by Nic Kelman
He tells you how he never cheated on her (no, he never did, not to your knowledge — but what about that time six months ago when he called you and told you about that girl at his gym, the one who wore only Lycra shorts and a sports bra when she worked out, the one with the delicate nose stud, the one who would talk to him whenever she saw him, leave him openings to ask her out like telling him she had nothing to do that weekend, the one with the body, the one he said “couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty,” the one he had carefully avoided telling he was married, the one that was “driving him crazy,” the one you told him you couldn’t give him any advice about, the one about whom you said, “Do whatever you want. Life is short.” — what about her?), how he never cheated on her, how he did more and more things just to please her, but that her insecurity got worse, not better. How at first he did things like train himself not to glance up over her shoulder when he caught shiny, healthy, blond hair out of the corner of his eye. How by the end if he was the first one home he would frantically mop the floor of the apartment, in a panic she would come home and scream at him that he had made it dirty because he knew she couldn’t stand that.
He is embarrassed when he says that out loud, when he sees the look on your face. “It sounds ridiculous out loud, doesn’t it? You can get used to anything, I guess, anything can become normal,” he says. He takes a sip of the Château Lafite. “God that’s good wine,” he says.
He tells you about a sausage. About how she had thrown a sausage at him in the supermarket just a couple of weeks ago because it contained, among fifty other things, veal, and she hated veal, was against veal, and she had assumed he hadn’t thought about that when he picked it out, hadn’t thought about her when he picked it out, when in fact he had picked it out precisely because it was Greek and he knew she liked Greek delicacies. “She was always like that. She always assumed the worst about me,” he says. “I don’t know why.”
But it was the dog that had finally done it. He tells you how they had gotten a dog recently, two months ago, how they had silently, mutually agreed that this would be a last-ditch attempt to save the relationship, that this would give them something to share. You don’t tell him how even you know that was a bad idea, don’t ask him why he hadn’t known better, ask him what the hell he had been thinking it would give them to share besides a responsibility you could have told him neither of them wanted. He doesn’t need to hear any of that right now. Instead you think, “Well, at least it wasn’t a child.” You think that because you’ve heard that one before too.
And so he goes on to tell you what you already know. How when they both got home from work neither of them wanted to walk that damn dog. How they both felt their own exhaustion was the more valid. How they would get into screaming matches every single night over who should be taking the ten minutes it took to take the dog downstairs and around the block. How they would end up calculating on paper who had done more walks. How sometimes, out of stubbornness, they would both sit there ignoring each other, ignoring the whining dog, until the dog went and peed in a corner which would, of course, start a whole new round of accusations.
Dessert arrives. It is especially good, superb. He loves it. “God, I’ve never had zabliogne like this!” he says, “It’s like . . . like . . . like . . . ” He is a writer, your friend.
“Like really good zabliogne?” you say.
He laughs. “Yes,” he says, “like that.”
And then afterwards he says “I’m not sure I want to go” and you say “Fine, I don’t want to go if you don’t want to go” and he says “Well I’ll go if you want to go, don’t not go because you think I don’t Want to go” and you say “I’m not going to go if you don’t want to go, nine times out of ten it’s the best thing but it doesn’t work for everyone, there is some risk — Felix — you know Felix right? — when Felix got divorced it only made him angry to be there” and he says at last “OK, fine, let’s go — but only for an hour or something and I’m not sure I want a dance or anything.”
And then he sits there quietly for the rest of the ride, looking out the window. And so for the rest of the ride you wonder if she took the wedding presents with her when she left, you wonder if you will ever see her again, this woman you welcomed into your own life as well, this woman you made an effort to be friendly with even though she was a pain in the ass, even though she didn’t try to be friendly with you, even though you knew — yes, knew — that she’d be gone sooner or later, even though she told your friend she didn’t like his friends, that he spent too much time with them, even though your friend began spending less and less time with you because of her, alienated himself from you and his other friends, although you were going to be the one here, two years later, taking him out to dinner and holding his hand now they’ve finally realized for themselves what you could have told them two years ago when you first saw him so deliberately not check out a high school girl that had always been his type. This woman you welcomed into your life because your friend said he was in love with her.
And so what if you like her? So what if she’s nice and makes an effort to get along with you, begins calling you up and telling you what your friends are doing, where everyone will be going that evening (a place she chose, a place none of you like in particular, a place that doesn’t have particularly good food or beautiful girls but that will do because none of that really matters as along as everyone is there together, as long as going there means your friend, her significant other, can still be included), begins saying things like, “You know it’s so-and-so’s birthday next week — we really have to do something for him” when you’ve been doing something for so-and-so’s birthday since she was in junior high. So what. Then you simply have to choose when they separate. And while you will always choose your friend, every now and then you will want to call that girl and see if she wants to come to the party you’re having because she was really good company, she was fun to have around, and then you will be a little mad at your friend for fucking her in the first place instead of just staying friends with her. But you would never say any of this because all of this is just a minor irritation after all, a thought you would have while being driven across town, nothing more, because you know that compared to what your friend felt and is feeling, compared to what she felt and is feeling, all of this is trivial.
