Girls (21 page)

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.

And you realize that right here, right now, in this case, this has nothing to do with anything other than being delighted with the idea you could be a corrupter. That you could just reach out and pluck something from the sky and drag it down. That you could snatch this perfect thing up and watch it wilt in your hand. Yet not, like a Mongol, taking pleasure in the destruction for its own sake (as you sometimes think you would enjoy doing in your darkest, most angry moments). But instead taking pleasure in the destruction because the act that causes it also happens to be an act that makes you feel good. As if the actual act of cutting flowers to decorate your house was just as pleasurable as looking at them once the fresh-cut blossoms were in place. You are delighted by the idea that if you were to make this girl dance for you, while the act was giving you pleasure, it would be consuming something in her that could never return. As if on a cold, cold night not only the warmth and dance of the fire gave you pleasure, but also the fact that the wood must be burned to produce the fire. For some reason, the fact that the thing is used up in the process, the idea that no one else can ever have exactly what you had, is tremendously exciting. It is precisely the same feeling you have had whenever you and you alone have consumed a unique bottle of precious wine. Anyone can understand that, can’t they? That this makes you feel special, set apart from all other men even if in only a very small way?

And as you recognize this, you understand why when you have shared a girl like this with one or even two of your closest friends, it has brought you even closer together, because you have shared a pleasurable experience that no one else has ever had or can ever have again.

Then you have a wonderful idea. You could get her and her friend to dance together for you. You could get these two eighteen-year-old, Shirley Temple-drinking freshmen to press their bodies together, to grind their pussies on each other’s thighs as they danced, to kiss. That would be even more depraved, even more degrading, and thus even more destructive. That would leave even less behind for those who came after you.

And that is exactly what you do. You have her call her friend over to the table and you tell them what you want. At first they are reluctant, they’ve never done anything like that before, which is of course exactly what you want. But it turns out, like almost everything in your experience, to be only a question of money. You agree to pay them double the normal rate each to dance for you for an hour. But they still have to check with a manager, they are delightfully ignorant of the club’s policy regarding something like this. The girl you sent your friend off with wouldn’t have been. Naturally the management has no problem with it.

As you make your way back into the depths of the corridor you pass your friend but he doesn’t even see you. He is dead to the world, anesthetized.

When they first start dancing, they are a little awkward, they look at each other more than they look at you, a little embarrassed by each other’s flesh, suddenly aware of the nakedness they only recently shared together in the dressing room without a second thought. It is the girl who has been dancing longer who finally takes the lead, who at last slips one thigh between her friend’s legs and pulls her close, crushes their breasts together. And with that, as if they had finally taken the dive into a pool they knew was cold, they are suddenly relaxed. They begin to look at you more than each other as they rub their bodies together, slide up and down each other. And as the hour progresses you are pleased to see that towards the end the situation has reversed again, that towards the end the girls are paying so much attention to each other’s bodies, are so involved in their long, open-mouthed kisses, that they have stopped looking at you altogether. Towards the end you note with satisfaction that when one’s thigh rubs between the other’s legs, it comes out glistening.

When you went down the corridor, they had looked a little sick, as if they were getting on a roller coaster they weren’t sure they wanted to ride, they weren’t even holding hands. But now when you pay them, when you count out the hundred-dollar bills, when you give them 30 percent extra for a job well done, they look flushed, happy, as if they’re glad they did it after all. They stand next to each other, naked, with their arms still around each other’s waists. They only stop touching each other to count their money.

While you wait for them to count it, before they thank you and smile at you and tell you they hope you’ll come back (which you won’t — not for them — they have nothing to offer you now), before they put their clothes back on, you think about how if either of these girls moved in with you and asked you for a dog, you would never have the problems your friend had. If one of these girls lived with you and asked you for a dog and you agreed, from the beginning you would no more assume she would share responsibility for the animal than you would a six-year-old. If she asked you for a dog, you would know what you were getting into.

Your friend is done too and you leave. Outside, breathing the fresh night air in deep, he says, “God I feel great! I don’t know — like I’ve had something painful removed, like something heavy is gone. I mean, I know I’ll feel worse in the morning, I know that, but it won’t be as bad as this morning I don’t think. It’s like she reminded me there really are other things out there.”

As you both get in your limo he adds, “She’d be furious if she knew I’d been here tonight.”

“Why?” you ask. “She left you, you’re through, what business is it of hers?”

He nods. Looks out the window, taps the tinted glass with the index finger of one hand. It makes a little tinking sound. “She’d still be furious,” he says. Then he looks at you and adds, “Especially at you. Boy, would she be pissed at you.”

“I know,” you say. “I know.” Then, “What happened to the dog?”

And what if we don’t do any of this? What if we don’t have the opportunity or the time or do have too much integrity to lie to our wives or too much self-control to indulge ourselves at another’s expense, whether hers or her parents’? What then?

Then we go out and buy ourselves a motorcycle. We buy a black leather jacket to go with it. Then we sell all our antiques and buy expensive furniture made by some Finnish designer, start listening to music that is more popular (with who?) than the music we used to listen to but is still six months out of date. Then we start collecting expensive comic books. Then we make fools of ourselves anyway but with nothing to show for it. Certainly nothing that could make other men look at you with lasting envy, that could make them think about you, a stranger, later that day or week and think “that lucky bastard,” that could make them lash out at their wife or girlfriend later that day over something they would otherwise have been patient about. Certainly nothing that could make older women look at you, a stranger, with rage rather than amusement or pity. Certainly nothing about which you could say with tremendous satisfaction, “Laugh all you want, perhaps I am making a fool of myself. Perhaps this is, for some reason, undignified, beneath me. Perhaps, for some reason I should know better. But it’s worth it. It’s worth it because when I go home tonight, I get to fuck her as much as I want, this girl, this fast, young thing.”