Strip

by Andrew Binks

  Mother left the table, sat in the cool living room with her Vogue. My father spoke. “Why not dance in the summer and do school in the winter?” I admired his inartistic logic. He had tried to see this madness from my point of view.

  “A dancer can’t dance part-time.”

  “But you’re not a dancer. You have no idea what you’re in for.”

  “I know exactly.” My secrets had worked against me. Of course the idea seemed crazy. “I have been dancing now for years.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I am good. I’ve had good teachers…”

  “Behind our backs?”

  “It was all free. Lisa says I could dance professionally.”

  “Lisa?”

  “She danced with the Company. She knows.”

  “I thought this was just some crazy hobby. I won’t support you, you know. You can do it on your own.”

  “I will.”

  “I doubt you’ll make it past the audition, anyway, but if you want to waste the rest of your summer, go ahead.”

  My mother wept; I could hear the sniffing and nose-blowing coming from the living room. I wondered what it was. Did she want me to escape, or follow my dream? Did it strike a chord in her?

  I don’t recall much else except that he stamped and shouted his way through the house and then simply abandoned me, told me during those last days that I was a talentless dreamer. He said I’d be back and that I had never taken care of myself and had no idea what the real world was like.

  He was right. I had no idea how I would end up—all day long on foot, seven hours of dancing, lying about my work history to get another seven hours serving food at night, cleaning slop and filth at the Club Rococo on Portage, ashes and plates full of flu germs, fevers and sore throats. I served Scotch and Coke, a combination my parents would have sneered at. Waitered talentlessly at five different dumps: empty steakhouses, geriatric-crowded English tearooms, a dinner theatre of Hollywood has-beens and a trendy Jewish lox café where I couldn’t keep up. All this for a dream. But the dream had a price—poverty, being fired, losing the race, fatigue, sharing one cup of coffee and calling it a date. My tendons, knees and ankles crackled when I finally put my legs up.

  The perks along the way were: the hopes of a scholarship once the trial period was over; the leftovers the restaurants sent me home with; the clients’ intrigue at having a dancer serve them food; and the rare, “Well done, John,” after a perfect pirouette—music to this dancer’s ears.

  I justified sleeping on the floor by saying Baryshnikov had done the same thing. My desire to suffer for art was strong. This was the dream—to do something as simple as move my body to music. Just move. Colleagues, even the jealous ones, started saying I’d make it happen—out of all of them, I would be the one. Me and Leslie Browne in The Turning Point. That important. I was on scholarship just enough to remain poor, not destitute. They needed to break me, but maybe I was just too pliable to begin with, and after two years of gritting my teeth through assessments, Kharkov took a temporary shine to me and in a moment of weakness—when I was doing a particularly spot-on double saut de basques—he took me off the golden egg of scholarship and offered to put me on the payroll as an apprentice.

  I couldn’t share the joy; peers were now officially jealous and parents silent. And from the corps de ballet I watched and learned La Bayadère, Paquita, Le Corsaire, Sleeping Beauty, Romeo and Juliet, Les Sylphides, Rodeo, The Nutcracker. I rode the Company buses, planes, blizzards and tornados from Minneapolis to New Orleans, from Seattle to Atlanta, hoping that someone would injure themselves. But it was there on the stage in my hometown I finally appreciated that my dream had come true. I was on the very stage where Nureyev and Fonteyn had danced.

  My doubtful parents appeared when the circus came to town. But still, they needed to be convinced. And I had to please someone other than myself. It was bittersweet, not being able to say, I told you so. Knowing they were in the audience made me swell with pride, but I wondered if they knew how hard it had been for me to get there. I desperately wanted them to see how good I was—what a different person I was. How all they had planned for me was so much less than all that I was at that moment, revolving onstage, leaping, flying to Agnes de Mille’s steps and Aaron Copeland’s music. During curtain call I tried to look for them in the audience. Surely they saw how happy I was, and how good I was at something I loved. I hoped they saw my talent. My mother had seen so much dance she must have known the good from the not so good.

