The Year of Yes

by Maria Headley

  The Do-Overs. The thirty-something guys who were happily beginning their youth again, this time as the only “real men” in a program full of hot eighteen-year-olds.

  The Gurus. The thirty-something guys who didn’t notice the eighteen-year-olds, and therefore were fervently desired by all of them. Usually yoga teachers on the side.

  The Professors. Though there were rules against dating one’s students, they were not well enforced. A side effect of writerly repression was that several people in the program were obsessed with scripting sadomasochistic onstage sex. The rest of the unlucky workshop participants would have to pretend to be actors, and read the scenes aloud. “Ohh, ahh, yesssssss. Pleeease, plunge my head into a bucket of pee.” Nothing could have been more unappealing. Except for the semifamous professor in charge, lech-erously informing my friend Elise that she looked as though she’d been really turned on during her reading of a rape scene.

  Zak. Lovable, but not dateable, given the roommate situation. Zak had his own in-program dating woes. He’d had a brief interlude with the blonde Russian babe that all the straight boys in the program followed around. Something undisclosed had gone wrong. Now he was forced to hide every time he saw her.

  Griffin. Lovable, but not dateable, given that, other than Zak, he was my only male friend in the department. He, Zak, and I formed a triumvirate of late-night intellectual obnoxiousness. When Griffin was in our kitchen, Zak and I were allowed to be as loud as we wanted to be, because he’d charmed Vic and could do no wrong. Griffin was a small Greek guy from Indiana, and in possession of a talent for making anyone, in any room he walked into, fall instantly in love with him. All of his female friends had tried to sleep with him at some point, and I was no exception. In my case, I’d hung out with him one night until 4:00 a.m., eating his trademark bad pasta and drinking wine. When it was too late for me to go home, he’d given me his bed.

  “You can stay in here with me, you know,” I’d said.

  Griffin had taken a couple steps toward the bed, then a couple back.

  “I can’t. I’m from Indiana,” he’d finally said, and flew from the room, his pillow clutched to his chest. It wasn’t that he was confused about his sexuality. It was that he was one of the last men on the planet who believed in sleeping only with people you loved. He’d later revealed that he’d spent the remainder of the night conflicted. We were close friends. It was possible that we might really get along. Should he go back in? Should he not? What was really being offered?

  “Yes,” I’d told him. “It was what you thought.”

  “Damn it, damn it, damn it,” he’d replied, but the moment had passed, and we’d never been inclined to get naked again. Soon after, I’d hooked Griffin up with Elise, who’d conquered his resistance through a combination of sexy ankles, fishnet stockings, and braless stirring of pumpkin risotto. Now, she was taking him shopping for small, soft sweaters in the women’s department, and introducing him to the joys of high-thread-count sheets. He was slightly ashamed of how much he loved this, and worried that he’d be recategorized into a Stray. He wasn’t. He was his own thing. There was no one on earth like Griffin, and that was half of why I adored him.

  THE ABOVE CATEGORIES, combined with my work overload, caused me to keep my head down whenever I had to make an appearance on the seventh floor of 721 Broadway. The boys of the DWP weren’t even on my radar. Therefore, the first time I met the Boxer, I was dismissive. He was part of the Do-Over category, and in the grad program. Not bad looking. None too tall, but making up for it with great arm and chest muscles, due to the fact that he worked out at a boxing gym. Blondish, close-cropped hair. Sexily broken pugilist’s nose. It did not occur to me to be interested in him. The thing that made me reconsider the Boxer was his voice. I heard this great, raspy boom echoing across a crowded classroom, and I looked around in spite of myself.

