The Unknowns (27 page)

I get cash from the ATM in the lobby, despite the usurious five-dollar fee, because when I feel this bad I am allowed to waste money. Twenty-five dollars gets my hand stamped with a special ink that only shows up under black light. I give the cashier two more twenties, which he exchanges for singles to be passed around the club’s microeconomy. There’s a board above the cashier’s desk with W
HO’S
D
ANCING
N
OW
printed at the top and, beneath it, nameplates engraved with the stage names of the dancers: Princess, Midori, Porsche, Tiffany, Asia, Mykel, plus New Dancer 1 and New Dancer 2, representing girls who haven’t been there long enough to get a nameplate made. These nameless girls more than any others seem to hold out the possibility of happiness: perhaps their names are Jen or Heather; perhaps they are nice, normal women who happen to be incredibly hot strippers and who would like to hang out later. As I pass through the heavy velour curtain into the club itself the music has the viscosity of an element somewhere between air and water. The room is a big cuboid, dressed up with velveteen drapes but beneath them unmistakably cinderblock industrial. Everywhere around this rough-edged theater are women in sex costume: tiny shorts, skirts too short to serve a skirt’s purpose, bikini tops and minuscule T-shirts and huge heels. It is a rich and thrilling set of possibilities, and the prospect of choosing from among these women makes me hopeful. I walk down the aisle toward the stage, making
eye contact with the women without acknowledging the men at all. Men here have to extend privacy to one another, as in a restroom. We’ve brought our lust and sadness to this place to have them tended to by professionals.

The rows of theater seats, red and beginning their decay, run parallel to the long catwalk. I choose a seat midway along the front row and turn my attention to the dancer, a tiny Asian with a stretchy blue skirt hiked up all the way around her waist. She smiles with a distant mania as she shakes her breasts vigorously back and forth, a movement more athletic than erotic. She’s too skinny, too crazy, but I lay two bills on the lip of the stage anyway, to establish my bona fides. I shift back in my seat and relax into the arousal and the music, feeling my concerns narrow to a pinprick.

The song ends and the dancer picks up her clothes, gathers the dollar bills scattered over the stage, and hurries off, no longer a performer, now just a naked girl stuffing things into her purse. Over the PA, the DJ instructs us to give a big welcome to Alannah, and a blonde emerges in a little white skirt, black shirt tied tight across her breasts. She’s not small, and she seems to be overspilling her clothes. And then she selects me from the six other tippers in the front row, looks me straight in the eye, and unleashes a smile that generates in my brain the exact chemical correlative of
This girl and I are in love
. The male nervous system’s response to a smile from a pretty girl—the sudden infusion of joy and fear—is no less powerful when you’re paying for it.

Alannah begins to dance. Intermittently she shuts her eyes and resembles a girl dancing alone in her bedroom, imagining being watched. It’s possible that she’s enjoying herself. She’s either an exhibitionist or a skilled pretender; there’s no way to tell which. She makes her way to the end of the catwalk and back, smiling at each spectator in a nice-to-meet-you way, until she reaches me and, once again, it’s as though we have some private arrangement. She holds
my eye for almost half a minute, far longer than she gives anyone else. I sink into my seat, a luxurious erotic charge circulating through my body as sweet as any feeling in the world, and on the worst night of my life it’s available for nothing but money.

As her final song goes into repeat-to-fade the DJ exhorts us to applaud and Alannah gathers up her take. On her way off the stage she grins at me, and then she’s gone and I’m reeling.

There follows one of the mysteriously long pauses that sometimes interrupt the entertainment’s flow at the I-Hole. The dancers fan out to proposition us; they’re not allowed to solicit while another girl is performing. A thin woman with olive skin leans over the armrest to offer me a lap dance, and I decline quickly. I sit buzzing in my cushioned seat, trying not to look at the door from which Alannah will soon emerge. The DJ plays generic techno music and says over the PA, “Mystique to the back, Mystique to the back,” like a paging desk at an airport. And then I feel a hand on my shoulder and Alannah is at my side, wearing her minimal outfit again, bending in close and saying, “So c’mon back with me.” She takes my hand and we walk together, like a couple, away from the stage.

