No Touching

by Ketty Rouf

  The music ends. What was it? What did I just dance to? Silence. I slip my dress back on. I did it. It was just a few minutes, but it was something important. One of those moments in life you think about when you want to feel happy for no reason. Happiness with no cause. A perfect thing.

  “You’re very graceful. And your breasts are magnificent; congratulations. You could be very successful, and make some decent money while you’re at it. It’s a yes for me. You can start whenever you like. Would tonight be possible? I don’t have a lot of girls for Saturday night, and there’s always a big crowd.”

  Start? Me? Tonight? Did I come here to “start”? I did it to do it, so I could say to myself, “There, I did it!” To be a nude dancer onstage for three minutes, that’s what I wanted.

  “I’d like to start as soon as possible”—the words burst from my lips like a cry of joy—“but I’m afraid I can’t tonight.”

  It’s a lie. In reality, I’m scared.

  “That’s okay. You can just let me know your availability.”

  She explains the rules while she shows me around the club. I trail after her obediently.

  “When a customer asks you for a private dance, you have to take him into a room. No one in the main club can see what goes on in the private rooms, but there are cameras. You’re always being filmed and monitored from the manager’s office. It helps us protect you, and it also keeps the girls calm.”

  “Keeps the girls calm?”

  “We actually have more problems with the girls than with the customers. A lot of the time, the girls are the ones who go a bit too far, to get their customers excited, get more money out of them. For a lap dance at the table you keep your G-string on, and it lasts for one song, that’s it. If the customer wants you to keep going, he has to buy another ticket. They pay for the dances with tickets. In the private rooms, when you’re completely naked, both of your feet have to stay on the floor. Don’t let yourself be touched. Your job is to sell the performance of your body. That’s all we ask you to do. If the customer touches you, you stop.”

  “So they have to pay in advance?”

  “Yes, bearing in mind that you’re not required to say yes to every customer. It’s your choice. Customers have to buy tickets from the cashier to pay for dances, and then they have to give you those tickets. The tickets are your pay; you give them to the manager at the end of the night. I’m usually the one who keeps track of the number of tickets. You can accept cash, but within reason. Tips are okay, too. What you wear is totally up to you. I’ll introduce you to Poppy. She knows all there is to know about this industry. I’m going to have her stay with you on your first night, help you with your first dances with the customers. And I’d recommend that you wear platform shoes, like the other girls. Stilettos look very pretty, but you won’t get through the night in them. Oh—I almost forgot: have you thought of a stage name yet?”

  “A stage name? No . . . I haven’t.”

  “Here. This is a list of pseudonyms that no one else in the club is using.”

  “Actually, wait, I don’t need it. I’ve got it! I’ll be Rose Lee, like Gypsy Rose Lee! She’s the one they invented the word ‘striptease’ for, in the forties. She’s a burlesque legend; have you heard of her?”

  “No, but I see you don’t lack ambition.”

  Rose Lee. Maybe that’s who I’m seeing in the dressing room mirror now. I’m wearing a black dress like hers. I feel like I’m inhabiting a new skin, infinitely softer than the old one. What if I really did this? Just for one night, to see what it’s like? I could be this other woman, just for a night. The lipstick suits me; you might almost say I look pretty. I take one last glance in the mirror, to make sure my mascara hasn’t run, that Rose Lee is fucking hot, and that she’s really me. A fine sheen of perspiration covers my décolletage, giving it an extra glow. The excitement of sensing myself to be in a body I’ve missed, I’m sure. I don’t know what I’m feeling, exactly. It’s the feeling you get when your heart pounds, but you don’t know whether it’s from fear or desire.

  9

  Who cares what anything means? Isn’t it better to live knowing that nothing really counts, that God is dead, that love is just one more illusion on a long list of them?

