The Better Mother

THE PLAGUE

1982


There’s something creeping through the night, a faceless monster that breathes, damp and quick, on the back of Danny’s neck. At first he thinks it’s just him, that his visit to his parents’ house has disconnected him from his carefully structured life. But the feeling that something menacing is following him has been increasing for months, long before the family visit, and it will not disappear. He begins to notice a skittish, unsettled look on the faces of the other men at the bar, on the trails in the park at night, at a birthday party for his friend Jack.

On a Friday afternoon, Edwin, perched on Danny’s couch, turns to him and says, “Marco is sick. It’s that gay disease.” His head droops on his chest.

In a flash, Danny knows what is chasing him, or at least he knows the shape of it. The havoc it creates with a touch of its invisible finger. Their friends are sick, shivering through pneumonia, a mysterious cancer, cold after cold. The monster, nameless and undiscriminating, captures a body and then another, felling each by a different method.

“But there are only two cases in Canada,” Danny protests. He feels panic rising up his legs, into his stomach. “I heard it on the radio.”

“People are getting sick all the time, but no one’s counting, or no one really sees what’s going on,” Edwin mutters. “James stopped coming to the bathhouse months ago, and we don’t know where he’s gone. And Sean. I saw him last week. He was wearing an overcoat and toque in this weather. It won’t take long, Danny, before everyone begins to freak out.”

“What are we supposed to do?”

Edwin grimaces. “Nothing. Live harder. What else?”

Danny walks down Davie Street with this new awareness and sees that men move with their heads down, not looking up for fear of seeing yet another man newly infected, newly spotted with Kaposi’s sarcoma. In the nightclub, the dancing has become feverish, panicked, as if these nights of shaking their asses and arms to New Order could be annihilated mid-song. The night progresses, and the men move sombrely through the crowd, some drinking quickly, some doing lines in the bathroom until their faces reconfigure into a forgetfulness that doesn’t obliterate the confounding circumstances, but dulls their feelings, which is second best, but perhaps acceptable for now.

The gay community newspaper has been publishing reports since last winter, and is now punctuating the low-level panic with actual words. Gay cancer. No one knows how it jumps from one body to another. Danny wonders about sex but shakes the thought free. What he does with other men doesn’t belong to the doctors and the journalists, only to the park and cry-muffling bush.

He returns to the park after an absence of a few days and begins to notice how everything has changed. The needles on the trees have turned rust brown; those that have fallen to the ground are half powder now, crushed by the passing feet of humans, coyotes, even the sharp paws of raccoons. All thirsty, all searching for fresh water. Danny walks by a sign. FOREST FIRE HAZARD HIGH. NO FLAMES IN WOODED AREAS. Ahead, he can see the lit ends of cigarettes bobbing in the evening light. He wonders what sound one-hundred-year-old trees make when they burn. He imagines coarse, scratchy screaming, the whoosh of branches lighting from the bottom up. The nerve endings in his fingers twitch as he aches for a fast blaze, instant combustion. If he doesn’t touch someone soon, he will slowly smoulder.

The f*cking is sad and deliberate. Danny is grateful for the silence, for the tangled clumps of bush that darken and conceal. Sex is a consolation when nothing is certain. Though the men hold each other briefly, it is better than being alone in your apartment, where there is no protection against the shadows that fall across your skin until you are convinced you are dying. Here, in the park, everyone knows everyone else’s thoughts. They don’t need to be spoken.


The movie with the Siamese Kitten has been lingering with him for over a week. He hears Miss Val’s voice wherever he goes, that purr and growl offering advice to the film’s novice dancer. “Now, sweetie, remember to look those fellows in the eye. If you want tips, you have to make each one feel like he’s the only guy in the room, like the two of you are going to go off and mate like bunnies.” Even now, as he stands on his balcony in a patch of shade, he laughs at her delivery—part world-weary dame, part concerned mama trying to make sure her kids are treated fairly, part bad actress shouting lines when there’s no need.

He replays the shake of her backside, the way the camera zoomed into her face until her fake eyelashes cast shadows wider and longer than his index finger. He swears he could feel the pounding of her heels, as if she were dancing on his chest. If he closes his eyes right now, he could smell her—that combination of cigarettes and cedar and clean, dried sweat. He can feel her fingers in his hair, her long painted fingernails gently grazing his scalp. If he could have revealed every one of his secrets to her years ago, he might never have run away. Even now, Miss Val might still be the person who understands him, who makes him see he isn’t the only one who dreams of being just as he is but lovelier. And then maybe he wouldn’t want to scratch off the parts of his face that he shares with Doug or Betty or even Cindy. She was the mother he could never have. And he loved her for it.

—

He stands in a musty basement room below the radio station. The once-white walls have been so assaulted by damp that they are now yellowy grey and strangely shiny. A short man with a crewcut stands with his arms crossed over his chest. He squints at Danny, who forces a smile. The man doesn’t reciprocate.

