Since Paul and Rich are too busy being important, jabbering into their cell phones and frantically shaking and pounding on their BlackBerries like they’re about to beat the high score, Dave gravitates over to me, talking while we get dressed. “I’ve been reading your column,” he says. “It’s amazing to me how you can write something so honest and raw, but still make it funny. You’ve really got a knack for it.”
“Thanks.”
“Sure. I hope Laney’s not driving you crazy, bringing over food all the time.”
It’s strange, hearing her name spoken so casually by him. “No,” I say. “It’s really very nice of her.”
“Sometimes she can go a little overboard.”
I think of Laney straddling me, her auburn hair falling wildly around her face, eyes closed, mouth open, as she bucks and shrieks her way to orgasm. “It’s fine,” I say. “She’s a good friend.”
He pulls off his try-on shirt, and there’s something about seeing the love handles and sagging pectorals of the man who doesn’t know I’m sleeping with his wife that makes me feel even worse than I already do. Dave’s not a bad-looking guy for forty-five, but he married a young sexpot and then let himself go, and I just want to grab him and haul him in front of the tailor’s mirror and say, “Look at yourself, you dumb fuck. What did you expect?!” And for one crazy instant, I find myself stepping forward and opening my mouth to tell him, because in the long term I think there would be an upside for both of us, but then Max makes his announcement about the titty bar and Dave nods his head and says, “Now you’re talking,” flashing me a conspiratorial, titty-bar grin, and in that instant I feel a little less bad for him, and the impulse to reveal myself is gone before I can get myself into more trouble than I’m already in.
Max herds us to a high-end gentleman’s club a few blocks away, the kind with crimson velvet ropes and stanchions out front, and the Armani-clad heavies working the door greet him by name. I consider a variety of ways to make my apologies and leave, but Mike and I have only just buried the hatchet and I don’t want to do anything that might lead to a new misunderstanding. So pretty soon I’m sitting on a long, L-shaped couch in the dimly lit club with the other guys. Max heads over to the bar to put down a card, stopping to admire the two ladies currently dancing on the poles, while a handful of the other dancers working the room start circling us like birds of prey in their high heels and negligible lace outfits. Within minutes Rich has pulled out a wad of cash and bought Mike his first lap dance. A small-breasted brunette with a crown of teased hair and a sequined G-string is leaning her nude torso across him, moving slowly to the music, running her hand down his thigh as she whispers in his ear. Word of a bachelor party in the club spreads quickly, and soon we’re surrounded by more dancers than we can handle. Paul grabs himself a tall blonde and heads for the champagne room, still talking on his cell phone, while Mike, Max, Rich, and Dave are content to have basic lap dances right there on the couch.
I miss my wife.
“Hey!” Mike says, looking out from behind his stripper, who is now sitting on his lap with her back to him, grinding herself against his crotch in a circular motion. “Someone take care of Doug.”
“I’m fine,” I say, holding up my drink. “Today is about you, not me.”
“Bullshit,” Mike says. “Max. Find this man a girl.”
“I’m a little busy right now, man,” says Max, who is almost fully reclined on the couch, looking lasciviously at the petite redhead bouncing on his lap.
“You’re my best man, Max,” Mike says. “Do your job.”
“Stay where you are, Max,” I say, quickly getting to my feet. “I can take care of myself.” I head over to the bar on the far side of the room, and order myself a Jack and Coke. The trick is to keep moving, so as to avoid becoming a stationary target for any of the roving dancers. While I wait for my drink, I watch Mike and the guys in the mirror behind the bar, whispering and flirting with the girls on their laps, cracking jokes and high-fiving each other. Dave, in particular, seems enamored of his dancer, an Asian girl with disproportionately large breasts, and his hands keep snaking around to cradle her ass, a flagrant violation of strip-club etiquette, but he must be tipping well because she doesn’t seem to mind.
“Hi,” says a plain-faced brunette with long coltish legs and a sheer halter top, rubbing my shoulder as she sidles up to the chair next to me. “I’m Shawnie.”
