by Andrew Binks
“Harlem.”
“But—the Dance Theatre of Harlem?”
“And unless you can convince me as Verlaine…”
At that point Chantal ran out of the room in tears.
“Chantal! Christ!”
Louise giggled. “Chantal’s afraid of New York.”
“Maybe she’s afraid of herself,” I added.
I’d taken a wrong turn. I started doubting Madame, and once I lose trust, I am gone; that’s when my eyes go blank, I suppose. Slowly day by day, class by class, rehearsal after rehearsal, the thought crept over me that I had little to do but recover, get strong, get some cash and then get out of there.
The next day, I inquired about payday, with not much money to spare, and they laughed. We were on a break in the small kitchen off the classroom. As usual I was deaf to the Québécois rat-a-tatting going on around me. I had practised my question. “Et bien, quand est-ce que nous reçeverons nos salaire?”
“Didn’t Bertrand tell you? The classes are our payment,” said Maryse, in quite good English, which was a shock since she hadn’t spoken to me since we first met. She obviously took great joy in being able to deliver such bad news. I had had enough free classes to know this was not a bonus. In smaller places, men’s fees were always overlooked. Madame definitely owed us. Besides this, I started to see her innovative exercises as masochistic, designed to destroy line, over-build thighs, and make me strong, like Madame, but too tight. What had worked for her at the academy in Budapest wouldn’t work for me. My legs were becoming bulky and overly muscular. She was one of those teachers who could only work from the perspective of their own body type, and although her strength had made her an anomaly and a legend, it hadn’t made her a very good teacher. Her reputation was of no use to me. My pants were becoming tight on my thighs. I remember Kent, someone I was yet to meet, using the term thunder thighs. This turbulent honeymoon with Madame was over. It was worse than what I had left on the prairies.
Even though I was losing my line and my flexibility, I’d survive the misery she was dishing out. And I still wanted to prove myself before taking my final bow. This “fire walk” had happened with Kharkov and each one of the teachers in the Company’s school. You either got no correction, or you got picked on by all the teachers, all at once. In both instances your head would be spinning after a few weeks of the treatment. And now it was happening with her.
I couldn’t leave empty-handed, and without money. I also needed something—a role, a performance—for the resumé. I ruled out the idea that she might provide me with something good, a gem, a bit of conceited wisdom if possible, like most well-intentioned, yet fucked up, dance teachers I’d had. Perhaps the example of her strength and single-mindedness would be that gift. The way she taught made certain things more obvious: ballet was obviously unnatural and bad for the human form (unless, like Nijinsky or Daniel, you were born a freak of nature with legs and feet like a bird), not to mention it being invented by a mad French king who must have had some kind of strange foot-bondage fetish.
One night at her dinner table (an easy place to eat small portions after watching her snot-encrusted infants mash food through their angry little fists), over the last of some Hungarian wine, I mentioned that I would have to start looking for a job. She banged the dirty dishes into the sink and said, “You can stay here and pay me rent when you have it.” With the offer she wobbled, then pressed her body close and smiled.
It was time to go.
None of the other dancers spoke about money. They boarded with siblings who had also left the folks out in the wilds of northern Quebec, but to brave the city as government clerks and bank tellers and house painters. If any of the dancers did have a job, it was part-time for pin money to buy tights and shoes, not rent and food. Madame spoke English very well when she was angry: “These other dancers are spoiled brats. They don’t understand you need to work. How do you think I paid for my training in Budapest?” This she shouted in the studio for all to hear, exploiting my situation to put them all down, and for a moment Madame and I spoke the same angry language. She seemed excited at the idea of my life beyond the dance studio—as if her secure routine in the narrow world of ballet had become a bore. But it was all an act.
Right away I started looking for a place to live. I lost my patience; just being under the same roof ruined my sleep. The brat-and-baby noises started early and went late. Every noise started a disturbance in another part of the house, and all of it overlapped, stopped for a moment, and then started up again.
