The Sex Squad

by David Leddick

  I never knew where Miss McRae had learned to dance. And learned to teach. She seemed to have sprung full-grown into life as a portly ballet teacher. With nice feet. She must have danced beautifully upon them at one time. They were her only gesture towards a ballet background. She wore big black dresses like slipcovers, but on her feet were little pink ballet slippers. Always immaculate.

  I never knew if she had a husband. Had had a husband. Or a boyfriend. Or a girlfriend. Nothing. And very probably there was nothing. Ballet is very fulfilling. She probably went home at night, just tired. Not missing a lover or fame or a glamorous past or any of the rest of it. For her, ballet was like three good square meals a day, I’m sure. Although I think she had three good square meals a day, too.

  Belle-Mère began to get serious as my high-school graduation started looming. “I think we should go to New York, Harry,” she said to me one night when she came home from class. Belle-Mère wasn’t dancing better, but she was dancing stronger. She was in great health, even if she couldn’t do a double pirouette.

  “I think that’s a good idea,” I said.

  She looked at me a little surprised. “We can’t hang around this town forever. Levoy will be twenty-two his next birthday. You’ve finished school. I think now is the time to strike out,” she said.

  “Fine. When do you want to go?”

  She ignored me.

  “And I think I need a new teacher,” she said. “I’m not really improving. Levoy feels the same way. Oh, someone called Sally Ann called you today. Who’s Sally Ann? There’s no Sally Ann at the school.”

  “You remember her. She was the choreographer and the dance captain at the Music Tent last summer. She probably wants us back.”

  “Me, too?” Belle-Mère asked.

  I let that go by me and went to call Sally Ann. It was a New York number. I knew they stay up late in New York.

  It wasn’t for the Music Tent. It was for Saint Subber’s summer theater in New Jersey. She was going to be the choreographer there. She said it would be a full season of shows. No traveling to Milwaukee. They were going to do Carousel and Paint Your Wagon, and they were also going to do Brigadoon. That’s why she wanted Levoy and me, because we already knew the show. She thought she could get me the sword dance solo. One hundred and fifty dollars a week and a lot of work.

  I was pretty excited, but I asked her if there was maybe something for my mother. “What does your mother do?” she said.

  “Dance,” I said. “Sort of.”

  “What does your mother look like?” Sally Ann said.

  I appreciated that she didn’t ask how old she was. Belle-Mère was sitting in a nonchalant manner in the easy chair across the room, reading. But she wasn’t turning any of the pages of Dance Magazine.

  “Good,” I said.

  “Does your mother do anything else? Does she sing?”

  “She sews,” I said.

  “Good. Let me see what I can do. Saint has a costume department. Maybe we can get her in there. Auditions are next week. Can you be here? I’m sure you’re dancing even better than last summer. Zachary Solov is the choreographer. I’m the dance captain and his assistant. He’s the choreographer at the Met and I want him to see you. He’ll love you.”

  “The Met?”

  “The Metropolitan Opera,” she said.

  I thanked Sally Ann, got the details as to where the auditions were being held, hung up, and explained to Belle-Mère that we had to move to New York the next weekend. My high-school graduation was a farce anyway. All those silly noodles. They were all staying in Chicago. I was going to New York with Belle-Mère and Levoy. Levoy had to leave Igor the monkey behind. Which made me feel sad. I used to go over to Levoy’s and Igor had learned he could ride on my shoulder as long as he didn’t pee. Now he was going to the zoo to be with other monkeys just when he had learned to control his bladder.

  We took the Greyhound. With Edna McRae’s blessing. She said we must go immediately to Ballet Arts in Carnegie Hall and not miss any classes. We should try to get into Vladimiroff’s classes, or failing that, take class with Vera Nemchinova, the last of the Diaghilev ballerinas.

  “I think she drinks too much, but you’ll never notice,” Miss McRae said. “She did Les Biches for Diaghilev in one of the last seasons. Nijinska, Nijinsky’s sister, did the choreography. It was never performed in this country. She’s one of the last ballerinas trained in St. Petersburg. You’ll learn a lot from her.”