  These are the thoughts I woke up with, the draw, the pull toward nothingness. I put a double dose of sugar in my coffee. I’m freaking out, and that’s really what tastes bitter. After the high of the audition came the crash, and now reality is rearing its ugly head. I know nothing, absolutely nothing, about the world of the night, or men, or women, or myself, or my stupid fantasy of dancing nude. What the fuck am I actually going to do in that posh club near the Champs-Élysées next Saturday? Andrea wrote my name on the dancers’ schedule. Well, she wrote Rose Lee W. The W made me think of a pair of wings. Later I realized it stood for work.

  I put on my cotton granny panties to go into school. They’re comforting, like a pair of fuzzy slippers for my mind. Comfort’s important when you want to feel equal to a challenge; clearly this cut of panties was invented by a realist. For me, though, realism only lasts a few hours. Even before the sun goes down, I fling myself headlong into triumphant idealism: lace G-string, high heels, stockings. Just for myself. A little bit of intoxication to give myself courage. But my mind never stops working, the whole time. Am I a realist, an idealist, or a nihilist? That’s the problematic of the morning. Not granny panties—nihilism. The students find the concept of Nothingness fascinating. To them, thinking is a wasted effort. All those young minds dozing next to the radiator or doodling filthy pictures in class are running away; they prefer places where thinking is for losers. They smoke, they drink, they close their eyes and feel alive when the music hammers at their temples. Their indifference reeks of pot and beer. Teenagers have a pretty clear understanding of Nothingness. Maybe that’s why I need to wear my granny panties when I teach: no pointless giddiness in the face of those empty minds.

  In the hall on the way to the teachers’ lounge, I’m surprised to see Hadrien leaning against the wall like he’s waiting for someone. He shouldn’t be here.

  “Hi, Madame. Have you corrected the essays yet?”

  “Not all of them . . .”

  “I know who shot the spitball. He didn’t mean to hurt you, but . . .”

  “The matter is closed. I’ve informed the principal, and he’ll be taking the necessary measures. Thank you, Hadrien.”

  I avoid his gaze, embarrassed by the loyalty of his gesture and the cowardice of mine. I never followed up, discouraged by the mountain of paperwork, the time I’d have to spend filling out forms that would do nothing but humiliate me that little bit more. I’m just like everyone else, that’s what hurts, more than a spitball in the eye.

  The pile of essays is sitting, unmarked, in my pigeonhole in the teachers’ lounge. I pull Hadrien’s paper from the stack, hating myself for lying to him twice. But the thought of slogging through a bunch of trite, witless writing, combined with the little thrill left over after the audition, has extinguished the spark of my good intentions.

  “Jo? How are you?” Hurley has just come into the teachers’ lounge.

  “Hi. I’m reading essays . . .”

  “You all right?”

  “Oh yes, fine.”

  “You sure? Maybe it’s just me, but I never see anything around here but the universal depression of the teachers . . .”

  “That inevitable universality . . .”

  “No point in thinking, Jo. When I’m upset I don’t sleep, and then you know what I do? I dance in the dark. After a whiskey or two, that is.”

  He leaves as quickly as he arrived, without saying anything else, not even goodbye. “Dance in the dark.” I understand better now. Hurley always seems to be running late, to be missing something. You can even see it in his clothes: loose trousers with no belt, shoelaces untied, shabby sweater. His socks definitely don’t match.
Seems like it’s not just the students who believe thinking is pointless. I wonder what I’m doing here. I slide Hadrien’s essay back into my pigeonhole. Another few weeks, and it’ll be crammed with documents and memos and late homework. My great pleasure at the end of the school year is to throw everything in the garbage, even a few essays I never handed back. I slip a poem by Paul Valéry into Martin’s pigeonhole. I copied it out for him on a sheet of aged paper, with my quill pen. He doesn’t have any classes today; he’ll find it tomorrow morning. It’ll be a surprise. I cling hard to these little things that give everyday life some flavor. Like the square of chocolate I allow to melt in my mouth, to buck up my courage for the five hours of teaching that lie ahead, the two-hour gap, the papers to correct, the photocopies to make.

  I can’t wait to get home and take off these ridiculous panties.

  10

  Most little girls dream of white dresses and contented marriages, or of being pop stars or businesswomen.

  Me, I dreamed of having a beautiful pair of breasts.