  The class was taught by a famous avant-garde playwright. He’d assigned us the first page of Kafka’s The Castle, not a play, mind you, an unfinished novel about a poor guy trying in vain to get into a very low-rent heaven. We were supposed to do we knew not what with it. The playwright sat in the back of the house, grimacing his trademark sexy grimace. We were not experimental enough for him. His plays involved dreamlike realities and absurdist dialogue seeded with spectacular one-liners. He was a superstar for a select audience. I pretended I’d read the play the teacher was known for, but I lied. I was only interested in Sam Shepard, and I had too many day jobs to spend any time on my homework. I was getting by solely on my smile, which I spread indiscriminately around the department, hoping it would get me forgiven for not working up to my potential. When my turn came around to show my interpretation of The Castle, I sent the Boxer into the booth, to speak over the God mic, and flung all the other men in the class onstage, where they opposed my friend Ruby in her quest for a place to sleep. It was a sort of no-room-at-the-inn situation, which went surprisingly well the first time around, and heinously the second, when the professor made me repeat what I’d improvised. After class, the Boxer came up to me and told me he thought it had been “not bad.”

  We shared other classes, it turned out. One was with my most beloved professor, Martin, a Guru in his own right, who always carried about twenty-five pounds of obscure and wonderful books in a beaten-up leather bag and delivered his lectures in a distinctive growl. Martin and I were close cohorts, often drinking wine after class and trading volumes. He had a pack of young male acolytes, who could usually be found trailing behind him, hoping that some of his elusive combination of brilliance, eccentricity, and badass sense of humor would rub off on them. In one of Martin’s classes, I read aloud a prose piece about the ridiculous loss of my virginity, and the Boxer laughed so hard I thought he might have a coronary. He asked for my phone number, and though Vic had again admonished me for giving it out, I did. He’d laughed at my jokes, goddamn it. My ego was enamored. Also, even though I’d seen him carrying a well-thumbed paperback of Raymond Carver stories, never a very good sign in a prospective boyfriend, I thought that the boxing made up for it. It gave him a certain working-class appeal, a grounding in the physical that convinced me that he’d never try to knock me out with references to Rushdie.

  We went out to a sports bar (a sports bar! I rejoiced. It was so not my taste, and since I thought my taste had historically sucked, anything in opposition to it seemed like a great idea) and watched baseball. He had another friend with him, who was possibly there to evaluate me. I was wearing the wrong thing. Red dress. Far too sexy for a bar full of televisions and beer. I feared that my dress made me look desperate, and so I spent the entire evening tugging at it, trying to make it less bombshell and more windbreaker. Not possible. The Boxer said almost nothing to me the whole night, and I went home, feeling dweeby.

  When the Boxer called me later that week, and asked if I wanted to meet up that night, I was surprised, but pleased.

  “Meet me at six,” he said, and gave me an address on Broadway. Maybe he liked me after all. I could see myself liking him. He was intelligent, funny, and a gentleman! He hadn’t even tried to kiss me on the first date! I revised my opinions of him, and decided that he was just old-fashioned. Nothing wrong with old-fashioned.

  LATER THAT NIGHT, I walked down the street in search of our meeting place, expecting dinner, and maybe a play, given that we were roughly in the theater district. The neighborhood got less and less likely as I walked. I checked the address. Maybe I’d gotten something wrong. There was nothing on this corner. Nothing, that is, but something called Flashdancers, A Gentleman’s Club. I’d seen this place advertised on the tops of taxis, a busty blonde in four sequins and a smile, offering herself up to traffic. Despite the fact that the sign was neon, I deluded myself into thinking that “gentleman’s club” meant the sort of dark, oak-paneled bar where you might find F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway drinking expensive scotch and smoking tobacco peddled by cigarette girls. I didn’t think I could just walk in. Probably, I thought, I wasn�
�t even allowed. I walked up to the big, bald guy standing outside, and nervously asked him if I had the right address.

  “You wanna go inside?” He grinned at me. Gold tooth.

  “I’m supposed to meet someone. But is there a restaurant? I think I might be lost.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “We have an all-you-can-eat buffet.” He winked, in a friendly manner. I looked at a sign posted next to the door, advertising the buffet. I felt happier. This was good news. Maybe it was one of those secret New York places. There was a club downtown, for example, that you had to access through a tunnel that started in the storage room of a grocery store. The clammy, dark passageway was the epitome of creepy, but if you had enough faith to get through the vault door at the end, you hit paradise: an old speakeasy, with swing music, velvet couches, and great martinis. I couldn’t imagine that the Boxer would actually take me somewhere sleazy. We had to go to school together, after all, and it’d be too embarrassing. I peered into the dark hallway beyond the door, but couldn’t see anything.

