It didn’t seem to faze either of them. Levoy now had a scholarship from Miss McRae where he got lessons in exchange for sweeping up and cleaning the mirrors. Miss Afrodisian said she finally had made the break into show business and was starting next week in a musical revue as “the Male Lily Pons.”
Before I could ask how this could be, Belle-Mère decided I’d had enough education for one evening. She said we had to go to bed. “It’s a school day tomorrow.” And thanked Levoy and Afro very much for coming over. “It was really fun,” she assured them.
Afro asked us to please come see her show at the Club Whoopee. “I only work Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. And I do a little coat-checking, of course.”
That was just the beginning of our life with Levoy. He came around a lot. He cooked for us. He sang for us. He danced for us. But he never stayed overnight.
He often waited for me after class. And mainly talked about how to improve my technique. He dinned into me how important the standing leg was. “You must not relax into it. Up, it has to be up from the arch of your foot through your knee into your hip. Then the rest of it is free to move.” Much of what he told me was playback from Miss McRae, but he had quick perceptions of his own. He showed me how to stretch my feet by getting a kind of hammerlock on the lower foot with both hands and pulling that arch over.
He showed me how to do push-ups standing on my head with my feet braced against the wall. “You have to look like a man and act like a man on stage,” he said. “If anyone is looking for girls there are plenty of the real thing around.”
Levoy was fond of singing, too, but largely from a repertoire of his own. “Violate Me in the Violet Time” often accompanied the evening dishwashing, as did “A Woman Without a Man,” which started: “You can roll a silver dollar around the barroom floor.” Somehow I loved that image. “ ’Twas a Cold Winter’s Evening” had a wonderful line, too: “When a gentleman dapper stepped out of the crapper.”
This pervasive atmosphere of illegal and immoral sex did Belle-Mère a world of good. She never seemed to worry that it would do me any harm, and she was right. All my attention was focused on my classes. My ballet classes exhausted me, and my regular classes took up all my spare time, what with my homework. Occasionally, we would go to a Susan Hayward movie, Belle-Mère’s favorite, but the ballet world was a closed one. It took up all our time, and we wouldn’t have had it any other way.
She seemed to have been waiting all her life for this total immersion in a climate of intense, hothouse femininity.
We had wonderful evenings in our dingy little flat on West Roscoe. I would be studying, or trying to, at the dining-room table, slowly picking away at the oilcloth to reveal its webby substructure while trying to memorize something about the Huguenots. Meanwhile, in the background, Levoy would be counseling my mother to let her hair grow longer and tease it “into a huge mane of hair. One can never have too much hair, never!”
Or Afro would be fitting an elaborate dress on Belle-Mère that was being created for his nightclub act. Afro would tell Mother, “You have a perfect figure for couture.” Adding, “If I could, I would only wear black.” Which was untrue. In fact, Afro had a great predilection for green satin and never entered a room without eyeing the draperies. Scarlett O’Hara had left a deep impression on Afro, but I think the true role model was Brenda Starr.
Lovers
I think sixteen is about the right age to start having a regular sexual relationship. That’s how old I was when I started sleeping with Levoy Ping.
I was nearing sixteen when we met at Edna McRae’s school, and for the next two years Levoy was a fixture in my life. As he was in Belle-Mère’s. I guess that’s how he slipped around us. That and the kissing.
Levoy was a wonderful kisser. We were sitting beside each other on the couch watching television. I was kind of cozied up to Levoy, he had his arm around my shoulder. He said something funny, and when I looked up at him, he kissed me. Very warm lips. Just moist enough. Before I knew it, he was lying on top of me kissing me with a lot of tongue. It was fun.
And then we were pressing our groins together. We actually spent a number of evenings pressing our groins together. Well, not many, because we were almost never without the presence of Belle-Mère. Where she could have been the evening we started kissing, I can’t imagine. Maybe I was home with a cold and Levoy had gotten there ahead of her. The Adult Beginners was the last class of the evening.