  We went to Hy’s Steakhouse that night, our regular place for birthdays, graduations and prime Alberta beef—dark enough to recede into shadows when you’d had enough of anyone’s company. My mother reached across the table and held my hand. I think it meant she was proud. We chatted quietly about the neighbours, the neighbours’ kids, their cars, renovations, scandals. For a moment I felt I was being treated as an adult, with a career and a life, until I realized we were talking about everything but my accomplishments and my short life in the ballet studio.

  On our drive home, my father did his best to act sober after three double ryes. “You’ve done us proud,” he said. “I knew whatever you tried you would be successful, that was never a question.” He still managed to get his point across. I slept in my room in the basement that night.

  It boiled down to years of pain, victory and vindication in the Company’s main rehearsal studio, where posters of the Company’s pioneers looked down on me. Two years of intensive learning, following, copying, mimicking, forming, graduating, understudying and finally performing. Two more years hoping to move out of the corps, until the offer of a second soloist contract, and then Montreal, which clobbered me.

  When I woke at Marcel’s the next morning, the impact of the distance I had strayed hit me. In that luxurious Sainte-Foy penthouse, after bubble-bathing in the boys’ tub and leaving an oily ring of tanned sloughed skin in their Jacuzzi, I looked out at the white rooftops to the frozen St. Lawrence and sipped un bol de café au lait. I had to believe that this alone wasn’t what I honestly aspired to.

  The boys drove me downtown, back along the same route I took to Madame’s studio. I doubted there would be anyone there today. Madame’s crap car wouldn’t have made it through that snow. At last I could take a legitimate snow day and not feel guilty about it. It was much more fabulous to cruise into the Old Town in Marcel’s mother’s cozy Mercedes than to slouch back after a day of Madame’s abuse, or be dropped off in the wee hours by Patrice and his New Yorker. It was odd, the silence in that car; we didn’t talk about anything important or anything at all. The snow raised the level of tension just enough to make us believe we had to concentrate on the ride. Marcel smiled when he dropped me off, winked too, then they both cruised on to a meeting at the Château Frontenac—something about us doing a hair show.

  My place was not a Sainte-Foy condo, but it was home and it was warm. Up I went, eager to tell Kent I had a night off, but he wasn’t there. I thought he’d have been waiting by the window, drinking coffee, thinking about sneaking a cigarette inside rather than hobbling around in the cold hallway.

  The weights sat by the wall. My sleeping mat lay still on the floor. Empty beer cases were stacked neatly. Kent’s bed was parked by the kitchen. Boxes sat unopened, bags untouched. Quietness was smothering the room, while snow fell silently outside the windows. Loneliness showed up more often now, and it showed up at times like this. I was starting to find comfort in company and especially in Kent’s company. Where the hell was he? He was in no shape to be out. I flopped onto my mat and for the first time in ages my back relaxed. The deep sleep on Marcel’s sofa and a week of lying on the warm sand had softened me up.

  Why had I turned away from the easy life? If I’d listened to my father, I could be cozy in a university residence right now with the promise of a couple of years more education before the guarantee of transferring—feet never touching t
he ground—to a secure life that rewarded its devotees with endless distractions: vacations, cars, sound systems and alcoholic downtime. Or if I had been really clever, I would have figured a way into that Sainte-Foy penthouse, no matter what.

  The blanket of quiet had turned the Old Town into a ghost town and my heart leapt when the buzzer went. But the even thudding up the stairs was too heavy to be Kent’s, and I opened the door to a bundled Bertrand. He’d taken the early ferry from Lévis and since there was no class, he decided to pay a visit.

  “Je peux vous offrir un boisson?”

  “Bière?”

  “Le matin?”

  “Comme tu veux.”

  Beer before nine—he had come over to the dark side—meanwhile I made some tea.

  “’ow are you?”

  “Fine. Your English is better.”

  “Louise.”

  I gathered that meant she was teaching him. We hadn’t actually spoken much for the last couple of months. All I’d done was lift him, and almost crush a few vertebrae in the process.

