Strip Page 5

  “Pas de tout, but people who never saw me dance have turned me into a legend. To be honest, I miss it desperately. Watching you do entrechat or tour jetés or anything eats me up inside. I was so much better.”

  “Will I ever be great?”

  “You shouldn’t have to ask such a question. Being a fine dancer is so much more than greatness will allow. To be great you need an ego, and you must be lacking a soul—like me.” He laughed at this, but we knew it had an element of truth. “It will be up to you to be fine, but not great.”

  That week, we met for meals and sex and I took open class at the Conservatoire. I never stayed over at Daniel’s again; he would come over to my place and then go home. We needed the time—a courtship, I told myself—to get to know each other.

  He came over late on Saturday night, a week into my new life, after attending a closed rehearsal. Daniel lay on the bed staring at the ceiling, his nose whistling, after another sweaty attempt to penetrate me, while I sat on the toilet telling myself the pain would lapse.

  “One week. It’s been over one week,” he said. “You’re afraid to let go. You will never be free as an artist or a dancer if you can’t let go. You will be nothing more than an uptight Anglo from the prairies.” Then he left.

  We were good with silences—connected enough to not need to speak. In spite of this little obstacle, I felt something was about to change with some kind of proposal. Then, with the little piece of polished rock he would give me, we would become the toast of the Montreal dance world. Our names, John and Daniel, would be on everyone’s lips. I would be his protegé. He would be my master.

  Sitting here on the stairs, even now, body as it is, bereft of tears, blood and sweat, it seems absurd to wonder how he saw me. What is a bad decision? What’s the difference between a bad decision and adventure, or a good decision and boredom? Do all decisions make themselves? I haven’t thought of him wistfully for months, almost a year. I haven’t pined. You don’t believe that? And I can’t even remember the last time I got one hundred percent sentimental over him and had a good old-fashioned wine-soaked wallow. The cornerstone of lust holds up those castles in the sky.

  It was after I bought Egyptian cotton sheets and pillowcases at Ogilvy’s, and the salesman made a fuss over the thread count, something I’d never heard of, that Daniel became scarce. He was busy coaching, and when I pressed him for a rendezvous, he stopped returning my calls.

  I’m no stalker, but love does strange things. I didn’t want to sit in our café alone, wondering if he’d drop by, staring at a bunch of other sallow-faced intense couples. I didn’t want to feel like my ass (the gluteus maximus part) was turning to putty either. I picked another café nearer to the Conservatoire, where he did most of his work, and drank endless refills of café au lait en bol and ate just one more croissante au beurre and listened to ballet brats complain about their bony knees or flat arches, and wondered just how much butter it would take to turn my obliques into love handles. I didn’t want to forget what I was: a dancer, not just someone in love. It was every part of my life. It was me. I couldn’t live without it. But it seemed the magic was slowly leaving my body.

  I looked for him at Eddie Toussaint, but years ago they had banned him from their studios for artistic differences. Les Ballets Jazz was on a Central American tour. I finally got up the courage to inquire to the tight-lipped receptionist at the Conservatoire. She told me he dropped by sometimes, but only to use the space. She thought maybe he’d gone to New York, on invitation or on an emergency. Was it a family emergency and he couldn’t get in touch with me before he left? Did he leave a message? Had there been some miscommunication? Was he too preoccupied to even talk to me? As Rachelle said, “If you believe that, you’ll buy this watch.”

  When I asked Hugues, again, if there had been a message, he said the same thing, “Pas de message,” imitating my harsh English accent. He was as helpful as his face was angelic. I knew he knew something, but he probably figured this maudit anglais didn’t deserve a decent answer. He seemed permanently secretive. He said there was no word, not even from a friend who fed Daniel’s cat. He had a cat?

  “I talked to someone who talked to someone else who said d’ey saw him, said d’ey t’ought ’e was back,” Hugues finally said.

  “He’s back?”

  “Didn’t you know he might have a job as a répétiteur in New York?” Hugues grinned. “You know him. ’e ’as lots of friends, you ’ave to share ’im, and you ’ave to enjoy him when ’e is around.” After that, Hugues didn’t speak English so well.

