Strip by Andrew Binks Page B

dancer leaves a company, the news spreads like syphilis. And when a dancer takes up with the likes of a Daniel Tremaine there will be a price to pay. Besides, it had always been the West against the East. The West was viewed with disdain and mild curiosity, as was the East by the West, perhaps with a little more envy. “You must start over,” she told me. “How long have you been dancing?” I thought she was being sarcastic or exaggerating but she meant every word as blankly and blandly as her lifeless face muttered it.
    â€œAlmost six years, and I used to swim…” My voice trailed off. She couldn’t care less.
    â€œYou should be better than this,” she said through a burgeoning fake smile.
    â€œBut Madame, I was soloist, second soloist, with the Company.”
    â€œThe 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.”
    â€œIn 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,