The men in the audience came and went. There was a five minute break, and the show began again. No one was asked to leave the auditorium. One could spend the whole day here without being disturbed, it appeared. At the time, I still thought this was a curious sort of dream, not totally unpleasant and having nothing better to do decided to stay put and see the women again and maybe check whether Teutonic Claudia’s signal had been deliberate or not. After all, she did have spectacular breasts, strong, high globes whose red pasties harmonized perfectly with her flaming hair.
But when her time came in the order of rotation, after a young pimply stagehand had cleared the previous dancer’s scattered red, white and blue feathers from the stage (she had performed a faltering but broadly comic French Ooh La La act), the regal Claudia did not appear.
Instead, the M.C. sheepishly slithered on and, leering outrageously, said:
“And now a real treat for all you amateurs of sheer pulchritude, for the first time ever on a New York stage, for the first time ever on any stage, the virginal, the beautiful Anais . . .”
A young woman hesitantly came to the fore.
He had not been exaggerating: it was visibly her first time doing this. She didn’t even have much of an outfit. Just ordinary summer street clothes with a few silk belts and scarves and a scarlet boa no doubt borrowed just now from another of the girls here.
She had long dark untidy hair that trailed all the way to midway down her back. Her pale shoulders shone like beacons through the tangled hair draped across them. Her aquiline nose stood out proudly, punctuating the savage beauty of her features. Her ruby red lipsticked lips stood out like a lighthouse in a starless night.
Jesus, I thought. She is the one.
As she embarked on her slow, languorous dance, more sad seduction than ironic burlesque, my fevered imagination was already imagining, writing her whole life story to this point, all the burdens and adversities that had led her here to have to dance for strangers for a few dollars.
She was visibly an amateur. The single spotlight held her in its grip as she tried to inject some feeling into her movements. It didn’t work. It was evident it was not her choice to be here. A man to my right heckled. Two more in the row in front of me stood up and walked out. Even the music she had chosen or been allocated was wrong for her, some big band tune that could never blend adequately with her innate grace and dignity as she attempted to negotiate its rhythms to the staccato clockwork stance of her private dance.
I was captivated.
Even from where I was sitting, the dark pools of her eyes drew me like a whirlpool of emptiness.
She attempted a brave smile as she pulled her white summer cotton skirt away with a minor flourish and slid the thin silk scarves to and fro across her flat, taut stomach. I gulped. Her clumsiness almost made me want to cry.
There were more heckles from the sparse audience. On stage, Anais lowered her eyes, as if ashamed of her imperfections. I wanted to applaud, to counter the negativity of my fellow punters, but didn’t. She was now, apart from the boa circling her neck like a slave collar, just in brassiere and knickers, both black and plain, the pallor of her tall, thin body isolated like a pool of light on the heart of the stage.
Finally, the management put her out of her misery and the music accompanying her semblance of a dance stopped and the spotlight on her was switched off. There was a moment of silence through which I could just about notice Anais in the penumbra picking up the pieces of clothing she had earlier shed and hurrying off to the stage’s wing. Then the circle of light returned and the ersatz Carmen Miranda was back, balancing her plastic bananas with a broad grin on her lips.
I rose. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t rush the stage and chase Anais. Some heavy would stop me and beat me up in all likelihood if I attempted that.
I rushed to the exit. Quickly walked to the side of the small theatre seeking the exit the performers might use to depart the premises. There was a door on 7th Avenue that seemed to fit the bill. I stationed myself outside.
Night came. I became drowsy from all the waiting.
Somehow, my eyes closed and I was no longer in New York and again the time was now.
I couldn’t forget Anais. Something about her had moved me deeply. I wanted to see her again. I wanted to listen to her story, to touch her, smell her.
Months later, I travelled in time again. It was three in the morning, my own personal witching hour when memories and regrets tore me apart with both glee and scientific precision and I felt despair like acid killing me with every added second.
I blinked and it was Manhattan.
A bit greyer than on the previous occasion, as if a thin layer of dust had settled on my memories. The noise around Times Square was louder. The flashing neon more gaudy. I realized I was wearing the same clothes as on my last visit. A similar amount of money was in my pocket.
The theatre was still there, but it felt older, as if several years had elapsed. And they had. Some of the bulbs inside the marquee had perished and not been replaced. It now just read “the House of Burlesque” in flickering motion.
I paid the entrance fee and took my seat.
The floor was sticky, the curtains frayed and the interior of the theatre stank of dust and bad days. The other spectators also appeared shadier than previously, many like refugees from the weather outside, some in stained clothing, holding brown paper bags with bottles inside.
It was no longer a burlesque show, but a run of the mill and particularly unimaginative strip tease show. The costumes the women wore at the onset of their numbers were minimal and plain, and the performers all exuded a strong sense of boredom and indifference as they shed their clothes with metronomic regularity until they stood, for the final third of whichever song they were dancing to, nipples and pubic thatch starkly exposed for all to feast on. There was no longer any tease involved, just unencumbered and artless nudity.
