Strip

by Andrew Binks

  It’s funny how cruel we can be toward our own selves in split seconds. It seemed farcical that I had ever thought the two of us made some kind of match, and so obvious that we were from completely different levels in the hierarchy. My life was an angry dance that was frantically whipping about this terrestrial stage, crashing into the edge of the proscenium, pulling on the flies, the curtain, the backdrop for support, putting other dancers on edge, at risk; Daniel’s dance was order, perfection and a soulless, heavenly world of impressive accomplishments. What cruel entity had arranged this near-rendezvous, or collision? My throat contracted, my face heated, and I stifled a natural response to follow, shocked that I didn’t care much that it was Daniel. And shocked, too, that I was experiencing nothing toward him more than disdain, not even hate. Okay maybe a little heartbrokenness, but the whole picture of two men, so apparently enamoured with each other, was what hit me. I certainly didn’t want to spoil it.

  Meanwhile la belle province was buried under a week of snow. There was nothing to do but sit and wait and then find out that New Year’s would be spent in the airport. Hotels were all full and the best they could do was a bus to the train in the morning. I called Kent, his mysterious emergency still on my mind. He answered on the first ring. “Are you okay?”

  “Oh sure, I was just checking in with you.”

  “Oh God. I thought there was an emergency.”

  “Are you back?”

  “I’m at the airport, in Montreal, or somewhere near Montreal. Looks like you’ll have to make other plans for New Year’s.”

  “Well, here’s to you and me in ’83—we’ll toast for real tomorrow, all right?”

  I felt like I’d been away for years. “I miss you.”

  “Yeah, I could say the same thing at this end.”

  I found a corner of floor. Floor is familiar for dancers—although I prefer sprung maple to terrazzo—and got as comfortable as possible. I had my book of Nelligan poems, the one Kent gave me, and slowly leafed through it thinking I was making sense of the verse. There was great comfort in having something of his with me. I opened it to a poem, “Soir d’hiver,” appropriately about lots of snow, and the pain of life as well, from what I could tell. Another, “Amour immaculé,” about loving someone, a saint perhaps, who remains silent, impassive and proud. Who would do such a thing? Vaguely familiar. I wondered about what Nelligan had suffered as I drifted into a deep sleep. Midnight I was woken by brief whoops and then dozed for the next six hours.

  On the train, I stared through a smudge of coconut oil my forehead left on the window, at clouds of churned-up snow blowing past us, wondering about Kent, wondering about Daniel, his friend—why they would fly from Rio on New Year’s; did they have something better planned? I even wondered about the clean-cut employee who had told me about Kent’s phone call. My head was spinning. What would Daniel have thought if he had seen me tanned, fit, blond, experienced, jaded, older and nastier? I still would have been no more than a morsel to be tasted.

  I knew then, in that instant, that it had been lust—it was so mixed up with hate and apathy that it couldn’t have been love at any time. It was obvious. I prayed Nelligan and I were free of our bad memories, notre désir at last. I was forgiven. It all made sense. The shame at my obsessive behaviour was gone in the blink of an eye. There was nothing that would ever connect us to each other ever again. I was starting to understand what love was: generosity, patience and care, for now. I dozed as the dry air pulled at my skin. I woke to a split second of Daniel vanishing forever, being swallowed up in the funnel of snow that swirled in the path of the train. I was full of thoughts of seeing Kent. In fact I was dying to see him.

  The cab skidded from the station and finally gave up at the gates of the old city. I walked up Sainte-Ursule and saw from the street that my apartment was still intact, so before dumping everything I knocked on Kent’s door. I knew Kent was where I could find refuge. There was a long silence, but lights said that someone was home, then a bang on the stairs, several uneven thumps on the stairs and the door opened.

  “Surprise, mon ami. I came back just for you.” Kent’s broken up face greeted me: a plum-blue shiner streaked all the way down his nose. A swollen upper lip. He was leaning on a cane. “What the fuck?”

  “There’s not much left of me to come back to.”

  He lunged onto me for a quick and awkward hug. I heard him sniff and knew he was crying. He sniffed and pulled away. “Fuck, you look good enough to eat. Through a straw is how I’ll have to do it.” He turned and led me silently, half-step by half-step, up the stairs and into the living room. He said he fell down the stairs the day before, just after getting back from Montreal, and panicked, which was why he phoned me—said he just wanted to hear my voice and he didn’t know when I was coming back. He denied he left a message about an emergency, says maybe it got mixed up in the translation. (From English to English?)

  God, it was still winter and now things had gone from bad to worse, no club in flames, no job offer from the Paris Opera or the Moulin Rouge, not to forget the New York City Ballet. And these other pieces didn’t seem to fit; he looked beaten up. When I joked that he needed someone to take care of him all the time, he broke down. He said crying hurt his ribs, said he had truly missed me. I sat with my arm carefully over his shoulder, for a long time. I wanted to undress him and make love to him for the simple reason that he was so vulnerable, less of a predator than I perceived him to be.

  “Maybe you could take care of me,” he said.

  “I’ll be your nurse. I’m sure I can find a costume at the club.”

  “I might need more.”

  “I’ll sleep on your couch if Henri doesn’t mind.”