  “Chantal, Maryse no more dance. Is finished.”

  “Pourquoi?”

  He laughed out loud and a big smile came across his face like I had never seen. “You,” he said. “You burlesque. You said Madame and Jean-Marc…”

  “Ah.”

  “Louise. Me. Maybe we will go. I am sorry for that. I bring Louise to tell you about this.” He swigged his beer. “I go to see Louise now.” At least he had something good to do instead of class this morning, I thought as I watched him disappear down Sainte-Ursule into the blowing snow.

  The phone rang, which it rarely did since Kent had moved in, and it was one of the bankers from Toronto. “We’re coming down for Carnival. Is the offer still open? It’s just for a night or two.”

  “Sure, just call before you get here. How many?”

  “About five.” Simple as that.

  By the afternoon, the blowing had settled and left the Old Town looking like an overgrown Pavlova—not the dancer, the dessert; lots of stiff peaks of meringue with me as the fruit centre. I had some time to myself in my place and I took it as a chance to leaf through Kent’s porn, mixed in with his New Yorkers, Saturday Nights and L’actualité. Kent liked to read, and to look at naughty pictures. It was funny to look at these guys, from the sublime (posed and beyond perfection) to the ridiculous (not posed, bad lighting, bad skin and pretty unflattering). I was a little bemused; Kent had set the bar way too high in terms of sexual gratification.

  Bichon and Sugar came by, hesitantly clumping up the stairs. I was sure it was a couple of drunks. I opened the door to pseudo-drag—though if you saw them you would think there go two lovely, tall women—and we all headed out into the winter wonderland. We rendezvoused with Marcel and François after their meeting with the hair show people, and drank champagne at the Clarendon. There was some levity, and for a moment I felt like I could have a little community here, and some security. From there we split up, and the girls and I stumbled into the snow, giggling and tipsy. In a consignment store in some ancient cellar they convinced me to buy a used rat sauvage fur coat for three hundred dollars, a good week’s tips. The girls lived like stars and spent that way, too.

  “Marcel hates me,” I said. “Ever since I got back from down south, he’s had a big goddamned hate on for me.”

  “Sweetie pie, you are teen beat-me-off property,” Bichon started in her rocky French Canadian. “No one could possibly ’ate you—more than I do, anyway. God, I ’ate you. You’re so cute.” She hollered, “I ’ate him!”

  “You ate him?” said Sugar.

  “No I ’ate ’im,” said Bichon.

  “Did you mean dat you did eat ’im. Dat’s what I want to know.”

  “Oh shaddup, you big old bitch.”

  “You bitch in stitches.”

  “More like d’ opposite,” Sugar said. “I think Marcel ’as da ’ots for you.”

  “He’s in love with me?”

  “Not love for Christ sake. Did I say love? Tabarnak.” We all tittered at the same time because it sounded so damn stupid. Although, it wouldn’t have been that bad. I could still carve out a comfortable, if dull, life in that penthouse. The mom would have to go, and François would have to stay. “There’s something you should know,” Sugar went on.

  “François knows about the audition?” I said.

  “What audition? What the ’ell are you talking about now? I’m not so sure I like you no more.”

  “Nothing. Go on. What were you saying?”

  “Louis told Marcel it’s curtains for certain. Marcel says its da Mafia want to run the place, dey say too many dancers getting in da way—not enough t and a. ’e’s pissed off. That’s why we’re here—we came as a favour. Wanted to help him go out wit’ a bang. ’e’s always been so good to us.”

  “You’re doing him a favour? But you just said tits and ass.”

  “Is this not an ass, you twat? Anyway, ’e’s always been good to us. ’e’s always kept us working, between our Montreal gigs.”

  “Why the silent treatment?”

  “He didn’t want to hurt you. He likes you. We all do. ’e’s confused.”

  “Merci. Je vous aime aussi.”

  Bichon turned to Sugar and wagged his finger. “I told you ’e speaks French. Now he knows all da shit we said about ’im.”