I sat in silence as the strippers followed each other on the small stage, waiting for I didn’t know what. There was no longer a presenter, just a muffled voice on the P.A. system mouthing a vaguely exotic name prior to each dancer’s appearance: Mitzi, Christina, Melissa . . . During the performances, I could sense some of the other men in the audience touching themselves or more in the darkness.
A squat Latina woman whose genital area was time-wise halfway between a full wax and her usual jungle bush climaxed her set with a triumphant bend and flashed us all a furtive glimpse of her pink innards and the shoulder movements of the guy sitting in front of me increased significantly. I was about to abandon my quest and leave the joint, when the next act took over the stage.
It was Anais.
Or Anna Maria, if I believed the announcer.
She had changed.
She was older and no longer as tentative, as if she had spent the months (the years?) since I had seen her last taking lessons from the other performers or had maybe just acquired the talent to be more sensual out of thin air.
Her wild gypsy hair was the same, her pale skin still a delicate shade of porcelain, her limbs long and spidery and her stomach just a touch rounder.
She danced, stripped to the Eurythmics’ “Thorn in my Side”, her movements sexy and deliberate, swaying in unison with Annie Lennox’s vocal swoops. This time there were no heckles. When she shed her final garments, I held my breath hoping that what I had imagined in my crazy dreams of her would hold up to the reality of her body.
It did. The shade of her nipples veered wonderfully between brown and pink like a kaleidoscope of shifting desire and her breasts stood firm, just the right side of either large or small, delicate, calling for my tongue, tantalizing, real. My eyes moved down and, as if following my signal, she slowly moved her outstretched hand away from her cunt as the last measures of the song entered their fade-out, revealing her thick curls. I caught my breath and the music stopped and the lights went out.
The silence was deafening before a few of us applauded.
&n
bsp; The silence returned until the disembodied voice on the P.A. was heard.
“And now, the parade. Gentlemen, be generous with your tips . . .”
The strippers, all stark naked, walked on to the stage and gradually moved down into the auditorium and began making their way across the rows where us male spectators were sitting. Invisible signals passed between the erstwhile dancers and some of the men in the audience, and after a few bank notes had changed hands, some of the girls would rub themselves against the generous customers. I caught a glimpse of hands caressing flesh, straying, moans, movement, whispers. I declined the untold offers of the first few dancers who reached me and waited for Anais. I tried to see where she was, which men she had stopped to attend, gratify or whether she was part of this unholy procession. She was. Two rows away from me, she had her back to one fat punter, his hands unmistakably running across the bare skin of her backside, no doubt kneading, intruding. Her eyes and mine met across the chiaroscuro of the strip club.
I waited. Turning down all the other strippers.
Finally, she reached me.
I handed her the first note I found in my pocket. Neither of us even checked its denomination.
She pressed her breasts against me.
“I saw you when your name was Anais,” I whispered to her.
Her eyes came to life.
“That was a long time ago,” she answered.
“I know,” I sighed.
“You can touch me, you know,” she said. I thought I could detect a faint foreign accent.
My hands moved to her shoulders. I could feel her breath in my ear. Her softness was like a sting. I closed my eyes and abandoned myself to the blissful sensation. One of her hands brushed against the front of my trousers. I was hard.
“I’ve been thinking of you ever since that first time,” I said. “You are beautiful.” All I could come up with was a damn cliché!
She indicated she had to move on. My time was up; there were other men further down the row.
I was about to say “No . . .” when she whispered, “I am available, you know.”
“OK,” I spat out.
Five seats further down the aisle I watched as a suited Japanese businessman dug his fingers into her cunt, having no doubt paid more than me for extra privileges. Finally, the parade ended and the women trouped back towards the stage.
I met Anais outside the theatre ten minutes later. She had changed into jeans and a black tee-shirt.
We did not discuss money. We walked to the Iroquois on 44th Street, crossing the early evening traffic on Broadway. I bribed the clerk to let me have a room at such short notice and neither of us having any luggage or reservation.
Anais and I fucked for hours. Definitely fucking and not making love. Few words were exchanged as if we now knew that our respective stories, the equally tortuous and complicated roads which had taken both of us to this room were of no importance.
I mapped every square inch of her skin with the unbound folly of an explorer of unknown worlds. I drank the moistness that pearled from all her openings like the survivor of a terrible trek through unending deserts.
I felt quite delusional as I noted how my cock fitted her cunt as if we had been built for each other in some strange factory by a glove maker who knew every secret of our bodies. I listened to her gasps as if they were songs. My tongue, like a blind man’s hand, surveyed the textured territory of her teeth, her throat, the ridges of her perineum, the crevice of her anus, the satin of her white skin until my own throat ran dry. I gasped.
“Wait,” she said at one point and moved on tiptoe to the sink, where she cupped her hands under the open tap and then filled her mouth before returning to the bed where I lay prone and emptied herself down my throat to relieve my thirst.
Tired, raw, sated, our bodies spooned, half of my cock still embedded softly inside her, killed by tenderness, we were like corpses on the hotel room bed. She dozed off. I resisted the attack of the night but could not hold on to consciousness much longer.
