by Andrew Binks
“So you’re a top?”
“I don’t know. I do like sex if that’s what you want to know.”
“I can’t believe, with an ass like that, you’ve never been fucked.”
“Never had the opportunity.”
“It’s an amazing feeling.”
“For you?”
“For you.”
He lunged. You could forgive kissing, but I bit through the lip lock. “I have to go.”
“You’re joking.”
“I wish I was. I can’t do this tonight.”
“You can stay. We don’t have to have sex, or I can come over, give you some company. We could cuddle.”
“No. I need to sleep. I’m just… I can’t.”
“More wine?”
“No, really. I better go. To be honest, I’ve only slept with about seven people—and only sort of.”
“In your whole life?”
“It’s been kind of a no man’s land down there. I think it had to do with a couple of undescended balls and a hernia.”
“Well, everything looks well descended now. Jeez, you’re practically a virgin. I’ve been with upwards of two thousand. Maybe only seven today…”
“Sex, never mind fucking, is one of the most pleasurable experiences for a man, any man.” And with this comment I was flooded with a mixture of humiliation and what I knew to be a fear of not being good enough.
“You sound pretty committed to the cause.” Kent was obviously a sexual athlete. I didn’t just want to be number two thousand and one.
“You’re saving yourself for someone in Montreal?”
“You might say I’m old-fashioned.”
“Sex and love go hand in hand for someone like you.”
“And someone like me is what?”
“You’re a romantic. You’re hopeful. You’re a dreamer or you wouldn’t be here. I told you I know dancers, and I’d say you have taken a hefty risk.”
“Sex and love.”
“That’s why you’re here. Don’t worry. You’ll find both. Together. At the same time.”
“It’s not like I grew up in a hotbed of sexual activity.”
“You probably just had no idea. What’s the worst that could happen?”
I thought of our last tour when some guy in Thunder Bay asked if I wanted to go on a date. He said, “Look I don’t want to marry you I just asked you for a date.” I realized after that, that the other six guys weren’t like me. They weren’t looking for love.
“I guess I’m hung up on the love part.”
“Maybe you should fall in love a little more often.”
“With you?”
“Not with me. God. Just, you know, loosen up. You’re a dancer. There are things you have to cultivate—your instincts for one, an appreciation and knowledge of good wine for another. Sex, too.”
“Hah.”
“Sex is an incredible gift. Don’t waste it on some moral high ground. You can eat spaghetti alone, which is fine, or you can share it with a friend or even a stranger or with someone you love, slathered with sauce and good, fresh parmesan. Each time it’s unique and good in its own way. Tell me this is bland.”
“This is definitely spaghetti with sauce.”
“God you’re a baby, but you like me don’t you?”
“Daniel tried to…”
“Daniel? Daniel? That’s who you’re saving yourself for?”
“Shit.”
“Don’t worry. Unfortunately the world’s full of Daniels. If that’s what you’re pining, I mean waiting for, good luck. I’ve had a few.”
“A few thousand.”
“No, you count those types on one hand. You’ll get over him—I guess you know he liked fucking, by the way.”
“Is that what you did?”
“Not really. We are both after the same kind of thing. Anyway you, my dear, have some growing up to do. I’ve always thought dancers were a little on the thick side.” Kent’s tone had changed. I had offended him. “They can’t really help it with the protected lives they lead. One thing you should know, though, is that a guy like Daniel will never save himself for another man.”
“We’ll see.”
“You better start enjoying sex for what it is. Love will happen. I fall in love ten times a day.” Kent slowly got up, went to the window.
I had spoiled the evening by talking too much, by being too much of an innocent—or at least presenting myself that way.
Certain images come back to me, as easily as torn bits of folded paper with fading phone numbers, or a silken business card I keep pulling out of a wallet, too worn to use, but reminding me of something. You know exactly where it is if you need it. It might show up unannounced or it might be lost forever.
