Miss Fortune (18 page)

“Lauren, let's move back a little,” David suggests.

I scream back, “
Why can't I ever do what I want to do!
”

David just leans down and whispers calmly in my ear. “I think you'll be more comfortable farther back.”

It felt very odd to be coming into a strip club as a female. As the thing that the old guys were paying money to look at. I told David that I had the urge to announce, “Look! More holes coming in! More holes!”

David tells me that I don't have to worry. Nobody wants my holes. My holes are bossy. Fair enough.

The last thing I'd want him to think about me was that I'm some school mom who doesn't enjoy a skeevy strip club once in a while. Hopefully he'll be able to ignore my actions and my words and see me as a woman who is not insecure.

The bartender comes over and asks if we want something to drink. She's a she. And she's acting so calm. Like she's just . . . at her job. I try to give her a secret “Let me know if you are being held here against your will” look and order eight glasses of wine.

Waiting for my first glass of wine, I keep asking David, “Is this fun? How am I supposed to have fun? How do I enjoy this? What am I supposed to do?” David worries that if I don't calm down soon it's going to look like he's dragged me there against my will.

I don't want to ruin David's night, so I yell a quick “
I've not been kidnapped.
”

After my ninth glass of wine, I start to calm down and am able to get myself to look at the stripper. She's nothing like I pictured her. Nothing! Not to sound cruel, but she's dorky. Very long waisted, with a flat chest. A cowboy hat on her head, her hair in pigtails, she's not dancing to the heavy metal music that's playing as much as walking to it. She's got her hands on her hips and is just walking side to side to the music. There's a lot of nodding and winking. The sexy moments come when she crouches down, nods with a big smile, winks—“ta-da!”—and pops back up with a big fake laugh. She's like a musical theater stripper. Completely unsexy. I can handle this! It's hilarious.

David and I are laughing hysterically. “Go get your gun, Annie,
go get it!” But then something horrible happens. Her song ends and she leaves. No, come back, Annie, don't get your gun!

The next stripper comes out, and she's gorgeous. Muscular, tattooed, short black hair, very confident—and why should she
not
be? She struts out, picks out her music, jumps up on the pole, and slowly spins down.

David has stopped laughing and has suddenly gotten very serious. He leans in to me. “Now, this is interesting. I mean she's clearly a dancer. So interesting how each of the girls approaches it. Very different body type. She holds her power in a different blah-blah-blah.” Oh yes, Doctor, what is your scientific analysis? Mmm-hmmm. Hmmm. Hmmm.

This was it. This was why I'd been so nervous about coming to a strip bar with him.

My worst nightmare was that I'd have to sit next to David while he pretended not to be attracted to a twenty-year-old naked girl with a body that I've never had and it's not like I'm
going
to ever have. “Just wait, I'll be fifty soon, honey! It's coming! My saggy-boobed, covered-in-moles body is just around the corner!”

I think I can safely say that for most of our relationship, when it came to sex I'd always been a real “yes man.” Up for anything. Put me in, coach. Glad to be invited to the party. You get the picture. I'd started our relationship with weight issues and the standard “I hate everything about my fat ass, face, and fat-ass body” self-loathing. His full-on love for every part of my body changed how I saw myself. His sexiness made me sexy. He infected me with sexy. My weight fluctuations, which would make me nuts, didn't bother him at all. I could tell they really didn't. He wasn't just saying that to keep the peace. Honestly, I think he enjoyed when I gained weight so he could pretend he was with a different woman.

Recently, I've been feeling a bit more clunky when it comes to busting a sexy move. The other night I tried to get undressed all
slow and stripper-like and my shirt hadn't gotten even halfway off before David spotted something on my back and said, “Lauren! What's that mark? It that from your bra? Has that always been there? I don't think it has. Here, come with me, I want to show you what I see in the mirror.” It all ended with me struggling to get a good look at what he saw. He was pushing my neck around and contorting my body so I could look at it.

David is also very taken by the music that the stripper has chosen to dance to. “Oh my god, this is Van Morrison's ‘Into the Mystic.' You know that's the song I want played at my funeral, right?”

Are there any other details about your funeral you'd like to go over? Because
now seems like a good time.