Sometimes Levoy would try to kiss me when Belle-Mère was in another room, but I wasn’t having any of that. I think I thought kissing was something like swimming: it felt good and it was fun. Of course I was masturbating by that age, but I don’t remember conjuring up any images. It, too, was like swimming. Fun, felt good, readily available. More so than swimming.
Levoy and I were probably doing our little dry-humping number for six months or so before he slipped it to me. And even that was pretty modest. Maybe Mother was in class again, but we were sprawled on the couch with Levoy pressing into me. He reached down and undid the buttons on my pants and the buttons on his own and pressed his cock down in between my legs. And came in a jiffy. My underpants were soaked.
After, he lay on top of me groaning for a while, and then like a dead body. I said, “Gosh, Levoy, I have to get up and change my underpants. This feels icky.”
He muttered in my ear, “It wouldn’t be so icky if I had been up your ass.” I didn’t answer that one. I just struggled out from under him. Changed my underpants and rinsed out the other pair so Belle-Mère wouldn’t see something funny in the laundry. But, of course, it wasn’t long before he was up my ass. And I was up his. It was sort of like more fun. But I certainly wasn’t in love with Levoy. I had no ideas about that kind of thing.
I was in love with ballet.
Summer Theater
I had only been studying for a little over a year but I was acquiring technique. Because I was growing at the same time that I was studying intensely, my body had changed a lot. Miss McRae’s voice kept calling out in class, “Pull up, pull up.” And I did. My legs were straight. My waist was thin. My back was flat. But actually, I didn’t care so much that my body looked good. What I cared about was that suddenly I could do double pirouettes. I could get up on the ball of one foot, bend my other knee so it formed a triangle with my toe on the knee of my standing leg, and around I went. It was thrilling.
I had good feet. I got them from my mother. We both have good arches and our toes point into nice shapes. We both stretched out our legs and pointed our toes and it looked good. Levoy, of course, had fantastic feet. (“Too supple,” Miss McRae declared, but there wasn’t a person in the class who wouldn’t have loved to have those “too supple” feet.)
I was beginning to jump. My thighs and buttocks were beginning to get larger and stronger, and I had nice arms. Not too graceful. I never felt embarrassed by all those airy-fairy gestures and positions. They kind of made sense to me.
For only a year’s study, I was dancing pretty well, when some of the dancers in my class started talking about auditions for summer stock. Chicago had a summer theater, the Music Tent, that did Broadway musicals. Tried-and-true stuff they knew the public would like. Levoy was going, and he insisted that I come along. “But I’m not ready,” I said. “I’m just starting.”
“You’re good-looking and I don’t think they care about double pirouettes and entrechats-six and all that stuff. They just want you to get out there and move your ass. Give it a try.”
Levoy also insisted I wear a tight little striped top of his. I wore my school tights and slippers with it. I really had no idea if I was cute or not. I was blond. Blondish. That’s all I knew.
We went to the Kingsley Studios for the audition. There were a lot of boys there–this was a “boys only” audition evidently–and we knew most of them. Edna McRae’s was the best school in Chicago, so anybody who was planning a career went there. There were a few boys who had come in from New York and some older guys, dancers,
I guess, who had washed up in Chicago because of boyfriends or other kinds of jobs.
The choreographer giving the audition was a woman. Her name was Sally Ann. She liked me and took the time to show me some of the steps. I had never done show dancing, but it wasn’t so hard. Just fast.
They were planning to do Oklahoma! evidently, so there were a lot of strutting and legs-apart kinds of steps. Cowboy stuff. Brigadoon was being done, too, so we did those sword-dance things. That was easy to do.
Sally Ann took our names and telephone numbers. She said, “Levoy and you have the same phone number.” It was a statement, not a question. She was quick.
I said, “I live with my mother and Levoy doesn’t have a phone so he uses ours.”
“How old are you?” she wanted to know.
“Seventeen. Almost seventeen,” I said. Almost was six months away, but who needs to know?
“You look younger. But good. But good,” she said. “You must be studying with Edna McRae. I can always tell. Nice sharp positions.” I nodded. She was talking to me much longer than anyone else. She went on to talk to others.