I see a child running naked into the street. The street is in front of me because I am that child. Afraid of what goes on inside—of me. Inside, I’m broken. Afraid of pained urine, an aching abdomen. Afraid I was broken like my mother. To make it better she took me for tea at Eaton’s. I was always well enough for tea. She dressed me in patent leather shoes, a little black velvet cap and a tweed coat. I always sat on the banquette and she faced me so she could look past her teacup and over my head to watch the reflections of those who came and went. I asked her once if I could have a brother or sister. I thought it was that easy. Like asking Santa for presents. She squeezed my hand, looked at me and smiled. I thought she was going to laugh, so I smiled, too, but she started to cry. “It’s not up to us.”
“Who then?”
“God. Sometimes God sees that people are so happy with one child that he sends more to another family. God will give us different gifts. You’ll see.”
That afternoon my mother surprised me. After tea she said we should get some groceries but she took me to my first movie. We sat in the theatre and watched The King and I, my mother’s second-favourite movie after The Red Shoes (which, she said, I was too young for) and my first homoerotic experience: Yul Brenner dancing barefoot, with a woman who looked like my mother.
I figured that since she couldn’t have children, she got different gifts. God had sent her a black mink coat and a black convertible Pontiac Parisienne, no station wagon for her, not like the other mothers. And the rooms in our home stayed empty, the boys’ bathroom became the men’s cloakroom and the girls’ bathroom, the ladies’ powder room. And my room stayed my room. And I just wanted to play outdoors with brothers and sisters. Instead I wandered in the dry prairie heat, hoped no one would know I had a scar. Prayed for the broken part to go away, no matter what the cost. I knew she was broken, too, and that God’s wishes were as strange as Santa’s. All I prayed for was to not be like her, or worse, like him. I wanted to leave myself, like a prairie rattlesnake shimmies out of his skin.
Kent stood naked in the light. His body small, hard from the vertebrae under his skin to his tight ass to the veins under his calf muscles. “This has been such a good night,” he said. What was it that made me trust him? He moved the curtain aside and looked down on the street. “There’s a gay bar outside the gate, on the way to Lower Town,” he said. “If you’re ever looking for love, and Daniel doesn’t come through, it’s called Le Cirque—or you can pay me a visit.”
“I’m going to go back this weekend,” I said, “and stay with him.”
“Good luck. You can sleep here you know. You don’t need to try out your new mattress tonight.”
“No. I think I need to be alone. Thanks anyway.”
Later, when I was dressing, he squeezed some bills in my hand. “For the bus,” he said, “to Montreal.”
Back in my apartment, I lay on my new mattress. I stayed dressed to keep the chill away. I woke the next morning, having had one of my deepest sleeps in months, and got myself ready for the bus ride back to Montreal.
It wasn’t until I was on the
back of this bus, in a drooling dry-aired reverie, that certain things became a little more obvious. First, Kent must have thought I was a masochist. Second, I had arrived at a jobless, moneyless dead end.
Hugues had moved or was away. Phone numbers had been changed. I walked to the Old Port—walked past the jewellers where I had believed he was buying my engagement rock, and stopped and waited—as if a magic portal would open and I would be transported back to that day. I was a mess of instincts and fantasies. I wandered Montreal and ended up outside his place, waiting for him to answer the door. There was no “I know you’re up there.” I’d done that as a kid—tried to wrangle my way into someone’s tree fort.
I spent the rest of that night on a bench at the bus station while the winners in Montreal filled the clubs, and glistening cars and cabs left the rest of us to sleep on our broken dreams. I dreamt he came to the bus station, and we cuddled and ate croque monsieur and drank red wine out of a thermos. We even had sex. He left with no messages of how to meet, ever again. I woke with that familiar stickiness in my crotch and a stained zipper. As I tried to dry myself at 5:45 a.m. in the can some old guy wagged his dick at the urinal for me. There’s always someone around to make you feel wanted.
That morning, dirty, stained and tired I got the bus back to Quebec City; the ride took forever. There were some gigglers and partiers who had been up all night and were making the fun last as long as possible. Fatigue won out, for all of us, and the bus droned silently along the highway. I thought of my parents and wondered if they were thinking about me.