Perhaps I'm not evolved enough. Not sophisticated enough for strip clubs with my husband. I wish I could put my finger on the cause of this rush of adrenaline it's giving me. Is it knowing that David, if he so desired, could be with a woman like that? Some young beautiful women like old guys. Is it that cliché of how men get rugged and handsome as they age and women just get bitter as they watch them getting more and more rugged and handsome? Who knows? I don't want to spend the last half of my life talking about getting old and telling young girls how lucky they are to have fat in their faces. Dear lord, let me be wiser and let me get out of this strip club before I start pretending I love strip clubs and start making plans for my dad's eightieth birthday party.

The next day when I tell people about how I went to the strip club and it was just men my dad's age sitting on their hands struggling not to masturbate while a twenty-two-year-old naked girl danced, people are shocked and disgusted.

“Oh my god! Which strip club did you go to?” Every single person assured me that I went to the wrong one. “You have to go to mine. You'll love it. It's totally different. There are pirates . . .”

I loved David's apartment from the moment I met him. The scent of jasmine outside his Santa Monica complex was so pungent that the first time I smelled it I thought it was fake, and I checked around me to see if I was standing in front of the laundry room smelling someone's jasmine-scented Tide detergent. The plants with stems covered in brown fur that curled up like monkeys' tails and the cactuses covered in giant yellow blossoms were so exotic I took photos of them to send back home to my folks in Indiana, with a note saying, “Look, Mom, it's like Hawaii!” Once, when I was waiting in my car to pick up David for a date, I shot a video of the impossibly tall palm trees that lined the street as they swayed in the wind, thinking that if I ever opened my own spa I would play the video on a loop in the waiting room to relax people.

David had been drawn to the classic Southern California sixties-motel style of the building. He chose the apartment for its proximity to good schools for his first son. “I was willing to sleep on the couch for the rest of my life to make sure that Jack got into a good school,” he told me when we were first dating.

The only minor knock on the place was the lack of views. The
windows on the back side of the apartment faced the dirty white wall of the building next door, and the front windows looked out on “the Party Building,” mostly occupied by UCLA grads. David and I both kept odd working hours and would get confused about what day of the week it was, but thanks to the loud techno music and a drunk girl yelling, “It's Friday night, woo-hooo!” we always knew when it was Friday.

In the very early days of our relationship, one of the Party Building's tenants would hang his wet suit outside on his balcony, and every time I'd open the blinds, I'd see the wet suit swinging in the wind and would think someone had hanged himself. The best thing that ever happened to the Party Building was the Chinese family that moved in for a few months. The grandfather did stretches on the balcony in his black socks and shorts. Sadly, by the time I moved in, a year and half after David and I started dating, the Chinese family had moved, and our view was of a Russian lady in a nightgown watering a single geranium three times a day.

None of that mattered to me. As E. M. Forster wrote in
A Room with a View
, the only perfect view is the view of the sky overhead, so if you can't have that, why even get picky about it?

David and I would sit on the front steps of the apartment after I first moved in and say things to each other like “I don't care about making money; I care about creating art” without laughing. Earnest and intense, we both loved historical documentaries, modern art, and going to music concerts where we were almost always the oldest ones in the audience.

From the get-go we were emotionally competitive. This sounded awful to most of my stable friends, but not for David and me. We were actors. Emotions were what we talked about, analyzed, and indulged every day of our lives, whether we were getting paid or not. It's what we got off on. Not the small stuff. Not the happy
moments. We're not going to bother with the light stuff, comparing who laughed the longest or whose bliss blew our minds the hardest. When a weight lifter is looking to win the heart of another weight lifter, does he or she bench-press a folding chair or does the weight lifter bench-press a small pickup truck? It was all about who had endured more, who had suffered more in his or her life. David was a widower who grew up in the seventies in the roughest area of Brooklyn. He won that contest like he won my heart: easily and with a lot of monologues and wild hand gestures.

After Jack would go to sleep, we'd lie in bed listening to folky country ladies singing about life and loss, and it was never “Boy, that Patty Griffin writes some beautiful songs”; it was “Patty Griffin is trying to kill us. We can't listen to ‘When It Don't Come Easy' anymore tonight because our hearts will explode. I'm not kidding; Patty Griffin wants us dead.”

We were both drama school kids, but David went to Juilliard. He was trained to feel emotions that the back row of the balcony could see.

