Strip (9 page)

Only one of them, Saint-Saëns's “The Carnival of the Animals,” provided any real dancing challenges. My only other hope was a piece she was putting together to Holst's
The Planets
, but even then I had been assigned all adagios while Jean-Marc and Bertrand were allowed to allegro. True, adagios showed off my line, but I had the quickest
entre-chat
, and tighter and cleaner footwork. One bright spot remained—Chantal's bullying: if I placed my hands on her waist for a lift, she would dig her nails into my wrists, and on pointe she would shift aggressively to make it look like I didn't have her on her centre; she would pull at my arms, or go limp spontaneously, and Madame could see through it. If anyone were to shit on me it would be Madame and Madame alone. “Chantal you are dancing like a dead marionette.
Qu'est ce que vous faites?
Enough! Monsieur Rottam is a dancer, not a cheese-maker!” Thank God someone else had incurred Madame's wrath.

One Monday, after one too many lifts and not enough dancing, I pressed her, “Madame, when do we start rehearsing
Rimbaud
? Shouldn't we be rehearsing
Rimbaud
? And what are the exact dates? Which theatre in Harlem? The Apollo? The Company performed there. Before my time of course, but I've seen the pictures, just after the Apollo reopened and then closed.”

“It's the Harlem School of Music.”

“That's in Brooklyn. It's the Brooklyn Academy of Music.”

“Harlem.”

“But—the Dance Theatre of Harlem?”

“And unless you can convince me as Verlaine…”

At that point Chantal ran out of the room in tears.

“Chantal! Christ!”

Louise giggled. “Chantal's afraid of New York.”

“Maybe she's afraid of herself,” I added.

I'd taken a wrong turn. I started doubting Madame, and once I lose trust, I am gone; that's when my eyes go blank, I suppose. Slowly day by day, class by class, rehearsal after rehearsal, the thought crept over me that I had little to do but recover, get strong, get some cash and
then
get out of there.

The next day, I inquired about payday, with not much money to spare, and they laughed. We were on a break in the small kitchen off the classroom. As usual I was deaf to the Québécois rat-a-tatting going on around me. I had practised my question. “Et bien, quand est-ce que nous reçeverons nos salaire?”

“Didn't Bertrand tell you? The classes are our payment,” said Maryse, in quite good English, which was a shock since she hadn't spoken to me since we first met. She obviously took great joy in being able to deliver such bad news. I had had enough free classes to know this was not a bonus. In smaller places, men's fees were always overlooked. Madame definitely owed us. Besides this, I started to see her innovative exercises as masochistic, designed to destroy line, over-build thighs, and make me strong, like Madame, but too tight. What had worked for her at the academy in Budapest wouldn't work for me. My legs were becoming bulky and overly muscular. She was one of those teachers who could only work from the perspective of their own body type, and although her strength had made her an anomaly and a legend, it hadn't made her a very good teacher. Her reputation was of no use to me. My pants were becoming tight on my thighs. I remember Kent, someone I was yet to meet, using the term
thunder thighs
. This turbulent honeymoon with Madame was over. It was worse than what I had left on the prairies.

Even though I was losing my line and my flexibility, I'd survive the misery she was dishing out. And I still wanted to prove myself before taking my final bow. This “fire walk” had happened with Kharkov and each one of the teachers in the Company's school. You either got no correction, or you got picked on by all the teachers, all at once. In both instances your head would be spinning after a few weeks of the treatment. And now it was happening with her.

I couldn't leave empty-handed, and without money. I also needed something—a role, a performance—for the resumé. I ruled out the idea that she might provide me with something good, a gem, a bit of conceited wisdom if possible, like most well-intentioned, yet fucked up, dance teachers I'd had. Perhaps the example of her strength and single-mindedness would be that gift. The way she taught made certain things more obvious: ballet was obviously unnatural and bad for the human form (unless, like Nijinsky or Daniel, you were born a freak of nature with legs and feet like a bird), not to mention it being invented by a mad French king who must have had some kind of strange foot-bondage fetish.

One night at her dinner table (an easy place to eat small portions after watching her snot-encrusted infants mash food through their angry little fists), over the last of some Hungarian wine, I mentioned that I would have to start looking for a job. She banged the dirty dishes into the sink and said, “You can stay here and pay me rent when you have it.” With the offer she wobbled, then pressed her body close and smiled.