My visit is in danger of being brought to an end too soon. Alannah and I are about to go into a room lined with small curtained booths. Inside a booth, we are going to conduct a quick negotiation—I will not haggle; I don’t want to corrode the excitement by getting stingy and realistic—and then Alannah is going to take off her clothes and rub her elegant body up against me. At some point I’m going to ejaculate in my underwear—there is a tissue dispenser mounted on the wall of each booth in anticipation—at which point the ability of the I-Hole and its subcontractors to excite and distract me will be tapped out, and knowledge of certain realities will flood back in to fill the void.

She exchanges a quick greeting with the beefy black security guard and leads me to a booth. Inside she says, “So it’s eighty for a
private,” and I give it to her, and the awkward part is over. I fish my keys out of my pants pocket so they won’t get in the way, hang my jacket on a hook. And then she puts her hands on my shoulders, sits me down on the banquette, and, grinning, turns around and prettily lowers her skirt. Her white thong is the smallest imaginable. She slides down onto my lap, then throws her head backwards onto my shoulder, while in the mirror I watch her undo the knot on her shirt for the second time. The perfume on her neck is sweet and fruity. She starts to writhe, and her skin is absurdly soft, and light seems to emanate from her pores. For some reason I am not hard. Alannah continues to move against and before me, demonstrating her deep and thorough grasp of the physical language of male sexual fantasy. The bikini top comes off, and then the G-string. Her breasts are swept across my face; her cunt and her asshole are offered for scrutiny; her eyes suggest an unstoppable sexual hunger. Why is something always wrong? Alannah is straddling me now, her back to me again—there are only so many positions for her to take—and in the mirror she wears a look of intense concentration. Her grinding on my lap suddenly feels incongruous. This isn’t what I need. It seems important not to let her know. Once the song is over—is this the second or the third?—I will get out of this noisy windowless place. I see my own face in the mirror and think
Maya’s gone
, and I watch my features crumple as tears stream down my cheeks and land, hotly, on Alannah’s shoulder.

She jumps up, startled.

“Sorry,” I say.

“What was that?” she says.

“Uh, I just—I’ve had a really hard day,” I say, and this admission starts the tears flowing again.

She understands, now, what she felt trickle down her back, but she doesn’t seem relieved. She stands in front of me, naked but for her huge shoes, and grabs her purse from the little shelf, a gesture
that is somehow the opposite of pornographic. “So, what,” she says. “Are we done?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I guess we’re done.”

I have a mode for retreat, practiced during those long hours in my childhood bedroom. My job now is to soothe myself, and I dedicate myself to it. I ignore a series of increasingly urgent voicemail messages from my father. I spend days reading collected editions of old comics and watching TV shows on DVD. For boys of my generation, the dream was not to be an explorer or an Air Force pilot but to own every comic book and every video game ever made, and I am keeping faith with my childhood self. Perhaps girls were a distraction all along, a fool’s gold, and the toys and hobbies they replaced were the true path. In my dreams, Cyclops and Wolverine fight each other to a stalemate over Maya’s corpse.

Right now Maya is going to work, filing stories, complaining about me to a friend. Although I can’t identify anyone she might confide in. I’ve been wearing the same T-shirt for three days. What if she turns up on my doorstep? I could change the T-shirt in anticipation of her arrival, but that would be self-defeating. I compromise by leaving a clean T-shirt on top of my dresser so I can pull it on when the doorbell rings. Months from now, when I’ve resumed changing my clothes and leaving the house, the T-shirt I’m wearing now will remind me of this period and I will try to smile but fail. I spend minutes at a stretch trying unsuccessfully to remember how she smelled. Maybe I should buy some of her citrus shower gel and become a pathetic old man who stands fully clothed in the bathtub sniffing at a bottle of shower gel. I’ve known her only a couple months, but I’d been waiting to meet her ever since I noticed Bronwen Oberfell’s profile while watching television, and so my mind took her in: things shifted into position around her and wedged themselves securely in place. The problem of loving her is a bug, a
big one, a showstopper, and I chew on it endlessly, nagged by the feeling that I’m missing something. There must be some way to love her that can coexist with ignorance. Maya’s past is unknowable, but what part of anyone is knowable? We can only know each other the way we know distant stars: by observing years-old light, gathering outdated information, running calculations and making inferences.

