Excerpt from "The Bod"

by Jo McKendry

The Audition

I began to hoard stolen goods--a crock-pot with a broken lid, a battered copy of the Joy of Cooking, a red leather bag and a boyfriend. Bronzed and muscled and of a clear intellectual bent, Lars was from the same neck of the woods as me--his father had once driven through the town of my birth, declining to stop the car. His parentage was part-this and part-that, which parts which I did not seek to decipher. I purported to be of muck Irish descent by way of County Limerick, though Mother maintained there was one Protestant in the family. She felt it filled us out a bit, gave us leverage. I did not go deep into the genealogy with the fresh young man but dispensed with further introduction and took to the bed at our left.

Our fornication was a triumph.

We replicated it at once, to be sure.

Thereafter we met strictly on the weekends, so as not to interfere with his general studies. Of what I did not ask (fouettes to the Philippians) but left him to his generals and books. In time we discussed many things: the 'nature' of Paul Keating; people in common. It seemed we had collided years earlier at the university. The only thing I recalled about the university was the floor of the library where smoking was permitted, one or two wayward senior lecturers, and the great lawn--how hundreds of us had lain about on it with our respective paramours, and when we tired of them climbed over prone bodies towards the next. It was a year-round slumber party of the mind, a grassy love-in unspoiled but for the marauding ibis that were native to the area. You couldn't help but be concerned that they'd pick at your bits. (Discuss.)

But that was all ahead or behind and meantime Lars and I went out to eat and drink on Saturday nights then walked the city streets and looked up at the lights of all the apartments we did not live in. "Imagine," we whispered to one another, just that one word so as not to interfere with the other's private run. For my own part, whenever my skin was within an inch of Lars's skin, I felt electrified, weak, nauseous, giddy, as if I'd been thrown over an electric fence and got jammed, spasming all over the sidewalk. My mind, my senses were a secondary thing. We reentered his tiny student room in midtown and rutted on the thin mattress till the life near left us. I fell out of the room sometime late on Sunday afternoon and our respective weeks started again. For an age we did not whisper an endearment, beyond our mutual admiration for Paul Keating, our attachment cemented through the ineradicable fact of our unfaithful, holy coition.

I grew more and more accustomed to his scent and some nights, mid-week, I lay astir on my grounded cot on 23rd Street, aching. I slept fitfully, driving myself underground and dreaming disastrously of little boys I had known in primary school, recovering their foibles and teensy exposures, jumping between frames from one little chump to the next, making of their features and idiosyncrasies a speckled mud soup.

One morning as I lay in, sifting through the night's drama and idly awaiting an afternoon audition, my roommate approached me with a personal tale, beginning "I, I . . ."

That had not been part of our original share agreement and I sat up on the mattress and inched my 'sits bones' towards the wall, the dire language of release having infiltrated my layers. Though I'd always had, as my brothers said, a "bony arse," and I located them with ease. (One wondered that one paid for fresh lessons!)

Three feet away on the other side of the room--my bit of room--Laura fell back towards the dresser and crumpled to the floor. She wore a dirty peach silk robe and clutched a twisted posy of toilet paper, her face covered in thick white night cream streaked with black.

"Did something happen?" I suggested halfway through her kabuki.

"No, no," Laura said, shaking her head, tears beginning to dribble down her cheeks.

"Something must have happened," I prompted her. I did not want to be late for the audition.

"No, that's just the point--nothing's gonna happen," she said, bumping into the floor and sobbing recklessly into her toilet tissue.

"What do you mean?" I asked, though I thought I knew. Her every pore had the look of being pre-ordained, as if whatever was going to happen had already happened in a prior lifetime and her present days on earth were a matter of fulfilling some great karmic repercussion. But weren't we all . . .

"This--" she burst in, indicating with a broad sweep of her arm the universal griminess, "is never gonna change!"

I looked up at the grey gunk on the ceiling, wondering if someone had recently taken a spatula to it and plastered it on.

"I'm never gonna make it as a singer," she went on, filling out her role. "I know I've got a voice . . ." as her throat broke in a humongous wail.

"I've heard you singing," I said. "You're much better than--"

"Do you think so?"

"Yes," I said, recalling Laura's sweet, high voice that in a note could drop to a lush, growly cabaret. It was like her body that way I thought, petite, yet slovenly and unkempt.

"I just wanna be Madonna," Laura said, forestalling my critique.

My face must have registered some confusion.

"Well--like her, you know."

I tried hard to imagine Madonna's dance moves on Laura's waddling bottom. The talk of Madonna seemed to cheer her and she got up and retied the silk belt of her robe.

"Thanks," she said, retreating to her bedroom.

