Girl, Undressed: On Stripping in New York City (19 page)

“I’m proud of you, you know, Meems,” says Eton gruffly as I fillet branzino in his apartment, the air thick with steamed asparagus, butter melting in the heat. He reaches forward and pushes a tendril of hair behind my ear, his finger lingering on the lobe, squeezing tenderly. “I knew you were more than all that.” He smiles, his blue eyes, warm, his blond hair, ruffled, young-looking, incongruous with the stiff Gucci suit. His smile is relieved, relieved that the need for him has been lessened before either of us had to acknowledge it and walk away. It makes it easier to make the decision to go back to the club, this success, this promise of riches, this fulfilment of promises, when before his eyes would darken winter blue in disillusionment and disgust at my flailing dreams. It’s just temporary now, stripping, like it was right at the start. It’s just research for writing, the actions of a quirky, stubborn, fierce girl who always took the difficult path. I know that people recognize their own kind. People like Eton don’t hang out with losers, with people like me. Unless they know, secretly, that one day, we’ll be worthy of them.

I go into Foxy’s the next day, curiously buoyant, even happy, an unfamiliar emotion in those days. It was seven months to the day that I’d arrived in Manhattan, a month since the
New York Times
article.

“Where the hell you think you’re goin’?”

Dolores stops me as I walk into the darkened club, and rises, majestic, a King Crab from the bottom of the ocean.

“You think we wouldn’t recognize you in the
New York Times?
That article made a laughing stock out of Foxy’s. Get your stuff. You’re fired.”

 

I sleep fitfully. I always used to wonder what this was: fitful. I could sleep on concrete floors, in airports, on Indian buses, on boats in tropical storms, on someone’s shoulder; I could sleep with thoroughness, exactness, refreshing, simple. Lately, though, sleep is this adjective:
fitful,
a nervous slumber, twitching. Sleep is a tick I can never quite shake. I can hear the giggly Asian girls through thin paper walls as I lie in bed and gaze at the ceiling and wonder whether to call Eton. It depresses me being in this colorless, boxlike cell, the new apartment. It depresses me not dancing. I feel a stirring inside, a desperate flapping, an oxygen-starved wail suppressed by convention, by lethargy, by something that feels close to giving up. I can’t write. I feel as if I’m curling up and fading away like a will o’ the wisp, a leaf in fall, deprived of all human contact. I miss routine, I miss the clients, I miss Lily and Bambi and Lucy, yet when they call I don’t answer the phone. I walk along Broadway every day, anonymous and small and silent. I bump into Lily two blocks from Foxy’s, just as summer turns to fall. It has been three weeks since I left the club. Lily gasps and puts her hand over her mouth.

“Mimi! Oh my God! I’m gonna get in so much trouble if they see me talkin’ to you! I tried to call you, we were worried, you never pick up. Damn, they’re gonna shoot me if they see me out here with you.”

“Why? What happened now?”

“No, jus’ the article still. They’re pissed you talked to the papers, and the girls are real bitchy, and it
sucks
without you. You know Bambi went to Vegas? Everyone’s leaving. I saw your friend Lucy the other day. She quit stripping, started school. I’m gonna quit too. Hooters said they’d give me more hours until I take the LSATs. And then I’ll just get a job with fake papers until school starts.”

“What? Why’d you need fake papers? You’re American . . .”

She stops, shocked.

“You didn’t know? Why the hell you think I work in that place? Don’t be deceived by the accent, Mimi. I’m American all right, I grew up here, it’s my home. But maybe I just don’t have the papers to prove it. You’re not the only one with no green card, Mimi. Listen, call me. We need to hang out again. You need friends.”