  “Do you think he’s inside already?”

  “Shit, I don’t know. You wanna go in, or you wanna stay out?” The bouncer was looking impatient.

  “I guess I’ll go in.”

  “That’s twenty bucks.” He stuck out a palm as big as my face.

  I’d never been to a bar that had such a big cover charge before. I dug in my purse, but I only had eight dollars.

  “Only because you’re a chick. Get in before I change my mind,” said the bouncer, waving me in for free. I wadded my money into my purse and ducked through a curtain.

  AT THE END OF A SHORT HALLWAY I found a holiday inn dining room: metal chairs with wipe-clean burgundy upholstery, small fake-marble tables, and little fake-crystal vases with fake flowers in them. A steam table against one wall, loaded with metal trays of anonymous fried objects. It would’ve been the kind of place I’d often ended up at during family vacations, had it not been for the fact that it was strewn with naked women.

  Freaked out, I looked around for the Boxer. No sign of him. I went and got a dangerously bargain-priced glass of wine, averting my eyes from a woman who was sitting with her essentially bare bottom on the bar. I surreptitiously wiped my glass with a cocktail napkin, drank it down, ordered another, and fled to a table for two, hoping that the Boxer would appear quickly. Maybe he’d misunderstood what kind of place this was.

  I’d only been to one strip club, and it had been in Idaho. I’d been dragged by some vagabond acting intern who’d thought it was local color. He’d neglected to understand that I, too, was local color, that these were my people, and if those things were immaterial, that I’d also been drastically underage. The strip club had been converted from a finger steak restaurant, but the vinyl booths and sawdust floor remained intact. The strippers had gyrated piteously around a PVC pole in the middle of the room. “Gyrated,” though, was too strong a word. Most of them had looked to be on serious drugs. They’d alternated between nodding off and racing about like wild ferrets. Sometimes they’d served as waitresses, bringing paper baskets of finger steaks. People ordered them. People ate them. People went to this place on purpose. There was a prominent sign posted: the torch lounge assumes no responsibility for consequences of viewing. I didn’t blame them.

  The only other stripping I’d seen had been with Zak, at a downtown cabaret that had been wildly, briefly hip. There’d been a woman dressed in a couple of plastic holly leaves and a tutu, shaking her thing to an Ani DiFranco song. Another woman had dripped hot candle wax all over herself while chanting Hail Marys. A woman dressed all in white feathers had brought out a guitar and sung a country-western ballad entitled “Did I Shave My Vagina for This?” Most bizarrely, there’d been a woman who’d billed herself as the Last Burlesque Show. (“Oh no,” Zak had whispered. “Oh no, oh no, oh God no.”) She was in her eighties, and fully dressed, at first, in a Dale Evans cowgirl suit. The Last Burlesque Show did scary things with a baton. By the time she’d gotten down to her tasseled pasties and spun them in opposite directions, Zak and I were both paralyzed, I with wonder, he with horror. The next act had been a belligerent woman who’d held a flashlight beneath her chin, campfire-ghost story-style, angrily reciting Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy.” When she’d finished, she’d trolled the audience for tips, and, discovering Zak, shone her flashlight on him, and demanded his wallet, yelling that she’d noticed he was cheap. We’d fled into the night, Zak fumbling for his asthma inhaler as we hit the street, me suspecting that it had been the last time he’d trust me to take him anywhere.

  My glass stuck to my table. My ass stuck to my chair. I didn’t want to stand up and walk out because I was hoping that I’d become invisible. I was completely embarrassed. If this was not just a miscommunication, if this was intentional, it was because the Boxer had assumed me to be wilder than I really was. I regretted that red dress. He probably thought that I was this kind of girl. What kind of girl was this, though? I had no idea. I was on my third, desperate glass of wine, and I’d graduated to drinking it with a straw to avoid touching my mouth to the glass.

  I was the only woman in the room who wasn’t a stripper. Not that the strippers were really stripping. They were dangling from poles, looking bored. They all had boob jobs. Breasts the size of cannonballs. My imagination launched to images of enormous false bosoms being shot at enemies. Civil War-era costumes. Screaming men. I squinched my eyes shut and tried not to think about exploding tits.