  He was silent as he sat slumped with his hands clasped.

  “Can I make some tea?” I went to the kitchen to fill the kettle.

  “I had a fight with Henri.” He didn’t cry as he spoke, but tears were flowing. “He’s gone to Montreal and wants me out in the next few days. I was phoning to ask if I could move my stuff into your place.”

  “He did this to you?”

  “It was mostly an accident. I tripped. Thank God I was drunk.” But I had the feeling it was as simple and nasty as Henri shoving him down the stairs.

  From this stairwell and all that has happened since I got here, I can say with some certainty that gay men don’t have roommates. They are either together or ex-something-elses—ex-lovers or ex-tricks—and if they aren’t, then one of the two has a fantasy that their roommate is, or will be, the man of their dreams. Then, I had a feeling that there was much more to this than Kent was letting on. Prove me wrong. I’d like nothing more.

  Kent asked me again about us being roommates.

  “I’m always on the other side of the wall.”

  “Maybe we need to be closer.”

  “We’d drive each other crazy.” I wanted to protect what we had. “I don’t want us at each other’s throats because we’re cramped.”

  “We have different schedules. I have lots of places to go when you need your space.”

  “Okay,” I was hesitant. “As long as you don’t smoke.”

  So, for the next two days Kent directed the move, sometimes from his place and sometimes from under a blanket and leaning on a cane, in the falling snow. Most of the furnishings were Henri’s, thank God. I hauled all of his things—grocery bags stuffed with clothes, some bedding, some dishes, his dismantled bed—past the Café Latin and up to my place, until it looked like Madame Talegdi’s garage. But I worked swiftly to change that.

  “Time for bubbly.”

  “I’m on painkillers.”

  “So I have to drink this by myself?”

  “God no. Painkillers and booze, it’ll be great. Here’s to you and me in ’83.”

  I’d assembled his bed in the kitchen half of the place and we set up a little nest in the sheets, got
naked and toasted everything we could think of. Counted all of our blessings, the roof over our head, each other, and the fact that 1983 started out so badly that it couldn’t possibly get any worse.

  Kent hobbled and chain-smoked along the hall outside the apartment as part of our fresh air agreement. “I don’t know how you can do this to me, when you come home every night smelling worse than an ashtray.”

  “Then you won’t mind if I don’t have a shower,” I said.

  “Then I could taste you.”

  I could taste the smoke when he kissed me. I can taste it now.

  The next afternoon I left Kent to recover at our place while I took the bus out to Ancienne Lorette, staring at grey car-lots and strip malls, wondering why I had come back from the over-sexed, over-sensual, sinfully fertile tropics to this never-ending eyesore. Loyalty? To Marcel? To Kent? To a bad dream? I had less and less to lose. Not coming back didn’t really seem so strange a concept. Why not run away?

  The snow started to slice past the windows and soon we were riding on the driver’s instincts more than the ruts in the road. The ride became quiet and slow. Did normal people do this? Didn’t they stay home with a book or a good show on television? I was really starting to drift in terms of motivation.

  When I finally got to the club it was to Marcel’s news that we had guest showgirls from Montreal. Real professionals. I walked toward the stairs. Some of the girls had taken holidays and looked strange, un-made up, well rested and needing to readjust back into the nocturnal life-under-a-rock world of Chez Moritz. Something was different. They were sharing a joke, a secret. Had someone died? Was Brittany back? Was it my birthday and there was a huge cake in the basement, from which some fabulous guy saying he was all mine, and holding a one-way ticket back to the tropics, would leap? When I got to the change area this playful atmosphere of giggles and glances all became clear: at a new makeshift dressing table complete with lights and a wide mirror with a hunk out of the corner sat two over-the-top drag queens that gave off absolute sweetie-I-love-you-but-don’t-fuck-with-me-or-I’ll-rip-your-head-off vibes—Mesdames Bichon Frissé and Tarte au Sucre. “Call me Sugar—Brown Sugar.” Bichon was lean and tall, and Sugar was as black as Grace Jones with a beautiful set of tight pink lips that she pressed when she meant business. They got up and stood on either side of me, looking me over with their hungry gazes. They must have each been about a foot taller than me. Sugar’s bustier was folded down revealing curly tufts of black hair on a firm chest. Bichon’s shoulders would have put any footballer to shame. These women were all men. But I couldn’t be anyone else’s appetizer. “Bitch, we struck it rich,” said Sugar.

  “’e’s mine,” said Bichon.

  “’e’s everybody’s from what I hear. And you know—good news travels fast. And by God, ’e is good news. Chèri, if you gonna dance wit’ us, you got to help us into our wigs, that’s the deal. If you know what I mean.”

  “I hear he’s a handy man.” Sugar laid her muscled arm across my shoulder, but I had to look up, way up. Her hands and wrists were fine and long, and they twitched as she spoke. “You come wit’ a best-before date, handsome? Can I call you handsome?”

  “I’m known as Le Grand Blond.”

  “But I’m grander and blonder, no kidding, but you can see for yourself some udder time.”

  “You call me whatever you want. I was taught not to argue with the ladies.”

  “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 bei
ng 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.