“Who sent you here?” he asks, his forehead wrinkling.

“I was at the library and the woman there told me to ask for you. You are Jerry, right?”

He huffs. “Yes, that’s right. But why are you here?”

Danny resists the urge to roll his eyes. “I’m looking for anything you might have on a dancer who used to perform in Vancouver in the fifties. You know, radio interviews and things like that.”

“Why should I help you? The general public isn’t even allowed in here,” Jerry says, his voice short and clipped.

There really is no reason for him to help. Danny is asking a total stranger for a favour. His intentions are quite straightforward: Danny wants to roll around in Miss Val’s voice again, let its roughness scratch his ears while he pictures her red-painted lips and long neck. But this is not something that he can explain to someone else. He stares at Jerry.

“The librarian told me that you’re the only one who can find what I’m looking for. She said you’re the best archivist in the country.” Danny smiles at the man.

Jerry shrugs then turns toward a card catalogue against the near wall. “The best, eh? All right then, what’s the name of this dancer you were talking about?”

—

Danny sits in a rickety wooden chair at a scarred chrome and laminate desk, his headphones connected to a tall reel-to-reel tape recorder, his hands twisting in his lap as he waits for a sound. Jerry said nothing about what he found, simply pointed Danny to this chair and handed him a pair of puffy headphones. The tape scrapes along for half a minute, silent.

Then a reedy, Upper Canadian voice cuts through the silence. In this interview, the reporter explores Vancouver’s reputation as a sin city. “Here,” he says, “tourists and locals alike can partake in the vice of their choice, be it drink, cards or women.” The year is 1956 and the reporter walks down Granville Street. “The ladies wear chic raincoats and mince down the sidewalks in high heels, while the men tip their hats forward and guide their paramours around puddles and dripping eaves. It’s ten o’clock on a Saturday night and everyone seems to have a place to go. The Cave Supper Club. The Orpheum Theatre. And a little place called the Penthouse where we found an experienced stripper known around these parts as the Siamese Kitten.”

Miss Val’s voice spills out from the headphones, warm and rough. What whisky would sound like if it could talk. Her words tumble and spin and Danny smiles at the sound.

“It’s a gas whenever we have a full house. I have a lot of fun with the other girls here, and if you have the right customers, they can really show their appreciation.” Her peals of laughter tumble into Danny’s ears, clear and undistorted. Brilliant. “You learn how to spot those fellows pretty quick, I can tell you.”

Before the reporter can ask another question, Miss Val continues: “Lots of people, they don’t understand what we do, but being a stripper is like any other job. We work and we get paid for it. Besides, where else could we wear costumes like this? I don’t see too many secretaries running around in beaded G-strings.”

“Why are you called the Siamese Kitten?”

Miss Val laughs again and Danny holds his breath. “I needed a hook, see, and I thought why not be Oriental? In the act, I’m a Siamese princess who is exiled and has to dance to earn money for her family. Lots of action. Lots of skin too, of course. But it’s a real show, real spectacular. Even the ladies love it!”

The reporter’s earnestness breaks through his voice. “But most little girls don’t dream of becoming a burlesque dancer when they grow up. It’s not all fun and games, is it?”

For several seconds, all Danny can hear is the background noise of the club: the clink of glasses, the murmur of voices. She takes a deep breath and then speaks. “It’s hard work. You can see it in the faces of the girls, you know? When we take off our makeup and you can see what we really look like, we’re like old ladies. I mean, I’m not even thirty yet, but I look ten years older. The girls never last very long. No one strips until she’s sixty-five, if you catch my drift. We burn out—fast.”

The weariness pools in Danny’s ears and he wants to take Miss Val’s hand and lead her to a chair where he can serve her a cup of tea and a sugar biscuit. He has never thought of her as tired. Whirling, yes. Kicking her way across stages, spiking the ground with her high heels, winking at men who gape at her on the street. How can she be tired like an ordinary woman?

The reporter leaves the Penthouse and walks to a seedy bar in Gastown where he begins a conversation with a bartender. Danny pulls off the headphones and stares at the stained wall in front of him. She was real, he thinks, like everyone else. She washed her underwear in the sink, rubbed her sore feet and slept with curlers in her hair. It pains him to think that she might have been like his mother, a woman who counted and recounted her spending money and squeezed oranges in the grocery store. Then again, who says that her real life wasn’t spectacular too? When she had to slice bread, Danny guesses, she did it in style.


He tries to sleep, but heat has infected everything. He feels sleep rolling over him in fitful waves, brushing his damp skin. Danny dreams that he is a little boy again, sneaking his way through the alleys in Chinatown. On every utility pole he sees the same poster, like an endless hall of mirrors. “The Siamese Kitten stars in the first-ever Oriental Sextravaganza made for the burlesque stage: SEXILE IN SIAM! One-of-a-kind dance numbers, chorus girls, heartbreak and, of course, plenty of Shake and Shimmy!” In the grainy, mimeographed photo, Miss Val holds one large fan in front of her body and wears a Chinese princess headdress that dangles beads and chains in her eyes.

