Girl, Undressed: On Stripping in New York City (17 page)

“You ever fallen in love Mimi?” he asked, and I couldn’t see his eyes through the lenses, but his mouth turned down, and he was still, and it was unusual to ever see the Captain still. He grinned before I answered, not that I had an answer for him, but perhaps the look in my eyes was enough. “People like you’n me, vagrants and gypsies, no place for that shite is there?” He hummed, suddenly happy, jumped up, flicked off the autohelm, and changed course. “Time to move Mimi. Let’s put up those sails. Time to move.”

Eton eats as few people do in the days of Atkins and South Beach: fast food and packaged sandwiches, with pure, unmitigated, unhurried relish and a complete absence of guilt. After a lazy, slow evening of grinding and chocolate, a lethargic morning of eating cock, we go out for eggs and croissants, shrimp and sandwiches, praline spread, crusty brown bread, and hot milky coffee.

“The problem with women,” he begins through a mouthful of
pain au chocolat,
“is that you just can’t say anything, or give suggestions regarding sex, without them taking it as criticism and getting offended. I always seem to have long relationships with the girls who have too many hangups, and great sex with the girls I wouldn’t ever date. It would be good to get the combination right.”

I don’t ask what category I fall into. It seems prudent not to, and in any case, Eton knows full well the impact of his words, and enjoys keeping me guessing. I made him dinner last night—lemon sole and asparagus—then cleaned his fridge and taught him how to slice an avocado. He looked at me in bemusement. “So you’re my girlfriend now, are you?” he laughed, and then I fell asleep on him, but not before whispering,
“Not until you ask me to be.”
I don’t know what I am. The ambiguity keeps me alive, frightens me with its unfamiliarity, its unwieldy, squishy warmth. It’s a strange and elaborate combination of dishes, as opposed to a crappy à la carte, prix fixe menu.

In exchange for the meal, Eton said he’d teach me how to deep throat.

It must be love.

“Have you ever fallen in love?” I ask Eton, balancing an aluminum take-out tray of filet mignon from the five-star restaurant around the corner on my knee. I glance in the glassy reflection of the large flat-screen TV, switched off. Face like a China doll, lashes like swallows swooping over pink girly cheeks. Clean, bare apartment. The maid had been in the morning. My bag—full of dollar bills, leaking G-strings and garters and fake hair—spills and tumbles across the floor, a streak of bad taste in impeccable, spotless design.

“Of course. I’m not completely heartless.”

Possibly we’re both just lonely, possibly I sense that Eton is, like me, an expert at leaving, and after all, Eton lives only ten blocks from the club, in a chic, spacious doorman building on the East Side with an expansive view of Central Park, populated entirely by the over-fifties. It’s convenient. We are both of us living a vacuum-sealed, flat-packed, round-edged, abbreviated, alleviated life. Gradually, imperceptibly, from the first day of meeting, we begin to spend most evenings together. “Don’t wash off the makeup,” he’d say, gazing at me as I stood in his glass-fronted shower. “What?” “I said don’t wash it off!” “I can’t hear you—the
water.
” “I just like you with it on. You look pretty. You look nice
.
”

It made it bearable, being with him after the filth of the day, after the tired repetition of the dance had been played out. Eton was a cunt, I could tell, wielding the flippant arrogance of the rich with the quirks of the misanthropist. People stopped when he walked into the lobby of a hotel, a bar, a restaurant (people respect arrogance, they follow it, believe in it); Eton was arrogant and he was bored. If he could have frittered away his multimillion-dollar inheritance, he would have done it. But it kept coming back. Online poker tournaments, roulette at a charity function, a game of Snap with the stakes at fifty cents, stocks, shares, investments, equities, mutual trusts, bonds—every economic seed planted in Eton’s Monopoly life grew fat, juicy fruit. He could have turned Old Kent Road into duplex penthouses, blooming like obscene monstrous peaches in a desert of real estate. He was pragmatic about his success, dismissive,
bored.
Life bored him. Money bored him. Food interested him. Sex. Mimi, with her disregard for convention, her complete absence of self-consciousness, interested him. “Keep the makeup on,” he’d order bluntly. “Those jeans are too big for you. They look awful. Take some money. Buy some clothes. Short skirts. Nice shoes. Get your hair done properly. I want you to look pretty.”