And so you are in a strip club again. You can’t seem to get away from them. All over the world you find yourself in them. But this time it is not business or pleasure. It is therapy.
When you arrive there is already a bachelor party there. Young guys, large, probably recently out of college where they all lived in the same fraternity. As some more of them filter in behind you, they are greeted loudly, shout things like “Dozer!” and “BJ!” and “Bitch!” They hug. And when they sit down, they stay away from the seats around the edge of the stage where they would each be required to give every dancer a dollar. It is easy to pick the bachelor out from the others as you walk by. While his friends catch up with each other, while the ones now from New York talk to the ones now from San Francisco, while they do that, he just looks at the girls and sips the beers his friends buy him.
And as you walk past, on the way to the VIP room, away from the rabble, you aren’t sure if your friend even notices them. Like the bachelor, he too is absorbed by the girls. Although his face carries a different kind of desperation. His face is more hungry than wistful, the bachelor’s more wistful than hungry. And noticing this you can’t help wondering how soon the bachelor will be back here with your friend’s look, how soon he will be looking for a girl that will be his first and not his last.
The only qualification for the VIP room is the extra cover charge. You pay it for both of you. What you are paying for, what makes this an area for very important men, is that inside you can get a friction dance rather than a lap dance. For a friction dance, a completely naked girl straddles you, puts her arms around your neck, and gyrates her pelvis on top of your crotch. While she d
oes this she may lean her torso back so you can see exactly how perfect her stomach is or she may sit upright and press your face into her breast implants or she may hunch over, touch her forehead to yours, and look into your eyes. A dance like this costs twice as much as a lap dance during which the girl is only topless and keeps one foot on the floor at all times. This is the only club in the entire Northeast to offer friction dances and just for this, on special occasions, groups of men come here from up to three hundred miles away.
When you enter, the open space of the VIP room proper is straight ahead, but on either side of you there are entrances to two dark corridors that stretch so far away their ends are lost in a dim, sweaty haze. Down these corridors are single rows of plush leather chairs. Sunken into many of the chairs are men. Climbing on top of the men, writhing slowly, in various states of undress, are women. Corridors, areas, like this always remind you of nothing so much as a painting of Hell you own, a painting of Hell you bought because it reminded you of corridors, areas, like this.
Somehow, when you sit down, the girls immediately smell blood. Some of them circle for a minute or two, wander past your table as if looking nearby for someone specific but being sure to turn around facing towards your table rather than away. You are always amazed by their ability to pick out the men willing and able to spend money from the men who just paid the extra cover to buy one beer and nurse it for two hours while they watch the all-nude stage show. There is a well-dressed man quite near you yet the girls completely ignore him and home in on you even though you are wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt and a baseball cap. They somehow even manage to distinguish you from your friend because when at last one of them comes and asks if she can sit at your table, she asks you, sits next to you, talks to you. You always compare it to that summer you worked in your father’s jewelry store. By August you could tell the moment someone walked in whether or not they were going to buy something. But even then, even when it was you, you couldn’t have said how you did it.
The girl who sits next to you and talks to you is far from the most beautiful girl in the place. It is always like that too. The girls that are not so pretty work harder, solicit. The men make a point of finding the beautiful girls. The beautiful girls are so much in demand they can even sometimes pick and choose who they dance for.
You do not look at her as she talks to you, about her night, about how hot it is in here. You are not rude but there is no reason to pay anything more than the most rudimentary attention to her. She is neither beautiful nor young. Your friend is eagerly looking at the stage where a truly stunning girl dances, a girl with extremely expensive implants, with a really convincing half-wig that makes it look like her hair would be three feet long if it wasn’t gathered up into that fake ponytail on top of her head. Eventually the girl next to you gets up and goes away, says, “Well, let me know if you want a dance later.”
This isn’t a sleazy place, the chairs are leather, the floors are carpeted. The bouncers are enormous and would throw anyone out if they got too drunk. But that’s not going to happen when even the cheapskates nursing their one beer still had at least fifty dollars to spend on looking at naked women. This place makes its money off the girls, not the liquor. But you are still able to order a bottle of good champagne, and you do so, tipping the waitress well. The men treat the waitresses and cigarette girls in these places terribly, order them around in ways they never would the dancers. The men want the dancers to think they’re gentlemen. They don’t care what the waitresses and cigarette girls think as long as they give them their drinks and their cigars. So they try all kinds of things with them they’d never try with the dancers, try to get them to sit in their laps, ask them to bend over more when they serve the drinks. With the dancers, the women they can pay to gyrate naked in their laps, they are often almost shy. And as if that weren’t enough, the men frequently tip the servers badly too. Saving money for the dancers, they don’t like to tip. You once saw a guy who had just spent six hundred dollars on dances and had a three-hundred-dollar bar tab not tip his waitress at all. Not a penny. So you tip yours well. You’re a nice guy, thoughtful. And she appreciates it, is surprised, grateful, says, “Let me know if you need anything else, I’ll be back in a minute to check on you.”