  BEHIND ME, THERE WAS SOME ACTIVITY, and it didn’t take long to figure out that it was a table full of kids, daring each other to approach me. School uniforms, like beacons shining out of the dark. Faces scarred by inept shaving. No one in their right mind would think these prep-school boys were done with puberty. I could hear them poking each other, trying to get up their courage. I was wearing a white wrap-around sweater and jeans, and I couldn’t imagine they really thought I was a stripper. The strippers looked to have been allotted three inches of cloth each. That, and as much silicone as their hearts desired.

  A skinny, freckled kid plunked himself down at my table. He blinked at me for a moment, then suddenly grabbed my glass of wine and slugged a sip. He looked triumphant. He weighed ninety pounds, at most. I grabbed it back, imagining my arrest for providing alcohol to a minor.

  “Who are you?” I said.

  “Peter.”

  “Peter what?”

  “VanHeu…” He reconsidered. “You wish.”

  “Peter YouWish,” I said, “you’re too young to be here.”

  “My friends want to know if you’re…” He dissolved into stammering giggles.

  I gave him the best evil eye I could muster. Not so hot, considering my lower lip was starting to tremble.

  “They want to know if you’re wearing a bra.”

  “None of your business.” A lacy bra that had cost too much money. I’d bought it that afternoon, and put it on in the dressing room, full of optimism for the evening.

  “Like, would you, like, give my friend Matt a lap dance?” he blurted, shoving a wad of ones at me. I shoved them back, but not before I noticed that there was a platinum card tucked into the cash.

  “No. Never. Absolutely not.” I decided then that the yes policy definitely did not include the underage. I hadn’t realized that I’d needed to make a rule about ninth graders.

  “The girls won’t. They say they’ll get arrested. We’re only allowed to sit quietly and drink soda.”

  “I don’t even know how you got in here.”

  “Bribed the bouncer. Duh.”

  I could see one of the kids doing homework at the table. Maybe this was what you did after school, if you were a kid in New York City.

  They were all clustered around my table now, sweating and shuffling their feet. Being surrounded by adolescent boys is like being surrounded by a flock of seriously awkward hummingbirds, and discovering, belatedly, that you are the feeder.

  “What’d she say?” they clamored.

  “S
he’ll do it,” said Peter YouWish.

  “She won’t,” I said. “Move it.”

  “I have my allowance,” offered another kid.

  “Me too,” said another.

  I wondered blurrily if there was a niche market in stripping for schoolboys. You’d travel from private school to private school, disguised as a substitute teacher. Four-inch-long plaid skirts and knee socks would hold no appeal for these kids. They saw them all the time. A Sexy Substitute, though, could make a killing.

  Finally, the Boxer arrived, holding a beer. The kids scattered like marbles. He looked at them, bemused, and then leaned across the table.

  “Need a drink?” The kids had managed to siphon my entire glass. The Boxer, for some reason, acted like this was perfectly normal. My pride hurt. If this was a test, if he thought I couldn’t deal with this, he was wrong. I was brave. And maybe he was going to apologize. And maybe he was going to morph suddenly into someone he wasn’t. In a foolish little corner of my mind, I still had hope. The alternative was too depressing.

  “Wine,” I said. I was already half-drunk. I might as well keep going.

  A stripper in a neon pink G-string had started to twirl, sensing the arrival of someone who might actually tip her. Over the God mic, a voice informed us that this girl was a stockbroker during the day and a stripper at night. Cannonballs. Or bowling balls. My brain dragged me to a bowling alley, where a guy in an embroidered shirt and rented shoes was hooking his fingers into the stripper’s breast, and tossing it, girl and all, down the lane. Strike! I cringed.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Fine. Terrific!” I nodded like a convert. “Great stripper!” Great was a misnomer. She had rigor mortits, and looked maybe seventeen. I felt like my wine might have poisoned me.

  “MIND IF I GO GET A LAP DANCE? There’s this Russian girl here, Masha…”

  The Boxer thumped me on the back, like I was a buddy.