No Touching

by Ketty Rouf

  Apologizing, they offer us some vodka and Red Bull and make more of an effort to engage us in conversation.

  “So, did you spend Christmas with your family?”

  Now Poppy is getting impatient. “We don’t have a family.”

  “Oh—you don’t?”

  “No, we don’t. Our mom’s dead, and our dad raped us when we were little. So what? Why are you looking at me like that? It’s the reason we’re here!”

  “Do you have any kids?”

  “No, we’re all menopausal.”

  We laugh and try to change the subject. Just then, the guy sitting next to me decides to talk.

  “I’m getting married soon.”

  Fleur pounces. “Well, I hope she’s sucked your dick plenty, because that’s all over now!”

  “It’ll be fine.”

  Poppy takes over. “It’ll be fine? Pfft! I’ve been here for years now, and not a single guy has ever said it was as good after marriage as it was before. Believe me, your sex life is dead.”

  I smile mechanically at Poppy’s words, but I can’t help thinking that she’s probably right; that maybe he should travel instead of getting married so young, that maybe they all should, they should spend their time chasing skirts because it takes a lot of women to make a man. I get up and leave the table; the conversation is petering out again, and given how stingy they’re being with the vodka, I don’t think they’re going to be spending much on dances, either. I head for the bar, scanning the clientele. It’s only in a place like this that a woman can look every man she passes straight in the eye. I approach the one who doesn’t avoid my gaze. He’s chatty, so things are off to a good start. This is his first time in a strip club. I’m sure of it. I have a knack for recognizing people like me, the ones who are just getting acquainted with the world of the night. With me they’re not as nervous; we’re cut from the same cloth. The other girls are less reassuring for a novice. They’ve lost any sense of reserve.

  He asks me for a dance; he wants to see what it’s like. I love a customer’s first time. It’s my way of deflowering them, taking them to a place somewhere between childhood and adolescence for a moment of abandon, before they remember that they’re men and feel all the powerlessness that goes with it. This guy looks to be somewhere in his early fifties, with locks of thick, graying hair that flop over his smiling face. He inspires trust. I can see the boy in his eyes. I can sense the animal in his hands. And I am slutty, sweet, crude, elegant. I am everything. I get inside him, gently. He has to lose his head. Yes, his head on a platter, mouth open, no more words coming out. Every woman that dances is Salome. That’s why we dance, to watch heads fall, men vanquished. I examine his neck, caressing the fold of skin that would be the perfect place to bury my dagger. And slash! Decapitated. He closes his eyes and sits very still, back pressed to the bench seat. I enfold him tightly in my arms and offer him my breasts, stroking the nipple I know he’s desperate to suckle, murmuring a few last words into his ear. He rummages in his pocket and hands me a twenty-euro note. I keep going for a few more minutes, just one more song, no more. Once again I’m a woman in love, a whore, an angel. He’s already realized that after this, everything, absolutely everything he experiences, other women, their skin, their sex, their kisses—all of it will seem flawed. Nothing else will be as good, and that’s why he’ll come back again and again, seeking the sublimity and the muddled adulation of his own fantasy.

  While I’m getting dressed, it’s his turn to expose himself, talking about his life, his divorce, his difficult relationship with his son.

  “That’s why I came here tonight.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “For my son. I wanted to give him an evening in this place; I’ve heard nothing but good things about it. Would you dance for him? I want to give that to him, for his eighteenth birthday.”

  “What a lovely gift from a dad! Yes, of course I’ll dance for your son.”

  We go back upstairs together. He’s in a hurry to go and find his boy; I’m proud to have been chosen to teach him this life lesson. Another head to cut off. I savor the delightful prospect of fresh meat. The DJ calls me over; it’s my turn onstage. We’ll meet up again right after my performance.