The truly stunning girl is done dancing so, telling your friend you are going to the men’s room, you intercept her as she comes offstage, ask her if she’d like to come and sit with you and your friend and have some champagne. She says she’ll be right there. She is exactly what the doctor ordered.
When she arrives at your table and just sits down without a word, your friend is surprised. His eyes light up and he glances at you and smiles.
The three of you chat for a while. She says she has only recently started dancing again, that she was “doing something else” for a year. When you ask her what she was doing she laughs and says, “I was married.” But he was too jealous, she tells you, even after they were married, even when she stopped dancing, he was too jealous. So they just got divorced and she had to go back to work. “You have to make money somehow,” she says.
Eventually you send her and your friend off to one of the corridors. “Stay there as long as he likes,” you tell her. She takes your friend’s hand, leads him through the room. Sheepishly your friend goes off with her, his eyes at last daring to dart all over her body. Halfway across the room, she looks back at him and says something that makes him laugh. This is what he needed, a dancer with a lot of experience. When he has his confidence back he’ll lose interest in dancers like that, in dancers that smile seductively when they’re facing you but whose faces go blank as soon as they turn away. When he has his confidence back he’ll want an inexperienced girl, one who isn’t too jaded, who isn’t so familiar with the physical motions, so practiced, that she doesn’t have to make herself enjoy herself to give a good dance. But for now he needs someone who will think for him, who will remind him what he likes. You know that as much as it should be like riding a bicycle, it isn’t. Every time you fall off you need someone to teach you how to do it again.
Almost as soon as they are gone, another girl asks if she can sit next to you. She is far from pretty, it looks like her nose may have once been broken, but she is young. Very young. “This is more like it,” you think, this is exactly what you wanted to amuse yourself with while you wait for your friend. You say, “Of course . . . please . . . ,” pull out a chair, offer her some champagne. She refuses, you can’t understand why, but she clearly takes it as a good sign anyway. Her shoulders relax. You hadn’t noticed how tense they were until she let them relax.
And she is relieved too when you begin to question her, she didn’t know what she was supposed to say. And you are fascinated by her. Genuinely fascinated. You love her regional accent, the suggestion that she has not been exposed to very much. And when she tells you she is a freshman in college you are slightly more interested. Even though this doesn’t surprise you, even though you suspected as much, hearing her actually make the claim still excites you a little more. Now you find yourself examining what parts of her flesh you can see outside her gown. It is very pale and very supple. Now you want to know what she looks like naked. Now you want to run the backs of your fingers over her exposed shoulders, over her neck. Now it is you who smells blood.
You ask her how long she’s been dancing. She tells you this is only her third night ever and her first time here, dancing fully nude. The idea that she hasn’t danced for many men before is even more exciting than her being a freshman and the idea that you might be the first man to pay her to dance completely naked is even more exciting than that. You wonder if she would tremble at all as she danced for you, if her skin would shiver slightly or break out in a cold sweat when you caressed it. You wonder if she would be able to look into your eyes for very long even if you told her to.
“Are you nervous?” you ask.
“A little,” she says. “But I guess it’s only a teensy-weensy bit more fabric I have to take off
.”
You smile at this. You hadn’t thought of it that way.
She points out a girl dancing on the stage, dancing very professionally. “My friend brought me in here — she says you make a lot more money here.”
“Is she a freshman too?” you ask. Her friend is beautiful.
“Yup,” she says.
Now you wonder if her friend’s breasts are actually real. They seem too perfect for that but you have to wonder where she could have gotten the money for that good a job. They must be real you decide. And then you wonder how an eighteen-year-old girl learned to dance like that.
You turn back to the girl at your table. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like a drink?” you ask.
She thinks for a minute, looking off into the distance, her eyes shifting around, and then, as something occurs to her, she smiles, turns her head to you, looks at you, and says, “OK, I’ll have a Shirley Temple.”
A Shirley Temple! You don’t show it, at least you think you don’t show it, but you are very amused. That’s why she didn’t want any champagne — she isn’t old enough to drink and she doesn’t know if she can on this first night in this new club, doesn’t want to take the chance of blowing this opportunity, of embarrassing her friend who vouched for her or, even worse, getting her in trouble.
With a grin you order the girl a Shirley Temple from the waitress. She is very surprised, repeats it back to you as a question. You nod. She shrugs, brings the drink. The girl sips it, leaving a ring of lipstick around the straw.
And ordering this drink for this girl has now made you crazy for her. You love that you are sitting there with a girl who still likes to drink Shirley Temples but that you could pay to press her naked pussy against you at any moment you chose.
