Nancy Huston - Black Dance

JUNE 1980, MONTREAL World Film Festival. Close-up on Milo, not quite thirty, at a fancy dinner party. He glances around the table — white tablecloth, champagne, oysters, women in sparkling jewelry making long, careful curls bounce when they toss their heads back to laugh, men holding forth in loud proud voices — and thinks it is fine. Whatever. (He thinks his Lower Manhattan hole-in-the-wall is fine, too.)

A young actress, bleached blond, wearing a slinky, strapless black dress and teetering on stiletto heels, comes over and sits down next to him. At once they dive deeply into mutual seduction. . CUT.

In Milo’s room at the Ritz-Carlton on Sherbrooke (a mile or so west of the gray stone house in which Neil was once uncomfortably lodged by Judge and Mrs. McGuire), he and the blonde are making love. It turns out that this woman, whose name is Yolande or Yolaine, he’s not sure which, is even more beautiful without than with her makeup and fancy clothes.

“Hey, Milo Noirlac,” she whispers into his ear when they wake up in the morning, “I adore you, you know that? I’m not sure it’s wise of me but I can’t help it, I love the hell out of you.”

Milo smiles, presses her to him and, in the brilliant sunlight of a Sunday morning in Montreal, makes love to her again. They chat afterward, tapping silver knives through the shells of their soft-boiled, room-service eggs.

“Dis is incredible.”

“What’s incredible, Milo, love?”

“Dis whole thing. Being back in my hometown after all dese years. . Winning a festival prize. . Meeting you , Yolaine, de best actress in Quebec and de most beautiful woman in de world.”

“ Especially meeting me.”

“Dat’s for sure!”

“Will you write a role for me one day?”

“Ha! You know de Belgian joke!”

“No?”

“How do you recognize an up-and-coming Belgian actress?”

“. . Well?”

“She’s de one who sleeps with de screenwriter.”

They let their chairs tip backward onto the bed and go at each other again, Yolande taking the initiative this time and Milo giving himself up rapturously to her caresses.

CUT to the bathroom: Yolaine murmuring sweet nothings into Milo’s ear as they shower together.

“I love your hair. . And I love the way you write. . And I love how gentle you are. . And I love how you’re going to take me with you on your trips. .”

CUT to Milo and Yolande walking on Saint Helen’s Island together.

“Why are you always so passive, Milo?”

“I tought you loved me.”

“Yeah, I love you, but. . I mean, a person’s gotta know what they want. I say let’s get married, you say fine, and then you don’t do anything about it!”

“Well. . what is dere to be done? Is it as complicated as all dat? I don’t know, I never married anybody before.”

“Neither did I, you idiot, but we should throw a party, send out invitations to our families, I know that much. .”

“. .”

“Okay, okay, I know you never met your parents. . But you must have been raised by some body, Milo. You didn’t grow up with wolves in the forest!”

“Dat woulda been nice.”

“Come on. . You said you had a wonderful grandfather.”

“He’s dead.”

“And. . don’t you have a whole houseful of aunts and uncles and cousins up in Mauricie?”

“Dere’s nobody left.”

“You want us to get married just like that, in city hall?”

“Dat’s fine wit me.”

“Okay, well. .”

Close-up of Milo’s right hand, signing his name with a flourish at the bottom of an official paper. We read the end of the text: united in wedlock on this day. . Signed: Milo Noirlac . He hands the pen to Yolaine. . CUT.

OVER THE NEXT half minute or so: flashes from the next few years as Milo and Yolaine begin the life of a fairly happy, rather successful, moderately artistic Québécois couple of the late 1970s.

Milo running up the short flight of steps onstage to be congratulated at an awards ceremony, Yolande clapping from the audience. . The same situation the other way around. . Milo making wild love with Paul Schwarz on their first scoping-out trip to Rio. . Yolaine memorizing lines in the living room, with Milo cuing her. . Milo chain-smoking as he writes at the kitchen table in the middle of the night. . Yolande coming home at three A.M. and the two of them making love amidst his papers on the table. . Yolaine jealous because Paul Schwarz is on the phone and she suspects there might be something between them. . Milo in a black hole, in bed, his head turned to the wall, Yolande hovering at his side and worrying about him just as Roxanne used to. . Yolaine and Milo vacationing on the Côte d’Azur after the Cannes International Film Festival. . Sitting side by side on the beach. . Making love in the sand after nightfall, when everyone has gone home. .

A conversation over dinner that night. Yolande smiles at him as they raise their glasses in a toast.

“What shall we drink to?”

“To us, my beauty!”

“Yeah, but to us what?”

“To us, I dunno. . Do we have to add someting?”

They sip their drinks.

“That’s just the question, Milo.”

“What?”

“Yeah, should we add something or shouldn’t we? I mean. . should I stop taking the pill or shouldn’t I?”

“Ah!”

“You said it. Ah.”

“I don’t know. . D’you want a kid?”

“I don’t know. But it’s time I did, with my thirtieth birthday looming on the horizon. What about you?”

“Me?”

“Yeah, you! Do you want a kid?”

“I don’t know.”

“That makes two of us.”

“Hmm.”

“We’re pretty weird, aren’t we?”

“You tink so?”

“Okay, well, we can think about it awhile longer.”

“Let’s do dat.”

“Yeah, right, we’re not in that much of a hurry, eh? We can give it some more thought.”

“Right.”

(Remember how warmly I encouraged you to have a baby with Yolande, Milo darling? I quoted Shakespeare’s sonnet to you: You had a father: let your son say so. . I wanted you to live forever! But in Quebec in those days, too many adults had been unwanted, illegitimate, orphaned, lost, or abandoned children. . Now that people could avoid having kids, no one seemed to know quite how they felt about parenthood.)

EXTERIOR, SAINT DENIS STREET — NIGHT. Paul Schwarz is in Montreal to work with Milo on Science and Sorcery , their project about AIDS in Brazil. Sauntering into a bar together, the first thing they see is Yolaine’s back, with the arm of a male stranger draped ostentatiously around it. Not missing a beat, Milo steers Paul over to a corner table and goes on talking about how to do smooth camera work in the steep, unevenly cobbled streets of the favelas.

When she gets up to leave a few minutes later, the strange man’s arm still possessively glued to her body, Yolande catches sight of her husband and freezes in her tracks. The man releases her, but Milo smiles and looks away.

She slips her arm back through the man’s arm and they go out the door together.

CUT to Milo working at the kitchen table the next morning, cigarette in hand. When Yolaine comes home, he pours her a cup of coffee and brings it to her with a kiss. She clatteringly drops the cup into the sink.

“I just don’t get it, Milo! I don’t come home all night and you don’t give a damn!”

“. .”

“You see me with another man, I don’t come home all night and that’s fine with you!”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Listen, it’s just not normal to be that unjealous! I’m jealous, and I find it only normal to be jealous!”

“So we each tink we’re normal. Dat’s normal. .”