“Hi, Shawnie,” I say.
“What’s your name?”
“Jack.” She lied first.
“You want to come with me to the Champagne Room, Jack?”
“No, thanks.”
“How about a lap dance?”
I pull a twenty out of my wallet. “Here,” I say. “You see that guy over there with the brunette on his lap?”
“Yeah.”
“His name is Mike. Go give him a lap dance and tell him it’s from me.”
“Mike,” she repeats.
“Right,” I say. “But tell him your name is Debbie, okay?”
“Who’s Debbie?”
“Who’s Shawnie?”
She grins. “Debbie it is.”
I drain my drink and order another, turning to watch as she pulls off her top and climbs onto his lap. He leans over to look past her at me, and I raise my glass in his direction. He flashes me a quizzical look, but then a new song starts, something by the Black Eyed Peas, and Mike disappears behind Shawnie’s arching back.
Twenty minutes later, I’m still at the bar, realizing with disgust that while trying to stay just long enough to leave, I’ve drunk too much to drive, when Mike comes over to get me. “Doug,” he says drunkenly. “I want to tell you something.”
“Okay,” I say. I’m pretty buzzed myself at this point.
“I feel funny, being in this place with you,” he says, sitting down on the bar stool beside me. “I mean, I’m marrying your sister and all, and here I am, in a strip club.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I say. “It’s just some harmless fun.”
“That’s right,” he says. “I just want you to know that I love Debbie very much, and I would never do anything to disrespect her.”
“I’m sure you wouldn’t.”
“This is just some stupid male-bonding shit.”
“I know, Mike. Don’t worry about it.”
“Debbie’s way hotter than any of these chicks anyway,” he says proudly, making a grand sweeping gesture with his arm.
“So is Laney Potter, but that’s not stopping Dave,” I say. We turn to look at Dave, whose face is buried between the giant breasts of his lap dancer, rocking her up and down with his legs to the beat of the music. “If only your clients could see him now.”
“You think Laney Potter is good-looking?” Mike says.
I look down at my drink, wondering why I brought her up at all. “I don’t know,” I say. “That wasn’t the point, really.”
“No,” Mike says, steering me away from the bar. “The point is, you’re my buddy and you’ve been through a lot and the guys and I want to buy you some lap dances.”
“That’s okay, really,” I say.
“Just sit down and enjoy yourself,” Mike says, shoving me onto the couch, and the other guys call out their own intoxicated bellows of encouragement. Max leans forward and gravely whispers to me, like he’s sharing state secrets, that for an extra hundred some of the girls will blow you in the Champagne Room, and before I know it, there’s a naked girl on my lap with bleached blond hair and a metal stud in her tongue. She smells of gin, lavender body lotion, and baby powder, and her high gum line makes me wonder briefly about strip clubs and dental plans. “Hi,” she says. “I’m Vanessa.”
“Jack,” I say, avoiding eye contact. She can’t be older than twenty, and her body lotion makes her taut belly sparkle like a sidewalk, which makes me think for a sad instant of Brooke’s eye shadow. And then the song starts, and it’s an old Van Halen song that reminds me of Julie Baskin, my first high school girlfr
iend. Vanessa starts to sway and grind on my thighs, and I close my eyes and remember a party in someone’s house, and how Julie and I stood outside in the shadow of the house, pressed up against each other kissing and petting, while inside this same song was playing on the stereo. She smelled clean, like scented soap, and tasted like Juicy Fruit gum, and I can still feel how in love I was, how pure and exciting and perfect it was to stand outside on a cool spring night kissing a pretty girl, and how whole we still were, as yet untouched in any way by life, and how easy everything was, because it was never meant to last. We never even broke up, just kind of dissolved peacefully, and a few weeks later we were each making out with someone else at another party, in love all over again.
“Hey,” Vanessa says softly, still moving her hips unconsciously against me.
“Yeah,” I say, opening my eyes.
“You’re crying.”
“Allergies,” I say, wiping my face with the back of my hand.
