Strip (5 page)

“I want to.”

“Now?”

“You sound surprised.”

I hoped the marijuana might make it easier, but the pain was excruciating. I always thought it would be so natural with the right person. But I ended up with my face pressed into the pillow, biting hard into it, trying to suppress a scream.

He gave up and dropped, deadweight, onto me. I whispered to him, “Thank you for being so understanding.” Then he sighed and rolled off.

Old thoughts about my inadequacy now haunted me. My mother drove me, her perfect boy, in her new Cadillac to the doctor's office while I sat bent over, a seven-year-old with a searing pain in my abdomen like something was stuck inside. The pain stopped my breath, a herniated something, an incomplete something else, a testicle that hadn't dropped. It was a series of trips to the doctor and operations in hospitals.

It always started with me standing on a small box in the doctor's examination room, my pants around my ankles while one or two doctors poked my abdomen, stared at my penis, or shoved their dry fingers behind my scrotum and up into me so hard that they raised me up off my little snow-soaked socked feet. The efforts to find the source of that pain and rip it out blinded me. They laid their big fingers on my stomach and pressed here and there on my naked body, staring at my front, touching me.

I was innocent until a fifth visit and that one doctor looked up at my face and our eyes met. He looked like one of the ballet princes, and I retracted my hips as my penis began to stir for the first time I was aware of. While I was consumed with guilt, my mother was more concerned with her lipstick and the dashing doctors. A few years later, I was back to the doctor for another hernia, or was it bedwetting? I remember my mother had her hair done for the occasion. The doctor dug around in my underwear pressing on my abdomen, intestines, stomach, balls, pulling on them as I tried not to show spontaneous arousal. The thought of his staring, and rough pokes and soft lingering fingers, while I looked at the top of his head, sent a terrible thrill through me. Years later when I would dream of the visits to the doctor I would wet the bed, but not with piss.

 

We lay with the
streetlight and shadows playing across our skin. I vowed to give up anything for love.

 

 

Two

A dancer's bare feet
approach the earth, toes extended. The soles, broad and thick, reach for the earth's membrane then cushion the impact, draw history and resonance through the weathered skin from core to core. The soul is shaken free of its trance. The body again ascends—as the feet beat back at the world with
entrechat
and
frappé
—to the stars.

 

A door above me
slams and my clothes fly down the open space at my side. I rise, look down the twenty-two-odd flights as a stray sock spirals defiantly to the bottom. Something cracks onto the floor below, cufflinks or my watch. It doesn't matter. My belt buckle? And no one will come after me. I am in no man's land, in the shaft of the sleek condo where I got everything I had ever asked for, or deserved, in a matter of seconds.

Sunday morning came quietly in Daniel's tree house. We woke late, and there was no “the Company”; no daily rehearsal sheet slipped under the door; no Company class; no dour-faced dancers poking forks in lone grapes on breakfast plates and dreaming about their second cigarette of the day. Once again I was outside my safety zone. There would be no equity-minimum-for-second-soloist paycheque in two weeks. There would be no speculation on who would get what role in the coming season. Before, I had paid-for dreams and goals, but now they were replaced by free promises.

By now, the Company would be assembled in the hotel lobby for a bus to an early flight back to Winnipeg, welcoming a day off. They would later go for brunch and then put their fingers down their throats and puke, or sit in a movie theatre and worry about their 102 minutes of inactivity. Rachelle would read the Sunday
New York Times
Gordon had picked up earlier at the Fort Garry, spread on the floor (with the bright prairie afternoon sun filling the room, making it difficult to ignore the streaked window and the gathering dust bunnies) smoking something harsh, drinking pots of coffee, disappearing with Gordon to the bedroom at regular intervals, then making him dinner and curling up on the couch for hours of
TV
and wondering if the Company would make her a principal dancer someday—why hadn't they already?

Peter would be playing with himself in his room, thinking no one could tell, or maybe he'd have his perfect feet shoved under the radiator to make them even more perfect. God bless those poor overstretched tendons. Then he'd probably get together with a few of the dancers for coffee, and not so much a chat as a series of agreeable grunts. He was social that way. They'd have Monday morning off.

I wondered if my days off with Daniel would be like Rachelle's, until he whispered in my ear, “Come, we have a breakfast to go to.”

“So early?”

“
Mon ami
, it is no longer early, we have slept late and will just make it.”

