Black Dance

by Nancy Huston

  “Hey, Milo Noirlac,” she whispers into his ear when they wake up in the morning, “I adore you, you know that? I’m not sure it’s wise of me but I can’t help it, I love the hell out of you.”

  Milo smiles, presses her to him and, in the brilliant sunlight of a Sunday morning in Montreal, makes love to her again. They chat afterward, tapping silver knives through the shells of their soft-boiled, room-service eggs.

  “Dis is incredible.”

  “What’s incredible, Milo, love?”

  “Dis whole thing. Being back in my hometown after all dese years . . . Winning a festival prize . . . Meeting you, Yolaine, de best actress in Quebec and de most beautiful woman in de world.”

  “Especially meeting me.”

  “Dat’s for sure!”

  “Will you write a role for me one day?”

  “Ha! You know de Belgian joke!”

  “No?”

  “How do you recognize an up-and-coming Belgian actress?”

  “. . . Well?”

  “She’s de one who sleeps with de screenwriter.”

  They let their chairs tip backward onto the bed and go at each other again, Yolande taking the initiative this time and Milo giving himself up rapturously to her caresses.

  CUT to the bathroom: Yolaine murmuring sweet nothings into Milo’s ear as they shower together.

  “I love your hair . . . And I love the way you write . . . And I love how gentle you are . . . And I love how you’re going to take me with you on your trips . . .”

  CUT to Milo and Yolande walking on Saint Helen’s Island together.

  “Why are you always so passive, Milo?”

  “I tought you loved me.”

  “Yeah, I love you, but . . . I mean, a person’s gotta know what they want. I say let’s get married, you say fine, and then you don’t do anything about it!”

  “Well . . . what is dere to be done? Is it as complicated as all dat? I don’t know, I never married anybody before.”

  “Neither did I, you idiot, but we should throw a party, send out invitations to our families, I know that much . . .”

  “. . .”

  “Okay, okay, I know you never met your parents . . . But you must have been raised by somebody, Milo. You didn’t grow up with wolves in the forest!”

  “Dat woulda been nice.”

  “Come on . . . You said you had a wonderful grandfather.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “And . . . don’t you have a whole houseful of aunts and uncles and cousins up in Mauricie?”

  “Dere’s nobody left.”

  “You want us to get married just like that, in city hall?”

  “Dat’s fine wit me.”

  “Okay, well . . .”

  Close-up of Milo’s right hand, signing his name with a flourish at the bottom of an official paper. We read the end of the text: united in wedlock on this day . . . Signed: Milo Noirlac. He hands the pen to Yolaine . . . CUT.

  OVER THE NEXT half minute or so: flashes from the next few years as Milo and Yolaine begin the life of a fairly happy, rather successful, moderately artistic Québécois couple of the late 1970s.

  Milo running up the short flight of steps onstage to be congratulated at an awards ceremony, Yolande clapping from the audience . . . The same situation the other way around . . . Milo making wild love with Paul Schwarz on their first scoping-out trip to Rio . . . Yolaine memorizing lines in the living room, with Milo cuing her . . . Milo chain-smoking as he writes at the kitchen table in the middle of the night . . . Yolande coming home at three A.M. and the two of them making love amidst his papers on the table . . . Yolaine jealous because Paul Schwarz is on the phone and she suspects there might be something between them . . . Milo in a black hole, in bed, his head turned to the wall, Yolande hovering at his side and worrying about him just as Roxanne used to . . . Yolaine and Milo vacationing on the Côte d’Azur after the Cannes International Film Festival . . . Sitting side by side on the beach . . . Making love in the sand after nightfall, when everyone has gone home . . .

  A conversation over dinner that night. Yolande smiles at him as they raise their glasses in a toast.

  “What shall we drink to?”

  “To us, my beauty!”

  “Yeah, but to us what?”

  “To us, I dunno . . . Do we have to add someting?”

  They sip their drinks.

  “That’s just the question, Milo.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, should we add something or shouldn’t we? I mean . . . should I stop taking the pill or shouldn’t I?”

  “Ah!”