Vanessa moves her face to within an inch of mine, and I can see a thin, raised scar that follows the line of her eyebrow. It’s faded enough to have come from her childhood, and I wonder how she cut herself. I imagine a young, sweet-faced mother who pressed a wet cloth to her head and rushed her to the doctor and held her hand while they stitched up the wound and felt the pain like it was her own. And then I wonder what made that pretty little girl with the loving mother turn down the road that brought her to this dark club, and my sad, unresponsive lap.
“I’m sorry,” I say, for more than she knows.
“You’re not into it,” she says. “What’s wrong?”
And before I even know that I’m doing it, I tell her. “I miss my wife,” I blurt out, so violently that our heads knock. “I miss her so much that it’s like this cinder block in my chest, crushing my lungs so that I can’t breathe.” I point to Dave, still lost in the Asian girl’s mountainous cleavage. “And you see that guy over there? I’m fucking his wife, and I never thought I’d be the kind of guy who fucks someone else’s wife. And paying a pretty girl to grind on me would be sad under the best of circumstances, but now it’s sad because, compared to everything else in my life, a pair of tits in my face is not terribly sad, which of course just makes it that much sadder, and I just want it to stop hurting already, you know? I just want to be able to breathe again. I’m tired of going to sleep every night terrified of waking up, but I’m scared for it to stop hurting, because that will mean I’ve moved on, and then she’ll be gone forever.”
And throughout this entire rant, she never ceases the slow, gentle rocking of her hips, and when I’m done, she runs her hand softly down the side of my face, the flesh of her fingers soft against my angry stubble, and pulls my forehead gently against hers. We sit like that for a moment, as the last bars of the song fade. “Jack,” she says softly.
“Yeah,” I say, looking into her wide green eyes. And in the instant before she speaks, I realize that I already know what she’s going to say.
“You want to come with me to the Champagne Room for a private dance?”
28
THERE ARE FOUR VOICE MAILS ON MY CELL PHONE, all from Laney. I call her back as I’m driving home from the strip club, where I made good my escape soon after my aborted lap dance. She picks up on the first ring.
“Are you still with Mike and the other guys?” she says.
“I just left.”
“Well, Dave just called and he says he’s going to be out pretty late.”
I’ll bet. “Probably,” I say.
“So.”
“So.”
“I want you in my bed.”
Laney opens the door in a red satin teddy, her long auburn hair cascading wildly around her, and I know I should end this, but she’s just so goddamn beautiful and after the strippers this feels positively wholesome, and it suddenly feels like I’ve been through a war today so I practically fall into her arms. Her bedroom flickers in the light of scented candles, and she sits me down at the edge of the high four-poster bed and undresses me slowly, kissing my chest and stomach, and then my thighs as she pulls off my pants. Once I’m naked she climbs onto my lap, wrapping her legs around me as she opens my mouth with hers, and I try hard not to think about the lap dance I had just an hour ago. Then, without taking her eyes off of me, she shimmies out of the spaghetti straps of her negligee and pulls it down so that her breasts are sudden, twin explosions of flesh in my face as she pulls my head into them. And as my hands reach around to find her ass, I can’t help but think of Dave’s hands on the stripper’s ass, his face hungrily planted between her breasts, and this should feel like justice, but instead it just feels sad, because we’re all the same. Dave, the stripper, Laney, and me; all trapped in the same pose, all wanting something other than what we’re getting.
When we’re done, Laney nods off and I quietly retrieve my clothing from the floor to get dressed. I’m making my way down the carpeted hallway when I hear a toilet flush and I freeze as Laney’s daughter, Rebecca, four years old with her mother’s red hair, steps out of the bathroom, small and cherubic in her pink pajamas. She looks at me through sleep-fogged eyes and then steps over to me and, inexplicably, lifts her arms to be picked up. “Tuck me back in,” she says sleepily.