If I was “super-tired,” David was so exhausted he was worried he was going to have a seizure and he'd stumble into the bedroom holding on to furniture and bumping into doorframes.

Comparing who had seen more shit go down, been through more dark nights of the soul, lost everything he or she had ever loved, and therefore was the deeper, more profoundly
feeling
human being, was our form of foreplay.

As an adult, I've always lived in tiny spaces. The house I grew up in seems like a mansion compared to all the places I've lived in since I moved out at eighteen.

Around the time Jack turned fifteen, the walls began to close in around us. Most of the apartment could be seen from the living room. If I needed one of them I never had to yell. I'd just say in a
normal voice, “Jack?” I'd hear a “Yeah” that sounded like he was standing right behind me. It didn't matter if the bedroom doors were open or closed. Like Santa Claus, I always knew when Jack was sleeping and I knew when he was awake and I left the apartment when he was acting “bad” because it made me uncomfortable.

By the time he and his first girlfriend started having sex, we could have been living in a flight hangar and it would have felt stifling.

We came close to having enough money to move once, and we spent it on a new mattress. Another time it looked doable and I had a cancerous mole removed instead. Moving is reserved for millionaires and army people.

Eventually Jack moved to Boston to go to college. We had a baby, repainted, and added a screen door. Our apartment has contracted and doubled in size like a mini universe. Or me during my first year of college.

Nothing makes the apartment feel more like a mother's womb than standing in line for forty-five minutes at LAX waiting for a taxi. I've just returned from a trip to Boise. Why did I tell David that I didn't care if he picked me up from the airport? He should have known that everything I say is a lie or a test. (David used to love picking me up from the airport. He'd arrive early with a bottle of water and an energy bar from Trader Joe's in case I was hungry.) It's sad not seeing his tall, handsome figure waving his arms up above his head in a crowd of five people, yelling “Lauren! Lauren! Over here! I'm here!” when I'm standing right in front of him. I felt unclaimed. Like luggage. Not seeing Leo as I walk into baggage claim is even worse. He's gotten to be such an expert at airport reunions in the past year. As soon as he spots me he'll scream, “Mama!” and run to me like I just got off a plane from North Korea.

David must be exhausted after being with Leo all alone for four days.

It makes sense to take a taxi. My plane landed at eight
A.M.
from Boise. Plus, I've been gone for only four days.

David's a stay-at-home dad now. We decided to do the classic role-reversal thing, so now we're surviving on my salary, and he complains that I never tell him he looks pretty anymore.

For an ambitious Juilliard graduate whose greatest joys had come from his film and theater projects, it can't be easy. I'd worried that after a few months of full-time apartment-husband work he wouldn't be able to handle it. Things would start falling apart. He'd start collecting guns and shooting at passing cars. Or the arrival of the new Juilliard newsletter would set him off on a drinking binge and the whole neighborhood would watch as he stumbled down the middle of the street shooting out windshields and shouting at Eddie the mailman, “I coulda been somebody!”

But since day one he's been adamant about how much he loves it and is constantly telling me, “I love it. I love my life. I love being with Leo. I love my bike rides. I love living in Santa Monica. I love beer.” I was okay that beer made the list and I didn't. My take is that he should do whatever he needs to do to make himself happy because I am so grateful for what he's doing.

I just hope he's as okay as he says he is. We're not young lovers, wooing each other with our tales of suffering anymore. Once we ran out of stories from our pasts to share, our tales of suffering started to feel like blancing rather than flirting. I suppose this is all perfectly normal with a toddler in the house. David's hitting his midlife crisis at the same moment Leo is hitting his toddler years. Nobody kills the sexy vibe of a sports car like a toddler, which is too bad because nobody appreciates sports cars more than a toddler.

I need new topics.

Things are so much better with David and me since Leo was born. We get along better. It's not as much fun to fight in front of a kid. Especially if you can't smoke, and I quit years ago.

David will still try to start fights now, but it's usually over such random things it's easy for me not to get sucked in. “You
never
want to go to Costco! That's the kind of person you are!” When I ask him what he's going on about, he'll admit that he doesn't actually know; he just wanted to yell.

As I move up the taxi line, I resolve not to take anything personally when I get home since I figure David will be stressed-out. Unless he starts talking about my mama being so fat that when she sits around the house she sits
around
the house. Nobody talks shit about my mama.