  Were we green. We got off the bus at the Forty-second Street terminal like refugees from the Ukraine. Someone in Chicago had mentioned the Chelsea Hotel, so we went there. In a taxi. We never took taxis in Chicago.

  This was long before Andy Warhol, but the Chelsea was just as bad then. A collapsing red-brick ruin with Virgil Thomson somewhere upstairs and alcoholics everywhere else.

  I called Sally Ann. Auditions were Tuesday.

  Sixteenth Street

  Our apartment. It seems impossible to think of now: four rooms for twenty-five dollars a month. The address was 248 West Sixteenth Street. One of a short row of ruined store-fronted tenements on a street with some cared-for buildings but largely pretty ruined itself. It was mostly Hispanic. I think I could safely say it was the worst block in Chelsea. Our neighborhood was called Chelsea. To this day, Chelsea has resisted being upgraded to the level of its name.

  Our street even had the worst whore. Other streets had slim, tight-assed Hispanic girls. Girls with a certain tautness and chic, something like racehorses jockeying for position at the post. But our whore was fat, slovenly, and not even Hispanic. She used to stand with one foot on our lower step, her elbow leaning on the iron stair-railing, watching the short dark men who walked by. Occasionally, she threw back a wave of greasy unwashed hair. A large rhinestone bracelet was her only gesture towards beautification. She turned her back on our building. There was no business there. Too poor.

  They all said it, our dancer friends who came to visit. “Your whore, she’s really bad.” We were ashamed and longed to have one of those flighty little Spanish fillies patrolling our block. But no such luck. The best we could do was Tony Perkins out cruising once in a while.

  Our building was filthy. Garbage was strewn in the halls. Urine stained the stairs and its smell floated in the air. Children ran down the stairs peeing. The contest, it seemed, was to see who, starting from the top floor, could reach the front door without running out of urine.

  All three of us carried a candle and matches in our dance bags, as the lights were often out when we got home and the stairways were pitch black. We were more afraid of stumbling than being mugged, though muggings weren’t out of the question. Breaking and entering was more the style of our building, and it was usually our neighbors who broke and entered each other. Why wander far from home when it’s all right here under your nose? To put it mildly.

  Later we also took to carrying a brick in our dance bags, too–to fend off unwanted advances as we came down the street. It was some neighborhood.

  The apartment itself? Someone we met at a rental agency put us onto it. Belle-Mère hesitated in front of the building; the worn stone, the light scattering of lettuce leaves, cigarette wrappers, and scraps of paper down the steps and onto the street daunted her, I suppose. The windows looked as if people had spit on them to clean them. “Twenty-five dollars a month,” she said. We went in and up to the third-floor front on the right. We opened the door with the key the agency had given us.

  It was a railroad flat. The first room was the kitchen. It had a small iron cook stove. A bathtub with an enameled lid in two liftable sections. A sink. Built-in cupboards, and two straight-backed wooden chairs. It was the sort of place where Little Annie Rooney would have lived when she was down on her luck and on the run from Mrs. Meanie.

  The next room was smaller, with a small mirror hanging on the wall by the window. (I still have that mirror.) There was a second small room with a window on the air shaft and then a rather large front room.


  “We could make this into a kind of practice room,” Belle-Mère said.

  “And then we wouldn’t have to furnish it,” Levoy said, looking out the window.

  There was a fireplace on the wall that had been sealed up with a small gas heater in front of it. It never worked, though we often tried it.

  “There’s no toilet,” I said.

  “It’s in the hall, I think. For everyone to use,” Belle-Mère said.

  She sounded so hesitant I had to say, “This is fun. It’s like going back in time.”

  So we took it. We painted it all white and furnished it from the Salvation Army. It was our home.

  One little room in the middle was Belle-Mère’s, with a single bed in it. We bought a cheap printed Indian throw for the bed. With a little end table and a lamp, both painted black. It was our sitting room, too.

  In the next little room, we had a double Salvation Army bed where Levoy and I slept. Our sex life was definitely over, so I didn’t have to worry that Belle-Mère would wake in the night to slurping sounds.

