to gaze at the construction of the place.
The music picked up speed. The drummer played a driving, impossible-to-ignore beat. The piano tinkled. Val began to tap her right foot in time.
She bowed low to the audience and said, “Hello, I am the Siamese Kitten. Tonight, I dance for you.” And then she smiled, throwing off her red silk robe and purring to the crowd.
The applause. It came at her suddenly every time, so deafening that she inevitably stepped backward, rippling the curtain as she steadied herself. But she felt the audience was holding her close, buffeting her from the sharp winds that blew in toward the city. In this theatre—the moth-eaten red curtains, the cold dressing room, the candy and cigarettes that littered the makeup table—she was nothing like what she had been before. Not a waitress, not a girl from a thin-walled house on the banks of the Fraser River, not Valerie Nealy, not the mistress of a handsome Chinaman. No, she was the Siamese Kitten, the dancer whose posture never slackened, whose long, lined eyes held the audience in her inscrutable gaze, whose costume fell away so regally that the men who watched her imagined her to be a Chinese princess who had lost her way.
Eventually, she was left wearing nothing but her green G-string and red pasties with gold tassels. She held a large fan in front of her, flashing her bum, then her belly button and, finally, the under-curve of her breasts. She finished by pulling her robe back on, one shoulder at a time. When she took her final bow, her hands in front of her chest, palms together, fingers up, she said, “I am the Siamese Kitten. Thank you for watching me. I see you again sometime.” As the spotlight faded, she could feel the collective flutter of disappointment that meant she could have danced forever, and these men, some of them lonely, others unfulfilled, would gladly have watched. Inevitably, one of the other girls or the night’s MC came to her and said, “I’ve never seen a new dancer work up a crowd like that. They couldn’t get enough!” She wondered if it was the gimmick or her choreography or the way she talked to the crowd as she danced. Several times, she stared at herself in the dressing-room mirror and searched her face for that special something. Maybe, she thought, I really am a star.
Before she left the theatre, she wiped off all her makeup except for her red, shiny lips. She didn’t care that they were shocking when combined with her light brown hair and grey overcoat, that they marked her as a woman different from the wives and daughters of respectable men. Without them, she was no more than a once-rejected waitress, and she could bear anything but that.
In some cities, it was hotel rooms. Small hotels that had once been run by respectable families but were now staffed by surly men who eyed her bum as she walked up the stairs, carrying her own luggage. Other times, if the run was a long one, she let a room at a boarding house. She arranged her bottles on a chair and propped her makeup mirror against the wall. In these unfamiliar rooms, she sang to herself or read the five-cent magazines that she bought in every city and town. She tried to learn how to knit, but her very first scarf ended up as a confused knot of cheap yarn, and she threw the whole thing, needles included, into the garbage at one of the theatres, maybe the one in Wichita, she couldn’t be sure. The other girls who travelled with her were lonely too, and they sometimes spent early mornings in each other’s rooms.
But she was bored most days, and her thoughts often turned to Sam. She imagined her hands running through his thick hair one more time, the bones of his pelvis pressing against hers, the taste of his skin in her mouth. She touched herself, pretending that her fingers were his, that her touch was really the brush of his lips. This usually worked for fifteen minutes, but afterward she could smell herself, undiluted and uncombined, in the sheets that were twisted around her. She thought she might weep at the idea that she had been in love once, but even then everything about that love was false, for the presence of his wife hovered above them whenever they were together, even though she didn’t know it