid us less than a round of drinks, fifty bucks a night, to do our three shows.

So that was it. I suppose I wasn't going to carve out an existence as a bad stripper in an obscure part of an obscure city. And I wasn't going to strip in Montreal, where I'd already made enough of a fool of myself. What a laugh. I could see Daniel's brunch buddies showing up for a freebie. Anyway I could now say Daniel was an asshole, out loud too, if I had to think of him at all. I wasn't going to go back to Montreal to dance either, in crappy shape, and as everyone in the Company said, the Conservatoire was a joke, only made great by its dancers, most of whom had gotten their start with other companies. Their company promised what their training program couldn't deliver.

So, now that both my technique and my bank account sucked badly enough that I wasn't in any shape for a fresh start, with stripper muscles in my chest and shoulders, Madame's contribution to my thunder thighs, a new centre of gravity somewhere between the moon and Uranus, and a lower back tough as an overdone pot roast, and the rest of me wondering which end was up, was I no longer a real dancer?

Go back to university? Why was I so stubborn about doing what I wanted to do? I just knew that I couldn't sit still in a lecture hall, alive from the neck up, knowing that my whole body had become such a large part of my life. I would be betraying something that on some level I knew I could still be good at.

Follow Brittany in her Cadillac? Start doing the circuit? Find her ex? Give him back his outfit? Was a legit dancing career entirely over? Time to take steroids and hit the gym daily? Hope my nuts didn't shrink and that I would bulk up? Dumb down? Be a fitness model? A hooker? Pose in porn out in California? Take the money and run? The world was no longer the oyster I wanted it to be.

Kent was still awake when I got home and I was surprised at how happy I was to smell relatively fresh smoke in the hallway. He reclined on a stack of pillows, on his bed. “Where the hell have you been?”

“Did you miss me?”

“You're in no condition to do whatever it was you were doing. You're practically an invalid. The show is ending, by the way.”

“Which one?”

“The one between my legs.”

Kent clambered out of bed and hobbled to the fridge. “I need the exercise,” he said. He opened beers for the two of us. We sat on the bed. “You know, you're young, but you're not that young.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“You should be happy that the decision was made that easily. Time to change gears.”

“I know, but it doesn't seem to matter anymore.”

“So, where's the dream at?”

“The dream?”

“To be a dancer. You had me convinced that was the master plan.”

“I don't know. I'm scattered. I'm high one minute and in the depths of it all the next. It's cotton candy and anything you want, against drill sergeants and riding crops.”

“Well, what started it all?”

“Dance?”

“Dance.”

“Just plain old love for everything: the beauty, the aesthetic, the bodies, the art form—the feeling mostly—the music. Have you ever listened to Chopin's nocturnes or a bit of Debussy or Ravel? I mean, how can a body not respond? It's organic. It feels so good. It still can, I know that.”

“That's it?”

“Isn't that enough?”

“Well it is reassuring that it's not just Gloria Gaynor and Heart. So that's encouraging.”

“Who made you career monitor of Sainte-Ursule?”

“Tell me, what it is you have to offer—as a dancer?”

“Myself.”

“
Myself
is vague.”

“And I'm vague.”

“Don't feel sorry for yourself.”

“Okay, you're being tough, but I can take it. Let's see. I have to offer my joy of doing it?”

“Don't look at me for an answer. I don't know. It's not a quiz. You just don't sound convincing. Think about it.”

I sipped my beer.

“Wait a minute.”

“What?”

“One more time—you and me in '83.”

“Et vous aussi, chèr ami. Hey, it rhymes. Now, don't change the subject.”

“New Year's. Ha. You were icing bruises, and I was watching the skin peel off my arms. Fuck. Let's change the subject.”

“Things can only get better.”

“I'm with you,” I said, and then in my harshest French, “Je suis en accord avec voooo!”

After I showered, I squeezed into Kent's bed and, in retrospect, I see now that that evening, for the first time in my life, I made love to another man. Real love. We were naked against each other and I kissed his beer-and-cigarette-scented mouth so deeply that I barely knew where he started and I stopped. I was hungry for his closeness. Would he know this was love, or just think I was improving my technique?

When I woke in the morning, I lay quietly with him beside me and thought about the previous evening. I believed the dream to be a dancer had finally left me. Kent was right, I had nothing to offer and my dreams were rooted in a selfish ego. I had put in my time, deservedly and passively hoping I'd move up the ladder, but maybe my motives had never been clear enough, or had gotten sidetracked. Did I want to impress someone other than myself? Did I have to prove something? I really was my blank stare. Kent snored, and I slipped downstairs to buy a normal coffee among normal people, like a normal person.

 

That night, Steve wanted
to have a meeting in the washroom. “What's the matter,
chèri
? This isn't like you.”

“I'm tired. I'm tired of everything—winter, cold floors, city buses, four-hour sleeps, this shit-stubborn back, having to find another job, again—and not even being…”

“Excited? About this?”

It felt so wrong. I had become a different person overnight. I had no idea who the new person was, but he seemed to see the old one quite clearly.

To add to the confusion, when we left the can, Guy, Steve's Guy, was waiting in his Iroquois costume. He was a truly gorgeous man, not a bathroom thrills slut kind of guy that I had become. He didn't say anything. He didn't have to. It was simple. I was evil and he wasn't.

So the two of them went off to have their own drama, leaving me to get into the new costumes Marcel had made: velvet lapels and cuffs for me, and dyed-black wild turkey feathers for Bichon and Sugar. He had obviously pulled out all the stops, gone way over-budget as they say.

Bichon and Sugar, the two of them looking like a cross between Marie Antoinette and Big Bird's widow, pecked away at our situation like it was the end of the world, taking it to heart when they didn't have to worry because they'd be back in Montreal in a few weeks. Perhaps they cared about Marcel in a way I could not. When they finally tired of creating alternatives and options for Marcel's future, they focused on me with advice and warnings. “You can't forget your technique,” Bichon said. “Watch out for the talkers,” Sugar advised.

“Stalkers?” said Bichon, face scrunched in misunderstanding.

“Talkers, for shit's sakes. And don't do that to your face, it cakes your foundation. The talkers will still be talking fifty years from now, about dreams and plans, and watching like hawks to see what everyone else is up to.”

“Even if you never get back into the ballet,” Sugar said, “you make great chorus boy material. Can you sing?”

“I don't know.”

“But you have a dream?”