  We put up a dance barre across the front wall in the big room, crossing the windows. We rarely used it except to hang wet dance clothes on it. That room was always too cold to be used in the winter, and in warmer weather, our Puerto Rican neighbors had frantic, noisy dancing parties that penetrated that room so it was uninhabitable. There was no rest or relief in that room, but having it empty and luminous at the end of the other rooms kept us from feeling confined.

  The odor of that building was unique, quite separate from the urine smells in the hallways. From the endless cooking in our neighbors’ kitchens there was a sweetish, sour, sickening kind of smell. A smell of cooking vegetables, but I never knew which vegetables. Some mixture of the small, tortured tubers I saw outside the Puerto Rican stores in the neighborhood. Maybe with a bit of goat mixed in. Like body odor. Or dried vomit. Perhaps there was dried vomit in the halls that mixed with it. Does it sound disgusting? It was, but it didn’t really disgust me.

  It didn’t disgust any of us. We were focused on our dance careers. We were soon off to Saint Subber’s Lambertville Music Tent anyway and a summer much like the previous one.

  The auditions were easy. Zachary Solov’s choreography was a step forward from our season in Chicago and Milwaukee, but show business is show business: kick, step, twirl, smile. I saw Sally Ann point me out to Mr. Solov. He had curly hair, a turned-up nose, and a big grin. That merry Russian look. He tried to be a temperamental star but he was really just a good egg.

  Belle-Mère was sent way up Eighth Avenue somewhere to help the costumers with fittings. Everything that could be was rented from Brooks Costumes. (I didn’t even know there was a Brooks Brothers, so I never confused the two.) A lot of new costumes were being made for The King and I, which had been added to the repertoire at the last minute, since all the good costumes had already been rented out.

  I suppose all summer stock is the same thing. First, all the other male dancers check you out, to see if you’re fuckable or competition. The ones in the mood sleep with each other and get it out of the way early in the season. Then the singers make their moves. And the stars pass through, picking and choosing bed partners here and there, like a quick shopping trip to the supermarket: “Oh, this looks good … and this … and this …. Let’s get the hell out of here.” And male and female, they’d be gone to another summer theater and another company.

  Then there were the shoals of people in the company management and from the audiences and from the neighborhood of country homes in Bucks County and New Jersey that surrounded the theater. The dancers were something like a party of pioneers crossing the country while the Indians raided them. Except our Promised Land was autumn, when the season would be over.

  When you’re seventeen, I guess your self-concept is that you are supposed to capture someone else’s fancy. At least when you are a seventeen-year-old male dancer. It never occurred to me to select someone for myself. Levoy had selected me, and now I had deselected myself. Levoy did have good manners. He didn’t try to crawl over me in the night.

  Harry Is Left Alone

  She was too old to fuck. Levoy? He didn’t like women. Why was he fucking my mother? Why wasn’t he fucking me? Even though I didn’t want him to. It was a weird mix of being incredulous and jealous and not knowing of whom exactly.

  I started backing out of the room. I’ll just leave, I thought. They’ll never know I was here. Belle-Mère’s eyes popped open and looked directly into mine. She had the same “Am I hallucinating?” expression on her face I’m sure I had on mine. Then she did try to get out from under Levoy. He only pumped harder, misunderstanding what she was doing. He thought it was passion. I ran back through the kitchen and into the hall. I slammed the door hard behind me so they could hear it.

  I went down and sat on the front steps, my dance bag between my feet. I felt sort of shaky. Surprising, surprising things had just happened.

  I heard someone running down the stairs and into the front hall. I turned. Belle-Mère. For someone usually so scatty she was pretty composed.

  “Can you just forget about all this? It won’t happen again. It hasn’t happened very much.”

  I said, “I feel like a betrayed whore.” I had just been reading The Berlin Stories and had been pretty impressed with Sally Bowles.

  “Why ‘whore’?” my mother said. I didn’t answer. I decided not to tell her that I had been sleeping with Levoy, too. That would be all too much like Isherwood’s book.

  “Actually,” my mother said, “I was just trying to save Levoy from a life of perversion.”

  “Fat chance,” I said.

  “We can’t put all this behind us, I guess,” Mom said, and sat down beside me on the steps.