Young Danny runs and runs until he reaches the club where he first met Miss Val. He sneaks in behind the legs of a man who walks with a cane, and darts into the theatre. He sits in the back, under the shadow of the balcony. One row ahead, he sees a black bobbed head nodding slightly to the beat. A crash of cymbals erupts and he stares, wide-eyed, at the stage.

First, Miss Val is a young princess, picking flowers in the garden, attended to by servant girls who dance in costumes slit high up the leg. She strips to a lilting Oriental melody played by a single flute and one violin. In the next act, she’s in the middle of a war, standing centre stage while musicians pound drums. Pieces of foam, painted to look like the debris from bombed-out buildings, fall around her. She strips as she recounts how her family was forced to leave the palace for a cave dwelling in the faraway, snowy mountains. By the end of the scene, she is wearing rags that are tied and torn in strategic places.

Danny claps enthusiastically, joining the thunderous applause all around him.

The Siamese Kitten’s father dies, and she and her mother make the long journey from the mountains to Bangkok, where the poor princess supports them by dancing in clubs frequented by foreigners. She falls in love with an American and dances a special routine created for him alone, a slow, seductive striptease with fans made of peacock feathers.

When her soldier leaves Bangkok, the Siamese Kitten secretly follows him to America and discovers his wife and two children. She begs and begs, but he does not leave his family. Instead, he hisses at her to get the hell out of town before everyone puts two and two together. Tears streaming, she boards a bus for Los Angeles, where she dances again and where hundreds, nay thousands, of American men love her at first sight.

The act ends with the Siamese Kitten lying on a red silk chaise, a gold cigarette holder in her fingers, wearing nothing but a G-string and an embroidered shawl around her shoulders.

“Who would you rather be, my friends?” she asks the audience. “The wife at home who has no idea what her husband is up to?” The crowd roars with laughter and stamps its feet on the club floor. “Or me, the Siamese Kitten, wearing the finest silk, adored by not one man, but more than I can even count?” She winks as the curtains begin to close. “The choice seems crystal clear to me.” She blows a series of smoke rings that float up toward the stage lights, dispersing as they rise.

Danny wakes up covered in a long lick of sweat. It’s still dark and the street is quiet. He wonders how he will get through this summer.


The phone rings and rings. Danny checks the clock—ten thirty in the morning. He’s slept in.

Naked, he hurries to the living room. The curtains are still closed and an otherworldly light filters in. Danny swears he can see a quiver of anticipation shimmering through the air—perhaps the room itself is waiting for the action to begin. Or maybe all he’s seeing are wayward fruit flies, circling the one beam of light that has managed to force its way in.

He picks up the black receiver and clears his throat. Before he says anything, he hears a familiar voice.

“Danny, it’s Frank.”

Danny sits on the floor; his joints have turned to mush. Almost instantly he imagines a reunion, Frank’s arms around im again, the warmth of sleeping with someone whose body is a visceral, nerve-tinged memory.

“Frank,” he says, his mouth immediately recognizing the shape of his name, the catch in his throat for the ending k. “It’s nice to hear from you.”

“I need to see you.”

“See me?” He wants to shout, But it’s been three years, why now, why are you calling me now?

“I just need to talk to you about something. It’s just that, well, things have changed.” Frank’s voice trails off into a crackly, not-quite-silence.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“We have to talk, that’s all. Can you meet me next Thursday? Maybe for lunch?”

Six days away, Danny thinks. How can I wait that long? “Sure. How about the diner on Denman?”

“Fine. I’ll see you there at eleven thirty. Bye.” The line goes dead.

He stares at the receiver in his hand, at his own bony knees splayed out on the living-room floor. He remembers the light, almost blond hair on Frank’s arms and legs. The way he used to brush his hand lightly over the tips until Frank shivered and grasped Danny’s wrist to stop him. When they were lying in bed, while the light in the bedroom brightened from black to grey to dawn, Danny felt immersed, as though Frank’s body were absorbing his so that they would become something else together, a creature both angelically beautiful and reassuringly real. One winter day, they stood together at an art show and Danny turned his head and saw Frank lit from above, the white beam from a ceiling bulb diffusing all the shadows around them. Frank seemed precious, exquisitely pristine and still. If Danny could have folded up that image and pressed it into his own skin, he would have. He is tempted to rummage in his night-stand for the old photos of him and Frank together, but he resists. Now that he has constructed a life accommodating Frank’s absence, there can be no room for him. None.

He makes it to the bathroom, where he splashes water on his face, feeling the chilly floor tiles radiate cold from the bottoms of his feet to the tips of his ears, touching every part of his body on the way.