  One spin, two spins, three spins. My head is whirling. I do the only pole-dance move I know, upside-down, clinging to the pole. When the world’s upside-down like this I’m a kid again, too, playing on the jungle gym and the swing set, ready to fly, with that particular quivery feeling you only get from the fear of falling. And maybe it’s because I’m a little bit drunk, my vision blurred by the lights, the dizziness, the darkness lurking everywhere, but I think—over there, on the opposite side of the room from where Rose Lee is dancing, talking to another dancer with his elbows on the bar—I see a young man I recognize. Him—here? I press my back to the pole as something inside me breaks apart. I sway in place, paralyzed with panic. I turn my head slightly—my customer is approaching the young man, pointing to the stage. This is worse than anything. A total catastrophe. A masterstroke of bad luck. I spot Iris passing near the platform. I call her over. “Please, please, take my place,” I beg her. “I’ll explain everything—just please, help me.” I take my hair down to hide my face and flee to the dressing room, utterly terrified. I feel tiny and pathetic, teetering on my stilettos. Like something dirty. I want to disappear. To leave. It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, I repeat frantically in my head. You got off the stage in time, he didn’t see you. But did he see me? Did he see me? I gulp some water. I feel as if I’ve run for miles. My heart is hammering in my chest. It’s worse than that out-of-control feeling desire gives you. Why, why did I come in tonight? I was tired, exhausted, but it was the goddamned desire for money. That’s what it was. The desire for money, and the physical excitement I feel when I do what I do here. Vanity. Nothing but vanity.

  Iris, having filled in for me, comes down to the dressing room. “Rose, are you okay? What’s the matter?”

  “A guy I know . . . I don’t know if he saw me . . .”

  “You can take off if you want, you know. Tell me where you saw him, and I’ll check for you. He might have left. I’ll talk to Andrea.”

  I didn’t know that, in cases like this, Andrea will let us look at the security cameras to see if a client we don’t want to recognize us is still on the premises. It could happen to any of us. I check the cameras. They don’t miss a thing. Eyes that see absolutely everything. I spot them, father and son, wandering through the main room, around the platforms, like they’re looking for someone. Looking for me. Panic rips through me. I feel like my insides are on fire.

  “Iris, here, look, please—it’s those two, you see them? Do me another favor, please? It’s just playing another role; it’s good practice for you, right? Go and talk to them, tell them Rose Lee’s busy with an important customer, say I’ll be busy all night. And tell them I’m sorry, and as an apology I’m sending you to be the boy’s birthday present instead. Give him a dance and try to talk to him—see if you can tell whether he knows who Rose Lee is. Please?”

  She sets off on her mission. With Andrea’s permission, I stay where I am, watching the security screens. Iris is skilled and smiling. I watch her head for the private rooms with the boy. Beneath the camera’s watchful eye, she puts on the full show. I know her dance moves, her poses, all her ways of making the customer abandon himself. In just a few minutes she deploys her whole bag of tricks, interspersing erotic poses with resounding spankings. She’s doing her job perfectly, but the boy sits perfectly still in the face of the onslaught. When she’s finished dancing and is putting her clothes back on, he leaves without a word. Iris lifts her shoulders toward the camera in a shrug. I stay in the office until the father and son have left the club after making the rounds of the main room again, eyes glued to the stage.

  “I don’t know who this kid is, but he’s impossible to talk to. I gave him a har
d-on; that’s all I can tell you.”

  I thank Iris. All I want is to get the hell out of here. The night is endless agony, struggling to quash my terror. It’s-okay-it’s-okay-it’s-okay. Soon everything will go back to normal. I’ll clean up the mess of my own desires. Rose Lee was just a detour, a digression. We’re all entitled to a little detour, aren’t we?

  I’m not going to get a lot of sleep tonight. Just a few meters away from the stage where I was dancing nude, confused or enchanted or maybe filled with animal desire, was eighteen-year-old—what’s his name again? Kevin? Bryan? A student in his final year, studying IT and business administration, who’s often late for his classes, whom I frequently see running past my classroom door. Sometimes he hangs out in the corridor at the end of the day, talking with Hadrien and a few others from my class.

  Tonight, he was almost my customer.

  I have to stop doing this.