Cynthia, worried about me, calls in the evenings. I try to present with the precise emotional blend that suggests psychological health for someone in my position: a mixture of grief and regret and wry sad humor and self-awareness, not repressing or wallowing but authentically experiencing and processing and healing. Cynthia is pretty acute when it comes to feelings, and delivering so complex a performance to the necessary standard of verisimilitude leaves me exhausted.

I consider hiring a prostitute, which I’ve never done, but I’m afraid it would provoke a repeat of the crying-on-a-stripper incident. I wonder if there are prostitutes who will let you cry on them, who will even make noises of consolation for a small surcharge.

The guiding idea, inasmuch as there is one, is to make myself comfortable while time works its anodyne ways on my heart. My dad’s phone calls are sand in the gears. When I see his name on the phone’s screen I erase the message unheard, but this makes me feel guilty, and my job at the moment is to minimize bad feelings, and after two messages a tipping point is reached. When he calls for the third time I find myself picking up the receiver and putting it to my ear.

“Eric, hi,” he says with a mixture of surprise and wheedling. “Listen, I’ve got a—”

“What’s your bank account number?” I say.

He makes some hemming noises and then begins to recite the digits, which I write on the margin of a newspaper. “And the routing code?” As he speaks I hold the phone two inches from my ear, so the voice saying the numbers sounds very small and far away. “This isn’t
going to happen again,” I say before hanging up. I fax my signature to my financial manager to authorize the transfer. Five minutes later his assistant calls to let me know it’s gone through. She has the pragmatic good cheer of a nurse, someone who knows private things about people. I won’t speak to my father again until after the stroke, almost ten years from now.

That evening, the United States launches missiles at Dora Farms in southeast Baghdad, on the basis of reports that Saddam Hussein is visiting his children there. Fifteen civilians are killed. The reports turn out to be mistaken. Ten days later Pete Oberfell will parachute into Iraqi Kurdistan with the 173rd Airborne. Kirkuk falls quickly, and Pete’s division misses almost all of the fighting, to the relief of Pete’s family. The 173rd stays to provide security after the collapse of the Iraqi government.

Three years later, at Stacey Oberfell’s request, my mother and I will visit him at his parents’ house on Christmas Eve. The snow is unusually heavy, even for Colorado. On our way, my mother tells me that Pete’s fiancée broke off the engagement a few weeks after he got home.

Pete is still pale but now he towers over me, with big adult-sized arms and legs. As we shake hands, he takes in my presence like I’m neither a good thing nor a bad thing but a fact to be aware of.

“You showed me that computer game that one time,” he says, sitting down in a high-backed chair. “That was cool. I was going to learn computers right after I got back. I started taking a course.”

“How’d that go?”

“It wasn’t for me,” he says. “I couldn’t concentrate. I have a hard time paying attention to stuff like that.”

Stacey comes in with mugs of coffee on a tray. Pete takes the first one.

“So are you glad to be back in the country?” my mom asks.

“Honestly, no,” he says. “I hated every second when I was over
there, but this is worse.” The tone in which he reports these feelings is factual and uncomplaining.

“How can this be worse than
Iraq
?” my mother asks.

Pete’s level gaze never flickers. “What do you know about it?” he asks.

“Pete,” his mother says. Pete stands without saying a word and leaves the room. We don’t see him again. Back in San Francisco I make a donation, in Pete’s name, to a charity that helps veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder, and I wonder if Maya’s name should be attached as well.

I will see her once more, while I’m out with someone else. I quit girls for a long time after Maya. Even after I could reliably get out of bed, even after I had started working on a JavaScript graphics library and buying a car and leaving the apartment, the idea of
meeting a girl
and
getting to know her
was too much to contemplate. And then, about a year ago, time and boredom and loneliness wore me down and I signed up with an online dating site.

From the moment I clicked
CREATE YOUR PROFILE
the whole endeavor felt exhausting. I didn’t want a new set of protocols to optimize: what to write in the profile fields, what to say in an initial message, when to escalate from email to brunch—all the crap I’d wasted my life on, only now I was doing it alongside millions of extroverted and apparently well-adjusted people.