Girls (20 page)
And eventually you’ll tell yourself you really did do the right thing.
But then you’ll find you won’t be able to sleep. Then you’ll find every time you close your eyes you don’t remember how she smelled, you can actually smell how she smelled. Then you’ll find every time you look at the clock it’s gotten later and later and that soon you won’t be able to get the bare minimum amount of sleep you know you need to function at work so you’ll get up and go into the bathroom and lock the door and jerk off over how her T-shirt clung to her nipples like a plastic film for covering food, over how hard her nipples felt up against you, like two little buttons up against you, over how somewhere in there the wine got opened and you poured it over her naked thighs and over her lower belly and over her pussy — which you’re somehow sure must be tight and thinly furred and a very pale pink indeed — and you licked it up, her muscles flexing taut with every flick of your tongue, her pelvis bucking into your face, bruising your nose. Then you’ll find it doesn’t take you very long to cum.
But as you walk back to the bedroom, you’ll suddenly start worrying that maybe because you rejected her she’ll make something up, she’ll say something happened when it didn’t. A friend of yours told you about a friend of his, a high school teacher in Florida, who got fired just because a girl said he’d been coming on to her when it really was the other way around.
So then you’ll lay awake wondering if that could happen to you, trying to remember everything you’ve seen her do, everything you’ve heard her say, trying to figure out what sort of person she is, if that’s something she’d do, if she’d be scared enough that you were going to tell your best friend or your daughter that she’d decide she’d better tell them first or if she’d just laugh the whole thing off, just say, “Boy, I must have been drunk, I can’t believe I did that!”
And maybe eventually you’ll look over at your wife, breathing heavily next to you, and for some reason you’ll put your hand on the side of her face, for some reason you’ll stroke her hair. Maybe for some reason you’ll lean over and kiss her on the forehead and she’ll moan and brush your hand away and, still breathing heavily, turn over and face the other way. Maybe you are even more of a coward but nothing is any better.
And yet, you remind yourself, the horn had been the best part of your bicycle. Your parents had given you the bike but you had bought the horn with money you’d made stripping paint off a house two blocks away.
And it is because words have no mass that they transmute so easily. It is because words are nothing more than abstractions that, if we repeat them over and over, they lose all meaning. It is because words are nothing more than abstractions that if we repeat them over and over, if we really look at them, they disappear. It is because they are nothing more than abstractions that if we repeat them over and over, day after day, to the same people, we realize words do not exist.
You are at dinner with a close friend. Two years ago he had called you and said, “I think this is really it.” A couple of nights after that you had sat at a bar with a different, closer friend and both of you couldn’t help laughing. What else was there to do? You made the usual bet. You gave them two years, Alex gave them six months. Now Alex has lost but you’re not happy that either of you won. You really aren’t.
When he called to tell you it was over at last, you invited him out to dinner and he eagerly jumped at the invitation. “I need to get out of this house,” he said. Yet you feel no more sympathy for him than a doctor administering care to a patient, a patient who has done something stupid, a patient who left a lawn mower running while he fixed it “just so he could see where the problem was.” You know what he needs and you give it to him but it requires no thought on your part. You go by the book, you have seen it many times before. For you this care is simply a matter of patiently going through the necessary steps. Then you know you will have done everything you can for him and only time will help with the rest of his convalescence.
The restaurant is very expensive, somewhere he could never afford. It is Italian, quiet, carved out of a cellar like a bomb shelter. There really are three-hundred-pound men in jogging suits and gold chains coming and going. But the food is the best Italian food in the country. It is a good place for diagnosis, a good place to ask him the questions he needs you to ask, a good place to nod your head and eat your risotto and not say very much.
