David Francis - Stray Dog Winter

A fake satin seashore rippled over the stage and the ballerina twirled among its folds. He borrowed the binoculars, focused them on the male lead who reappeared from the trees. Lust was different from passion, he thought as the dancer was drowned in a flood of ballerinas. Darcy focused on Chernenko’s daughter, already dozing up in her shell-shaped box. He felt redeemed somehow. It would be a long ballet for a short story but Fin was engrossed. Her leg rested easily up against Darcy’s and he felt the casual magnetism still there. He pressed his feet on the back of the seat in front of him, his toes still cold in his Albert Schweitzer boots. A new ballerina entered, wearing black, carrying a parasol. Is that the lady or the dog? he whispered, shifting in his seat. Someone along their row went shhhh and a masculine Slavic woman turned with her lorgnette. Next there’d be a troika on stage and cotton tufts of falling snow.

Darcy stood and moved past the knees, trying to be discreet, then walked up the aisle and through the echoing foyer. Hardly anyone was out there now, just the remnants of their smoke and some ushers. A row of silver-framed ballet posters—a swan with flying ballerinas, a painting of a sylphlike dancer in harem pants and turban, playing in Scheherazade perhaps. Darcy found his way downstairs into the tiled darkness.

It stank like a pissoir because that’s what it was. An inexplicable comfort, a stall, but the toilet was too filthy to sit on, no seat just a foul tin bowl. In the next stall a brown-suited man stood balanced with his feet on the flat metal rim of the seat, glancing anxiously over the rusted divider. His door was open, his old Russian erection half-hard. As Darcy went and stood at the urinal, he gave him a cheerless smile, a moment of graceless communion.

A cistern ran but it was otherwise silent. Darcy wondered why he was here, inexorably, with himself in his hand; he didn’t need to pee. There would be no boys from the ballet, not even an understudy, just the cowering comrade with the shame in his eyes. In a shining strip of metal in front of Darcy, the shadowy shape of his own face, narrow and distorted, waiting for… what? A young Baryshnikov? He’d be upstairs dancing or in a dressing room, or watching the performance like everyone else. The reflection of his face and the old man behind him felt strangely safe even though he imagined places like this were probably under surveillance. Maybe they were looking at him through the strip of tin, adding to their registry of deviants.

He glanced at a shadow in the doorway and was met by an exaggerated look. A man in his thirties with hazel eyes, Latinlooking, he seemed to smile but his lips didn’t move, and then he was gone. Darcy buttoned himself and left but the face stayed with him. Brows dark and full as caterpillars, golden skin despite the winter, his hair chestnut-streaked and slightly tousled.

Darcy reached the top of the stairs and breathed himself back to the world above ground. To this new normality. The program-seller in her booth, almost asleep on her feet; smoke from a cigarette curling from her hand. It was as though he’d conjured the man with copper skin. Then Darcy noticed him walking across the tiles with easy strides in a herringbone coat and cream fur hat, a thick black scarf around his neck. As if in a trance, Darcy moved over the Persian carpets and through the vastness of the entrance hall, hoping the man was the sort who might look back.

Darcy, he heard from behind him.

Fin stood in her wrap, her coat over her arm in the shadows of the burgundy velvet curtains. She’d caught him in action. He took a last glance at his quarry despite her, the man gliding down the icy steps and into a fresh canopy of snow. He covered the ground so gracefully, Darcy wondered if he’d even leave prints.

You took my binoculars, said Fin. She lifted them carefully from around his neck. Were you gone on safari?

I just needed some air, he said.

She motioned with her program, down towards the dark stairwell with the Russian sign for toilets. People usually go outside for air, she said.

Darcy raised his eyebrows innocently. He barely understood it either, he just knew. He’d come here in part to avoid the old haunts and he was already finding new ones.

Fin rolled her program and pulled on her coat. I once had an orgasm on a horse, she said, but I don’t hang out at the stables.

It stirred up an image in Darcy: the missionary climbing the slope away from him, being left naked in the grass.

You still go riding, said Darcy.

Fin clipped her binoculars back in her purse. Not here I don’t, she said, as they walked out into the snow. Darcy remembered the nights he walked from school and visited the clearing, lay his shirt in the grass in a careful ritual, spread the arms out wide. Alone, he pushed against his arching back and recalled the salt smell of the missionary’s sweat, the sensory memory rising inside him and a prepubescent jolting, a strange euphoric recall in the grass among the butterflies.

Darcy rode beside his father in the kombi, taking the long way back from the Yamala shops, Darcy changing the gears with his right hand while his father did the clutch, but Darcy missed third when he saw the missionary walking along Humphries Road. The kombi in neutral, his father just let it roll, half on the bitumen, half in the dust. Is that him? he asked, but Darcy said nothing. Roll down the window, his father said.

The missionary stood with his white shirt sleeves turned up and a narrow black tie, loosened from his collar because of the heat. Darcy’s father leaned across Darcy to the open window. I’ll take you to the top of the hill, he shouted.

The missionary opened the door, stepped up into the rumbling van. Make room, said Darcy’s father, and suddenly Darcy was sitting between them, putting the grocery bag down under his feet, and the missionary was saying a quiet American thank you.

I believe you two know each other, said Darcy’s father, starting up the road, doing the gears on his own.

The missionary removed a black baseball cap with risen letters that said UTAH. He ran his hand through his shock of thick hair. We have met, he said, yes.

Darcy wanted to offer him grapes from the bag but he didn’t. He glanced over, saw the awkwardness sewn in the corners of the missionary’s eyes. Did you read the Book? the missionary asked him.

Darcy turned his gaze to the floor, the missionary’s leather sandals, his dusty feet. I looked at the pictures, said Darcy.

So you’re a Mormon, his father said, and for a moment Darcy thought he spoke to him, then he noticed the missionary nodding, fiddling with his baseball cap. Darcy stared at the tattoo of the thorns on the missionary’s arm, he felt his knee against the missionary’s pants and a ripply feeling spread over him. He thought of the Rose of Sharon that covered his mouth, the weight of the missionary rubbing against him.

Are you married then? asked Darcy’s father.

The missionary’s smile was slight. It’s not compulsory, he said.

A truck ran past from the quarry and the kombi shuddered. We thought you’d have lots of wives, said Darcy’s father, didn’t we, son?

Darcy stared straight ahead, concentrating on the white line, the electric touch of the missionary’s leg.

I met your wife, said the missionary. She didn’t seem well.

That’s none of your business, said Darcy’s father, his change of tone sudden. Darcy eased his knee away.

The missionary turned the cap in his hands. I was on my way to see her now, he said.

Darcy’s father stopped the van, leaned over past Darcy and opened the passenger door. I can take care of my family, he said.