Dance, Gladys, Dance

by Cassie Stocks

  “The first principle of design, Matthew?” His arm would sweep out, point at the chosen student, and rest on him or her until the correct reply was given.

  “Balance.”

  Gimlet would give a quick nod and then another flourish. “The other principles, Ginny?”

  “Proportion. Rhythm. Emphasis. Unity.” His hand would beat along with the answers, fingers opening and closing like someone making a shadow bird on a wall.

  Rumours passed from behind student canvases that he’d once held a position at a prestigious American college, but had been let go for transgressions that, according to the gossip, ranged from drug use to theft to an inability to get along with his colleagues, to (notwithstanding his lovely faculty wife) sex with students. I hoped the latter was the truth.

  My voice quavered when I answered the questions Professor Gimlet asked me in class. Once I spat a wad of gum right out of my mouth onto my desk as I tried to articulate the principles of two-point perspective. I didn’t want to be the sour note in his orchestra of answers. I wanted him. I needed him to escape that teetering ledge I stood on. He would teach me one-on-one what I needed to know about art. I would be his protégée and his muse, inspiring him to artistic heights he’d not yet reached. We would become famous together. He would be the maestro of my next great escape.

  I took to waiting beside his desk after class and asking awkward theory questions endlessly planned and rehearsed the night before. I’d stand, nod, and smile at his answers, wondering what it would be like to lie in bed beside him. Once class was over, I seemed invisible to him, another face in the shuffle of students filling and emptying the desks each week.

  In my second semester, I had another class with him, Advanced Design 231. About a month after this set of classes started, Professor Gimlet finally saw me. Before I walked up to his desk, I’d unbuttoned my green plaid shirt almost to my navel (three buttons lower than he wore his) and I’d left my bra in the dresser drawer in my room. The classroom was empty. It was so quiet I thought I could hear the ticking of the big round clock way up on the wall. He shuffled papers into his briefcase.

  I leaned against the desk. “Professor Gimlet? I wondered if I could ask you some questions about the dominant oblique direction you mentioned in regards to relating design elements.”

  He sighed slightly and lifted his head. His eyebrows rose at the sight of my bare skin. His eyes traveled up to my face and met my eyes with the same silent question I’d been asked by men in barrooms since I was eighteen. By then, at twenty-seven, I knew how to answer yes with nothing but a small smile.

  “Well, Frieda,” he said, his eyes travelling back down and coming to rest above my belly button. “One of the most important things an artist can do, beyond all this theory, all the elements of design, is to experience life.” He looked around the classroom, up at my face again briefly, and then began to slowly run his finger up and down my arm.

  I held onto my breath and the edge of the desk.

  His fingers were long and his nails perfectly shaped. I’d never been with a man with hands more attractive than mine. You were lucky to find a pipeliner who still had all his fingers, never mind a manicure. “Do you think you want to experience life?” he asked.

  I nodded, unable to speak. The bell for the next class rang and I jumped a little. His smile twisted at the corners as though he’d taken a bite of something slightly sour.

  “I’m working on a series of drawings of Hindu gods and goddesses for a book,” he said. “Do you think you’d like to pose for me?”

  “I’m not Hindu.” Brilliant, I thought. “Yes” might also have been a good answer.

  “It’s the body form I need. The faces will be modelled on ancient drawings.” He circled his fingers around my wrist.

  I couldn’t think. Visions of Eastern gods flew around in my head. “It’s not the elephant, is it? What’s its name?”

  “Ganesh? No, I was thinking of Durga,” he said. “The goddess Durga.”

  When a man tells you he wants to model a goddess after your body, it’s hard to resist. I didn’t know then that Durga had eight arms.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Gimlet Portraits

  And so it had begun. I posed for Professor Gimlet once as Durga in a hotel room for about ten minutes with my arms raised in prayer above my head, before other, more imperative matters took over. He never had me pose for him again, at least not for any artistic purposes. We had four months of awkwardness in class, hurried phone calls, and meetings in seedy motels. The only good thing about the motel rooms we met in were the grim paintings on the walls. We made up names for them: Rigor Mortis Mountain Range, Bridge Over Putrid Waters, The Ruptured Metropolis.

  For the first time in my life, I became obsessed with my appearance, terrified that one day Professor Gimlet would look up and realize I wasn’t attractive enough. My bathroom came to resemble a cosmetics counter in a downtown department store. It was during this wannabe-diva phase that I cultivated a friendship with Ginny. She became my beauty advisor.

  Did I imagine Gimlet would leave his wife for me? Of course I did. Did I care about her — this shadowy figure who kept him from me? Not really. I wanted what was best for him, and that was me. I’d soon be going to gallery openings and swanky parties with him. I’d join cultured society. The lovely young artist, Frieda Zweig, arrives on the arm of suave Professor Gimlet. What a beautiful couple they are.

  When I did paint, it was portraits of him: Gimlet in Repose, Post-Coital Gimlet, Gimlet the Marauder. I spent hours on them. Where John William Waterhouse had placed beautiful women in flowing gowns, I put Gimlet with flowing hair in medieval tunics. I thought the paintings were incredible, filled with longing and passion, but I certainly couldn’t turn them in for marks. I didn’t show them to Gimlet either. I planned to show them to him as a surprise, after we moved in together — a testament to how much I cared for him. I’d have a gallery show one day: Frieda Zweig: The Gimlet Portraits.