  11

  Piled untidily on my desk, a pile of papers calls out to me desperately. I never should have forgotten the students, my real work. Only a few days and twenty essays to correct separate me from the first day back at school. For just a few more nights, I will be the venal woman who wantonly turns her own body into a marketable commodity. I’ve asked Andrea to space out my work nights, but she begged me to come in every day until vacation ends because she doesn’t have enough dancers. I wanted to cancel, to say I was sick. It would have been partly true, at least. Since I saw that student at the club, my migraines have started up again, and the insomnia, and the stomachaches. Whenever I’m at work, I can’t stop staring at the door every time it opens—dozens and dozens of times. Rose Lee is slipping away from me, and the nights are becoming less profitable. I’ve started clearing out my locker. Last time, I brought home my shower gel and razors and perfume samples. Tomorrow I’ll pack up the dresses I don’t wear anymore. In the end I’ll sneak out like a thief, because I don’t have the courage to tell them I’m quitting.

  I attack the papers with renewed dedication: assessment matrix, strict grading, symbol key for marginal notes. Ten, fifteen minutes spent on each one, no more. These aren’t essays; the students aren’t capable of engaging in true philosophical reflection yet—they’re just exercises intended to help them gain some skill. Using the concept of responsibility as a starting point, they have to give one or more definitions, explore different lines of thought, possible problematics. These are the vital building blocks, not only of writing an essay, but even simply of developing a reflection. It takes work, for me, too. As I make my way through pages blackened by their efforts, with traces of folding and refolding at the corners and inky spots covered with White-Out, and their rough prose, struggling to put thoughts into words, I find myself touched by the imperfections. It’s from all this, from their wobbly and tentative words, that I’m duty-bound to construct a coherent whole. On a separate sheet, I write down all the good things I find, however scattered or confused, in each paper. The answer key I’m going to give them will consist solely of their voices, the sum of their intuitions. I want each one of them to feel like they’ve touched on some truth. Wallen didn’t grasp the legal implications of the concept of responsibility, but that’s okay. She did make the connection between responsibility and freedom. Lény figured out the two meanings of the concept by researching the Latin etymology: respondere means answer. This helps us to define responsibility first as the ability to exercise good judgment and, second, as a burden we take on. Hadrien focused on the reflexive nature of responsibility: being responsible is to take responsibility. Some other students also managed to reflect on the internalization of authority, or the difficulty of knowing what we’re really responsible for, because if we’re supposed to postulate a link between man and his actions, like the one between cause and effect, how can we know how much of ourselves is present in what we cause to happen? What I’ll need to explain to them next is that the idea of responsibility requires us to posit the premise of personal identity as: “I am the same.” For how can a subject be responsible for all of its actions if it lacks substantive permanence? So, I am the same now as I was then. I am the same.

  Three hours to mark twelve papers. I’ve done some good work today, only eight left. I draft a conclusion while considering what to wear tonight.

  12

  I go down to the dressing room to put on my mask and summon up some passion for the job. A swipe of blush on the cheeks, another line of kohl to darken the eye, a fresh layer of under-eye concealer, perfume, quick brush of the hair. The newest recruit sits next to me, blonde and creamy-skinned and looking like she’s still in her teens, a pretty, well-brought-up doll with nothing slutty about her at all. Stage name: Rebecca. She’s never danced in a club before, it’s obvious. Later, on a quick pee break, I surprise her in floods of tears. She covers her face with her perfectly manicured hands.

  “I wanted to do this because it was a dream,” she says, “to be that woman, to understand how the night works, but I don’t feel right, it isn’t working, I’m not making any money, the customers are judging me—‘What are you doing here? Why are you doing this? This isn’t for you. You shouldn’t be here. You’re a good girl, I can tell. I do respect you, but honestly, I pity you girls. Why get naked just for money? It must be a hard, hard thing, I think, a really hard thing for girls to show their bodies like that. It’s a shame, it’s such a shame!”

  She dries her tears and redoes her makeup while Poppy hands her a shot glass and takes a half-empty bottle of Zacapa rum out of her locker. We each throw back a shot, one by one. Poppy glances at her breasts in the mirror and says:

  “Strippers are crazy sensitive, all of us.”