  I wanted breasts like the ones I’d glimpsed on the topless dancers on TV, one New Year’s Eve, before my mother changed the channel. I thought about them every day. And every night before I went to bed, I repeated the same prayer:

  “Please, God, give me breasts like the dancers in the rhinestones and flesh-colored fishnets. It’s all I’m asking you for. If you can’t do that, I’d rather be a tree instead. Amen.”

  At recess, the kids played kiss chase, but always without me. I sat with my back against the chestnut tree at the far end of the playground, away from their taunts, from the feeling that I wasn’t one of them.

  “Are you a girl or a boy?”

  I asked myself the same question. I wanted to be like them, like the other girls, the ones whose little squeals I could hear as they let themselves be pushed up against the big hedge near the chestnut tree. The boy clutching the girl’s waist and pulling up her skirt, eager-eyed, his hand groping at the childish white panties. She’d always have stopped pretending to resist by then. I would have let him do it, too, but I didn’t wear panties. I always took them off when I went to the bathroom in the morning, before class. I’d stuff them deep into my book bag, just another white thing among the sheets of paper.

  No boy ever lifted my skirt on the playground. Until I finally filled out at twenty-two, my body had no dominant characteristics. Short hair, pudgy fingers, the sad-eyed gaze of a child soldier. One day I’d be a boy, the next a girl. I put on ambiguity every morning with the pink-and-blue of my oversized track suits. Once I hit age twenty, I lost all hope. Just figured fate had passed me by, and gave up.

  But sometimes, flowers bloom out of season. And nice tits, too. In spite of their belated appearance, my 36Cs provided irrefutable proof that I was a girl.

  Now I feel sorry for flat-chested girls with their sad little sunny-side-up eggs nobody could ever make a feast out of, and mothers with their deflated bags in padded bras, and the nerds in their little-girl cotton undies. “It doesn’t matter,” they say, “because men fall for your brain, not your body.” And I feel sorry for women who’ve had boob jobs, because, let me tell you, it doesn’t get any better than a nice pair of natural breasts, and they don’t cost a penny. I feel sorry for you, and I feel sorry for myself. Because I know the chaotic but overriding voice of a body that’s being let go. The voice you drown out with the effort to lead a conventionally successful life, or with that four o’clock piece of cake, or dreams of pregnancy because children-are-pure-joy, or the eternal mantra our bodies aren’t the only thing that counts.

  But really, our bodies are the only thing that counts. Our bodies are all we have, and if we let them, they’ll determine the course of our lives. Mine began the exact second I felt like I’d never seen anything more beautiful than the taut skin of my breasts, the rose-pink of my nipples pressing against my palms.

  Did it really take me thirty years to be born? Yes, maybe. I dreamed of being the kind of sexy woman who gets men hard, drives them crazy, the kind who’s not ashamed to show her ass and spread her legs. Turns out it’s never too late to strip yourself bare. And at the end of the day, thirty-five really isn’t old at all.

  Back at home, I look at myself in the mirror. After thirty-five years, four months, and sixteen days, Rose Lee has been born at last. Her hair tumbling in dark waves over her shoulders, her skin tanned and perfumed, she stands naked in front of me. Her eyes gleam.

  Rose Lee is me.

  11

  Saturday night, 10:15. I’ve been frozen on the corner for half an hour now, pressed up against the front of a closed boutique. Two hulking bouncers flank the front entrance of Dreams, their stony, silent faces blinking on and off in the light of its neon sign. I count to three, take a deep breath, filling my lungs like a free-diver. Time to take the plunge. I clutch the bag with my dress and shoes from the audition against my chest. I find myself unable to speak to the bouncers. The bulkier of the two opens the door and glances at the girl selling tickets in the lobby. She stops applying lipstick for a minute and looks up at me, throwing me a mechanical smile.

  I step inside. I remember the décor, the purple walls, darker now in the dim light. The music thumps. In the main room, warm spotlights lazily caress the illuminated platforms. A dancer untangles herself from her lascivious pose around the pole to go up to a customer holding out a bill. She thrusts her ass toward him, and he tucks the money into her G-string. It’s just like an American movie.