  “Marcel is sad?”

  “’e knows you won’t stay. So yeah, I guess he likes ’aving you around.”

  And that night, after our run-through, and before I put on my eyeliner, our cozy life went sequined-pasties-on-your-nipples up. Marcel, his eyes glistening, told us, “This will be it. Enjoy your last few weeks, it’s all we’ve got. From now on, it’s strippers, les étoiles and Patrice. Maybe we should have applied for a Canada Council grant.” But no one laughed. Meanwhile the rest of the girls—the strippers—kept raking it in and the club paid us less than a round of drinks, fifty bucks a night, to do our three shows.

  So that was it. I suppose I wasn’t going to carve out an existence as a bad stripper in an obscure part of an obscure city. And I wasn’t going to strip in Montreal, where I’d already made enough of a fool of myself. What a laugh. I could see Daniel’s brunch buddies showing up for a freebie. Anyway I could now say Daniel was an asshole, out loud too, if I had to think of him at all. I wasn’t going to go back to Montreal to dance either, in crappy shape, and as everyone in the Company said, the Conservatoire was a joke, only made great by its dancers, most of whom had gotten their start with other companies. Their company promised what their training program couldn’t deliver.

  So, now that both my technique and my bank account sucked badly enough that I wasn’t in any shape for a fresh start, with stripper muscles in my chest and shoulders, Madame’s contribution to my thunder thighs, a new centre of gravity somewhere between the moon and Uranus, and a lower back tough as an overdone pot roast, and the rest of me wondering which end was up, was I no longer a real dancer?

  Go back to university? Why was I so stubborn about doing what I wanted to do? I just knew that I couldn’t sit still in a lecture hall, alive from the neck up, knowing that my whole body had become such a large part of my life. I would be betraying something that on some level I knew I could still be good at.

  Follow Brittany in her Cadillac? Start doing the circuit? Find her ex? Give him back his outfit? Was a legit dancing career entirely over? Time to take steroids and hit the gym daily? Hope my nuts didn’t shrink and that I would bulk up? Dumb down? Be a fitness model? A hooker? Pose in porn out in California? Take the money and run? The world was no longer the oyster I wanted it to be.

  Kent was still awake when I got home and I was surprised at how happy I was to smell relatively fresh smoke in the hallway. He reclined on a stack of pillows, on his bed. “Where the hell have you been?”

  “Did you
miss me?”

  “You’re in no condition to do whatever it was you were doing. You’re practically an invalid. The show is ending, by the way.”

  “Which one?”

  “The one between my legs.”

  Kent clambered out of bed and hobbled to the fridge. “I need the exercise,” he said. He opened beers for the two of us. We sat on the bed. “You know, you’re young, but you’re not that young.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “You should be happy that the decision was made that easily. Time to change gears.”

  “I know, but it doesn’t seem to matter anymore.”

  “So, where’s the dream at?”

  “The dream?”

  “To be a dancer. You had me convinced that was the master plan.”

  “I don’t know. I’m scattered. I’m high one minute and in the depths of it all the next. It’s cotton candy and anything you want, against drill sergeants and riding crops.”

  “Well, what started it all?”

  “Dance?”

  “Dance.”

  “Just plain old love for everything: the beauty, the aesthetic, the bodies, the art form—the feeling mostly—the music. Have you ever listened to Chopin’s nocturnes or a bit of Debussy or Ravel? I mean, how can a body not respond? It’s organic. It feels so good. It still can, I know that.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  “Well it is reassuring that it’s not just Gloria Gaynor and Heart. So that’s encouraging.”

  “Who made you career monitor of Sainte-Ursule?”

  “Tell me, what it is you have to offer—as a dancer?”

  “Myself.”

  “Myself is vague.”

  “And I’m vague.”

  “Don’t feel sorry for yourself.”

  “Okay, you’re being tough, but I can take it. Let’s see. I have to offer my joy of doing it?”

  “Don’t look at me for an answer. I don’t know. It’s not a quiz. You just don’t sound convincing. Think about it.”