  Back upstairs in the main room I notice a man staring at me, waving a ticket. He’s sitting at a big table with a bunch of other guys, some of them younger, and a blonde girl in glasses who keeps gasping with excitement. Another girl, this one a brunette, is sitting silently next to the man, arms crossed over her modest cleavage. The man who motioned me over asks me to dance for the guy on the brunette’s right. I come close, part his legs. The brunette grabs his hand and says, forcefully: “You can’t dance for him, he’s married. I’m his wife.” I explain to her that it’s just a present, that nothing will happen, it’s just a performance. She doesn’t back down, gets more aggressive, cursing in my direction. Conciliatory words rain down on her from the rest of the table: “Come on, it’s no big deal, it’s his birthday; you were okay with coming here, don’t be jealous, it’s his birthday present.” She subsides but doesn’t let go of her husband’s hand. I don’t look at her again, just do my job the best I can with her there, staring at me, and her husband grinning next to her like an idiot. This man who is hers—that’s what she must be repeating in her head over and over right now, He’s my man! He’s my man!—this man gets visibly hard for my ass when I rub it against the front of his trousers, my spread legs, the voluptuous glory of my breasts just within reach of his tongue. With a quick movement, he adjusts his erect penis inside his underpants with his free hand. It’s not just the man that his wife’s clutching hand is trying to hold back. Poor woman. You can’t keep a man from getting hard for a woman. That has nothing to do with love, or feelings. The body is our strongest reason for existing. I had to come here, to be Rose Lee, to accept the delicious exaltation of rubbing myself against thousands of hard cocks, the unvarnished confessions of so many men, to see the animal inside them and inside me, to stop resisting it. My mother was right: there are no princes or princesses. Suddenly, a heavy blow lands on my back. It’s the outraged wife, hitting me, and her cries of “Stop, stop, stop it, you slut!” that force me to stop dancing. She’s gone crazy, lost all control of herself, unable to do anything but shriek. Cries of “You’re a whore, get away, you slut!” thud against me, and it hurts. I pick up my dress, and, without even putting it back on, I retreat. I flee to the dressing room and have a banana and, with Poppy’s permission, a nip of Zacapa.

 
Every woman, young and old, beautiful and less beautiful, should do this job. For one evening, or a month, or for their whole lives. They would really see men, know what they’re made of; it might spare them a lot of suffering.

  Coming up from the dressing room I see her, on a sofa at the end of the corridor, away from the stage lights: the woman who hit me and called me a whore, crying. I pass her without looking at her. Her tears won’t accomplish anything. I wish I could explain it to her, and that she’d understand. But I’m not here to be a psychotherapist.

  Later, a man, reeling and stumbling, asks me for a dance. There are only a few songs left before closing time. “This is the last one,” I tell him, “is that okay?” Faced with the prospect of the last dance, and the end of the night, he rifles through his wallet, pulls out his bank card, says, “I hope it isn’t blocked.” Who cares about an overdraft? The last pleasure of the night has no price.

  Dreamless night. Not much money.

  I head for the dressing rooms again. A small group of girls is clustered around a laptop, giggling. When I see what they’re looking at, I want to laugh, too: photos of a micro-penis. They’re heaping scorn on all guys.

  The laughter is bitter.

  In a few days, this will all be over.

  I stuff all the dresses from my locker into my bag.

  13

  Papers graded and neatly stowed in the blue folder with my notes for the next class: two hours to discuss responsibility. Plato and Kant lie dissected on my desk. The bite-size morsels of philosophy I’ve chosen are the last thoughts in my mind to be inevitably scattered by my arrival at the club. The night has already begun at Dreams, and it’s begun without me. Just a handful more hours, and I’ll be finished with it. My agitation rises with each step. My impatience, too. What could possibly happen after this? What will be left in life to experience? I can feel, in every cell of my body, the brazen, furious vitality of someone standing face-to-face with a destiny they have chosen themselves, deliberately fulfilled. And, in the end, abandoned. That was the problematic of the student’s papers: how much of ourselves is there in the things we cause to happen? How responsible are we for them? At the heart of that question lies the surreal end point of my journey: the dressing rooms and Rose Lee’s locker. I just passed Rebecca on the stairs. She hasn’t quit, then. Here, you come right up against the daunting prospect of being your own source of courage. Poppy is in the middle of changing her outfit. “Maybe it’ll give me some motivation to work,” she says, a hint of irony in her voice. Iris is huddled against the wall next to the shower, talking on the phone. She hasn’t even seen me. I look around for Fleur. Her locker is padlocked shut, which means she isn’t working this evening. Her absence is a relief. It’ll make me feel a little bit less like I’ve lied. It’s easier to disappear without a word.