I lost my precious sleep. As well as needing sleep to recover physically, it was the only escape from my problems. In the meantime, Madame took another boarder, her cousin Milosz, a Hungarian cellist looking to move to Canada. Every day by the time we got home, the old guy had left the kitchen a mess: daily disasters included burned spaghetti, plate upon plate of crusted dried food and one of the kid’s plastic toys used as a coaster for the hot espresso pot, which adhered to the toy and in turn to the counter. She’d swear up a storm, which was interspersed with her fawning over Jean-Marc, then she’d scream at the baby, and cough from imminent lung cancer. She’d fly around the kitchen like Giselle gone mad: “Jean-Marc/ that bastard Milosz/ oh but Jean-Marc/ look what that fool Milosz has done/ Jean-Marc is so, so…/ goddammit, can you believe this idiot cellist?” All I knew was that I couldn’t dance tired, look for a job, find money and an apartment. I couldn’t even afford the dumps with pink walls, orange shag carpet and dusty macramé hangings covering the holes in the walls.
That night I lay in my room, the world of ugly apartments and the mayhem of Madame’s home on the other side of the door. I stared at the ceiling thinking that maybe Romeo and Juliet in Montreal had been my swan song and the best I would ever dance. I had stepped out at the wrong time entirely. These dancers in Quebec had dreams and futures different from mine. Madame had a home, albeit in a hurricane zone. With kids, a husband and a ballet school, she had much to fall back on. I had little, verging on nothing. I was living someone else’s plan. I had strayed so far from thinking I would be settling in with a beautiful man and dancing like a prince. I was in the wrong ballet, one for which I hadn’t learned the steps.
The next afternoon Bertrand stared me down. I’m not sure why, but it was too late to bother convincing me of anything. After, in the dressing room he approached me. “Now you fight. Il faut que Madame sache que tu es mieux que Jean-Marc. I saw at the Conservatoire. Mais avance, comme les Mongoliens.”
Bertrand saw me dance when I was in love. “Mongolians?”
“Magyars,” added Louise. “That’s what Madame said.”
I had no idea what they were talking about and it could very well have been lost in his translation or hers, but he persevered. “Mais, quel obstacle t’arrête?”
“Rien. Nothing is stopping me, but I can’t go back.”
“Ces chances-là n’arrivent qu’une fois.” A polite way of telling me this is my last chance.
I argued, “Vous etes fou! Madame aime Jean-Marc! Christ! Louise, tell him. Madame doesn’t like men like me. I don’t look at her the way she wants. I don’t give a shit about Jean-Marc, which bothers her even more. Explique-lui, s’il vous plait!”
I don’t believe in grace—maybe disgrace; I’ve never thought my useless prayers deserved to be answered over anyone else’s. However there is something to be said about finally knocking on the right door (after slamming my head repeatedly against the wrong one), and feeling slightly blessed, even if the blessings are small. After a lacklustre class with Madame (in which she attempted to distract us from the doubts that she was less than brilliant by spontaneously breaking into a series of fouettés, once again, and I started to see her as a fearful, insecure spoiled brat, unfulfilled and desperate for attention from six equally desperate dancers) I wandered up toward the Old Town, delaying the return to Madame’s bedlam of burned food and broken toys. I was em
pty of Daniel, dance, energy, inspiration and direction; and especially sick of Bertrand’s psychotic enthusiasm. My body was rebelling. My lower back, which had never been a problem, was locked up tight as if a metal corset were clamped around my torso, from all the lifting she had me do. Therefore, even if I had wanted to stoop so low, I could no longer hope to impress Madame in class. In the mornings, I walked like my grandfather in his last years, and stared at the ground until I became limber and warm. She had proven to me that I was not worthy, nor capable, of any roles of substance in her repertoire. I thought of that pathetic dance teacher in Montreal who used to beg for his job on his knees. I wanted to fall to my knees and beg, but my knees ached and my faith was questionable.