Once we get to our street, I tell the taxi driver to drop me off in front of the “pinkish peach building. That one. No, the one that's kind of like the skin-tone crayon color back when crayons were made by white supremacists.” Why can I never figure out what color our building is? He says, “You mean the tan one?” and drives me right to it.

The cactus in front of the house has a 7-Eleven hot dog wrapper stuck to it. The monkey-tail plants have started to look less exotic and more like the tails of monkeys being kept in concrete cages in bad zoos. All the grass in front is dead. It's a little embarrassing. It's the most dilapidated building on the block next to the New Age philosophy center whose roof is caving in.

It's always hard to come back to the apartment after I've spent time with friends who live in houses. In Boise everyone has a house. I think they may actually be free there. My house envy has the tendency to become painful and ridiculous if I don't watch it. I need to watch it. I've watched
Dateline
specials on serial killers and I find myself envying them for their basements.

When I start to complain about the apartment, David hears it as “Why can't you be rich?” I don't mean it that way. What I mean is “Why can't
I
be rich?”

If I were able to complain without David taking it personally, I'd say my main complaint about the apartment is that it's sunless. It's true that the California sun beats down on us daily, and it is sometimes nice to be in a sunless apartment, but not always. I could buy a sunbed to help perk me up when I'm at home, but we'd have to get rid of the kitchen to make room.

I'm not complaining. It's a wonderful home. Leo's first home. Visitors are always telling us how they love the “homey feel” of our apartment, which to me always sounds like it has a lot of books and is dusty, but I appreciate the sentiment.

Besides, what is it that David always tells me? Don't judge someone's insides based on their outsides? My family is inside there.

•   •   •

It's one
A.M.
and my heart is racing. A loud scream has jolted me awake. It sounds like someone being murdered. Three screams later, I realize they're sex screams.

David sleeps pretty heavily, but I feel him stirring in the bed. “He thinks he's a dog,” he says and gives a sleepy laugh.

“What?”

David leans over and whispers into my face, “Leo's having a dream about being a dog.”

“He's not barking, David. It's from the—” David is already back asleep.

“AAH! AAH! AAH! AAH! AAH!”

It's the Florida newlyweds. The ones whose beat-up Saturn is being held together by Ron Paul stickers. When they moved in, I misread the stickers and announced to David, “Guess what. The
couple moving into the apartment next door? They're big Ron Paul supporters.”

I don't think the newlyweds have any idea how thin the walls of this building are. The whole building is like a series of bathroom stalls where you can hear everything that's going on next to you and see everyone's feet. I've been shushing Leo since he was born, and I practically smothered him when he was a baby so his cries wouldn't bother anyone, but here she is, screaming at the top of her lungs.

“AHHHHHH!”

This will make a great Facebook post. I hate Facebook. All those Lucky Ladies: “Hot-air balloon, champagne breakfast surprise from the world's best husband! I'm one LUCKY LADY!” “Whose husband surprised them with two tickets to Pink! Uhm . . . mine did! I'm one LUCKY LADY!” “10 years of laughter and happiness together that I never thought was possible . . . I'm one LUCKY LADY!”

“AH! OH! OHHHHH! AAH!”

How is David sleeping through all of this? This could be hot. Like being in a sex club but without the cover charge. Actually, I hope David doesn't wake up. I'd have to unbutton my nightgown and untie my bonnet. He must have doubled up his melatonin. Sexy stuff, this old, married-people business. I can't wait until he gets a sleep apnea machine.

“AAH! AAH! AAAAH!”

I ran into that sex-screaming girl during her first week here. She's not the sexiest thing. She returned my cheery “Hello, new neighbors!” by grunting at me and shuffling away like an overly medicated psych patient.

“She looks like Lurch from
The Addams Family
in a sundress,” I told David. Because I'm a feminist I quickly added, “And good for her!”

At least she's getting laid.

The last time David and I had sex I got distracted by a dry patch of skin on his back. For a while, the only positions I wanted to do it in were ones where I could get a good look at it. After I asked him, “Is it itchy?” he ran to the mirror so I could show him where it was. That was months ago. Now we don't even talk to each other once we're in bed. Wait, that's not fair. A few nights ago, I asked him to turn toward the wall and stop blowing his whiskey breath in my face.