  Add to this foundering romance the fact that there seemed no plan of attack for my physique, and I lost my footing. I had avoided the Conservatoire long enough. I started taking drop-in classes, hoping it would eventually lead me to him and be noticed at the same time. I could wait no longer for some kind of dream of a mentorship with Daniel. I couldn’t dance in a bubble. I finally decided to audition for the Conservatoire, but no one took much notice, and one of their uptight répétiteurs had the gall to suggest I take a simpler class. I had gone from professional soloist, well second soloist, in the West to corps in the East. Dancers return to the basics occasionally, it does us good, so I took my training in hand and surrounded myself with summer students following a pounding drill by a Chanel No. 5–marinated, Gestapo torturess. The Conservatoire studios were legendary, but paid the price for their nastiness. Although their teachers had produced fine dancers, the best had gone off to New York and companies in Europe.

  “Your technique has been forced,” the torturess said. “You will ’ave to start over. You will ’ave to relearn.”

  Then another frustrated emaciated has-been picked up where the torturess left off, in a men’s class. Between pliés we did the usual sets of push-ups, with her on our back, chin-ups with her pulling down on our ankles, and pliés with each of us sitting on a partner’s shoulders, to make us solid. “Your plié is completely wrong.” She pinched my lower back with her claws. I can still feel it.

  The third blow came from a faded legend. Not a Daniel, but someone who owed his reputation to all of the years that had passed. The other dancers called him the “Sugar Plum Fairy” under their breath. He was an overgrown, over-the-hill, alcoholic boy whose shape changed between each binge and purge of booze and pizza, gravy-soaked frites and Frusen Glädjé, hold the waffle cone. He whined, “You just aren’t serious enough.”

  I’d heard about his definition of serious: he went down on his knees to keep his job. But all he did was pray and cry and beg. I refused to beg, but returning to the basics for a while wouldn’t hurt my technique. I had to trust what Daniel had said. So I ate less, drank more coffee, warmed up earlier, stayed later, took every class on the schedule. And I made sure to keep my appointment with Madame Ranoff, the artistic director, to make it clear what my plans were.

  Madame’s office was dark. The collected years of history crowded the atmosphere, robbed the air of oxygen, turned living beings to chalk. Madame looked as transparent as the ghosts in the photographs on her wall. Her old skin was waxworks smooth, her smile small, tight and forced. Every time she opened her mouth her dentures clicked. She had been making tough, do-or-die decisions for years to keep her dancers working. She was another who had danced with the Original Ballet Russes. And like the truly intimidating legends—Graham and Makarova—she had a rock-hard soul. Single-mindedness, time and obsession turned people like Madame Ranoff and the Sugar Plum Fairy into legends.

  I didn’t tell her I had cut my ties, or about my training in the West. I was a fool to think I could marry into the Montreal dance world. She must have known. They all must have thought I was an opportunist. When a dancer leaves a company, the news spreads like syphilis. And when a dancer takes up with the likes of a Daniel Tremaine there will be a price to pay. Besides, it had always been the West against the East. The West was viewed with disdain and mild curiosity, as was the East by the West
, perhaps with a little more envy. “You must start over,” she told me. “How long have you been dancing?” I thought she was being sarcastic or exaggerating but she meant every word as blankly and blandly as her lifeless face muttered it.

  “Almost six years, and I used to swim…” My voice trailed off. She couldn’t care less.

  “You should be better than this,” she said through a burgeoning fake smile.

  “But Madame, I was soloist, second soloist, with the Company.”

  “The Company,” she sighed. “They have a unique way of doing things. Not that I disagree, but they have their own set of laws.” She precisely applied condescending laughter to underscore her comment: “You must forget what you learned.”

  I was a specimen: the boy from the West who now had no technique, from the Company that had no standards. This boosted the Conservatoire’s collective ego. “I would like to audition for the Conservatoire.”

  “In due course.”