  I imagined both of our paintings on the walls of the mental apartment I’d decorated for the two of us, in a downtown high-rise. I had an amazing red lacquer and gold leaf cabinet already picked out from a boutique on King Street. The high-rise apartment was, of course, a precursor to the Victorian home with two studios in the back that we would move into later after we tired of life in the fast lane.

  However, I, as the lovely young artist, had given up working on my own assignments for school. I’d sit at the wobbly faux-wood desk in my dorm room, full of good intentions, with sketchpad and precisely sharpened pencils in front of me. Minutes later, I’d be lying flat out on the single bed, staring up at the speckled ceiling tiles, deep in the fantasyland I’d created of my future glamourous life. My grades and attendance began to fall until I was in danger of being suspended.

  I told Professor Gimlet about my academic standing one afternoon in Room 12 of the Clover Leaf Motel. We’d already made love and sat together on the edge of the bed. The hard afternoon light shone through the pilly blue polyester curtains on the window, making the skin on our naked bodies seem pale and thin. He kissed his way up my arm.

  “You’re failing?” He dropped my arm.

  “Well, we have been rather busy.” I leaned my head on his shoulder and drew circles on his thigh with my fingernail. One of a set of long red fingernails applied and painted by Ginny the night before. She insisted men found them sexy. They made me feel like some sort of mammalian digging creature, like a vole, but it seemed Ginny had been right — until now.

  “Have you told your parents?”

  “About us?”

  “No. You haven’t told them about us, have you? About failing?”

  “I suppose I will have to eventually.”

  He pushed my hand away. “You can’t blame this on me.”

  I sat straight up. “I’m not blaming you.”

  He stared at me as if he couldn’t quite recognize me. “You’re not pregnant, are you?” he asked.

  “W
here the hell did that come from?”

  He ran his hands through his hair. “Are you certain you want to go to art school?”

  “What?” My head was spinning.

  “Maybe you could do something else — hairdressing or something. It would take the pressure off us.”

  “Did you just say hairdressing? In case you’ve forgotten, I’m an artist.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Oh, right — an artiste. Your marks don’t reflect any particular talent.” He got up from the bed and pulled on his jeans. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”

  My carefully constructed and endlessly detailed future life exploded right in front of me. I was certain I felt fragments of martini glasses puncturing my skin.

  “Don’t you care about me?” What a fucking dumb thing to say.

  “Frieda, Frieda,” he said. He reached over and patted me on the head. I shook his hand off. Who did he think he was? Patting me on the head while I sat there, naked, still leaking his cum?

  He began to gather his things, getting down on his hands and knees on the brown carpet to retrieve his socks from under the side table. “You knew what this was when it started. This isn’t going to get messy. I can tell you that. I’m not giving anything up.”

  I felt thoroughly messy already, about to become messier, if I actually vomited like I felt like doing.

  “I never asked you to give anything up.” I said. I just thought he would.

  He quickly put on the rest of his clothes. We were supposed to have at least three hours together this afternoon.

  “Are you leaving?” I asked.

  “What does it look like?”

  The room seemed to be shrinking and expanding. I couldn’t fathom how we’d gone from our glorious future together to “you knew what this was.” It never occurred to me that I had the imagination to make the whole thing up, that he in no way felt the same way about me as I felt about him. I pulled a sheet free from the knotted tangle on the bed and wrapped it around me.

  “And you don’t think I’m an artist? You think I should be a fucking hairdresser?” My voice rose an octave with everything I said.

  He sighed from the mirror by the door where he stood adjusting his shirt collar. The Ruptured Metropolis painting hung on the wall beside him, the high-rise buildings dripping down in black globs.

  “Do you want the truth, Frieda?”

  I nodded.

  His mouth moved in the reflection. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. I’m not a child.”

  “Your work is competent, but not above average. I don’t think you’re doing Paraskeva College any favours by staying there.” He came back to where I still sat on the edge of the bed. He took my face and tilted it up to his.

  “You are, however, one hell of a fuck. But don’t tell anyone I told you that.”

  He walked to the door. “I’ll maybe try and call you later this week,” he said. He paused for a moment, like an actor who’d forgotten his lines. His mane seemed bedraggled and limp.

  In a fleeting moment of compassion, before I began to despise him forever, I realized he’d been playing a part for me as much as I’d played a role for him. I was the proverbial lovely young thing, fresh-faced and eager for the experience and he the suave pedagogue dominated by his virility. I wasn’t the role I’d played and I doubted he was either. I wondered who he really was, what made him behave as he did. I wondered if I’d known him at all.

  “By the way,” he added, “those press-on nails make you look cheap.” He closed the door softly behind him.

  He didn’t call. I didn’t go to any classes the next week. I stayed in my room and stared at the phone, willing it to ring. I never heard from him again. I waited another week and then I moved out of the dorms and never went back to school. I didn’t think I had the stamina to screw my way to above-average standing.