When I finally got to the Old Town I wandered up the cobblestone rue Sainte-Ursule—one of the first streets after the stone gate of Port St. Louis. Despite just a mild incline, my ass fought against each step. The street was four-hundred-year-old limestone storybook scenic. Windows with blinds half-drawn like droopy eyelids looked out onto the street, mindlessly watching. Maybe I could find some doorway or alcove among these eyes, where I could sit and have a good old-fashioned, self-indulgent cry.
In a café window, a bright orange local a louer sign caught my eye. Anything in the Old Town would be a fortune, but I needed to stand in a warm empty apartment for a few minutes and entertain my fantasies. Maybe the owner would offer me tea, and I would have a moment to chat with someone other than this tiny, nasty company of masochists. In the café, a guy in an ironed plaid shirt with the wholesomeness of a carpenter told me, “Deux-cent-quarante-cinq.” What had I lost in the translation that made this sound like two hundred and forty-five? Thousand? A day? A month? Was it the shed around back? Unheated? No running water? What could possibly cost two hundred and forty-five, when twice that amount got rust-and-avocado shag? He led me out of the café and stepped into the street, walked a few steps, then through another door and up some stairs leading above the café. The two rooms were huge: one with a yawning blocked fireplace, and the other with a small open kitchen in the corner by the window. Both had windows at least eight feet high, two looking over the café terrace in the back and two facing onto the street below.
“It was our office, but we move everyt’ing next door.”
I took a risk and let the landlord know, “Je suis danseur,” which either garners a little respect and intrigue, or reluctance. But he seemed unmoved, still pleasant. Either he took a liking to me or just wanted to live dangerously.
“Je suis Luc. Vous êtes bienvenue,” he said. He was my lucky Luc. He had to be because I didn’t tell him I was working for nothing and that my bank account was almost as empty as I was—enough for first month’s rent and groceries to get me to the weekend.
It had been so long since I had been in training as a student, and the memories of those days of scrimping seemed to want to vanish with my first real paycheque. Sure the scholarship came in very handy, but I still needed to eat and sleep. After three years of being a bad waiter by night (being fired from almost every eatery in Winnipeg) and a struggling dancer by day, you can bet that I jumped at that Company offer. But for those three years I learned how to be thrifty, and knew that plain spaghetti and a jar of dill pickles, mixed with whatever I could pilfer from whatever restaurant I happened to be working at, went the farthest on a dollar, and still left me with coffee money, which was a staple.
It was a deal. I was now free of the worst of Madame. The surroundings would help immensely. It was the difference between Prokofiev and Elgar, order and dissonance, Odette and Odile. I loved my little empty space. I could grasp the window frames and lean forward into the most painfully satisfying arabesques. I could dance around the space to my heart’s content. I could shove my feet under the radiators until I turned blue.
The first call on my new phone was to Daniel’s answering machine. After all, I couldn’t be that intimidating if I had moved all the way to Quebec and now had my own place. It was a short message, “Hi, it’s John, here’s my number. I’m in Quebec City,” in the best matter-of-fact-I-don’t-give-fuck voice I could muster. That’s what being in love with someone who, well, isn’t where you are emotionally, forces you to; it makes you a damn good actor. Was he out? Or still in New York? I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Then it was me I doubted. Did I sound blasé enough? Too blasé? My phone didn’t ring. Being my Pollyanna self, I thought it was broken and kept picking up the receiver to listen for the dial tone—until Friday night. I know this next bit couldn’t happen according to the laws of physics, but in retrospect, and according to the laws of dance, which often break any physical laws—demanding us to leap even after we have left the ground, for which, yes, we’ve all heard it, ad nauseam, Baryshnikov is famous: I leapt fifteen feet through the air, flying to answer the phone.
This next part did happen:
“My name is Kent. Daniel gave me your number.”
“How is he? Is he there? Did he get my message?”
“Message? Here? No. I’m in Quebec.”
“Is he all right? Is there some problem?”
“I think he’s fine. He called and gave me your number.”
“Is he still in New York?”
“He never mentioned New York.”