That evening she called. They wanted both Levoy and me. Rehearsals started the first week of June. We would be doing two shows and trading around with a sister company in Milwaukee. They were doing Kismet and Bloomer Girl, I think. We would perform two weeks of our show in Chicago and then go to Milwaukee while they brought their show in to our theater. Then we’d do two weeks of Brigadoon in Chicago, and so on. Then the summer would be over. We would get $125 a week, would be put in a hotel in Milwaukee, and would live at home in Chicago. After rehearsals, we could go to class.
We were stunned. Belle-Mère was stunned and thrilled. One hundred and twenty-five dollars a week coming into the house? It was a fortune. Maybe we should move. Maybe she should stop asking for alimony. Maybe I should quit school. Maybe we should move to New York. Her head was swirling with plans. I was already the voice of reason in our household. “Oh, Mom, let’s just save as much money as we can and I’ll study real hard for another year and then we can go to New York.” (Which was what we did.)
A lot of the guys in the company came on to me. Most of the singers from New York and all the leading men did, too. The guy who did Curly in Oklahoma! was very sexy and really got on my case. In the wings, he was very friendly, but I just did my schoolboy thing. I talked about my mother a lot and how I’d like him to meet her. What was I supposed to do?
Levoy never let me out of his sight. In Milwaukee, we shared a hotel room. So we were really getting at it when we were up there. No chance of Mom walking in, and there is something sexy about second-rate hotel rooms anyway. Who can resist them? Large, emptyish rooms with large, emptyish beds with headboards, a dressing table, an armchair, and floral draperies. A musty, empty smell. You had to take off all your clothes and fuck a lot, if just to liven them up. Otherwise you’d cry. I think they had a fatal effect on my ideas about interior decoration. The other boys in the company probably figured out what was going on, but Levoy and I always acted as though we were just friends. Which, actually, we were. Being older, perhaps he felt differently, but for me it was just fun. I stuck it in him. He stuck it in me. We took turns. One day it was his turn; the next day it was mine. It felt good. Seeing his large penis always got me pretty excited, and we did sixty-nine and that kind of stuff, too. But it was something like going to class. I enjoyed doing it. That was all.
If Levoy had said he was going away forever, I would have missed him. Some. You know how kids are. It’s only later, when we know how we’re supposed to feel about a lot of things, that we start feeling them.
Sally Ann, the choreographer, was very nice to me. I don’t think she had any ideas about me. She just liked me. We talked about what we were reading. I was going through a premature fascination with F. Scott Fitzgerald. She was very big on writers like Pearl Buck and Louis Bromfield, whom I had never heard of. I remember she was reading The Rains Came that summer. I think she found it in her hotel room. She wanted to go to India and be covered in emeralds and rubies by some prince. I told her he might be pretty dark. She didn’t care.
Anyway, I danced in show business, but I was never crazy about it. Most of the dancers loved it. Loved the admiring faces out front. The men waiting at the stage door. Always men, whether they were waiting for the girls or the boys. Sometimes goofy people or kids waiting for a diva or a ballerina for autographs, but otherwise men, men, men.
Later, when I was studying at the Opera in New York with Margaret Craske, a student named Betty Ann Paulin was smiling and “projecting” in class as she danced. Pretending she was right down on the footlights as she did her glissade, assemblé, changement, changement. Miss Craske gestured at the pianist, Helen, to stop. “What are you doing, you wretched girl?” she said. “I’m selling it, Miss Craske,” Betty Ann replied. “Well, you can just go sell it somewhere else,” Miss Craske said in that high, fluty, fruity voice of hers. And motioned Helen to start playing again.
That’s how I felt. I wasn’t particularly interested in “selling it.” I loved the mathematical precision of classic ballet. The music played and it all unfolded. The body turns inward, then outward, then pauses. Then poses on the tip of one foot while the music goes on, then catches up. Somehow it was so meaningful, so useful to me.