I fell asleep and arrived back in the twenty-first century.
The next time I travelled back in time, yet again thousands of days had elapsed. Times Square was going downhill fast.
The theatre no longer existed and was now replaced by a seedy peep show. I had to purchase ten metal chits to get in and found out that the only way of spending them was to walk in to one of the dozens of narrow private cabins and feed the box on the far wall. At which point, a metal blind would rise revealing a thick glass rectangular window behind which a woman would be either stripping or already in the process of touching herself intimately or even stuffing a dildo into herself. Occasionally, a customer in a nearby cabin would slide a note under the glass partition where a space had been created for this process and would be treated to an intimate close-up that bordered on gynaecology.
Burlesque felt like several centuries away. This was sex at its most vulgar and humiliating.
I was on my last chit when a new performer made her way from a side passage onto the mini-stage that was surrounded by the exiguous cabins and their glass windows.
I recognized Anais.
She looked tired, wan, sadder than ever.
From behind the glass, I waved, hoping she would recognize me.
She did not. Or maybe the glass window only allowed vision one-way.
I waved again, mouthing “It’s me . . .”
She would not hear me.
Anais wiggled her bum against the mirror but when I slipped no note through the thin gap she swiftly moved on to the next adjacent window. A ten dollar bill was pushed through to her which she grabbed; she held her ear to the partition and listened to the customer’s request, nodded and leant back to the performing platform where she had left a large Strand tote bag from which she pulled out an oversize sex toy in the shape of a bee-stung cock. As she brought the object down towards her opening, the metal window lowered itself. I was out of tokens.
I rushed back to the lone attendant on duty and changed another twenty dollars into tokens but by the time I returned every single cabin was occupied. When there finally was a vacant one and I’d fed the damn mechanism, it was another girl behind the glass, a small titless blonde who looked as if she had just come off the street on a school day. Her cunt was shaved and pierced and a rose tattoo peered at me just above the nipple of her left breast.
I realized the cabin I was now in was the one which had housed the man who had previously slipped the ten dollar tip to Anais to pleasure herself for his gratification. I looked down. The floor beneath my loafers was still wet from his ejaculation.
I walked towards the Port Authority Bus Terminal at the other end of 42nd Street and was sick.
Only three days later, I was back on Times Square and everything had gone to seed. Drug dealers were on every corner, half the cinemas and shop fronts were boarded up, and derelicts and panhandlers outnumbered the tourists.
The peep show that had once been the burlesque theatre had changed its name and appearance again and now advertised “Live Sex”.
Somehow I knew what to expect, but still paid the entrance fee, hoping against hope that the inevitable would not occur.
There was a bed on a raised platform and a crowd of guys pressed up against the improvised stage. I managed to make my way nearer as some of the men gradually peeled back and left. On the bed a couple was fucking, the woman’s legs raised high in the air supported by the man’s shoulders and the stud was positioned so that all the spectators had a clear view of his cock moving in and out of the woman’s vaginal aperture.
The bed creaked but neither of the performers made a sound, mechanically going through the motions. It absurdly occurred to me how long they could actually go on screwing for the crowd, and how the guy could stay hard semipermanently, when the man and the woman finally separated and, wordlessly, rose from the bed and walked away into dark area. The crowd shuffled and I was able to move to the front. Evidently, the couple or another we
re soon to return as the men stayed there waiting.
And the next live sexers appeared.
The man was a monstrously tall black man, with a grey towel draped across his midriff. He stood himself at the front of the bed with his back to us voyeurs and pulled the towel away. He must have been particularly big in the trouser department as a few men standing on the sides and granted a better view whistled softly in approval.
An instant later, his partner made her way to the bed.
Anais.
Now visibly a decade or so at least older than when I had first seen her in what was now for me the Golden Age of burlesque.
Her skin was still terribly white, but no longer shone with that inner light that had so struck me before. She had no towel, and moved fully naked towards the bed, her shoulders slightly stooped. Indifferent to the crowd of men facing her she leaned back and lay down, then opened her legs wide. Her labia looked bruised, overused. The black guy moved closer to her, holding his massive erection in one hand and positioned himself.
Just all like those centuries ago, her eyes caught mine. Those pools of darkness were flat and dead and there was no sign of recognition. I noticed puncture marks on her thin arms as the man entered her in one movement, and she closed her eyes. He began his mighty thrusts.
I tore myself away from the crowd of men. At least I owed her that. Not to watch.
I’ve been back to Times Square many times since on my time travelling journeys. It’s different now. Burlesque is but a jewelled memory, and the whole area has been gentrified, Disneyfied, cleaned up. And however much I troop up and down the area, and dip into shiny new souvenir stores and wondrous theatres with shows for the whole family, I have never come across Anais again.
Time passes faster and faster between every visit, so I assume she is likely dead by now.
And I remain the same age.
And will do so forever.
But I cannot erase the memory of Anais and how we fitted together so well and I was allowed for just a few hours to experience joy.
The Mammoth Book of Erotica presents The Best of Maxim Jakubowski Page 19
