Strip. Andrew Binks

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 probably 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?”