Stripper Lessons

by John O'Brien

  Cocktail is here, emptying the balance of his cider from bottle to glass. “Ready for more?” she accuses.

  “I guess . . . sure,” he says, eyes more on Stevie than on her. Sudden resolve. “Here, I’ll pay you now. I need to go to the men’s room.”

  She doesn’t like this one bit but takes the money. What can she do? The guy’s in here all the time. And what does he think he’s staring at over there? “Do this,” she says, placing a cocktail napkin on top of his glass. “People will know that you’re still here.” Then, annoyed at the fact that he is still preoccupied and evidently ungrateful for her instruction: “This is what you do everywhere when you’re leaving your drink for a minute. Haven’t you ever been in a bar?” She storms off without waiting for an answer.

  And Carroll, though he always has wondered why some drinks have napkins on top of them, is far too uptight to ponder that now. Plan to walk right by her. If there’s any way to talk then talk, if not go to the rest room, maybe try again on the return trip. He walks in her direction while looking mostly toward the men’s room, ostensibly taking this slightly-out-of-the-way way to avoid the crowd around the stage. Almost to her, six feet, and it looks like he’ll have to pass her by as she’s still involved in her conversation. Right next to her, chance a toward glance, slap on a pleasant howyadoin grin . . . and just then she looks up. They’re virtually nose to nose. Oh, serendipity! and no time to think.

  “Could you do a table . . . ?” (wants to add “dance” but it gets choked off and he ends up sounding that much cooler like he’s mastered the jargon of the place and of the girls, who, as he suspected, really do refer to table dances as tables)

  “Sure . . .” (wants to add his name but can’t remember it or if she even knows it so the inflection that would normally segue into the direct address is left hanging for a beat and almost sounds to him at least like enthusiasm)

  “I’ll be over at my seat. Just ask for Carroll.” (wants this to sound witty and is completely unaware of how propitious it was for him to choose this moment to inadvertently remind her of his name)

  “Okay, I’ll be right over.” (wants to use his name now that she has it but is always sensitive to these situations and doesn’t want to sound like she’s using it just because she’s relieved to be given it when she maybe should have known it all along)

  Carroll makes a beeline back to his seat, forgetting that he was on his way to the men’s room. Stevie turns to the man she was speaking with and excuses herself, forgetting his name too. On the stage Andrea is done with her set, but before passing into the dressing area she bends forward and moons the room.

  “Thank you, everybody,” she lilts.

  At his seat, mouth dry and palms wet, the room becomes more something he’s watching than something he’s sitting in. His mom could do that too. He’d be sitting on the sofa watching TV, and she’d switch on the vacuum cleaner in the hallway. Then the noise was a player, looming, growing louder, already competing strongly with the television. Remotes weren’t around yet, and the living room floor, where he and the TV were, collected its share of cookie crumbs, so things would only get worse. Ever louder. All of a sudden he wasn’t a kid watching television in a living room; now he was a kid watching a room in which a television set was on. It comes and goes and goes and comes. To him, at that age, there were plenty more cookies yet to be eaten, sans saucer, but Mom and Hoover could always fix that. There is a way to tell, out of the corner of your eye, how she’s—Stevie that is, in the here and now—how she’s killing time: look at her hands, they never quite complete any of the many tiny gestures that they begin. Now we’re killing time until the moments prior to the start of the next song. Table dance punctuation, he learned from last time. There’s a girl on stage. It’s someone he knows, but that’s as far as it goes. Like groggily trying to prepare the coffeemaker too soon after crawling out of bed, you look at the parts, you know they belong there, but you really can’t identify them beyond that. Your mind isn’t ready, but Stevie is. Why else would she walk toward him and look at him, both at the same time?

  She’s here. “Are we ready,” she says. This won’t be so bad, she thinks, and for the first time she realizes that a guy like Carroll, all the guys like Carroll, aren’t all that bad, could in fact compare favorably to her boyfriend (that fuck). Makes her think of when she’s so sick of the music here that she could bust and the barmaid turns on the mixer to make a milk shake for the fat manager so he can get even fatter (like that’ll help his case when he wants to walk her out to the car at night) and the noise drowns out the music for a few seconds, and it’s a relief. That stupid buzzing mixer, for those few seconds, sounds better than the music. She can tell by looking at Carroll that he has a little extra money tonight. Better pace the conversation; he’s probably looking for more than one or two songs tonight. Guess three. Four. A few.