When I pick her up, she wraps her arms tightly around me and buries her face in the crook of my neck, her chubby cheek smooth against my jaw. In the dim glow of her Tinkerbell nightlight I can see the pink walls, the plush white comforter with a pattern of pink hearts, the assembly of stuffed animals protectively crowding the perimeter of her bed. I lie her back in the bed and wrap the comforter snugly around her. Then, just before I straighten up, she raises her head, eyes still closed, and kisses the bottom of my chin. “I love you,” she says, before rolling back against the wall, and the hot tremor in my chest rises to my throat. I tiptoe out of the room and down the hall, and hit the first floor running.
I get home around midnight to find my mother’s car parked in the driveway, and I’m sixteen again, busted coming home after curfew, having been up to no good and wondering how much they know. She’s on the living room couch, dozing in front of Leno, cradling a sleeping Claire’s head in her lap. Her hair is splayed and flattened against the back of the couch, her makeup smudged in a way that makes her look out of focus. Her left hand is buried in Claire’s hair, and in her right is a half-filled wineglass, held miraculously upright against her chest, like she had fallen asleep with the glass on its way to her mouth. There’s an empty bottle of Merlot on the table, and no other glasses in evidence, which is good, because it means Claire is being responsible about her pregnancy, but a little sad because it means my mother has polished off the entire bottle herself.
I’m quietly wrapping my fingers around the stem of the wineglass to take it from her when she pulls it away from me. “Get your own,” she murmurs, barely stirring.
“Hey, Ma.”
She opens her eyes. “You smell like sex.”
“What are you doing here?”
She finishes off the wine in her glass and then hands it to me. “But if you were having sex,” she says through a long yawn, “why wouldn’t you stay the night?”
“Mom.”
“A few theories come to mind, and none of them bode terribly well for you.”
“I’m fine,” I say, collapsing into an armchair.
“You look fine,” she says sardonically, fixing me with a dour stare. “Come on, Douglas, we have no secrets in this family.”
I laugh. “We have a truckload of secrets in this family.”
“No, we have lies. Families need lies. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to look at each other anymore. But trust me, there are no secrets.”
On the television, a hopped-up Leno whines through his monologue like he’s been sucking helium.
“I thought you hated Leno,” I say.
“I’m sitting on the clicker.”
I reach over and turn off the television. “So,” I say. “What brings you here?”
/> She gently brushes some of Claire’s hair off her face. “Claire needed to talk.”
“She called you?”
“Is that really so hard to believe?” she snaps, offended. “She’s going through a lot right now, and she wanted her mother.”
“No. I’m sure she did.”
She looks down fondly at Claire. “The poor girl hasn’t slept in days. She’s always internalized her stress like that, ever since she was a little girl. And when it gets really bad, this is the only way she can fall asleep. I used to come to her apartment in the city, and then to her and Stephen’s house. I know how to talk her down.”
“I never knew that.”
“Well, then, it’s official. You don’t know everything.”
I lean back in my chair and close my eyes, feeling sad and guilty about too many things to quantify. “I’m sorry, Mom. I don’t mean to be like this.”
She looks back up at me. “You don’t have to apologize to me. You’re my little boy. Just be a little kinder. You don’t have the market cornered on heartbreak, you know.”
“I know.”
“Good. Now be an angel and freshen my drink.”
I lift up the empty bottle and turn it over. “I think you’ve had enough.”
“And I think I just told you to be kinder.”
“Are you spending the night?”
“I’ll go home at dawn. If your father doesn’t see me first thing in the morning, he becomes disoriented.”
“You’ll be exhausted.”
“I’ll nap in the afternoon. It’s good practice for the nursing home.”
She closes her eyes. In the darkened room, her wrinkles are gone, and she looks like my mother again, the woman who would lie in my bed at night and tell me stories that always began, “When I was young and beautiful … ” And I would always interrupt on cue and say, “You still are,” and she would kiss my nose and say, “So just imagine what I looked like back then.” And then, after the stories she would sing me to sleep with show tunes. Sometimes I still hear her singing “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” as I’m drifting off to sleep. And now she’s dozing on the couch of her widower son after rocking her divorcing daughter to sleep, before running home to make sure her demented husband doesn’t trash the house in a panic.
How to Talk to a Widower Page 17