  Gimlet was a prominent art professor from a design college and part of me believed that everything he said about my talent, or lack of it, was true. Who else was there to believe? Mrs. Hernd in her giant polyester caftans in the spare bedroom studio? She hardly seemed authoritative. Besides, Gimlet had been right about the press-on nails.

  Gimlet’s damning assessment of my talent rattled me. I continued painting but when I finished each piece, all I could see were flaws and inadequacies. Fair. Below average. I’d put a large black slash across each canvas and stack it in the closet. When I ran out of canvases, I whitewashed them all and began the whole process again. I didn’t talk to anyone and rarely left the basement suite I’d moved into. I had a bit of money left from my student loan and I was determined I would create something worthwhile before the money ran out. I’d prove him wrong.

  I didn’t. The harder I tried to prove something, the worse the paintings got. I stayed up for days smoking, drinking coffee, and painting until I could barely see the canvases. Nothing. It was all shit.

  Soon I no longer aspired to paint something worthwhile; I just wanted to stop wanting to paint at all, but I couldn’t completely stop then. I didn’t know how to stop. If I weren’t Frieda Zweig the Painter, who would I be? What would I do? Starting with the flamboyant portraits I’d painted with Mrs. Hernd, colour had become my language of understanding, of truth. With artist’s eyes, I saw the world as something I could recreate in my own colours, and, by doing so, comprehend it. Without that sight, or if I had been wrong about it, I might as well be blind. How would I know where I was?

  One of the paintings I did in the basement suite after Gimlet was of the goddess Durga. I’d gone to the library and found out that she was the destroyer of all evil. I painted a picture of her spearing Gimlet from the back of the tiger she rode. It looked too weak, as though she might be helping him up with the point of her spear. I added more gore until the canvas made me feel sick to look at it and then I gave up and painted it over.

  I was in that in-between place — no woman’s land — feeling too tired, broke, and sad to continue working, but still unwilling (too afraid, perhaps) to wholly give up on it when I met Norman, the Sex Store King.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Wherein I Embark On Job Interviews

  From Mr. H.’s house, I embarked on the next step in the ordinary life plan: find a job. Ginny convinced me to apply for jobs in the Careers section of the paper rather than the Help Wanted columns where I normally looked. “Bamboozle them,” she advised me. “The force of your personality can overcome your lack of employment qualifications.” She lent me “career clothes” — severe blazers with matching microscopic skirts. I agreed. I needed to look my perky best to finance my upcoming life of quiet desperation. I even bought pantyhose — “Nylons, said Ginny. “What century are you from?”

  Right. Away I went. . .

  The first interview was for an administrative support position at the head office of a clothing company in a towering downtown building. I took the mirror-walled elevator up and adjusted my beige skirt. I wore a matching blazer and a white blouse with a floppy bow at the neck. I’d refused to wear any shoes with heels higher than two inches but still I felt like I was in drag. I carried one of Ginny’s leather briefcases — empty, except for my bus transfer and keys to Mr. H.’s house. The air seemed to get thinner the higher I went and by the time I reached the fourteenth floor, I could hardly breathe. The handle of the briefcase was damp with sweat. I can do this. It’s just a job. I need to eat.

  I was ushered into the office of Human Resources, a small room exactly like fifteen others I passed on the way in. A white particleboard desk with a computer on it faced away from the window. On the wall hung a framed inspirational poster with a picture of sun shining on a snow-capped mountain peak and underneath the words, “SUCCESS. Those at the top of the mountain didn’t fall there.” Oh really? I was still trying to decide whether it was a joke when the Human Resources woman came in. She introduced herself as Ms. Coleville. She had curly black hair, serious black nerd glasses, and looked a few years younger than I was. She seemed
pleasant and I thought I was doing well as we chatted about the weather. Calm. Cloud Bank. Cumulus. Then the actual interview began.

  She flipped open a folder on her desk. “What specific goals have you established for your career?”

  Oh shit. “Specific goals? Well, finding a job is certainly my first goal — and after that, not being fired from the job. Of course, getting paid in there somewhere would be nice too.” I laughed.

  She managed a straight-line smile. “Everyone has strengths and weaknesses as employees. What are your strong points for this position?”

  “Well, I need a job. I’m a hard worker and I think I would be an asset to your company.” I thought that sounded good but she didn’t even write it down.

  “What would you say are areas in which you’re needing improvement?”

  “You mean work areas?”

  She nodded and looked at her watch.

  “I suppose I could improve my typing skills and I could learn more about financial operations. . . or fiscal operations of various. . .” My hand flapped in the air. I put it back in my lap. “Of the economic realities of business as a whole.”

  She adjusted her glasses and asked, “What have you learned from your participation in extracurricular activities?”

  “Extracurricular activities? Like?”

  “Like volunteer work, sports, hobbies — activities outside of your working life.” She waited, her pen poised above the folder.

  “Right. I don’t do many of those things. I, uh, planted some flowers last night, though. That was nice. The dirt smelt good. I used to paint but, well, I don’t anymore.”

  She flipped through some papers on her desk. “What did you learn as a Retail Consultant?”