It was time to go.

None of the other dancers spoke about money. They boarded with siblings who had also left the folks out in the wilds of northern Quebec, but to brave the city as government clerks and bank tellers and house painters. If any of the dancers did have a job, it was part-time for pin money to buy tights and shoes, not rent and food. Madame spoke English very well when she was angry: “These other dancers are spoiled brats. They don't understand you need to work. How do you think I paid for my training in Budapest?” This she shouted in the studio for all to hear, exploiting my situation to put them all down, and for a moment Madame and I spoke the same angry language. She seemed excited at the idea of my life beyond the dance studio—as if her secure routine in the narrow world of ballet had become a bore. But it was all an act.

Right away I started looking for a place to live. I lost my patience; just being under the same roof ruined my sleep. The brat-and-baby noises started early and went late. Every noise started a disturbance in another part of the house, and all of it overlapped, stopped for a moment, and then started up again.

I lost my precious sleep. As well as needing sleep to recover physically, it was the only escape from my problems. In the meantime, Madame took another boarder, her cousin Milosz, a Hungarian cellist looking to move to Canada. Every day by the time we got home, the old guy had left the kitchen a mess: daily disasters included burned spaghetti, plate upon plate of crusted dried food and one of the kid's plastic toys used as a coaster for the hot espresso pot, which adhered to the toy and in turn to the counter. She'd swear up a storm, which was interspersed with her fawning over Jean-Marc, then she'd scream at the baby, and cough from imminent lung cancer. She'd fly around the kitchen like Giselle gone mad: “Jean-Marc/ that bastard Milosz/ oh but Jean-Marc/ look what that fool Milosz has done/ Jean-Marc is so, so…/ goddammit, can you believe this idiot cellist?” All I knew was that I couldn't dance tired, look for a job, find money and an apartment. I couldn't even afford the dumps with pink walls, orange shag carpet and dusty macramé hangings covering the holes in the walls.

That night I lay in my room, the world of ugly apartments and the mayhem of Madame's home on the other side of the door. I stared at the ceiling thinking that maybe
Romeo and Juliet
in Montreal had been my swan song and the best I would ever dance. I had stepped out at the wrong time entirely. These dancers in Quebec had dreams and futures different from mine. Madame had a home, albeit in a hurricane zone. With kids, a husband and a ballet school, she had much to fall back on. I had little, verging on nothing. I was living someone else's plan. I had strayed so far from thinking I would be settling in with a beautiful man and dancing like a prince. I was in the wrong ballet, one for which I hadn't learned the steps.

The next afternoon Bertrand stared me down. I'm not sure why, but it was too late to bother convincing me of anything. After, in the dressing room he approached me. “Now you fight. Il faut que Madame sache que tu es mieux que Jean-Marc. I saw at the Conservatoire. Mais avance, comme les Mongoliens.”

Bertrand saw me dance when I was
in love
. “Mongolians?”

“Magyars,” added Louise. “That's what Madame said.”

I had no idea what they were talking about and it could very well have been lost in his translation or hers, but he persevered. “Mais, quel obstacle t'arr
ê
te?”

“Rien. Nothing is stopping me, but I can't go back.”

“Ces chances-l
à
n'arrivent qu'une fois.” A polite way of telling me this is my last chance.

I argued, “Vous etes fou! Madame aime Jean-Marc! Christ! Louise, tell him. Madame doesn't like men like me. I don't look at her the way she wants. I don't give a shit about Jean-Marc, which bothers her even more. Explique-lui, s'il vous plait!”

 

I don't believe in
grace—
maybe disgrace; I've never thought my useless prayers deserved to be answered over anyone else's. However there is something to be said about finally knocking on the right door (after slamming my head repeatedly against the wrong one), and feeling slightly blessed, even if the blessings are small. After a lacklustre class with Madame (in which she attempted to distract us from the doubts that she was less than brilliant by spontaneously breaking into a series of fouettés, once again, and I started to see her as a fearful, insecure spoiled brat, unfulfilled and desperate for attention from six equally desperate dancers) I wandered up toward the Old Town, delaying the return to Madame's bedlam of burned food and broken toys. I was empty of Daniel, dance, energy, inspiration and direction; and especially sick of Bertrand's psychotic enthusiasm. My body was rebelling. My lower back, which had never been a problem, was locked up tight as if a metal corset were clamped around my torso, from all the lifting she had me do. Therefore, even if I had wanted to stoop so low, I could no longer hope to impress Madame in class. In the mornings, I walked like my grandfather in his last years, and stared at the ground until I became limber and warm. She had proven to me that I was not worthy, nor capable, of any roles of substance in her repertoire. I thought of that pathetic dance teacher in Montreal who used to beg for his job on his knees. I wanted to fall to my knees and beg, but my knees ached and my faith was questionable.