He tells you how he never cheated on her (no, he never did, not to your knowledge — but what about that time six months ago when he called you and told you about that girl at his gym, the one who wore only Lycra shorts and a sports bra when she worked out, the one with the delicate nose stud, the one who would talk to him whenever she saw him, leave him openings to ask her out like telling him she had nothing to do that weekend, the one with the body, the one he said “couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty,” the one he had carefully avoided telling he was married, the one that was “driving him crazy,” the one you told him you couldn’t give him any advice about, the one about whom you said, “Do whatever you want. Life is short.” — what about her?), how he never cheated on her, how he did more and more things just to please her, but that her insecurity got worse, not better. How at first he did things like train himself not to glance up over her shoulder when he caught shiny, healthy, blond hair out of the corner of his eye. How by the end if he was the first one home he would frantically mop the floor of the apartment, in a panic she would come home and scream at him that he had made it dirty because he knew she couldn’t stand that.
He is embarrassed when he says that out loud, when he sees the look on your face. “It sounds ridiculous out loud, doesn’t it? You can get used to anything, I guess, anything can become normal,” he says. He takes a sip of the Château Lafite. “God that’s good wine,” he says.
He tells you about a sausage. About how she had thrown a sausage at him in the supermarket just a couple of weeks ago because it contained, among fifty other things, veal, and she hated veal, was against veal, and she had assumed he hadn’t thought about that when he picked it out, hadn’t thought about her when he picked it out, when in fact he had picked it out precisely because it was Greek and he knew she liked Greek delicacies. “She was always like that. She always assumed the worst about me,” he says. “I don’t know why.”
But it was the dog that had finally done it. He tells you how they had gotten a dog recently, two months ago, how they had silently, mutually agreed that this would be a last-ditch attempt to save the relationship, that this would give them something to share. You don’t tell him how even you know that was a bad idea, don’t ask him why he hadn’t known better, ask him what the hell he had been thinking it would give them to share besides a responsibility you could have told him neither of them wanted. He doesn’t need to hear any of that right now. Instead you think, “Well, at least it wasn’t a child.” You think that because you’ve heard that one before too.
And so he goes on to tell you what you already know. How when they both got home from work neither of them wanted to walk that damn dog. How they both felt their own exhaustion was the more valid. How they would get into screaming matches every single night over who should be taking the ten minutes it took to take the dog downstairs and around the block. How they would end up calculating on paper who had done more walks. How sometimes, out of stubbornness, they would both sit there ignoring each other, ignoring the whining dog, until the dog went and peed in a corner which would, of course, start a whole new round of accusations.
Dessert arrives. It is especially good, superb. He loves it. “God, I’ve never had zabliogne like this!” he says, “It’s like . . . like . . . like . . . ” He is a writer, your friend.
“Like really good zabliogne?” you say.
He laughs. “Yes,” he says, “like that.”
And then afterwards he says “I’m not sure I want to go” and you say “Fine, I don’t want to go if you don’t want to go” and he says “Well I’ll go if you want to go, don’t not go because you think I don’t Want to go” and you say “I’m not going to go if you don’t want to go, nine times out of ten it’s the best thing but it doesn’t work for everyone, there is some risk — Felix — you know Felix right? — when Felix got divorced it only made him angry to be there” and he says at last “OK, fine, let’s go — but only for an hour or something and I’m not sure I want a dance or anything.”
And then he sits there quietly for the rest of the ride, looking out the window. And so for the rest of the ride you wonder if she took the wedding presents with her when she left, you wonder if you will ever see her again, this woman you welcomed into your own life as well, this woman you made an effort to be friendly with even though she was a pain in the ass, even though she didn’t try to be friendly with you, even though you knew — yes, knew — that she’d be gone sooner or later, even though she told your friend she didn’t like his friends, that he spent too much time with them, even though your friend began spending less and less time with you because of her, alienated himself from you and his other friends, although you were going to be the one here, two years later, taking him out to dinner and holding his hand now they’ve finally realized for themselves what you could have told them two years ago when you first saw him so deliberately not check out a high school girl that had always been his type. This woman you welcomed into your life because your friend said he was in love with her.