I refuse the money for the visa but buy the clothes. Cocktail dresses, tiny pointy shoes, slim-fitted jeans, skirts that swing elegantly around toned legs. I wear the G-strings I wore in the club, the heels, the makeup. He likes to dress me, becomes offended and confused when I don’t take more money. “I bought you a gift,” he says one Sunday, three weeks after we met, when every night was a messy, carnivorous feast of bodies. “Put it on,” he orders from his chair, unmoving, unmovable, yet a smile curled at his lips. “I want to see you in it. But don’t wash off the makeup.”

 

It was a maid’s outfit.

Sex and food. Slow, methodical, delectable consumption, frenzied gorging, satiated nibbling. He takes me to Pastis, Café des Artistes, Nobu, Da Silvano, The Spotted Pig, Mamoun’s Falafel on MacDougal Street—the restaurants as varying as his sexual palate. We talk about Greek tragedy and TV programs, about films and French philosophy. When we aren’t having sex, we talk about sex, in between courses we relish like sex. He licks his fingers after plunging his huge hand gently into me, as if my juices were a rich and heady reduction sauce, and he watches, fascinated, as I lick his stomach, swallow greedily, go back for more. One time I walk through the door to his apartment late after work, and he peels off my clothes, lays me out on the kitchen table, and proceeds to examine and prepare every part of me, like a chef trussing a particularly fine piece of meat. It is a thorough and exact preparation by an artist, and for the pièce de résistance he slides into me. I covet our lovemaking like an exquisite dessert almost too rich to enjoy, an acid pleasure offset by the tinge of sweet pain, a dusting of cocoa, a crystallized
Physalis
on the side. “I’ve never met anyone like you before,” he breathes in fascination after I tell him a story about sailing across the Atlantic, or traveling in Nepal, or the early days of New York. In these stories hardship is an adventure and Mimi a cheeky little gobshite who always comes out on top, who never cries, who is always indubitably sure of her ultimate success. An edited, repackaged Mimi minus the pain, the story without too many big words, the plot without the philosophy. He never visits my apartment in Brooklyn. He never meets Lucy or Lily or Bambi. He knows nothing of my family life, the parents I speak to rarely. Eton adores Mimi, Mimi alone, and I feed Mimi with the fruits of me, the degree, the intelligence, the ambitions, all that renders our affair acceptable in his world. Almost.

A French bistro on the Upper East Side. Everyone in the restaurant has a degree from Oxford or Cambridge, lives in Kensington, has known each other since prep school, will marry within the accepted circle. It’s Sunday, midday. We order steak frites and Bloody Marys. I sneak outside to smoke cigarettes with one of the girls, a giggly, pretty girl with huge bosoms studying law at Oxford. I have the Cambridge background, the ability to act as though I belong. Cling to it like driftwood, lost in this vast ocean of alien society. I don’t know what they know about me. We hadn’t discussed that.

“Where did you meet?” demands Sebastian of Eton when I return to the table. “Just in a bar,” I interject before he can reply, and Eton smiles at me, amused. The conversation grows thin, as conversation does when questions are batted forcefully away like mosquitoes, like flies, like missiles. “I can’t
stand
American girls,” announces William petulantly. “I just don’t understand them. I was talking to one for
hours
last night, and
still
no joy . . .” “You should come to my bar,” I murmur. “You wouldn’t have a problem picking up women
there.
”

Eton chokes on his Bloody Mary, and the pretty girl with enormous breasts giggles slightly. The bill comes. Eton pays, naturally, and we leave his friends and walk back through Central Park. It’s early summer and already the heat is scalding, hot toffee on bare skin. “You don’t have to be ashamed of what you are, you know,” he says to me brusquely. “You told me to behave,” I point out. “Yes. I’m sorry for being a cunt.” There’s a pause and we walk on in companionable silence. “I would fuck you when we get home,” he muses thoughtfully, “but I feel rather full after lunch, and I think I’d rather read.”

When we had sex he would stop sometimes, look at my face in almost tender confusion, and then spit into my mouth, jam his fingers, long and strong, into the esophagus, smile when I started to choke, run his index finger around my teeth, my gums. “I want to fuck your mouth,” he’d say, and when I gagged and brought up the thick, sticky, viscous, clear saliva from deep down in my throat he would smile in childlike pleasure, laugh, hold my head down a little longer.