  “You said it. Ah.”

  “I don’t know . . . D’you want a kid?”

  “I don’t know. But it’s time I did, with my thirtieth birthday looming on the horizon. What about you?”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, you! Do you want a kid?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “Hmm.”

  “We’re pretty weird, aren’t we?”

  “You tink so?”

  “Okay, well, we can think about it awhile longer.”

  “Let’s do dat.”

  “Yeah, right, we’re not in that much of a hurry, eh? We can give it some more thought.”

  “Right.”

  (Remember how warmly I encouraged you to have a baby with Yolande, Milo darling? I quoted Shakespeare’s sonnet to you: You had a father: let your son say so . . . I wanted you to live forever! But in Quebec in those days, too many adults had been unwanted, illegitimate, orphaned, lost, or abandoned children . . . Now that people could avoid having kids, no one seemed to know quite how they felt about parenthood.)

  EXTERIOR, SAINT DENIS STREET—NIGHT. Paul Schwarz is in Montreal to work with Milo on Science and Sorcery, their project about AIDS in Brazil. Sauntering into a bar together, the first thing they see is Yolaine’s back, with the arm of a male stranger draped ostentatiously around it. Not missing a beat, Milo steers Paul over to a corner table and goes on talking about how to do smooth camera work in the steep, unevenly cobbled streets of the favelas.

  When she gets up to leave a few minutes later, the strange man’s arm still possessively glued to her body, Yolande catches sight of her husband and freezes in her tracks. The man releases her, but Milo smiles and looks away.

  She slips her arm back through the man’s arm and they go out the door together.

  CUT to Milo working at the kitchen table the next morning, cigarette in hand. When Yolaine comes home, he pours her a cup of coffee and brings it to her with a kiss. She clatteringly drops the cup into the sink.

  “I just don’t get it, Milo! I don’t come home all night and you don’t give a damn!”

  “. . .”

  “You see me with another man, I don’t come home all night and that’s fine with you!”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Listen, it’s just not normal to be that unjealous! I’m jealous, and I find it only normal to be jealous!”

  “So we each tink we’re normal. Dat’s normal . . .”

  “For God’s sake, Milo! You’re just too passive! You have no will of your own! I’ve been telling you so for years! It is impossible to know what you really want, because you don’t want to tell me! I want to make love, you say fine; I want to marry you, you say fine; the great Paul Schwarz wants to make a film with you, you say fine; and what if he wants to sleep with you? Do you say fine then, too? Maybe you do! I spend the night in the arms of another man and you say fine. Are you missing a cog or what, Milo? You should get help!”

  Before answering, Milo stubs out his cigarette, carefully washes and dries his coffee cup, and puts it away in the cupboard.

  “You don’t belong to me and I don’t belong to you. People can’t belong to each oder. They can’t even know each oder . . . Dey don’t even know demselves! I don’t feel de need to know everyting you do. I trust you. Everybody does what dey need to do, don’t de
y?”

  “But if I leave you, Milo?”

  “Well . . . if you leave me, you leave me. You won’t be dere, so you won’t have to tell me, I’ll see it all by myself.”

  “Jesus, I don’t believe it. You’re incredible!”

  CUT to the two of them in bed, writhing in each other’s arms. But Yolaine’s mind is elsewhere . . .

  Then comes a depressing scene most of us have probably lived through at least once: on a rainy, desperately gray November afternoon, surrounded by boxes and suitcases, the couple divvies up their kitchen utensils . . . record collection . . . library books . . . all the possessions they’ve accumulated in five years of marriage.

  CUT to Milo’s right hand, signing his name with a flourish at the bottom of an official paper. Close-up on the end of the text: divorce by mutual consent. As no children issued from this union, no legal dispositions need be made on the subject. Signed: Milo Noirlac. He hands the pen to Yolande.

  (And then, Astuto . . . It was just a few weeks after your divorce, wasn’t it, that . . .)

  One evening, in his new and much smaller apartment out in the Mile End section of Montreal, Milo is completely engrossed in the Science and Sorcery screenplay . . . so when the phone rings (jump, shout, What?), he picks up the receiver angrily. Listens. We hear a man’s voice but can’t make out the words. After a few seconds, Milo sits down again.

