Turning Back the Sun(7)
To Rayner each turn seemed more vapid than the last. The girls entered dressed as geishas, cats, houris, schoolmistresses, chatelaines. As they peeled off their veils and wimples and smocks, he felt as clinical towards them as to the women he examined each morning for pregnancy or breast cancer. “Do they do it for money?”
“No,” Ivar said. “They get paid a pittance.”
So their mystery deepened.
From time to time their acts were broken by interludes of conjuring or song, and in one of these Zo? appeared. She was accompanied by violent music. In its mask of powder and eye shadow, she had re-created her face not for human intimacy but for theatrical display. He saw this now. It projected her with schematic vividness. The stringent ballerina”s hairdo withdrew all softening from her battle plan of upcurved mouth and highlit cheekbones. She was fiercely attractive.
She released herself headlong into the music. Her dancing was as she”d said, an amalgam of her own: a tumult of twisting, leaping and mime, out of which—as if from early training—erupted balletic pirouettes and arabesques. She seemed to dance out of some defiant core in her, without thought of her audience. The music throbbed and swung. Every movement shouted: this is me! Even her figure, encased in a vulgar iridescent leotard, came as a surprise. Her torso with its long, delicate arms and soft-looking breasts, descended to full hips and strong dancer”s legs. She seemed less sexual than violently, demonically physical.
Rayner sensed the audience go still: confronted by the unexpected. In the screen of mirrors behind the stage they were all reflected as a diffused whiteness, like dead fish floating in the dark, while the fierce, small figure in the leotard, cut low behind down a shimmering brown back, flung herself angrily at their indifference.
They confused her dance with striptease. At several tables the men were growing restless. Somebody shouted up: “Get yer clothes off!”
Rayner wondered why the club engaged her, unless as a foil to the strippers. In this underworld of spangled G-strings and rouged nipples, she emerged as an enigma, only half tamed. She”d somehow got away.
Rayner said: “She doesn”t seem to care about her audience.”
“She cares all right,” Ivar said, “but she”s self-centered.” His lips compressed sourly. Rayner thought he detected a hint of hurt pride, which in Ivar was odd. Zo? was the only performer on whose body he passed no judgement. Perhaps, Rayner thought, he was too familiar with it.
“She got left behind,” Ivar laughed, “like the savages.” “Left behind?”
“Yes, this place started up ten years ago as a satirical cabaret. Pretentious stuff. Can you imagine it, in this town? And of course nobody came. The government didn”t even bother to close it down. It just faded out. Felicie”s father bought it for a song, and the old troupe gave up. All except Zo?. She never accepts anything. The club kept her on as “something different.” “ He sounded slightly bitter. “One day she”ll dance herself to death.”
In the middle of Zo?”s act, Felicie returned to their table. Rayner went on staring at the stage, refusing to comment on her singing, but Ivar told her, “You”re beautiful.”
She smiled and followed Rayner”s gaze. She said, “I can”t stand Zo? when she”s like this. She”s so cold.”
By now the spectators, in their lethargic way, were reacting as never before. Their dislike arose not in shouted abuse but in a diffused murmur of resentment which came welling up out of the dark. It was extraordinary. By her dance”s end an almost tangible wave of anger was beating against the stage. After the strippers” open thighs, this other performance struck the half-drunk audience as an insult. The girl was flattering herself instead of them, making shapes with her too-independent body. And her inaccessibility was unbearable.
Her only concession to eroticism happened a minute before she ended. Then she literally let down her hair. It fell brown and shining to her waist. It transformed her. It lengthened and gentled her face. And all at once she looked unsure. To Rayner it seemed as if this was her way of undressing—a way more self-exposing than any of the others”. She no longer looked like a woman, but a young girl. She finished in stillness, but the eyes staring out between the frame of hair were now tentative, and seemed suddenly to need the audience”s applause, which did not come.
Even Rayner”s lonely clapping sounded not for her pastiche dance, but for the courage with which she had invested it. She left him vaguely confused. He had misjudged her. After a while he got up to leave. Ivar had turned moody, Felicie was drunk, and the rest of the audience were concentrating on another stripper, as if Zo?”s dance was no more than a failed version of this one. And maybe it was, Rayner thought. He was always laying his own meanings on simple things, he knew. And perhaps Zoe was as empty as Felicie in her way: just an exuberant girl, dancing.
CHAPTER
4
What do you mean when you say you”re “cut off?” “ But Rayner did not know. Perhaps to feel cut off was to have grown up. He said, “I don”t feel I belong here.”
The man said, “I”m not sure that anybody does. This is such a peculiar place.”
“Other people accept it,” Rayner said. He glanced at the man, wondering how recent an immigrant or exile he was. “But I can”t put down roots here. I want to, but I can”t.”