I dragged myself off the bus and up to the Old Town. As I walked up Sainte-Ursule I fought the urge to ring Kent’s bell. But he stepped out his door and draped his arm over my shoulder. “Welcome home.” Over café au lait and croissant, which he treated me to, he told me how he finally let the guy at Kresge’s suck him off for my mattress, and throughout the conversation, with the tact of someone consoling someone at a funeral, he had the decency not to ask me how Montreal went.
The last of my money went to the first month’s rent and security deposit. At the end of each day of bad dancing I wandered restaurant foyers and hotel lobbies looking for work. Wasn’t this a tourist town, for God’s sake? Employers weren’t impressed with my French, but hell, weren’t the tourists English? It didn’t matter; no business in Quebec City would hire a wasp with high school French. The slim and slimy maître d’ at the Chateau Frontenac curled his upper lip as if I had just shit in the foyer. (Believe me, no matter how quaint the lobby of a hotel or the dining room of a restaurant, you can be sure that the personnel office stinks of leftover food, cigarette smoke and butts older than rotting leftovers, and anything else dried up, crusted, forgotten, tossed over or snatched from the kitchen.) Meanwhile others brushed me off with a single wave of the hand, with no more effort than you would use for a housefly.
How would I survive in a fairy-tale town with a four-hundred-year-old wall around it, nursing a broken heart and a broken ego? One fucking Oui to a job could have changed my life. On the other hand, it might have meant that I would still be working at the Chateau Frontenac. I wanted another meal with Kent that night, just to be able to share my exasperation, but there was no answer at his door and the lights were off. I had a full set of cutlery at home, chairs and a table, and while I could have returned to my standby of pickles and spaghetti, I used my savings to buy a large bottle of red. I sat at the table and looked out the window—perhaps I’d see Kent come down the street.
I make my way to the ground floor of this white tower, hoping that, by some miracle, my clothes will still be waiting for me. I freeze when I hear a door open, hear voices, car keys jingling, and sigh when I hear it shut. I still curse those bastards and the doors slammed in my face; why the hell was it so hard to hire an Anglophone? In the Canadian public school system you may learn that there are two official languages but, mon ami, halting classroom French isn’t one of them.
My high school French teacher, Monsieur Laflamme, pointer in hand, prodded the language out of us. I sat in the second desk for an undetected crotch view. He was cute; a dark testosterone machine, coureurs-de-bois with the trimmed beard and big butt in hug-your-ass Hudson Bay Co. wool blends. Thick stubby fingers. Against the rules for him to teach Joual. You know: ouai instead of oui, Chez-K for K-mart, Chez Kreszh for Kresge’s, Pepsi for Coke, tabarnak for whatever, trou-de-cul for asshole, tapette for homo, et-cet-e-ra, et-cet-e-ra, et-cet-e-ra. I worshipped him—my study partner and I set elaborate costumed dialogues based on ballets. We draped the desks, wore costumes. None of it made sense. My speech centres were frozen but my brain was popping with inspiration. Laflamme stood back and watched open-mouthed as I haltingly played to him.
After I graduated, I heard that my study partner had made a different career choice: to dance at a bar downtown. Then he got a government job, and they paid him to study French full-time for two years so he could lick envelopes in our two official languages. Where is he now?
If you can afford it, red wine is good at a dead end, and it might be your only option. I was so sure Kent would wander up Sainte-Ursule that night but I woke, tumbling off of the chair.
Four
A dancer’s legs curve like a gentle “S” reaching from the base of the back, around and under the buttocks, the front of the thigh, through the knee and into the calf, folding then extending into a développé—presenting itself like a meal to be served—or a battement—the swinging pendulum from a body that is solid and unmoving. To plié, the muscles release, as if in agreement that—as supple and controlled as they must be—they will lower and then return you to the stature of a mythical god. To sauté, there is an explosive power, rock solid if trained properly, that slingshots the dancer into a precise trajectory, the sum of body, mind and instinct, as the knee recoils and summons all available physical elements to order. The thigh, the calf, each joint, each tendon, each tissue rallies to elevate the privileged being to a place of otherworldly experience and expression, before becoming earthbound once more.