It lasts six weeks, this Eden, and one evening I knock on his door late, late, late after three hours in the Champagne Room. It wasn’t unusual to go to his apartment after work, but I knew by now to be sober when I did so, in control, a smile on my face, conversation easy, light, intelligent, humorous. He hated me drinking, hated alcohol, hated anything that threatened his iron control over emotions, over weakness. He hated it in himself, hated witnessing it in others. He wanted a clean, aestheticized version of existence minus trauma and tears, minus fears and confusion. I know it’s a mistake to go to his apartment, but I’m too drunk to get the subway, too lost after working for twelve hours straight, and I never take cabs back to Brooklyn. I’m still saving for that escape route. He lets me in and his eyes fleck amber, angry without precipitation. I sit on his sofa and throw my money on the floor, six hundred dollars in Benjamins and several more in singles. It is twisted and crumpled and filthy.

“What are you doing, you idiot?” he cries, and he grabs my hand, and then kisses me hard, and recoils in disgust when he tastes the alcohol, the fear, the scent of the club. “Get out.”

I cry, I cry and I think he sees, for the first time, something underneath Mimi, someone else. He holds me tight then, and says, “You’re so lost, you idiot. Don’t worry, I’ll help you.”

But when he looks at me the next day, I know it’s the end. Revealing my truth has ripped the illusion to shreds. I guess he knew I needed him, or wanted to need him. We shamble uncomfortably through the next few days, stepping around each other carefully. At the weekend, when we wake up, facing away from each other as we always do, careful to maintain our separate sides of the bed, he clears his throat awkwardly.

“I think we should . . .”

“Yes, I know,” I say.

I pack my belongings and leave. “Don’t you want to be friends?” he murmurs quietly, his eyes lowered. I cry as I shake my head no, and then walk to the subway bound for Brooklyn. “You’re purty,” says a little boy while I’m waiting for the J train at Essex and Delancey, and reaches out a hand as if to touch a lone tear slowly rolling down my cheek.

I dance better after that morning, with more calculation, less heart, more simulation, less inhibition. Something died inside me, closed off, shut tight. I dance as if I know there is no redemption, no such thing as love, trust, romance, marriage, the happy ending. I dance like I know the ending, am resigned to it, could not lose myself believing it was real. I dance better, you see, when there’s touching without commitment, when it’s all a safe illusion.

 

“Have you ever been in love, Meems?” Eton had asked com panionably one day, sometime before I left. When, exactly, I can’t remember.

In Bollywood movies, you’ll notice that the female and male leads never reveal their emotions in Hindi. “I love you” is always repeated in English, the language of the colonizer, as if to distance oneself from the depth of the emotion by translating it into a language that is not one’s own. Perhaps they are merely capitalizing on the frivolity of this cheap and tawdry phrase, which has no equivalent in Hindi, in Devanagari, the language of the gods. Love traditionally had no place in the earthly concept of marriage, that financial and social transaction, except as duty. Perhaps the modern Western concept of romantic love in all its transience can only be rendered by that meaningless English sentence uttered over and over, as if repetition could imbue it with a significance it lacks by its failure to translate, its failure to import any meaning, aside from the futile.

“No. No, I don’t think I have.”

 

“You still love your wife?” I ask,
grind, grind, grind.

“She drives me fucking crazy. I even tell her she drives me crazy. Marriage changes, you know? You marry someone for who they are, and you love them for it. They change and become who you want them to be, a good mother, and you still love them for it. But . . . there’s gotta be something
more.
”

I know what you mean, Mr. Nice. More than a dark club on a humid Manhattan mid-July afternoon, sipping sugar-free Red Bulls with vodka to make the time go quicker, the edges a little less sharp. Maybe it’s that desire for more, for something different, which makes us all not-so-nice.

“If we ran away together you reckon we’d last longer than a year?” laughs Mr. Nice. I don’t think anything would last longer than a year in my life. How could anything grow in a heart overrun with the weeds of nicotine and New York, sourness and pride?

I dance for a Princeton banker. He’s hungry. Maybe you know the type. I certainly do by now. He takes me into the Champagne Room with another girl. She has hard plastic tits. Bit awkward, truth be told. Too many holes, too many rules. Dancing is hard because of the limits sometimes. However, I persevere with lesbianity, take a few restroom breaks, make the obligatory gasps and contort myself into positions suitable for Giuliani’s strict criteria ruling (non)sexual turn-ons, and then go for a drink with the guy afterward. Don’t ask me why. Curiosity, loneliness. I ask too many questions.
But you love your girlfriend? You would tell her you did this? Why not get an escort? Why go home unsatisfied?