Two minutes later as I fished in my bottom drawer for something to wear Laura reappeared round the arch of the door and told me "some man from Long Island" had asked her to go home with him last night.

"Oh," I said, wanting to ask how he expressed his gs, if he swallowed or--

"It's a lot of money," she said, "for a few hours work. It's like, maybe, five hundred, for one night."

"Oh," I said, trying to calculate the hourly rate.

Laura's face and backside began to topple again. From across the room I did a demi-plie to get underneath, prop her up a bit.

She pulled herself up suddenly, "Do you think I should?"

I hesitated, still trying to sort the numbers, the hourly effect.

"Five hundred dollars," she said confidently, "for one night," shaking her shoulders a little--just like Mother when she felt fancy, mod.

"You really want my opinion?" I said.

"Yes."

Admittedly, it was fresh moral ground for me and I felt an historic irritation at the Mercy nuns for having spent so much of my youth fielding mock questions they had composed as if they were a gaggle of teenage girls, along the lines of what we--not they--should do at the threshold of our disposable virginity. But their in-class trials had never entertained the notion of being paid for it.

"Well," I said, trying to buy us a little time.

"It would, be m-my--" she began to sob again, almost willfully, "fi-irst ti-i-me!"

Her voice sounded as if she was shouting underwater, the words refusing to come any louder or faster.

"Ohh-hh-h-h," she lamented as she fell into the corner wall and dissolved in the carpet runner.

I had guessed that was our dilemma. Not that it would happen a second and a third time, that was for certain, but it was this first time that the breach so to speak, would be breached. I rifled my mind for any tidbits we could use. My brothers and their friends paying for their first sexual encounters in the grass behind the State school? It meant--something, I felt sure, but what?

"Uh," I said, raising my hand to alert Laura to my growing body of thought.

Laura looked up at me, clear-eyed, expectant. I remembered my friend from the old days--getting warmer--what was her name? Mar-co Po-lo, the teenage alien sang loudly in my head, disrupting my stream. Shush! I shouted back at him. It must have slipped out as Laura burst into tears as if I had berated her.

"No, no, no," I said, making a move with my arms and upper torso as if to comfort her. Think! Katrina! Caspianopolus!! Whose father had counseled her at the tender age of seventeen to never pay for it. Come from one of the old islands, he had, like Greece, so that she would've felt the ancient weight of his words. She'd passed the advice onto me, on the lawn of the university. What was it exactly the old man had said: "Don't pay for what you can get for free."

"No," I answered with confidence, reasoning that her Long Island gent should keep his money.

Laura seemed pleased, even encouraged, and blew her nose vibrantly. She crawled towards me on her knees, like the back end of a four-legged animal, her forepaws outstretched, wet posy in hand as if to envelop me in her sinussy discharge.

The audition was held in a studio on Rivington Street. There were about fifty dancers besides the three already working with Steve Rosenfeld. I recognized one of them, a male, M, from ballet class. I did not accost him, or even wink lest I be deemed desperate, ambitious. I unspooled my spine, then shook my limbs violently. I retraced my body to vertical and began to appraise it. Leaner than some, more full-thighed than others. Would my humeri ever grow in? I sucked in the little paunch that advanced like a frill at my abdomen. Then let it hang, remembering to "release." Some of the dancers had coiled their long hair into buns. Mine was brown again, and caught in a low pigtail at my nape. I resembled my own grandmother with her long visage, and giving off an air, in the photographs, of one of the quieter saints. At cross currents with the post-post-post-post-modern look, by my grandmother's account, who'd grown up on a dairy in Duranbar and thought sex was something that happened "as you slept." "Good God, woman," I yelled into my interior, "no time for reminiscence!"

It was my nerves steering me down the old dirt track. Steve Rosenfeld began to teach a short excerpt from his latest exhibition. His physical language was unfamiliar, his uncommon, lurching moves swallowing the space, set against fleeting particularities. I despaired of the time wasted but tried, by sheer force of will, to follow along step by step. There was a rumor slithering about the floorboards that Steve Rosenfeld had danced with Merce Cunningham, who I had lately come to adore. For a gal raised on the battering thighs of the Royal Academy his work was like getting an unvarnished peep at, say, Balanchine, which was, in turn, like getting an unvarnished peep at, well, Balanchine, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum and a touch of ad nauseum so that after first spying Concerto Barocco I'd taken myself into the toilets at the State Theater and quietly vomited. It happened whenever I fell in love. Ah, with Merce too. Glimpsing the fine inner workings of nature, finally. I had taken that one Cunningham class, but it was of no use to me then or now. Steve Rosenfeld was carving out his own art, his own steps; I had no way of recalling them in sequence. I looked at a move here, another over there, telling myself to just "do what you see," as I slipped silently into the second person, my doppelganger Pete.