  “I don’t believe you . . . Who de hell is dis? . . . Okay. No, tomorrow I go to New York. Next week I come. Tell me your address. Okay. Six o’clock next Wednesday. Okay.”

  CUT to Milo walking down the dimly lit hallway of a shabby rooming house. The odor of poverty fairly leaps at us from the screen: a gut-rippling mixture of urine, beer and cabbage. So thick is the layer of filth on the walls and floor that Milo’s hand hesitates before touching the door knocker. The door opens a crack; a bleary eye peers out; a chain is removed; Milo steps into the room.

  Smaller than he, the man reeks of whisky, decayed teeth and ancient sweat. His apartment seems to have seen neither daylight nor a duster in decades . . . Thank God for images, Astuto; thank God we don’t need to cast about for words to describe the place. The stench and strangeness are so overpowering that Milo has to consciously will his body to stay nailed to the spot.

  “Sit down,” the old man says. “Make yourself at home.”

  Milo lowers himself into a faux-leather armchair whose springs whine in protest at his weight.

  “So explain to me what you’re talking about.”

  “It’s true. I swear it’s true. Cross my heart and hope to die, I’m your da.”

  “My fader’s dead.”

  “No,” says Declan, ridiculously flexing his biceps. “Look: There is still a bit of life left in these old bones! If I was dead I’d know about it, seems to me!”

  “Who de fuck are you?”

  “I’m not kiddin’, I’m your da. Look! I’ve got your birth certificate and all.”

  Hobbling over to a chest of drawers, Declan pulls out a sheet of paper and waves it under Milo’s nose, then points triumphantly at words on the paper: “See? See?”

  But whether because of the dim light in the room or the hubbub in his brain, Milo can decipher nothing; all he sees is the black line of dirt under the old man’s fingernail.

  “Noirlac, Milo. Son of Noirlac, Declan and Johnson, Awinita. I’m Noirlac, Declan. I’m your da, see? Neil’s son, seventh of thirteen, right smack in the middle! Didn’t Neil ever tell you about me?”

  Milo is thunderstruck.

  “I’m the one who named you Milo! I chose your name, I did! In March ‘51, Miles Davis’s Birdland songs were on the radio all the time and I was crazy about them. So I called you Milo, which is Irish for Myles. Given that we’re Irish.”

  Silence. Then: “How did you find me?”

  “Saw in the newspaper you were livin’ in Montreal again. Called up information on the off chance.”

  “In de newspaper?”

  “Yeah, look . . .”

  Declan opens a folder containing a sprawl of newspaper clippings. Torn from the culture section of a recent Gazette, the one on the top includes a photo of Milo and Paul grinning from ear to ear, their arms around each other’s waist. Local Screenwriter Swings Contract with Major U.S. Producer, the headline reads.

  “So?”

  “So! You’re doin’ good, eh? You’re doin’ fine. Glad to know it, Milo.”

  “So?”

  “So I thought . . . you know . . . Me being your very own da and all, and you havin’ come up in the world, so to speak . . . doin’ even better than your own da . . .”

  “I don’t believe it . . . Is dat why you got in touch wit me?”

  “Well, I admit I thought you might see clear to givin’ your old man a hand. Makin’ him a loan, like.”

  Silence. Declan offers Milo a glass of whisky. Getting no response, he sits down and takes a swig directly from the bottle.

  “I told your ma I’d maybe ask you for a little help, and she said it was a good idea.”

  An electroshock.

  “My moder’s alive?”

  “Sure . . . Why should everybody be dead? We ain’t even old yet. We keep in touch. When you were born, I promised her I’d take care of you and I did.”

  “You took care of me? I’m tirty years old, I meet you for de first time in my life, and you sit dere and look me in de eye and say you took care of me?”

  “Yeah, you know . . . I stayed in touch with the agency . . . I always kept track of the foster homes they put you in . . . And if I heard your foster parents were beatin’ you too bad, I made sure they moved you somewhere else . . . None of that for me! Strangers, hitting my own son! No, sirree! I kept my promise to your mom . . .”