When she drifts away to start her shift I’m left alone on the sidewalk, and I can’t see the sky for all the tall buildings. There’s no one to call. I miss Brooklyn and Raoul and the musicians. I feel nostalgia for my previous nostalgia, which was, at least, less lonely than this, less mute, less hopeless, less miserable. I try to write some more. I call my agent. He’s enthusiastic about the new chapters but I’m not so sure. The first few he’d dismissed as “not commercial” enough.
More sex, more funny, less mean, less dark.
Mimi was giving me mental Chinese burns about the thing. I watch
Oprah
in the afternoon,
E! True Hollywood Story, The Tyra Banks Show, America’s Next Top Model.
I survive on packet noodles as my savings dwindle. The gigglys return bang-on 6:00 p.m. Their punctuality and routine depress me further. They emerge at exactly 8:23 a.m. every morning. They consume a breakfast of Nutella and frozen waffles and/or oatmeal flavored with one-hundred-year-old duck eggs. They leave for the office and return at 6:00 p.m. At 7:00 p.m. they go to the gym, for, ironically, cardio-striptease, or sometimes weekday warriors, classes full of pale, flabby corporate types who avoid the weights due to fear of overexposure to lithe, sweating, muscle-bound forms discussing the latest Jonathan Safran Foer novel in between grunts of satisfied effort. They return at 9:30 p.m., briefly check to ensure I haven’t consumed their Gatorade or one-hundred-year-old duck eggs, giggle to themselves on the sofa, and watch HBO in placid giggly contemplation together. “Ah! He is so fat giggly one!” “Ah yes, so fat, so fat.” Giggle giggle.

At first I ask them what are your aims? What are your ambitions? Where do you want to be in five years, ten years time? But I grow tired of their automaton-like responses, their soulless stocktaking of life. They exist in a perpetual, self-fulfilling cycle of sameness, never deviating from their path, never seeking improvement, never meeting new people, making new friends.

They are content.

 

Eton regards me with an air of bored contempt.

“I have no sex drive at the moment.”

I pause, consider, and allow a glimmer of fear to well up and crawl desperately over the sea bass like a survivor from a storm.

“Could it be
me?
”

“Perhaps. I don’t know.”

We leave the restaurant without speaking, and I walk back to the gigglys’ apartment alone. The agent rings. I ignore his call, turn over, and sleep fitfully.

 

The days start to roll by slower and slower. The money starts to dry up, the interviews, the meetings.

We stop dancing. I start taking yoga classes every day at my local gym. It’s cheap. Eton doesn’t pay. I take, sometimes, three classes a day. I’m still trying to write. The agent stops calling. In Midtown you never see the sky, I notice. Nobody smiles. I start walking around the city after my yoga classes, willing the rhythm of my steps to beat out the sadness in my heart, the weight, the loneliness. It’s unbearable, this pressure, this small, malevolent creature inside me thrashing around. I start to run because walking doesn’t work. I smile when I see Eton at night, though I feel, in some strange way, as if Mimi is starting to shrivel up, to starve, and that her well-being is dependent upon mine. I do not call anyone from my previous existence before Mimi. I don’t see the point.

I finish the three chapters the agent wants me to write, and when he eventually answers the phone, he sends them off to publishers. I hate the words, they are from neither Mimi nor me. Shortly afterward I have a meeting with an editor who asks me if I could change the book, turn it into a stripping sex guide for menopausal middle-aged women. My demographic:
Sex and the City
fans. Can I make it
sexy?
Like that JAP who writes a blog on the Upper West Side about dating and vaginal excretions? Her words scare me more than stepping out naked in front of a hundred leering men. In the end, I call the agent and tell him to cancel it all. I can’t write the book. Words—my words, Mimi’s words—mean too much to us, we can’t hand them over like an adoption, a retarded child we don’t want.

 

Money is running out. The visa has not yet arrived. I take more yoga classes, walk more, watch TV. One afternoon something happens, what I can’t remember, but it’s the break, and it comes out, that suppressed wail inside me, and its strength is frightening as it sweeps me, us—Mimi and me—along with it.