We were broken into groups of ten. Steve Rosenfeld sat on a gray fold-out chair at the front of the room, smiling and fidgeting on the seat. Pete had been positioned in the front line of the first group. He was a fleshless bag of bones of a nondescript age somewhere between twenty and thirty-two. He sported a whisper of chin-hair, as if in his boyhood it had not properly grown in, and was pointedly homosexual, with no physical ability to remark but that his left ear was tone-deaf. Strange that I was attached to him so. Pete tried to drift backwards as if unsure where he should stand, until the dancer behind asked if he would take a step forward. Bitch! I barked silently. Everyone began to move and Pete couldn't remember a step--insignificant beside his stark inability to execute it. M walked over and stood directly in front of Pete, picking up the excerpt from where he'd stumbled. Pete copied him methodically, like an old fellow after a stroke. At the end Steve Rosenfeld got up and clarified a section in which he stood on one leg, unfolding his other leg at a 45-degree angle to the floor while turning the palm of his right hand upwards, his head and upper body towards the windows on the left. Some of the dancers appeared to practice. Pete extended my right leg, opened my palm wide and turned my head and torso to the left towards the thick hedge of dancers with gnarled feet spread along the wall beneath the windows. They were wide-eyed, alert, apart from two or three whose nerves had shunted them into a torpor from which they couldn't ascend. They were slumped low on their bums, drowsing. At the second run-through Pete couldn't recall any better though I thought he'd be alright once we got to the unfolding leg bit. I was beginning to feel embarrassed when M stepped in. Pete followed him as best he could, even enjoying, once, a wild extension of my arms.

I waited as the other dancers took their turns, Pete collapsed at my breast. The pair of us pretended to watch though our capacity for seeing was temporarily exhausted. After an hour Steve Rosenfeld thanked everyone effusively, said he wasn't used to this many dancers coming to his auditions. He knew how difficult it was, and thanked everyone again.

"You, and you, you, you, and you," he said, pointing finally at me and mine.

He asked our names. Steve Rosenfeld said to please call him "Steve," then he taught another excerpt, longer and fast-moving. I threw myself into the physical process, reminding us both of the mantra: "monkey see, monkey do." I wanted to remind the others too, but I didn't want to give them a leg up of any kind. Blast them! I thought. When I was not concerned with Pete's 'winning' the audition, which had begun to creep into the dim corners of my mind, we danced awkwardly, rooted to one spot or staggering in a semi-circle, sometimes seeming to discover a movement, how it felt, or might feel if I could feel, half-crazed as we both were on adrenaline. At the end of what might have been minutes or half the day, Steve Rosenfeld thanked the left-over dancers and apologized for only needing one of us. He asked for a few minutes more of our time. I wanted to lay out a picnic for the two of us. He and M conversed privately on one side of the room while we changed into our regular clothes on the other. What an array of murmuring, half-seen loveliness! Pete and I marveled at the dancers' undergarments, their mini boobs and stout thighs, their meticulously shaved crops! I put on my grey woolen coat and prepared to exit into the customary blast of sunlight, the brilliant, nauseating light of thwarted hopes as I stepped into the remainder of the failed day . . .

"Thank you for coming," Steve Rosenfeld said, walking into the center of the room and softly shaking his head. He looked directly at me and asked if I would stay to talk with him. For a picnic! I sang inwardly. Pete walked towards him on wooden legs. Steve Rosenfeld took down our scant details, name and address, since Laura preferred that I didn't make or receive phone calls. Pete's hand trembled as he scribbled down the hours and addresses of the rehearsal studios in three different locations. Steve Rosenfeld couldn't pay much, "Maybe four hundred at the end," he said. Pete told him that we didn't expect to be paid anyway. He was thinking, mostly, of me. "Dancers never do," Steve Rosenfeld said despondently, before we broke into uproarious laughter. As we descended the stairs Steve Rosenfeld mentioned that M said he'd seen me in a show at DTW. M was mistaken, I'd never performed in a show at DTW and I rushed through the catalogue in my mind of all the dancers M might have seen whom he thought had been me. I was not displeased by the comparison, coercing one or two brunettes whose long arms and lean thighs on closer inspection, would not pass muster. Steve Rosenfeld looked at me half expectantly, but I let his secondhand comment slide and smiled as I pushed open the door and stepped out onto Rivington Street. The daylight pounced as if it had been lying in wait.


Jo McKendry grew up in Queensland, Australia. She danced in Sydney and New York before beginning to write. Her stories have appeared in Fiction, Antioch Review, Southwest Review and Stand.