  “My Indian name.”

  “Yeah, Nita gave you a Cree name, too. That’s right.”

  “What was it?”

  “Huh . . . it’s been ages . . . Got it written down somewhere. Prob’ly find it in that chest of drawers, if you wanna take a look. Or you can call her up and ask her for yourself. She’s back on the res now, up north. Happy to give you her number, if you can afford long distance calls. I sure as hell can’t!”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “She wrote to me last week. Go see for yourself, if you don’t believe me. Letter’s right there in the bedroom.”

  Milo rises. As he crosses toward the bedroom in slow motion, Awinita’s voice moves into our ears in crescendo: What ya doin’ in de dark, little one? Come wit me! Come wit your mom! . . . Fear noting, son. The sacred is neider above nor below you . . . Don worry ‘bout God or de Devil . . . Everyting you do is a prayer . . . Your Cree name means resistance. You gonna have to resist, little one. You gonna need to be strong . . . What ya doin’ in de dark, little one?

  In the bedroom: subjective camera, swinging down in a capoeira ginga from ceiling (cracks and cobwebs) to floor (overflowing ashtrays, discarded clothing stiff with filth). The bed hasn’t been made in ages. An upended orange crate serves as a bedside table. On the crate: an envelope.

  Milo crosses the room (lightfooted, Indian, his mother’s son). Picks up the envelope. Camera close-up on the clumsy, childish handwriting. Declan’s name and address . . . Montreal spelled Muntreal . . . Her hand traced these words a mere few days ago . . . he’s virtually touching his mother . . . Gently, he turns the envelope over. Withdraws the single sheet it contains. Unfolds it. Starts to read. Again we hear Awinita’s voice . . . but strange and low and echo-filled, as if from far away.

  Hi Mister Clening — Fluid

  glad to hear you found your son

  Milo refolds the sheet of paper. Slides it back into the envelope. Sets the envelope on the orange crate. Crosses to the door. Turns off the light. Leaves the room. Leaves the building.

  IT’S OKAY, ASTUTO. There would have been no point in your actually, physically traveling to an isolated Cree reserve way the hell up north in Waswanipi and meeting Awinita. She was pushing fifty by th
en, and probably alcoholic and obese . . . What would you have said to each other? I mean . . . your mother had been talking to you your whole life long. She couldn’t ever leave you.

  • • • • •

  Neil, 1927

  SEVERAL YEARS HAVE passed. We come upon Neil at age thirty-five, sitting at his desk in his new den on the second floor, reading glasses perched on his nose, his red beard now streaked with gray. The bookshelves on the walls around him are empty; at their foot, bearing shipping stickers from Ireland, several crates of books have been opened but not as yet unpacked. Distracted by family noises from downstairs, he is trying desperately to concentrate but getting nowhere.

  CUT to the dinner table, later that evening. Present are Marie-Jeanne, hugely pregnant, Neil, hugely despondent, and half a dozen snotty, squirmy little children, up to and including a thin, dark-haired six-year-old girl whose already-bossy attitude designates her as Marie-Thérèse.

  “You’re holding your fork the wrong way, Sam,” she says.

  “You’re not my mother.”

  “Do what she says, Sam.”

  “She gets on my nerves.”

  “Did you hear what he said, Mommy?”

  “Calm down, darling, it’s not that important.”

  “Pass the butter.”

  “You didn’t say please.”

  “Please.”

  “Please who?”

  “The butter, goddamm it.”

  “Watch your tongue!”

  “I’m full, Mommy.”

  “Mommy, can I leave the table?”

  “What do you think, Neil?”

  “Far as I’m concerned, they can leave the house.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “No, it’s not funny.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “No, I’m not serious. It’s just a line from this new poem I’m trying to write. Some people write Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born, others write Far as I’m concerned they can leave the . . .”

  “Ouch! Mommy, Antony pinched me!”

  “Ask your son if he pinched his sister!”

  “Did you pinch your sister, Antony?”