to leave with as little fanfare as possible, it would have been nice to have him regret losing me.
It was time to dance and love as others had done. I needed to keep following my heart. It was there, tucked inside Daniel’s sternum. That’s where I saw my future. I saw with conviction the rejigging of my technique, establishing myself in the East, and most of all, endless love.
I met Rachelle at Dunn’s for one last cigarette and coffee. There, surrounded by busy waiters, customers lined up at the door and glass cases of cheesecakes, we tried our best not to get too sentimental. “I’ll write to you about it.”
“Just phone. How was Kharkov?”
“He squirmed. You know Kharkov.”
Rachelle mmmm’d like she didn’t believe a word. “Don’t take any shit. The dance world doesn’t like outsiders.”
“The dance world is outsiders.”
“Not to sound negative, but I hope your prince is all he’s made out to be. You deserve it.”
She had her prince, and I wanted mine. “Take care of Peter.”
“You’re leaving a trail of broken hearts.”
“Peter? I think we sorted that out long ago.”
“He’s a sensitive boy.”
“Kharkov likes sensitive.”
“Sounds like he’s up next for soloist.” Rachelle was a perceptive girl.
“Did he tell you?”
“I heard you guys. I know all, see all. I am a woman, for God’s sakes. I just… I just don’t believe it.”
“Me neither.”
“No. Honestly. This isn’t you. It’s like you’ve been brainwashed. Yes, you’re dancing better because of all the endorphins in your systems, but it’s making you crazy.”
“Cake?”
“Oh God please no. My thighs are starting to squeak; I’ll have to start greasing them.”
When we were paying, I bought a whole cheesecake for later with Daniel. “It must be love.” Rachelle jabbed me in the ribs, her momentary seal of approval.
After the show that night, I packed my things and Peter, Rachelle and I opened a much-needed bottle of champagne.
“Altogether now, you know it by heart: Give me Veuve or give me death.”
“God, how many of my paycheques have gone up in bubbles since you two moved in?”
We drank it in a kind of noisy silence: Hotels doors banged, someone knocked on our door and an elevator bell kept dinging as if to mark the very last moments we would have together. But we sat, with our backs to it, in our own silence. “I can’t talk or I’ll cry,” Rachelle said, breaking the silence.
“You’ll probably get Tybalt,” I said to Peter.
“No. Too good-looking,” said Rachelle. “He’ll get Paris and a really good role in something new.”
“Something new?”
“Mark my words.”
Soon my thoughts shifted to the future, my future. All I could think about was getting to Daniel, and sharing another celebratory bottle with him. I didn’t want to drag this out any longer. Rachelle would get weepy if she had any more to drink—there was still a stocked mini-bar after all—and Peter was probably just thinking about his next role. I’m sure I’d already departed as far as they were concerned. We kissed, hugged, I took my bags and my cheesecake and tried not to run into anyone else, as I ran to him.
When I got to Daniel’s, we celebrated the Company’s departure and my new life. In the moonlight on the bed, after Daniel separated the seeds from the stems, we smoked and then we stuffed ourselves on cake and each other. We lay on our backs looking out into the treetops and he told me about an abusive father and a doting mother as he traced his fingers through the shadows above our heads. I told him about the big empty house in Edmonton and the anticipation of siblings who never arrived—how my father’s family humiliated my mother until it was revealed it was father who was reproductively challenged. (Was I a one-shot deal? If not, who was my real father?) Father appeased his guilt, starting with her first mink coat and continuing with her very own convertible—that woman drove a shrewd bargain. As a result, my mother referred to me as her “perfect boy.” The term was loaded with, “Since I can only have one, then he is perfect; in fact he is the only perfect male in this house…”
There, in the dark, was something I had never shared with another person. We weren’t hiding in a closet or a motel room. He stayed on the bed and I moved to the floor, leaning against the bed. He touched the top of my head with his long fingers. We were two men, two complete and naked physical beings, comfortable with ourselves.
“It’s time,” he said. “I want to make love to you, properly.”
“Soon.”
“I want to.”
“Now?”
“You sound surprised.”
I hoped the marijuana might make it easier, but the pain was excruciating. I always thought it would be so natural with the right person. But I ended up with my face pressed into the pillow, biting hard into it, trying to suppress a scream.
He gave up and dropped, deadweight, onto me. I whispered to him, “Thank you for being so understanding.” Then he sighed and rolled off.
Old thoughts about my inadequacy now haunted me. My mother drove me, her perfect boy, in her new Cadillac to the doctor’s office while I sat bent over, a seven-year-old with a searing pain in my abdomen like something was stuck inside. The pain stopped my breath, a herniated something, an incomplete something else, a testicle that hadn’t dropped. It was a series of trips to the doctor and operations in hospitals.
It always started with me standing on a small box in the doctor’s examination room, my pants around my ankles while one or two doctors poked my abdomen, stared at my penis, or shoved their dry fingers behind my scrotum and up into me so hard that they raised me up off my little snow-soaked socked feet. The efforts to find the source of that pain and rip it out blinded me. They laid their big fingers on my stomach and pressed here and there on my naked body, staring at my front, touching me.
I was innocent until a fifth visit and that one doctor looked up at my face and our eyes met. He looked like one of the ballet princes, and I retracted my hips as my penis began to stir for the first time I was aware of. While I was consumed with guilt, my mother was more concerned with her lipstick and the dashing doctors. A few years later, I was back to the doctor for another hernia, or was it bedwetting? I remember my mother had her hair done for the occasion. The doctor dug around in my underwear pressing on my abdomen, intestines, stomach, balls, pulling on them as I tried not to show spontaneous arousal. The thought of his staring, and rough pokes and soft lingering fingers, while I looked at the top of his head, sent a terrible thrill through me. Years later when I would dream of the visits to the doctor I would wet the bed, but not with piss.
We
