Strip (25 page)

“Oh so we're ladies? She, my dear, is no lady,” Bichon waggled a plum-coloured nail in my face, “but she is all woman, I can tell you dat.”

Beneath the costume jewellery-encrusted exterior of these two Amazon showstopper toughies, there was warmth and vulnerability.

“We dreamt of being dancers,”

“Once upon a time. Ballerinas, too, you bitch.”

“But I craved Mylar instead of…”

“…nylon. Feathers from swallows instead of…”

“…swans. Stilettos instead of…”

“…pointe shoes.
Crêpe de Chine
instead of…”

“…shep de creen, um I forget, o yeah, tulle. Muumuus instead of…”

“…tutus. Carrot cake instead of…”

“…carrots.”

I was witnessing part of a comic routine, complete with special attention to the wistful movement of lipstick-laden lips, bejewelled wrists to foreheads, performed somewhere and filed away but, more or less, based on good information.

Marcel hadn't mentioned them before I left, and yet they'd already started rehearsing and would be performing with us immediately. We had more in common than anyone would think: our shared dance background, and I could understand them, sort of. I mean I didn't have to pretend I could understand them. They were perfectly bilingual; their potty-mouth English was as jarring as their twanging Québécois.

Marcel was distant through all this, and I was finally starting to feel like the honeymoon was over, and that I, as flavour of the month, had gone sour. Running hot, then cold. It reminded me of the Company, my second-guessing, unchecked jealousies, need for attention, and how praise was erratically doled out, then rapidly retrieved. Was Marcel jealous of something? Had I disappointed him?

We all had an early night, and because of the blizzard, Marcel and François drove me back to their place in a warm Mercedes—opera lights, warm leather seats—to where they lived with Marcel's mother. I could barely understand François' French. Occasionally Marcel would translate when there was a pause. But François insisted on turning and talking to me the whole way, wanting to know what it was like to live on the prairies, as if to live in English Canada was another continent.

Camp with a capital “C” came naturally to Marcel. His penthouse walls were covered with leopard wallpaper. Sofas and ottomans were upholstered in cougar and fake tiger. The broadloom was thick, and stereo electronics flickered on the far wall. It was a collision of luxury and tack. He went home in a cozy car to this plush womb every night.

There were mirrors everywhere and a reflection from Marcel's mother's boudoir is how I first saw her. Looking like a retired showgirl, she wore full makeup on a snowbound Monday night in Sainte-Foy, sitting at her dressing table brushing her silver hair and calling out, across two thousand square feet of high-rise cushy penthouse, the news of the day: the blizzard will be getting worse, she warns, and then sobs telling the news of an uncle in Paris finally dying. Marcel reminds her that the uncle was ninety-three. She dabs her eyes and nods, “Quand même, quand même, et pourtant, je te demande.”

It made sense that the sets and décor at the club, and all the exotic costumes were backed by her. The only tits-and-feathers cabaret between Montreal and the Moulin Rouge, the Chez Moritz was her plaything. Her martinis took the chill away and connected me to a place I'd given up—the security of my parent's home. We sat in the expansive living room, a fire blazing in the hearth, while the blizzard blew all around us. We sipped our martinis. Kent would have already bedded down, probably snoring. Bare as it may have seemed in comparison, I wanted to be back in my own place with him. Marcel and François curled into each other in the opposite sofa. François stared at me like the dumb cute hunk that he was. Looking good was what he did best.

Marcel sipped his martini and spoke, “Mom danced with the Lido.”

“In Paris?”

“She met her husband—not my father—there. He made her a wealthy ex-showgirl.” Marcel looked toward the bedroom. “Isn't that right, Mom?”—as if this was an ongoing patter between the two of them. “She made sure it stayed that way when she met my father. They were barely married long enough to conceive me. He's dead. We think. Or wandering around the woods of northern Quebec wrestling moose or bear or whatever.”

As I lay down to sleep on a sofa that seemed to have more square footage than my apartment, I prayed for luxury. I was now officially sick of dumps. If I couldn't have the satisfaction of being a true artist and a dancer, then why the hell be poor? I was starting to see why my father had been so against my choice. He seemed to understand that comfort had a price, and once you knew comfort, you had no choice but to afford that price.

“What's this?” he had said about the dance bag, ensuring he would never know about me training with the women at the university, or having pointe shoes, rarely worn by men, custom-made to strengthen my arches. He would never know that my feet would end up as veined muscle, feeling like tenderized beef, or that I shoved my feet under radiators, pried at the cartilage for an unnatural stretch, or that Lisa, Madame Défilé and Drake made sure I learned depth from all the masters—Vaganova, Cecchetti, Bournonville, Cunningham, Graham—and the vast breadth of dance from flamenco to foxtrot to czardas. All he needed to know was that I had finally left pre-med for full-time dance, supported by part-time jobs.

That summer after my first year at university, my objective was to make money, enough to make my own decisions. I worked on an uncle's farm late spring into early summer and prayed my technique wouldn't leave me. Then, with twelve weeks of uncle's pay for chucking an early harvest of alfalfa by late June—and calloused hands, hardened biceps, a tight back, a butt that even dancers would envy—I made my announcement as we sat on the screened-in porch eating our berries and cream.

“The Company in Winnipeg has a summer program that they use as an audition for their full-time training,” I began.

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 Ch
â
teau 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.