I call Eton because there’s no one else to call, and there’s no variation to the long, unrelenting isolated days, and he doesn’t answer. I call and call, and stand outside the Time Warner Building, wrapping my scarf tighter, that wail leaking, leaking, leaking from deep inside. I’m terrified of being alone with her, and need someone to hold me tight, as if I had just woken from an interminable nightmare to find a deeper level to that hell. I see some movie star outside the Mandarin Oriental. Some kids ask her for an autograph and she smiles graciously and I want to punch her, and that wail sweeps me along again and I’m crying for hours, pacing and pacing. He calls me at ten. He’d been taking a waltz class. He doesn’t understand why I’m so hysterical. Posthysteria, he doesn’t recognize this vacant creature with the sad eyes. Mimi pining away, to leave someone he does not, could not, know. He sends me home, back to the giggly Asians. They’re watching HBO.

I go straight to bed. Sleep fitfully.

On 9/11, Foxy’s did not close for business. The managers are extremely proud of that fact, and even four years after the tragedy, they would reminisce about that day as if it were the epitome of pre-9/11 glory, that heady, mythological time all the older dancers talk of longingly, the time of company expense accounts, corporate credit cards, nights out on the boss no questions asked, when money would pour out of corporate wallets like cheap champagne. Foxy’s did extremely well on 9/11, totalling, between the hours of noon and eight, twelve “bottles,” or hours in the Champagne Room. Indeed, of the six or so girls who worked that day, none went home with less than eight hundred dollars.

When your world falls apart, you rely on what you know. When our twin towers fell, Eton and I, it’s what we went back to, sex. In our own little way, like those men on 9/11 who went to Foxy’s, sex was our constant, our need, our hook—what we needed to become properly acquainted with disaster.

 

“Face the wall,” Eton would order with an astonished look if I ventured too close in bed at night. “Meems, I’m not joking. Face the wall!” and he’d
harrumph
and turn over with a glare (the indignity! Women!) and he’d check, in five minutes, if I was still facing the wall.

“I think,” I say slowly, facing the wall one night as we lie in bed, “I’m going to have to go back to stripping. Just for a short time. To make some more money.”

From behind me Eton sounds neutral, bored.

“OK, Meems.”

After a while he starts to snore. Still facing the wall and careful not to wake him, I cry—faux tears, sexless, for show, like porn.

 

Several days after I’ve made my decision, I meet Eton for breakfast.

“What did you do last night?” I ask, spooning yolk out of an egg onto crusty bread. I keep my voice smooth and normal, I keep the ache and the waning, whining Mimi from my voice. I had been out with Lucy and Lily the night before, talking for hours about returning to dancing. Lucy was in the middle of her first term at law school and had given stripping up completely. Her parents were supporting her through college, and she had taken out huge loans. She knew how I felt about going back, but she knew what it was to need money. Lily had done the same: quit Foxy’s to do her LSATs, and couldn’t understand why I didn’t use my false papers to get a job in a big corporate firm as a PA or secretary, as she was planning to do once the exams were over and the bills loomed. She was, she said, banking on her boyfriend marrying her and giving her legal status so she could use her law degree. I was shocked when I heard Lily’s story. She’d arrived in the U.S. from Taiwan when she was three years old with her family, who’d been persecuted by the Kuomintang. But the U.S. government had refused them refugee status, refused them legality, and she’d been here ever since, as American, to all appearances, as Lucy.

“Mimi?” Eton is looking at me impatiently.

“Sorry, I was dreaming. Yes, so what did you do last night?”

“I met that girl, Sarah, the one with whom we had dinner in Café des Artistes.”

“Who?”

“The girl who went to Oxford with Julian and Sebastian.”

“Oh. That was ages ago. I didn’t know you were in touch. I thought she’d left New York weeks back.” I gaze at the headlines of the paper Eton was reading. I squint my eyes in and out of focus, yet still I can’t read the words. My head aches.

“It was pretty boring. She talked a lot of crap about bars and clubs, Bungalow 8 or something.”

Crack egg open. Yolk oozed thick and rich.

He pauses and chuckles. “We had the worst kiss I’ve ever had in my life.”

I look at him.

“A—
kiss?
”