  I told her I couldn’t really imagine the three of us living cozily together in our cold-water flat anymore. I was thinking that every time one of us came home there would be the expectation that someone would be in bed with someone. Not my mother and me, of course, but you get the picture.

  I’d been so excited when I rushed in. There were going to be auditions for the opera ballet company next week. Levoy wasn’t going to audition. He was still studying at Carnegie Hall at Ballet Arts. As was Belle-Mère. They were suspicious of Cecchetti technique, which was taught at the opera school. The teachers at Ballet Arts said it took too long. So I had been studying at the opera school by myself. I hadn’t seen much of Zachary Solov, since he didn’t teach. But when I came out of class that day, he had been in the ballet school office and, seeing me, was very friendly. “Be sure you come to auditions, Harry, but don’t worry. I get to pick one of the three new boys we need. You are definitely my choice.” He smiled. Patted me on the back. Not on the ass, I noticed. So he was truly being friendly. I was so excited I didn’t stay for the second class I usually took. But rushed home. And made my discovery.

  I let myself in, went to my bedroom, and there they were. Not even under the covers. Like two naked praying mantises. Not until I saw their naked bodies, Levoy pressed down on my mother, did I realize how much they looked alike. You could hardly tell where one appendage left off and another one began.

  I immediately thought of that joke about the little girl asking her mother if people went to heaven feet first. Her mother said, “No, darling, why?” The child replied that she had just passed the maid’s room and the maid was lying on her back with her legs in the air shouting, “Oh, God, I’m coming.” And the little girl added, “And she would have gone, too, if Daddy hadn’t been holding her down.”

  It did look like Levoy was holding my mother down while she was trying to escape from under him. But of course she wasn’t.

  What a lot of emotions. My mother. Mothers don’t fuck.

  So the good news and the bad news all came on one day. I was going to go into the Met ballet company and my mother and best friend were going to move out. And set up housekeeping together.

  They did just that. Right next door, in the building just to
the west of ours. Another cold-water flat like ours was available on the fifth floor and they moved there. Over the roof. It was shorter to go upstairs in our building, cross the tarpaper roof, and go down one flight to their new place. I was never in it and I didn’t help them move. I sat on the front steps and as the sun was setting went upstairs to my apartment. My apartment which was now all mine. My mother had taken my lover and departed, which was certainly the most melodramatic way to put it.

  They didn’t stay there very long. They found a bigger place up on Twenty-second Street near Ninth Avenue. My mother would call from time to time, so I learned that they had needed a third roommate and had invited Afro Afrodisian to come live with them. Afro took her/his Male Lily Pons act down to the Club 84 and went right to work.

  It was kind of strange being in my own apartment. Taking out the laundry. Ironing (very occasionally). Shopping for food. Cooking (also very occasionally). Fortunately for me, I was so busy at the opera that I was hardly ever at home except to sleep. And not always alone. But more of that later.

  Dancing with the Danish Ballet

  Stupid me. I didn’t even know there was a Danish Ballet. I’d heard of the godlike Erik Bruhn and I guess I knew he’d come from somewhere over the sea, but it never dawned on me there was a whole company full of godlike men like that. But there was.

  It was in the fall. I’d been accepted at the Met for their ballet company and had gone in to sign my contract and there was a hullabaloo of dancers going in the stage door when I arrived. The Danish Ballet had just arrived from Copenhagen and were in rehearsal for their season at the Opera, which would finish just as the opera season began. A man at the door said, “You here to audition for the extra dancers?”

  “Do we get paid?” I said.

  “Peanuts,” he said.

  “Well, peanuts are peanuts,” I told him. “Where do I go?”

  I went where we always went: the rehearsal room on the fourth floor. A very cute, short, dark man was looking everyone over. Fredbjorn Bjornsen. Perky. With sparkling eyes and his dark hair combed straight back and glued down. Quite a cutie, indeed. He looked at me and I guess thought my blond hair made me look kind of Danish. “Could you stand over there?” he said in perfect English, gesturing to the corner down by the mirrors where a few other tallish and blondish boys and girls were standing.