  I head for the basement. The steps seem to shrink under my feet. My knees are jelly.

  In the dressing room, half-open bags are piled on the floor, stage costumes spilling out of wide-open lockers, lingerie draped over chairs and G-strings scattered on the carpet. Ruby-nailed fingers adjust fishnet stockings and buckle high heels. Blond and dark and red hair gleams in the mirror, in curls or pinned into twists. A straightening iron smooths a recalcitrant extension. Dancers look appraisingly in the mirror; one girl gazes with satisfaction at the curve of her waist, while another scrutinizes the folds of her belly. I am in the antechamber of the femme fatale. It’s like a La Redoute catalogue: breasts for everyone, from the very large to the very fake to the almost nonexistent. Perky asses and fleshy ones, smooth curves and the beginnings of cellulite; false eyelashes, eyelashes in plastic packets, perfectly symmetrical strokes of eyeliner. Asses and eyes, the same expression, the same honesty. Billows of pale flesh and UV-tanned flesh and black flesh, all equally, carelessly nude. All these bodies making a single female form, a single gaping pussy, obscene, hideously sexy.

  I feel very small in my flat shoes, invisible in my loose clothing. I don’t know what to do, or where to go. A blonde jostles me, her breasts bumping my forehead. There’s no room for me in here, no empty chairs, not even a free spot on the floor for my bag. No one speaks to me. A few gazes land distractedly on me for a moment, like they know why I’m here but don’t give a damn. The raunchy talk is louder than the roar of the hair dryers.

  “I fucked him like crazy for five hours this morning. It was insane!”

  I paste a smile on my face in a hopeless attempt to hide my embarrassment.

  Where is Andrea? Which one is Poppy?

  I turn. I’m humiliated now, on top of my fear. I make a beeline for the exit, switching on the scorn machine—I’ve got nice tits, yes, but I also have a master’s degree! Scorn is great when you want to make it out with dignity. I’m just closing the dressing room door behind me when Andrea emerges from the manager’s office, her ever-present smile firmly in place.

  “There you are! Come on, follow me. Poppy is anxious to meet you.”

  In the chaos of the dressing room, Andrea points out a brunette dancer curled up on a chair near the microwave, eating soup. Mouth outlined with deep red lipliner, sharp slashes of coral-pink blush on her cheeks, dark violet shadows of fatigue on her young skin. That’s Poppy?

  The girl
dabs her lips with a napkin.

  “You okay?”

  “Hm . . .? Well, I’m pregnant, actually. But it’s no big deal. I’m going to get an abortion. My boyfriend’s not happy about it, anyway. I don’t want to deal with the hassle.”

  Poppy gets up abruptly, tosses the cup of soup and the napkin in the garbage, readjusts her breasts in her push-up corset. Then she applies dark shadow to her eyelids and more red to her lips, blends the blush on her cheeks, rubs glittery lotion into her legs, puts on a delicate ankle bracelet. She’s beautiful after all that. Like a pretty doll for grown-up children. I step a bit closer to her and look at her in the mirror. Poppy’s skin has the sweet smell of a baby’s.

  “How old are you?”

  She turns and looks at me with her beautiful eyes, not a crow’s foot to be seen.

  “I’m almost nineteen; my birthday’s in a week and a half. How old are you?”

  “Um . . .”

  “No one cares about your age, just your outfit! Show me! And we’d better get you made up, or they’ll have a fit. Have they given you a locker? You’ll need to buy a padlock. Have you danced before?”

  She seizes my bag, dumps it out.

  “Is this all you have?”

  “Er . . . yes, I’m on a trial period. I don’t know if I’m really hired.”

  “A trial period? That’s ridiculous, don’t you think? Of course you’re hired! Your dress isn’t bad. And we share clothes a lot. This chick named Caro comes by selling them sometimes, too. Your G-string looks like a pair of briefs! Here, put this one on instead. It’s ten euros. If you look next to the bulletin board, the clothes hanging there are for sale . . .”