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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.
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    We lay with the streetlight and shadows playing across our skin. I vowed to give up anything for love.

 
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    Two
    A dancer’s bare feet approach the earth, toes extended. The soles, broad and thick, reach for the earth’s membrane then cushion the impact, draw history and resonance through the weathered skin from core to core. The soul is shaken free of its trance. The body again ascends—as the feet beat back at the world with entrechat and frappé —to the stars.
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    A door above me slams and my clothes fly down the open space at my side. I rise, look down the twenty-two-odd flights as a stray sock spirals defiantly to the bottom. Something cracks onto the floor below, cufflinks or my watch. It doesn’t matter. My belt buckle? And no one will come after me. I am in no man’s land, in the shaft of the sleek condo where I got everything I had ever asked for, or deserved, in a matter of seconds.
    Sunday morning came quietly in Daniel’s tree house. We woke late, and there was no “the Company”; no daily rehearsal sheet slipped under the door; no Company class; no dour-faced dancers poking forks in lone grapes on breakfast plates and dreaming about their second cigarette of the day. Once again I was outside my safety zone. There would be no equity-minimum-for-second-soloist paycheque in two weeks. There would be no speculation on who would get what role in the coming season. Before, I had paid-for dreams and goals, but now they were replaced by free promises.
    By now, the Company would be assembled in the hotel lobby for a bus to an early flight back to Winnipeg, welcoming a day off. They would later go for brunch and then put their fingers down their throats and puke, or sit in a movie theatre and worry about their 102 minutes of inactivity. Rachelle would read the Sunday New York Times Gordon had picked up earlier at the Fort Garry, spread on the floor (with the bright prairie afternoon sun filling the room, making it difficult to ignore the streaked window and the gathering dust bunnies) smoking something harsh, drinking pots of coffee, disappearing with Gordon to the bedroom at regular intervals, then making him dinner and curling up on the couch for hours of TV and wondering if the Company would make her a principal dancer someday—why hadn’t they already?
    Peter would be playing with himself in his room, thinking no one could tell, or maybe he’d have his perfect feet shoved under the radiator to make them even more perfect. God bless those poor overstretched tendons. Then he’d probably get together with a few of the dancers for coffee, and not so much a chat as a series of agreeable grunts. He was social that way. They’d have Monday morning off.
    I wondered if my days off with Daniel would be like Rachelle’s, until he whispered in my ear, “Come, we have a breakfast to go to.”
    â€œSo early?”
    â€œ Mon ami , it is no longer early, we have slept late and will just make it.”
    When you get to know someone, you find out things about them that you overlooked—how they snore, chew, sip, wipe their nose with their knuckle, how sloppy they are or, in Daniel’s case, how meticulous: his attention to the order he dressed