And so what if you like her? So what if she’s nice and makes an effort to get along with you, begins calling you up and telling you what your friends are doing, where everyone will be going that evening (a place she chose, a place none of you like in particular, a place that doesn’t have particularly good food or beautiful girls but that will do because none of that really matters as along as everyone is there together, as long as going there means your friend, her significant other, can still be included), begins saying things like, “You know it’s so-and-so’s birthday next week — we really have to do something for him” when you’ve been doing something for so-and-so’s birthday since she was in junior high. So what. Then you simply have to choose when they separate. And while you will always choose your friend, every now and then you will want to call that girl and see if she wants to come to the party you’re having because she was really good company, she was fun to have around, and then you will be a little mad at your friend for fucking her in the first place instead of just staying friends with her. But you would never say any of this because all of this is just a minor irritation after all, a thought you would have while being driven across town, nothing more, because you know that compared to what your friend felt and is feeling, compared to what she felt and is feeling, all of this is trivial.
And so you are in a strip club again. You can’t seem to get away from them. All over the world you find yourself in them. But this time it is not business or pleasure. It is therapy.
When you arrive there is already a bachelor party there. Young guys, large, probably recently out of college where they all lived in the same fraternity. As some more of them filter in behind you, they are greeted loudly, shout things like “Dozer!” and “BJ!” and “Bitch!” They hug. And when they sit down, they stay away from the seats around the edge of the stage where they would each be required to give every dancer a dollar. It is easy to pick the bachelor out from the others as you walk by. While his friends catch up with each other, while the ones now from New York talk to the ones now from San Francisco, while they do that, he just looks at the girls and sips the beers his friends buy him.
And as you walk past, on the way to the VIP room, away from the rabble, you aren’t sure if your friend even notices them. Like the bachelor, he too is absorbed by the girls. Although his face carries a different kind of desperation. His face is more hungry than wistful, the bachelor’s more wistful than hungry. And noticing this you can’t help wondering how soon the bachelor will be back here with your friend’s look, how soon he will be looking for a girl that will be his first and not his last.
The only qualification for the VIP room is the extra cover charge. You pay it for both of you. What you are paying for, what makes this an area for very important men, is that inside you can get a friction dance rather than a lap dance. For a friction dance, a completely naked girl straddles you, puts her arms around your neck, and gyrates her pelvis on top of your crotch. While she does this she may lean her torso back so you can see exactly how perfect her stomach is or she may sit upright and press your face into her breast implants or she may hunch over, touch her forehead to yours, and look into your eyes. A dance like this costs twice as much as a lap dance during which the girl is only topless and keeps one foot on the floor at all times. This is the only club in the entire Northeast to offer friction dances and just for this, on special occasions, groups of men come here from up to three hundred miles away.
When you enter, the open space of the VIP room proper is straight ahead, but on either side of you there are entrances to two dark corridors that stretch so far away their ends are lost in a dim, sweaty haze. Down these corridors are single rows of plush leather chairs. Sunken into many of the chairs are men. Climbing on top of the men, writhing slowly, in various states of undress, are women. Corridors, areas, like this always remind you of nothing so much as a painting of Hell you own, a painting of Hell you bought because it reminded you of corridors, areas, like this.
Somehow, when you sit down, the girls immediately smell blood. Some of them circle for a minute or two, wander past your table as if looking nearby for someone specific but being sure to turn around facing towards your table rather than away. You are always amazed by their ability to pick out the men willing and able to spend money from the men who just paid the extra cover to buy one beer and nurse it for two hours while they watch the all-nude stage show. There is a well-dressed man quite near you yet the girls completely ignore him and home in on you even though you are wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt and a baseball cap. They somehow even manage to distinguish you from your friend because when at last one of them comes and asks if she can sit at your table, she asks you, sits next to you, talks to you. You always compare it to that summer you worked in your father’s jewelry store. By August you could tell the moment someone walked in whether or not they were going to buy something. But even then, even when it was you, you couldn’t have said how you did it.