I didn’t look forward to curtain time, to spitting in my mascara box and wiping the gluey black mixture on my lashes with the sticky little brush. Or painting my face. We still used greasepaint when I started dancing. It did have a peculiar sweet smell that always smelled hot somehow. Maybe I just associate it with bright dressing-room lights.
I loved going to class the next day. Seeing my leg go higher, my foot more pointed, my knee steadier. Day by day. Suddenly feeling myself higher in the air when I jumped. Having more time in the air to beat my ankles back and forth, like birds trying to escape. Suddenly really turning twice in the air when Miss McRae shouted, “Spot, Harry, spot!” Finding that if I snapped my head around twice, holding the window across the room in focus, my body followed. Also finding myself in plié when I came down, my feet neatly facing in opposite directions. It was like Newton discovering gravity.
Everything Miss McRae had been teaching us was true. You repeat the exercises, you change your body, and suddenly your body is obeying you. Creating new shapes. Letting you accomplish new trajectories through the air, new patterns for your feet, legs, arms, and head on the stage.
Homosexuals are men finally; and the thrill of your body accomplishing hugely complicated physical things is the same whether you’re throwing somebody out at third or managing three double tours en l’air without falling down. Which is to say, I guess, I never really got into being a pretty boy, spoiled by adult male attention. I liked earning the money. I liked being a grown-up and paying the rent for Belle-Mère. But most of all, I liked dancing itself.
The dancing we did in the shows that summer was sort of silly. Easily done and no challenge. I always thought that choreography had a lot to do with how well the choreographer could dance. Oklahoma! was choreographed by Agnes de Mille. She only gave dancers things to do she could do herself, and she didn’t have a lot of technique. So her steps were easy to do.
Miss McRae understood this and stopped me after class one day. “You’re doing very well, Harry. You have good concentration. I know you’re already working, but I hope you’ll study with me for another year. I think you could become an excellent dancer and partner. I think you could become a danseur noble. You have the right proportions, and a good face, and you’re a hard worker. Your mother knows she’s never going to dance, doesn’t she?”
What a good egg Miss McRae was. She undoubtedly saw Belle-Mère in her leg warmers and sweater tied at the waist going into class every night as my class came out. Nice body. But obviously far too old to dance professionally.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I think she does. It’s just that she loves it. Like I do.”
Miss McRae said, �
�She loves the idea of it. You love it because you can really do it.”
We left it at that.
I stopped sleeping with Levoy, if you could call what we were doing sleeping. It just seemed silly. He began hanging around with another red-headed kid who had just arrived from Green Bay. Maybe all that red pubic hair going at it at the same time was stimulating for both of them.
I didn’t miss it, sleeping with Levoy. It was ballet that held my attention. Miss McRae was teaching me the Bluebird variation from Sleeping Beauty. And Estelle Fairweather and I were learning the second-act pas de deux from Swan Lake in partnering class. We were going to do it with the Oak Park Civic Ballet. Little girls running around in swan outfits and us.
Levoy and Belle-Mère came to see it. Estelle didn’t have great points, but nice arms. She could really get that swan thing going. And I had been going to the gym twice a week in addition to class, so I could get her up there on the lifts.
Belle-Mère made my prince’s tunic: black velvet with a little ruffle in the neck and silver braid down the front. She’d seen a picture of Erik Bruhn posed at Elsinore in a tunic like it–as Hamlet, I think–and she copied it. It was her Christmas present to me. I got her new pointe shoes. She got me new tights, too. Black. I got my hair cut like Erik’s. I think the resemblance ended there. But Estelle and I did creditably. I wasn’t really nervous. All those shows at the Music Tent helped me with that. But I got nervous afterwards when we were taking our bows. I saw Miss McRae sitting behind Belle-Mère and Levoy. She’d arranged for us to do this production and even arranged for us to get paid–fifty dollars each. But she never mentioned she was coming to see it.
The next day in class she said afterwards, “Not at all bad. Not bad for a first performance. I was proud of you, Harry. You hadn’t even danced two years ago. We got you in the nick of time. For seventeen, not bad at all.”
The Sex Squad Page 4