My head roared, my heart was beating so fast. Daniel knew where I was. He’d gotten my message. Was this his way of telling me he wanted to get together again? Was he testing the water? Was the next move up to me?
“What did he say?”
“Nothing, he just gave me your number. I barely know the guy.”
Barely know the guy? So not only did Daniel dump me, but he dumped me on someone he barely knew. Did he see me as some kind of pathetic charity case? Was I to be a consolation prize? Was this guy another version of me? “So?”
“Well let me give you my number,” said the voice named Kent.
“I don’t have a pen.” Was Kent some gesture to absolve Daniel of any guilt (which I doubt he felt)?
“What’s your address?” Kent persisted.
“I’m in the Old Town.”
“There are lots of streets in the Old Town.”
“Sainte-Ursule.”
“Above a café?”
“Café Latin.”
“The apartment that was for rent?”
“Yes.”
“I live next door. Hey, I bet you’re the one I saw on the street. You’re blond right?”
“Dirty blond. I moved in yesterday.”
“Nice butt.”
“Pardon?”
“And legs. But you’re a dancer, so it figures.”
How did they know each other, Kent and Daniel—and how did they know each other not that well? I had wondered this with everyone I’d met who was connected in any way to him, until it burned me deep down. How could they know him casually, without falling for him, like I had? How dare they not fall for him? Who could know Daniel like I did? Love him like I had? Did Daniel have a network of guys across entière monde? I was just plat du jour in Montreal. One long audition, to Daniel, and I didn’t make the final cut. So much for gut-rotting bitterness. Jealousy.
Daniel had reintroduced me to jealousy. It was something I had lived with every day since I had taken my dance career seriously, and then almost boiled over, in my last year, before being invited to dance with the Company. They played us off until we practically devoured each other with hatred—our saving grace was our collective hatred of nasty faculty head-trips. It was ass-kissing to get whomever I wanted—Miss Friesen—to do whatever I wanted: give me a private meeting with Kharkov to let him know how devoted I was to the Company, and that I would do whatever it took to get in (except sleep with his wife). It was what brought out the best and worst in dancers.
“What are the chances of two wasps living side by side in Old Quebec?” Kent said.
I forced my disheartened se
lf to sound interested. “Where are you from?”
“Toronto, mostly. Hey, I’ll be right over. We can do this in person.” He didn’t give me a chance to reply. A moment later I heard a door slam out on the street. His door. Then another slam. Mine. Then I heard him on the stairs.
When I opened the door, I saw a smallish figure in a white t-shirt and jeans, Levis, with an obvious bulge in his button crotch. Hopeful is the only word I can use to describe my first impression of him. He looked like he had been in the no-one-to-talk-to desert way too long. His eyes were sunken and searching. He wasn’t like Daniel at all. Daniel had hair. Daniel had perfect teeth. Daniel was taller. But this guy, Kent, was making up for it by his openness and his crooked, hopeful smile. His young old-man’s face. I imagined his better days had seen lots of sun, cigarettes and drinks. But now his deep eyes drooped, just a little, with a sparkle. Come to think of it, Daniel probably wouldn’t have liked that. Dancers live in fear of aging; it’s all they talk about. They live their lives in dog years. Yet they do everything to bring it on: chain smoke, starve themselves, dwell on their short-lived careers and say things like “I’m old.”
Kent had a small hard body. Daniel would have liked that. Kent definitely wasn’t a dancer. Daniel might have liked that. He stood at the door in nothing more than that worn white t-shirt and faded-in-the-right-spots blue jeans. “Come on in, you’re shivering.”
He stood close. A nervous energy radiated off him and my nipples hardened and the hair on my arms stood up in some kind of response.
“Henri’s at home, so I thought I’d come over.”
The smell of stale smoke was on his breath and his skin.
“Who’s Henri?”
“My roommate. He’s uptight about company.” Kent looked around the empty room. “Is this it? Where’s your stuff?”
“This is it.”
“I guess it didn’t take you long to move in. Luc take a liking to you?”
“Maybe I was looking a little desperate. I’ve seen so many dumps.”