Kent’s French was really no better than mine and yet he had found a job. But a little voice in the back of my mind told me that he had that rare gift called charm. My famous blank stare revealed my lack of charm and enthusiasm at the prospect of more restaurant schlepping. I was transparent. Kent had met a couple that found his accent quaint and they admired his effort to speak, no matter how badly. He ended up waiting tables in their small restaurant. It was a hole in the wall where the furnishings hadn’t changed in four hundred years and the food was “exquisite,” according to him. I prayed his luck might rub off on me.
I could never have walked into a gig like that, let alone find it. And though there is something to be said for dedication and perseverance, the chances of getting work do not increase per miles searched.
Late Friday afternoon, I sat on my floor beside a phone that had forgotten how to ring, leafing through Le Soleil, making no money by the hour. The last dollars had been spent to and from Montreal, and the last spare change spent on a café au lait to weep into, leaving a jar full of pennies standing between me and a beer in which to drown my final sorrows. My father had made it clear after I dropped out of pre-med that there was no road home, and though we had reconciled when I proved that I could do it, and proved him wrong—I’d made it clear I would never again need their help—there was no way now to eat crow and phone home for a loan. If they knew what I had done to pummel my career they would be dumbfounded, and rightly so.
A newspaper ad for a nightclub, showing leggy feathery girls, à la Las Vegas revue, surrounding a guy who had way too much hair on his head, caught my eye, and I considered my chances of serving drinks there. Maybe they attracted tourists, and needed an English-speaking waiter.
What the hell had gotten into me? It was a cabaret. They dance there. Dance. I dance. Was I blind? They advertised this place with showgirls in silver sequined g-strings, feathers shooting out the
tops of their heads, a big-haired guy in the front with two more hot guys in the back in glove-tight pants. It all looked so polished, so French, so cosmopolitan, so Folies Bergères, so alluring, so damn exotic for this boy from Strathcona, Edmonton. It would be a job related to my chosen profession, mon métier. I had the same skill set for this job. And you don’t have to know how to conjugate verbs to dance in faux Moulin Rouge—you don’t even have to speak. Dance, like music, is the international language, spanning borders, cultures and millennia. If some woman is waggling her tail feathers in your face, I think we know what she’s trying to say (get me outta here and get me some money). No question, I wouldn’t need a translator.
I called the club and repeated the two most important words: travail and danseur. Above a noisy background and a throbbing bass, someone shouted in French and told me to call Agence en Vedette. There was more incomprehensible squaggling. Some guy shouted the phone number at me, which I didn’t understand, and then I let my crossed fingers do the walking through the yellow pages.
I paid a visit on Friday to the Agence, after class. It was on my route home. At the agency, a woman, Martine, with cigarette-rotted teeth and hair that had had way too much attention and looked similar to a rusty, teased bird’s nest, chattered in a smoky, cluttered office with two tough guys. She waved me in and stood up behind her desk, revealing most of herself in a tight leather vest and leather miniskirt.
“Je cherche travail comme danseur,” I ventured.
She babbled something back at me that was very quick and incomprehensible, but for some reason we knew we were speaking the same language. I had a product that she seemed to be in need of, which was a far cry from the past few months of rejections. She smiled, too, and in spite of the bad teeth, it was endearing, confident and open. I couldn’t help feeling like the two guys she was entertaining were thugs, but for now she liked me, and all seemed to be well with them. From her desk she took a business card that shimmered red and gold 3-D and swirled depending on the angle you looked at it. On the back she scribbled the number and name of someone: Marcel Missoni. It seemed it was his show. He must have been the big-haired one I’d seen in the paper. She told me to give him a call on Monday.