When I finally got to the Old Town I wandered up the cobblestone rue Sainte-Ursule—one of the first streets after the stone gate of Port St. Louis. Despite just a mild incline, my ass fought against each step. The street was four-hundred-year-old limestone storybook scenic. Windows with blinds half-drawn like droopy eyelids looked out onto the street, mindlessly watching. Maybe I could find some doorway or alcove among these eyes, where I could sit and have a good old-fashioned, self-indulgent cry.

In a café window, a bright orange
local a louer
sign caught my eye. Anything in the Old Town would be a fortune, but I needed to stand in a warm empty apartment for a few minutes and entertain my fantasies. Maybe the owner would offer me tea, and I would have a moment to chat with someone other than this tiny, nasty company of masochists. In the café, a guy in an ironed plaid shirt with the wholesomeness of a carpenter told me, “Deux-cent-quarante-cinq.” What had I lost in the translation that made this sound like two hundred and forty-five? Thousand? A day? A month? Was it the shed around back? Unheated? No running water? What could possibly cost two hundred and forty-five, when twice that amount got rust-and-avocado shag? He led me out of the café and stepped into the street, walked a few steps, then through another door and up some stairs leading above the café. The two rooms were huge: one with a yawning blocked fireplace, and the other with a small open kitchen in the corner by the window. Both had windows at least eight feet high, two looking over the café terrace in the back and two facing onto the street below.

“It was our office, but we move everyt'ing next door.”

I took a risk and let the landlord know, “Je suis danseur,” which either garners a little respect and intrigue, or reluctance. But he seemed unmoved, still pleasant. Either he took a liking to me or just wanted to live dangerously.

“Je suis Luc. Vous êtes bienvenue,” he said. He was my lucky Luc. He had to be because I didn't tell him I was working for nothing and that my bank account was almost as empty as I was—enough for first month's rent and groceries to get me to the weekend.

It had been so long since I had been in training as a student, and the memories of those days of scrimping seemed to want to vanish with my first real paycheque. Sure the scholarship came in very handy, but I still needed to eat and sleep. After three years of being a bad waiter by night (being fired from almost every eatery in Winnipeg) and a struggling dancer by day, you can bet that I jumped at that Company offer. But for those three years I learned how to be thrifty, and knew that plain spaghetti and a jar of dill pickles, mixed with whatever I could pilfer from whatever restaurant I happened to be working at, went the farthest on a dollar, and still left me with coffee money, which was a staple.

It was a deal. I was now free of the worst of Madame. The surroundings would help immensely. It was the difference between Prokofiev and Elgar, order and dissonance, Odette and Odile. I loved my little empty space. I could grasp the window frames and lean forward into the most painfully satisfying arabesques. I could dance around the space to my heart's content. I could shove my feet under the radiators until I turned blue.

The first call on my new phone was to Daniel's answering machine. After all, I couldn't be that intimidating if I had moved all the way to Quebec and now had my own place. It was a short message, “Hi, it's John, here's my number. I'm in Quebec City,” in the best matter-of-fact-I-don't-give-fuck voice I could muster. That's what being in love with someone who, well, isn't where you are emotionally, forces you to; it makes you a damn good actor.
Was he out? Or still in New York?
I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Then it was me I doubted.
Did I sound blasé enough? Too blasé?
My phone didn't ring. Being my Pollyanna self, I thought it was broken and kept picking up the receiver to listen for the dial tone—until Friday night. I know this next bit couldn't happen according to the laws of physics, but in retrospect, and according to the laws of dance, which often break any physical laws—demanding us to leap even after we have left the ground, for which, yes, we've all heard it, ad nauseam, Baryshnikov is famous: I leapt fifteen feet through the air, flying to answer the phone.