a show. Her agent once said she was the most reliable, least-bitchy dancer he had ever met. I can sit on a damned bus, she thought. I’ll sleep the whole way there. She checked the clock on the nightstand. Six hours before she had to leave. For now, she could stay still.
When she woke up, every breath was an explosion, and the bones in her chest felt like they were splintering each time she inhaled. She crept down the hall to the bathroom and rinsed her mouth out with cold water. She coughed, and a splatter of blood stained the sink. “Shit,” she said, before walking slowly back down the hall, where she pounded on another dancer’s door. “Where’s the hospital around here?”
Eight years later, during a sunny and pleasant fall, Val returned to Vancouver. She had been back before, of course, to dance in the theatres and clubs, and to see her agent in his office on Granville Street. There were too many loggers, too many mill workers, for her to ignore the place altogether. This time, however, she was back for a whole two weeks, staying in a downtown hotel with a view of the mountains. She didn’t think she needed such grand accommodation, but the manager at the Cave Supper Club insisted. “We don’t get stars of your calibre every day, Val. It’s been four months since Lili St. Cyr came through town and the boys around here are ready for more. Maybe you don’t remember,” he continued, “but Vancouver is one of the few cities that treats its talent right.” When she checked in, the man at the front desk asked if she would sign his pocket square so he could prove he had met her.
She thought about Joan, about the house she and Peter had bought outside of the city, with the fish pond and wall-to-wall carpeting. In her letters, Joan seemed consumed by the house, by the creaks in the floors, the steepness of the staircase, even the colour of the grout between the bathroom tiles. Val, lying in bed at a boarding house in Indianapolis, laughed while she read. She could just see little Joanie tumbling around alone in a gigantic house, a gin and tonic in her hand, fluffing up the pile of her carpet, staring at the other houses in the cul-de-sac through the big front window but not stepping outside to speak to one of her neighbours.
Joan never asked what Val was doing on the road, and Val didn’t tell her. She wrote of the impossibly tall Chrysler Building; the groves and groves of oranges on the side of the highway in California; the flatness of the American Midwest; the deadened eyes of the travelling salesmen she saw at train stations, the elbows, knees and seats of their suits shiny with wear and filmed with dust. But they both knew other words lurked behind her written ones: circuit, cabaret, the strip.
In her hotel room, she picked up the telephone and dialled her sister’s number. It rang once before Joan’s crisp voice answered.
“Joanie, it’s me. I’m back in town.” She heard Joan snort.
“Back? For how long?”
“A couple of weeks. I’m having Mum and Dad down to the city for a few days. I thought it would be a nice treat, especially now that Dad’s not working much anymore. Maybe you’d like to have dinner with us or walk with us in Stanley Park.”
Joan clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth and Val wondered how a woman so small could make such a sharp, gunshot-like sound. “It’s a busy time here for us, Val. Peter’s working long hours, and I really should be home to make sure he has a good dinner so he can keep up his energy. I’m sorry. It’s not a good time.”
Val looked at the fresh flowers on the side table, the shiny mirror across from the bed, the jug of cold water on a silver tray. This life—so much like their dreams of living in the big city, the ones they whispered to each other when they were little girls—or the bland interior of Joan’s house and dinners with Peter, his stout face reflected at suppertime in the dining-room mirror.
Val said, “Suit yourself,” and didn’t wait to hear Joan’s response before she hung up.
That night, the standing ovation at the Cave drowned out Joan’s words, and Val was glad she had returned.
The second week, she walked through Chinatown, wearing her navy cashmere coat and chocolate-brown