  Of course I hadn’t kissed one ass since taking class. And as far as they were concerned I was no more than some star’s arrogant bumboy. Tarnished goods. I had one disconnected connection. I had simply traded one set of lies for another. There were too many dancers in this city and not enough jobs.

  Forget my knees or forced turnout, my heart had become the pulled muscle. I could point to the pain the way I could point to tendonitis or a strained groin. How could a few weeks of simple self-indulgent wallowing for a questionable love-of-my-life do so much physical damage, when it had taken me almost eight years to become a dancer? Something left my body as quickly as it had appeared. My spirit perhaps. I was lead. I had lost my centre of gravity. My limbs pulled me off my axis and had become my enemies. I was shocked at myself, and my clumsy appendages.

  Booze helped. I drank in my room, and cried like Cleopatra into my Egyptian cotton pillowcases so Hugues wouldn’t hear. I went out, too. I had never been to a bona fide gay club or bar. It just wasn’t part of the discipline. There had been the odd outing with the corps to a questionable place called Tiffany’s in downtown Winnipeg but then only for a birthday. No one tried to burn up the disco floor with so much classical technique running through their veins, and so many critical eyes watching. Besides, you needed to be at least tipsy to do so, and booze had calories. (I’ll say it again, we are a boring lot.) It had always been bed by ten except on performance nights.

  I unpacked a t-shirt, and the cowboy jeans for house parties. I must have been determined to re-fire the engine, get the drive back, find someone, find Daniel (I felt like he was always just around the next corner), who could make me whole again. I left home at eleven that night, after three hours sleep. I found the club off an alley of another alley. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing there. Escaping the noise in my head and the heaviness in my heart? And every time someone started up a conversation I must have been pigeon-holed as that tight-assed Anglophone, or some American tourist looking for a real Frenchman. I couldn’t hear French or English. I was caught in a twilight zone of smoking men who weren’t interested in me, and whom I found unappealing. I skulked in the dark corners with my rum and Coke and dreamed of what I’d do with some guy dressed like a lumberjack, with hairy forearms the size of my thighs.

  No one had ever appreciated me the way Daniel had, and no one then in that bar seemed to find me attractive at all. I seemed to be disintegrating, like the elastic in over-washed tights. I kept my eyes peeled for his dark profile to appear somewhere in the crowd. It was only him who had made me feel desirable—lips, nose and all. How could I have felt so good? The more of my body he appreciated, the more of me there seemed to exist. As if my physical self was gradually coming into being for the first time. I’d only ever known myself from the inside out and he made me aware of the weight of me—my mass and the space I was taking up on the planet, and in his eyes. But love and Daniel were nowhere to be found.

  There goes my nose. Now I am bleeding from both ends. If someone comes into the stairwell I’ll tell them I’m rehearsing a scene from Julius Caesar. Why Daniel? Why thoughts like this now? Am I not pummelled enough? My mind is searching independently for a resolution and it wants to start there, back in Montreal. I assure you I am not expecting that handsome prince at the end of this bloodletting. I would rather die.

  In truth “he” was a kind of demented self-flattery for me, as in, How could someone so masculine and so commanding and so dashing, love someone so much less so (as I perceived myself to be)? That was it—Hey, everybody, look who loves me. I must be worthy.

  It was the kind of thought that kept me from doing a complete dying swan. I remember Kent once said maybe I really had been in love. He said that maybe I was being too hard on love and on myself. He said I should give love more of a chance. Give myself more of a chance at being human and knowing what it is love can do. But it’s still too soon to think about Kent; we’ve only just hit the concrete, and I’m still whimpering about Daniel. Kent, in his quiet, wise way, knew more about love than I ever will. He may have been right, but maybe I knew more about lust. For the truly hard-hearted, lust can paradoxically be safer; if beauty can be skin deep then lust can be a little deeper. But in those months, I found something that had only ever existed onstage—my ego.

  Since men didn’t seem to be swarming me like sylphs to a poet, my confidence dissipated proportionally. If I had pursued those strangers in the bar, they wouldn’t have liked what they found: a tired dancer with a tight ass. “What a waste,” they’d say. “You have such a nice ass.” Maybe it was evident. This was the new meaning of “rock bottom.”

