Strip
Copyright © Andrew Binks, 2013.
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Typesetting & Cover Design: Carleton Wilson
Cover photograph: Graham Davies
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Binks, Andrew, 1958–, author
Strip / Andrew Binks.
ISBN 978-0-88971-290-4 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-88971-302-4 (ebook)
I. Title.
PS8603.I56S87 2013 C813’.6 C2013-903131-6
For Bernard and Hugo
Mais tu restes muette, impassible, et, trop fière,
Tu te plais à me voir, sombre et désespéré,
Errer dans mon amour comme en un cimietière!
—Émile Nelligan (1879–1941)
from “Amour immaculé”
One
A dancer’s fingertips—etched with a language that is no longer decipherable—tickle space, trace its volume, press, pull, contract, constrict, until they touch, grasp, hold and balance, shift what is on and off balance. They retreat, release, flick, dab. At careless times they graze. Graze nipples. Trace filaments across the skin. They touch the sternum and search for the heart.
A slammed door echoes up this stairwell from the floors below. Am I naked underneath this bedsheet? Is there bleeding? Blood. Reassuring. It means I still have a heart. They say it’s in our blood, this new disease. So far, they say, hundreds have died because of it. And my balls ache. My lip throbs. I taste the warm blood and my saliva mixed with something salty. There must be tears; I can barely see. There must be tears. If I had something in my stomach I would vomit. I remember Kent said our New Year’s resolution was to make 1983 our year. “Here’s to you and me in ’83,” he said. Helluva year it’s turning out to be.
Everyone has a Daniel, and, with luck, you’ll have him early on, to break your heart to pieces and then get over it. Never make the same stupid goddamned mistake again. Funny how you can talk yourself into thinking the road less travelled will be a noble trip. I tripped on the road less travelled.
I haven’t thought much about him recently, not his sharp chin or his Adam’s apple with the tiny cleft of stray whiskers that his razor couldn’t reach, or his long nose extending down from his forehead, making him look like the distant relative of the black and white television test-pattern Indian. He was superb and perfect, and he knew it. Someday someone might be inspired to stage a full-length ballet about nothing more than his eyebrows.
In this stairwell, in this light, Daniel is no more than a flicker. Through him I have come to understand lust, désir. Through Kent—love, amour. Lust singes the hairs on your hand, and can just as easily bite them with frost. Lust can kill quickly. Love tears your world asunder, then leaves you to die on the battlefield. But if I have to blame anyone (that is, anyone other than myself) I would start with Daniel. I could blame Kharkov, too, who brought in Daniel as a guest répétiteur at the end of our tour.
Montreal, our last stop on the homestretch of our first national tour as a big-league company. And 1982 was the Company’s year; we premiered the full-length Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet. We were exhausted and bloated from too much road food. The ballerinas were thick around their middles—even the anorexics were struggling—from endless health muffins and Caesar salads with house dressing hold-the-croutons-in-the-name-of-the-diet, and late-night post-performance carrot cake, or the great fatigue fighter, chocolate, in its many evil forms. Cigarettes were no longer keeping the addicts thin. We ignored our colds and our injuries—women taped their toes, wrapped their ankles, and rinsed the blood from their shoes. Men danced through pulled groins, shin splints and torn Achilles tendons. We were sick from drafty buses, drafty hotel rooms, drafty rehearsal halls and each other. A few sought refuge in chamomile tea, steamy showers and naps. In the midst of it all I, too, needed a pick-me-up.
This malaise, this touring burnout didn’t stop me, or anyone else from trying to impress the arrogant fuck, Daniel Tremaine, Montreal’s ballet wunderkind, the teacher and choreographer you went to if you wanted to win a medal at a ballet competition. Deep in Place des Arts in the bright rehearsal hall, cavernous ceilings, mirrors for miles, Kharkov announced, “Monsieur Daniel Tremaine will be giving us company class while we are here in Montreal.” Giving us? (Kharkov only took class in December when he faked his way through Drosselmeyer in The Nutcracker. Even then he usually just fumbled his way through barre.) Kharkov was nervous about impressing Montreal. Daniel would be his salvation. I looked around the studio. Some dropped their heads, pretending to limber their necks, others caught my eye. Some rewrapped their warm-up gear, leg warmers and sweaters, placing them strategically to hide the extra pounds.
Daniel Tremaine, the legend. People had compared him to Nijinsky, said he was built more like a bird than a human. But it didn’t stop his very ethereal body from betraying him; as he rehearsed an understudy for Montreal’s Conservatoire’s production of Swan Lake in Glasgow, he tore his Achilles, badly. Therapy went well, but he fell on some stairs when wearing the cast, and ripped the healing, the muscle and the skin, even worse than the original injury. His dancing career went kaput, but it hasn’t stopped anybody from wanting a piece of his greatness.
I tried to take it in stride as Daniel stooped—all six-foot-three of him—the top of his head, his thinning crown, next to my crotch, correcting my line and adjusting my instep. Oh sure, I have been nervous to the core with each new coach, teacher and choreographer, but when he touched me that first time, it hit me like the February wind at the corner of Portage and Main; my breath was shallow, my heart frappéd inside my rib cage, my ears rang and my vision went dim. I squeezed the barre, inhaled and fought a sudden numbness in my thighs. Like I said, it is the kind of attraction that will eventually destroy you.
He ignored me the rest of the class, thank God, but I couldn’t stop looking at those big hands that had touched me, the broad feet that had walked in my direction, the same feet that had danced all the great roles at so young an age on international stages, and at the way he flicked his famous wrists as he dreamily explained something into the air. I suppose that blasé, unimpressed look was how he got dancers to push themselves; the dancer’s ego is a frail and determined thing.
After class, in the bright hallway, while the others wandered ahead,