Strip. Andrew Binks

around for a while. So your nuts are crammed into these things because between your entrechat and anything else that slams your thighs together at the speed of light, if your nuts aren’t out of the way, you could end up seeing stars. The only hazard when the equipment is out there is turning to your Swan or Princess or Sultana and in the midst of careless fouetté or pirouette having her knee whack your nuts. The pain. The numbing, bent-over-crippling, dizzying pain. It happens to all of us at least once.

      “What else? A goddamn tutu?”

      “A t-shirt.” Something loose and rag-like, showing tendon. Muscle. Line. That’s the dance bag. Maybe a skanky towel for the shower. “It’s ballet dance stuff. Tights, too, for men. Black, is that okay? Male dancers wear them.”

      “Part of your school work?”

      “No.”

      “And what about swimming?”

      “I still swim.”

      “In your tights?”

      “In my Speedo.”

      “How long has this been going on?”

      “About a year.”

      “Where?”

      “The studio—the one near your office. Madame…”

      “Défilé?”

      “How do you know?”

      “She’s been there for years. She came in for checkups—when she could afford it.”

      He turned to my mother. “How long have you known this?” But she just took a sip of her drink and went back to the kitchen.

      “She didn’t know,” I said. He’d made his point and from that moment we rarely talked. I had wronged him and his dreams and his agenda. My mother stopped talking to either of us. She’d sit in the sewing room under her poster of Nureyev and Fonteyn. I imagined her weeping though I could never be sure. I had done enough to shame them for life. There was no turning back. The distance helped me find a kind of bravado, and as a result I made another magical leap toward becoming a competent dancer. I had little—even less—to lose anymore. During his pre-dinner, post-looking-in-people’s-rotting-mouths drink, I’m sure I asked him why he was so against something so cultured, so refined, so creative. Maybe I just said, “Why do you hate that I dance?”

      “I’ll tell you something about Madame Défilé. She stopped coming to see me because she owed me so much. I gave up trying to get even a nickel out of her. Do you want to end up like that? Teaching little girls to point their toes. Worrying about when the power will be cut?”

      “She danced with Les Ballets Russes.”

      “And she’s going to die a poor, old lady.”

      “But I’m good. I really am.”

      “You don’t have the talent. After one year, at your age?”

      “I do.”

      “Fine. Do what you like, take up knitting for God’s sake, as long as it doesn’t interfere with school.”

      It was long overdue, this parting of ways, and after that I wondered if part of Madame Défilé’s fiery temper tantrums toward me were for my father.

      Daniel’s words broke my reverie. “You will make your parents proud someday, and put that Company to shame. Believe me.”

      And the streets in Montreal were different now that I was free.

      We went north along rue Berri, past rows of old walk-ups, and stopped in front of an iron staircase leading up to a massive flat. The stranger who answered the door raised his eyebrows to Daniel. Daniel touched the middle of my back and gently pressed me through the doorway. Six men sat on low plush couches and rat-a-tatted Québécois. One of them, who had the look of Hitler youth—good-looking but evil at the same time with a protruding brow and chin, and wavy, very bottle-blond hair—massaged my scalp and told me I was too tense. This was typical; I seemed to attract these kinds of comments. And the massage didn’t surprise me as I am sure he had hoped it would, because Kharkov had reminded me more than once that as long as I remained an uptight Anglo-Saxon, I would be stuck in the corps, then after I became second soloist, it was forever second soloist, never principal as long as, and on and on…

      The others ignored me.

      We sat around a low table and alternated drinking mimosas with dark coffee and nibbling daintily on lox, cream cheese and bagels, which was heaven and hell for me: it was my day off and I needed to eat, but with reckless guilt-free abandon, not restrained bites. Sunday was time-out from diet, discipline and dance. For two hours, I nodded politely at their babble, but knew my cursed blank stare was most likely working against me. I understood them perfectly when they said I didn’t understand French, which happened before and after pauses, but then their chattering would start up again. I so wanted to tell them I understood French quite well, but not Québécois.

      None of them cared about the Company, or me, or dance at all for that matter. Not one of them had seen the show. In retrospect, Daniel must have had some disdain in socializing with dancers. Justifiably so—dancers could be crushingly boring to outsiders, never to themselves: when you are taught that what you do is the most important, difficult and disciplined work a human could ever do, what else can there possibly be to talk about? As for these guys, they were probably trading decorating tips, or who had winked at them in the past two days. I’ll never know.

      It was Sunday, our first whole day together. One of the men, Hugues, the Aryan who massaged my head, walked us to his place in the Old Port. I couldn’t help dwelling on the idea that Hugues and Daniel had known each other much better than they let on. I was feeling more and more like the soft touch in this pas de trois. Regardless, he had the decency to point out places of interest, mostly historic buildings that housed restaurants where, he said, I might be able to get a job if my French was okay. I looked to Daniel, but he soldiered on, his royal highness deep in thought until he spoke. “It will be better for you to have your own space. There are too many distractions at my place. You will be staying with Hugues. He has an extra room.”

      “Of course. Perfect.” I vividly remember that snubbed feeling, but I quickly displayed my bravado. “Now I don’t have to look for a place.”

      “What about a job?” Hugues asked. “You can’t work wit’ no French. And you can’t pay the rent wit’ no work.”

      “I’ll be dancing, that’s my job, and mon français n’est pas parfait mais pas mal de tout, by the way.” Hugues grinned. I looked to a distracted Daniel for support, but he had that distant look I had seen in the studio. I had resources to take me to the end of the summer.

      “We will still have lots of time to spend together,” Daniel assured me.

      “Of course,” I replied, as if it was I who was reassuring him.

      Hugues’ place was just so, all light maple and clean-cut corners that looked onto a neighbouring limestone wall in a narrow alley. At the far end of the alley, overfed tourists waddled up a cobblestone street eighteen hours a day—on the way from the metro to the crêperies of Old Montreal, and on toward the ice cream and beavertail booths of the Old Port, their floral prints and gaudy perma-press created a travelling kaleidoscopic parade of continuous colour in the distance. Fortunately the only sound that made it down the alley was the clicking of horses’ hooves from the calèche. It was all a lifetime away from my room in Rachelle’s house on the banks of the Assiniboine, in a city surrounded by infinity. I imagined Montreal throbbing with an energy of troubled cafés where lovers argued, and smoky bars where they made love in the dark corners.

      Later that afternoon, leaving Hugues to his place, Daniel and I wandered silently along the Old Port to a precious gem store owned, he told me, by geologists. It was the kind of place where tiny lights in the ceiling focus on shiny chunks of polished stone, and people’s whispers were swallowed by thick grey carpet. He asked me to wait outside. I was dying to see what it was he was buying for me.