  Pride kept me from admitting that all Daniel wanted was my supple ass, and who knows for how long? Our survival instinct keeps us from such thoughts. In my room I drank my savings while I stared at that limestone wall. Lost sleep. Daniel had told me once in the early stages that I was sentimental “in a good way,” spiritual too, and sensitive—meaning he believed he could pass judgement, meaning he was full of it, meaning I let him do so, meaning I was blinder than Alicia Alonso. Now I even recall on our last night in Hugues’ living room, draped over the sedan, he had told Hugues he didn’t really know where we were going. I pretended not to understand as I freely and stupidly blurted I was in love, in my Le Spectre de la Rose–tinted glasses.

  After diluting my pride with a gut-bloating six-pack and a few glasses of red wine, I made the call to Kharkov. Who knows? Maybe he’d think I could lure Daniel back to Winnipeg, and then he’d take me back no question.

  Kharkov would not take my call, of course, but gave very specific instructions to his secretary Miss Friesen, a severe and uptight balletomane who got into ballet politics and mind games like a dirty shirt, and whose name provided no end of amusement for us more vengeful types. I was ready to grovel. “Can’t I please speak with him?”

  “Kharkov wanted me to pass along his regrets. I don’t think it would make any difference. He has already signed on four very strong males—two from Texas and two of our apprentices. He has to start rehearsing them immediately for the coming season. I’m sorry.”

  Miss Freezin’ was still so full of it. She couldn’t have been happier to take my call. Kharkov would use it as an example to the Company as he had in the past. He’d gloat, then they’d gloat, thinking they had landed in the biggest pot of ballet honey around, but it just wasn’t the truth. The truth was that they had a job.

  I called Rachelle after finishing all the wine. Her voice grounded me. “Hello prodigal son. We miss you like stinkweed. You’re drunk. Are you with your hubby? Are you coming back?”

  “That’s optimistic.”

  “Which one?”

  “All of the above, although I am quite inebriated.”

  “A little game of hide and seek?”

  “Good news travels fast.”

  “Never mind. Your big plunge has caused a wave of self-doubt. Three have taken offers to dance in Atlanta. You prob
ably could have gone with them or negotiated something. And the empty spaces have all been filled in. It’s all up-and-comers and new blood. Speaking of blood, Gordon and I are getting a divorce. Do you want an invitation to the un-wedding?”

  “If I were married, we could have a double divorce.” It’s funny how the memory of replacing the receiver of a phone into its cradle lasts longer than the feeling left by the call. I have this long internal list of post–hang-up-the-phone feelings. Someone tells you they are sick, someone accepts an offer, someone says goodbye, maybe for the very last time. That moment after stamps itself forever onto your consciousness. It could be filled with silence, or a clock ticking in an empty room, or the swirl of life still continuing around you in a train station or an airport. The echoed ring from the receiver being slammed down. In this instance it was the sight of gob and tears that dripped from my face onto the floor, as I had a drunken weep. I was still on the same patch of floor the next morning, shivering, when Hugues took pity and actually brought me a café au lait and wrapped me in a comforter.

  September’s cold, clear blue skies shone over everything: the city, the mountain—forcing everyone to be happy about good weather for sleeping, and a fresh start at school or work after their vacation. And me, hungover on a Monday morning with nothing to start. What now? Shop around? Find a small company? Which one? Les Ballets Jazz? Eddie Toussaint? I looked too desperate. I was dancing like a fucking broken nutcracker.

  Things have been a little too stop-and-start recently for me to be a big believer in fate; doors slam in front of you or behind you. It ends up meaning the same thing. I wouldn’t have described what happened next as luck, not then. In retrospect it brought a crazy dancer, Bertrand, into my life, to save me from my ennui, unclog the cogs and get the next part of my story unstuck. But it’s not what it sounds like—not another man for my dance card. Yes, I found him attractive, but only because he was the only person I’d ever met who was as crazy and as cockeyed-optimistic—a truly nutty look in his eyes—as me.