They seemed shocked, but not because my pay was being docked; I think they were appalled that any girl would talk smack about Prince. As word got around, I did get some sympathy from Rosie, but everyone else kept their distance. I had no money to call Mama, and this made me feel even farther from home.
The ballerina in me took control. I pulled myself together and went out and did “Thunder” and “Diamonds and Pearls” and then went back to the dressing room for a moment alone while the girls were dancing onstage. I put on my next costume and went to the side stage, out of sight from the crowd, and danced there for the rest of the show. Sometimes I did ballet barre, sometimes belly dancing. I’d look over once in a while and catch him watching me. He’d smile. I ignored him, thinking, I hate you right now.
I hadn’t eaten a decent meal in three days, but I was dancing, and I was dancing for myself, which felt good. This became my regular workout night after night, and it didn’t take long for my body to regain its rock-hard, quarter-flipping tone. What I didn’t know at the time was that this was the best thing I could have done to train for what lay ahead. It took a few days for me to get over the humiliation, and he was wise enough to give me some space. The next time he called me to come to his room and hang out, he was fishing to see if I was upset about it.
“Did the accountant talk to you?” he asked.
I said something like, “Yep. Don’t worry about it.”
I wasn’t about to argue with him, but I swore to myself that I would never let him or anyone else ever make me feel that way about my body again.
The funny thing is, later on when I was pregnant, I gained eighty pounds, growing more gigantic by the day, because I was being careful about exercise and retaining a lot of water. My husband never said a word about my body except to tell me, “You’re beautiful.”
The tour ended, and we all went our separate ways. Another hazard of the touring life: proximity burn. We were ready to take a break from all that togetherness. Prince went back to Paisley Park. I went to visit my parents, and when I returned to Minnesota, someone from administration called me into the office and told me, “Now that the tour is over, you’ll be taking over the rent on the apartment.”
This floored me. I was still making $300 a week, and between the phone bills and body makeup—not to mention frivolous expenditures like food, utilities, transportation, and taxes—my healthy stash of dancing money had dwindled to almost nothing. For the first time since I was eight years old, I had no money.
“Come home,” said Mama. “You can still go to Cairo.”
“The thing is…” I didn’t know how to explain this thing that was evolving between my dear friend and me.
My employer, I had to keep reminding myself.
We weren’t exactly dating during the tour; we went out almost every night with forty-eight thousand other people. But we had become more than friends. There was gossip and crosstalk about it, partly because he came into a rehearsal one day when Carmen was there, and he shook my hand. Prince didn’t shake hands with people, and he hated it when people tried to shake hands with him. He couldn’t afford to collect germs and get sick, but more important, his hands were his instruments. He felt naturally protective of them. Everyone in Prince’s inner circle knew this, so when he offered me his hand, it meant he felt the need to touch me, and the rumors started rumbling.
He never volunteered any information about where things stood with the other women in his life, and I didn’t ask. There was a sort of shorthand: If a girl had a bodyguard, that meant, Don’t talk to her. Don’t look at her. She’s mine. So Carmen had a bodyguard before the tour. And now suddenly I had a bodyguard, too. I didn’t press him for answers, but I didn’t jump into bed with him, either. We did more than shake hands, but there was a line neither of us was ready to cross.
Sexual chemistry was a huge part of Prince’s creative force, and it was a place he’d retreated to at the most painful moments in his life. I understand what he meant when he talked about a person’s “history,” and I’m glad that mine began with him. I wish his had ended with me—and he did try, I think—but that didn’t happen. Making peace with what did happen is an ongoing process.
During the “Most Beautiful Girl” days, after we’d become intimate but before we were engaged, Prince wrote to me:
Mayte,