When you get to know someone, you find out things about them that you overlooked—how they snore, chew, sip, wipe their nose with their knuckle, how sloppy they are or, in Daniel's case, how meticulous: his attention to the order he dressed himself—shirt first; how many times he washed his hands—frequently; when he washed his hands—always after touching me. What did he think of me, and the way I piled my clothes on the chair, and how my bed-head looked, and how my breath smelled and how the sheets had creased my face? Did he notice?

We rushed out the door, Daniel looking far more together than I felt.

“Welcome to your first day as an independent person, not following the pack.”

“It feels strange.”

“Good I hope.”

“Good.” But I felt like the prodigal son, again.

 

Back at the beginning
of my big dreams, I had this groovy little dance bag I'd bought at Army & Navy. After a year of dancing, disguised as swim practice, it all came out. I was between swim practice and dance class, and I had come home to wolf down my dinner. I tossed the bag by the front door and, as bags do, it fell open. Dad came home a few mouthfuls into my meatloaf. After the called
Hi
and the requisite,
Do you want a drink?
he walked into the living room with the bag, threw it on the floor, where the contents spilled—the shoes, tights, leg warmers, the layers of ripped
t
-shirts and sweat socks and the dance belt. “What are these?” he asked. “Something for Halloween?”

Ballet slippers
. For my father, I imagine this was something that only happened to other people's children, in other cities. This was something you only heard about and never, ever dreaded because it seemed so far-fetched.

“It's my dance stuff.” It lay on the living room floor, deflated, dirty too.

“Dance stuff? What kind of dance stuff?”

“Shoes.” (
Ballet slippers
caught in my throat.) “Slippers.”

“Slippers. What the Christ?” he said. Well, wouldn't it have been an education to see me sew the elastics on them, and carefully sew exactly where the shoe folds down? You can't sew the elastic just anywhere, and if you want two elastics to hug the slipper to your foot, then you've got a little geometry to do.

“What's this?” he asked in a confident monotone, as if the battle had been won and he was simply making a point. “A bathing suit or some queer kind of jockstrap?”

“It's a dance belt.”

“A what?”

I wanted so badly to tell it like this: tighter than a Speedo and smaller than one. It cuts up your ass-crack. You pull it on, then grab your nuts and dick and pull up. The old ladies in the audiences watching
The Nutcracker
for the umpteenth time say why do they have to have those horrid bulges? It's anatomy, honey. Arms, legs, boobs and cocks. They've been around for a while. So your nuts are crammed into these things because between your
entrechat
and anything else that slams your thighs together at the speed of light, if your nuts aren't out of the way, you could end up seeing stars. The only hazard when the equipment is out there is turning to your Swan or Princess or Sultana and in the midst of careless fouetté or pirouette having her knee whack your nuts. The pain. The numbing, bent-over-crippling, dizzying pain. It happens to all of us at least once.

“What else? A goddamn tutu?”

“A
t
-shirt.” Something loose and rag-like, showing tendon. Muscle. Line. That's the dance bag. Maybe a skanky towel for the shower. “It's ballet dance stuff. Tights, too, for men. Black, is that okay? Male dancers wear them.”

“Part of your school work?”

“No.”

“And what about swimming?”

“I still swim.”

“In your tights?”

“In my Speedo.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“About a year.”

“Where?”

“The studio—the one near your office. Madame…”

“Défilé?”

“How do you know?”

“She's been there for years. She came in for checkups—when she could afford it.”

He turned to my mother. “How long have you known this?” But she just took a sip of her drink and went back to the kitchen.

“She didn't know,” I said. He'd made his point and from that moment we rarely talked. I had wronged him and his dreams and his agenda. My mother stopped talking to either of us. She'd sit in the sewing room under her poster of Nureyev and Fonteyn. I imagined her weeping though I could never be sure. I had done enough to shame them for life. There was no turning back. The distance helped me find a kind of bravado, and as a result I made another magical leap toward becoming a competent dancer. I had little—even less—to lose anymore. During his pre-dinner, post-looking-in-people's-rotting-mouths drink, I'm sure I asked him why he was so against something so cultured, so refined, so creative. Maybe I just said, “Why do you hate that I dance?”

“I'll tell you something about Madame Défilé. She stopped coming to see me because she owed me so much. I gave up trying to get even a nickel out of her. Do you want to end up like that? Teaching little girls to point their toes. Worrying about when the power will be cut?”

“She danced with Les Ballets Russes.”

“And she's going to die a poor, old lady.”

“But I'm good. I really am.”

“You don't have the talent. After one year, at your age?”

“I do.”

“Fine. Do what you like, take up knitting for God's sake, as long as it doesn't interfere with school.”

