Strip. Andrew Binks

with another person. We weren’t hiding in a closet or a motel room. He stayed on the bed and I moved to the floor, leaning against the bed. He touched the top of my head with his long fingers. We were two men, two complete and naked physical beings, comfortable with ourselves.

      “It’s time,” he said. “I want to make love to you, properly.”

      “Soon.”

      “I want to.”

      “Now?”

      “You sound surprised.”

      I hoped the marijuana might make it easier, but the pain was excruciating. I always thought it would be so natural with the right person. But I ended up with my face pressed into the pillow, biting hard into it, trying to suppress a scream.

      He gave up and dropped, deadweight, onto me. I whispered to him, “Thank you for being so understanding.” Then he sighed and rolled off.

      Old thoughts about my inadequacy now haunted me. My mother drove me, her perfect boy, in her new Cadillac to the doctor’s office while I sat bent over, a seven-year-old with a searing pain in my abdomen like something was stuck inside. The pain stopped my breath, a herniated something, an incomplete something else, a testicle that hadn’t dropped. It was a series of trips to the doctor and operations in hospitals.

      It always started with me standing on a small box in the doctor’s examination room, my pants around my ankles while one or two doctors poked my abdomen, stared at my penis, or shoved their dry fingers behind my scrotum and up into me so hard that they raised me up off my little snow-soaked socked feet. The efforts to find the source of that pain and rip it out blinded me. They laid their big fingers on my stomach and pressed here and there on my naked body, staring at my front, touching me.

      I was innocent until a fifth visit and that one doctor looked up at my face and our eyes met. He looked like one of the ballet princes, and I retracted my hips as my penis began to stir for the first time I was aware of. While I was consumed with guilt, my mother was more concerned with her lipstick and the dashing doctors. A few years later, I was back to the doctor for another hernia, or was it bedwetting? I remember my mother had her hair done for the occasion. The doctor dug around in my underwear pressing on my abdomen, intestines, stomach, balls, pulling on them as I tried not to show spontaneous arousal. The thought of his staring, and rough pokes and soft lingering fingers, while I looked at the top of his head, sent a terrible thrill through me. Years later when I would dream of the visits to the doctor I would wet the bed, but not with piss.

      We lay with the streetlight and shadows playing across our skin. I vowed to give up anything for love.

      Two

      A dancer’s bare feet approach the earth, toes extended. The soles, broad and thick, reach for the earth’s membrane then cushion the impact, draw history and resonance through the weathered skin from core to core. The soul is shaken free of its trance. The body again ascends—as the feet beat back at the world with entrechat and frappé—to the stars.

      A door above me slams and my clothes fly down the open space at my side. I rise, look down the twenty-two-odd flights as a stray sock spirals defiantly to the bottom. Something cracks onto the floor below, cufflinks or my watch. It doesn’t matter. My belt buckle? And no one will come after me. I am in no man’s land, in the shaft of the sleek condo where I got everything I had ever asked for, or deserved, in a matter of seconds.

      Sunday morning came quietly in Daniel’s tree house. We woke late, and there was no “the Company”; no daily rehearsal sheet slipped under the door; no Company class; no dour-faced dancers poking forks in lone grapes on breakfast plates and dreaming about their second cigarette of the day. Once again I was outside my safety zone. There would be no equity-minimum-for-second-soloist paycheque in two weeks. There would be no speculation on who would get what role in the coming season. Before, I had paid-for dreams and goals, but now they were replaced by free promises.

      By now, the Company would be assembled in the hotel lobby for a bus to an early flight back to Winnipeg, welcoming a day off. They would later go for brunch and then put their fingers down their throats and puke, or sit in a movie theatre and worry about their 102 minutes of inactivity. Rachelle would read the Sunday New York Times Gordon had picked up earlier at the Fort Garry, spread on the floor (with the bright prairie afternoon sun filling the room, making it difficult to ignore the streaked window and the gathering dust bunnies) smoking something harsh, drinking pots of coffee, disappearing with Gordon to the bedroom at regular intervals, then making him dinner and curling up on the couch for hours of TV and wondering if the Company would make her a principal dancer someday—why hadn’t they already?

      Peter would be playing with himself in his room, thinking no one could tell, or maybe he’d have his perfect feet shoved under the radiator to make them even more perfect. God bless those poor overstretched tendons. Then he’d probably get together with a few of the dancers for coffee, and not so much a chat as a series of agreeable grunts. He was social that way. They’d have Monday morning off.

      I wondered if my days off with Daniel would be like Rachelle’s, until he whispered in my ear, “Come, we have a breakfast to go to.”

      “So early?”

      “Mon ami, it is no longer early, we have slept late and will just make it.”

      When you get to know someone, you find out things about them that you overlooked—how they snore, chew, sip, wipe their nose with their knuckle, how sloppy they are or, in Daniel’s case, how meticulous: his attention to the order he dressed himself—shirt first; how many times he washed his hands—frequently; when he washed his hands—always after touching me. What did he think of me, and the way I piled my clothes on the chair, and how my bed-head looked, and how my breath smelled and how the sheets had creased my face? Did he notice?

      We rushed out the door, Daniel looking far more together than I felt.

      “Welcome to your first day as an independent person, not following the pack.”

      “It feels strange.”

      “Good I hope.”

      “Good.” But I felt like the prodigal son, again.

      Back at the beginning of my big dreams, I had this groovy little dance bag I’d bought at Army & Navy. After a year of dancing, disguised as swim practice, it all came out. I was between swim practice and dance class, and I had come home to wolf down my dinner. I tossed the bag by the front door and, as bags do, it fell open. Dad came home a few mouthfuls into my meatloaf. After the called Hi and the requisite, Do you want a drink? he walked into the living room with the bag, threw it on the floor, where the contents spilled—the shoes, tights, leg warmers, the layers of ripped t-shirts and sweat socks and the dance belt. “What are these?” he asked. “Something for Halloween?”

      Ballet slippers. For my father, I imagine this was something that only happened to other people’s children, in other cities. This was something you only heard about and never, ever dreaded because it seemed so far-fetched.

      “It’s my dance stuff.” It lay on the living room floor, deflated, dirty too.

      “Dance stuff? What kind of dance stuff?”

      “Shoes.” (Ballet slippers caught in my throat.) “Slippers.”

      “Slippers. What the Christ?” he said. Well, wouldn’t it have been an education to see me sew the elastics on them, and carefully sew exactly where the shoe folds down? You can’t sew the elastic just anywhere, and if you want two elastics to hug the slipper to your foot, then you’ve got a little geometry to do.

      “What’s this?” he asked in a confident monotone, as if the battle had been won and he was simply making a point. “A bathing suit or some queer kind of jockstrap?”

      “It’s a dance belt.”

      “A what?”

      I wanted so badly to tell it like this: tighter than a Speedo and smaller than one. It cuts up your ass-crack. You pull