It was long overdue, this parting of ways, and after that I wondered if part of Madame Défilé's fiery temper tantrums toward me were for my father.

 

Daniel's words broke my
reverie. “You will make your parents proud someday, and put that Company to shame. Believe me.”

And the streets in Montreal were different now that I was free.

We went north along rue Berri, past rows of old walk-ups, and stopped in front of an iron staircase leading up to a massive flat. The stranger who answered the door raised his eyebrows to Daniel. Daniel touched the middle of my back and gently pressed me through the doorway. Six men sat on low plush couches and rat-a-tatted Québécois. One of them, who had the look of Hitler youth—good-looking but evil at the same time with a protruding brow and chin, and wavy, very bottle-blond hair—massaged my scalp and told me I was too tense. This was typical; I seemed to attract these kinds of comments. And the massage didn't surprise me as I am sure he had hoped it would, because Kharkov had reminded me more than once that as long as I remained an uptight Anglo-Saxon, I would be stuck in the corps, then after I became second soloist, it was forever second soloist, never principal as long as, and on and on…

The others ignored me.

We sat around a low table and alternated drinking mimosas with dark coffee and nibbling daintily on lox, cream cheese and bagels, which was heaven and hell for me: it was my day off and I needed to eat, but with reckless guilt-free abandon, not restrained bites. Sunday was time-out from diet, discipline and dance. For two hours, I nodded politely at their babble, but knew my cursed blank stare was most likely working against me. I understood them perfectly when they said I didn't understand French, which happened before and after pauses, but then their chattering would start up again. I so wanted to tell them I understood French quite well, but not Québécois.

None of them cared about the Company, or me, or dance at all for that matter. Not one of them had seen the show. In retrospect, Daniel must have had some disdain in socializing with dancers. Justifiably so—dancers could be crushingly boring to outsiders, never to themselves: when you are taught that what you do is the most important, difficult and disciplined work a human could ever do, what else can there possibly be to talk about? As for these guys, they were probably trading decorating tips, or who had winked at them in the past two days. I'll never know.

It was Sunday, our first whole day together. One of the men, Hugues, the Aryan who massaged my head, walked us to his place in the Old Port. I couldn't help dwelling on the idea that Hugues and Daniel had known each other much better than they let on. I was feeling more and more like the soft touch in this
pas de trois
. Regardless, he had the decency to point out places of interest, mostly historic buildings that housed restaurants where, he said, I might be able to get a job if my French was okay. I looked to Daniel, but he soldiered on, his royal highness deep in thought until he spoke. “It will be better for you to have your own space. There are too many distractions at my place. You will be staying with Hugues. He has an extra room.”

“Of course. Perfect.” I vividly remember that snubbed feeling, but I quickly displayed my bravado. “Now I don't have to look for a place.”

“What about a job?” Hugues asked. “You can't work wit' no French. And you can't pay the rent wit' no work.”

“I'll be dancing, that's my job, and mon français n'est pas parfait mais pas mal de tout, by the way.” Hugues grinned. I looked to a distracted Daniel for support, but he had that distant look I had seen in the studio. I had resources to take me to the end of the summer.

“We will still have lots of time to spend together,” Daniel assured me.

“Of course,” I replied, as if it was I who was reassuring him.

Hugues' place was just so, all light maple and clean-cut corners that looked onto a neighbouring limestone wall in a narrow alley. At the far end of the alley, overfed tourists waddled up a cobblestone street eighteen hours a day—on the way from the metro to the crêperies of Old Montreal, and on toward the ice cream and beavertail booths of the Old Port, their floral prints and gaudy perma-press created a travelling kaleidoscopic parade of continuous colour in the distance. Fortunately the only sound that made it down the alley was the clicking of horses' hooves from the
calèche
. It was all a lifetime away from my room in Rachelle's house on the banks of the Assiniboine, in a city surrounded by infinity. I imagined Montreal throbbing with an energy of troubled cafés where lovers argued, and smoky bars where they made love in the dark corners.

Later that afternoon, leaving Hugues to his place, Daniel and I wandered silently along the Old Port to a precious gem store owned, he told me, by geologists. It was the kind of place where tiny lights in the ceiling focus on shiny chunks of polished stone, and people's whispers were swallowed by thick grey carpet. He asked me to wait outside. I was dying to see what it was he was buying for me. It was one of the most perfect afternoons I had known.

“Do you mind if I ask how it was for you, when you stopped?”

“Considering I had no choice, a relief. It is nice to go out on a high note. Of course it has taken me years to look at it that way. But that is the reality. Look at the icons. Marilyn. Judy. Piaf.”