  At her direction he climbs into a booth. She follows and drops the counter over his lap. Surprisingly she mutters an embarrassed apology about this—surprising because every other dancer, including her every other time, gets through this tricky moment by acting as if it were a natural adjunct to being seated anywhere: there we go. Carroll doesn’t mind but lets it go without comment. He thinks the counter will give him a place to put his hands, but he ends up keeping them in his lap, at the ends of his arms.

  “Comfy?” she wants to know once he is seated.

  “Indeed,” he says suavely. Indeed? he thinks.

  She gets top-naked in short order and makes it to the song just a second or two after it begins. This guy . . . Carroll . . . this guy Carroll isn’t really such a bad way to spend a few minutes, she thinks. One look around the place tells her that, and she wants to give him his money’s worth. Whatever that is, his money’s worth. Funny how much bread guys will pay just to look at her tits. She’s been taking it for so long that it almost seems natural; in fact, natural may be exactly what it is. Still it’s weird. It’s not like they can touch her or anything, and when she accidentally touches them, say brushes a nose with a nipple, well that happens so infrequently that they can’t possibly be hoping for that. And even that, what’s in that?

  He loves looking at her breasts. So close, what could be better? He’s seen enough of her now—not to imply that he’s used to it, that would be ridiculous—that he has grown somewhat familiar with her body. This is his second time in a booth with her, two songs the last time, and he feels that they are sharing something. She knows that he’s looking at her breasts. Sometimes she even looks at them while he’s looking at them. It’s something they’re doing together. There’s an attachment, he knows there is, he can feel it. She’s beautiful. This is different from anything anywhere. It’s sex. It’s better than you can imagine. When she’s on stage he can only watch her, but here in the booth alone with her he can touch her with his eyes. It’s sex. It’s enough.

  “So what do you do, Carroll? How does a guy make enough money to afford such nice clothes?” This last intended as a friendly but facetious little allusion to their earlier conversation. But pass it by, not a great kidder. No harm though. He’ll probably just take it as a compliment—and why not? They are nice clothes.

  He blushes, cheeks fire tickle-red before those cool and neutral breasts. “I sort of splurged . . . but I can’t afford to do it very often. I’m a file clerk at a law firm. Been doing it forever, but they still don’t pay me all that much. Head file clerk, actually.” And, as if in apology for going with head file clerk, he adds, “You can only go so far.”

  She can see he feels humbled and ashamed at this latter admission, and she knows he shouldn’t be, maybe even wouldn’t be if it weren’t for her standing here naked, waiting to be impressed. “Yeah,” she says, “well that sounds fine, Carroll. (lower, firmer tone: oral parentheses) Turns out you can only get so naked, too.”

  She holds his eye for a beat: why not. She feels liquid in the heat: see what I’ve got. The music spins her ’round to the room. The base smacks her
ass with its boom. But there ain’t much to see out there, and there’ll be even less tomorrow. She’d like to crawl into the booth with Carroll and sit down right next to him, order some fries and hear all about file clerking. But that won’t happen; with the counter down she can hardly get her feet into boothspace and out of roomspace. Instead she arches backward, leans all the way back until her nipples point skyward and her cheek is next to his cheek and they’re both looking down over the implacable topography of her chest.

  “That was nice,” Carroll says after she turns back around and is facing him. For the life of him he couldn’t find a thing to say while he was at her cheek, and now that he’s finally commented his voice sounds stupid to him, the words inadequate.

  “Good,” says Stevie. It was nice. “I don’t think my boss would like it though.” She shoots a conspiring glance, smile.

  And if she were less sincere or he sharper, he might view that remark as a ploy: c’mon we’re on the same side so let’s open your wallet and share the wealth. But they aren’t and it isn’t. “You’re not supposed to do that?” he asks.

  “I’m not supposed to be ‘overly intimate,’ they tell us. To you I’m supposed to look like I’m having the time of my life, but to them and the other customers I’m supposed to look like I’m waiting for someone more exciting to dance for. They told me this when I auditioned. I don’t know what it means, but if you look when a girl dances . . . (waits for him to catch up, then on his nod) she’ll a lot of times drop her smile when she turns away from the booth.”

  “I guess I’ve noticed that, but I’ve never really thought about it,” he says, fascinated to be having this conversation, amazed that he could talk to any girl like this and more amazed that he could talk so easily to this girl about anything. It’s as if they’ve known each other for a long time—but even that would be new to him. Maybe it’s like she’s a person he always knew and just started talking with, like himself at home, or the television. It’s like talking to himself and the television. He feels safe. “Could I ask you something? I notice sometimes . . . about table dances? Could I ask you?” Like go ahead. Like pull away. Like turn up the volume.

  “Sure,” she says lightly. She’s down on her haunches, hands on the counter, barely swaying to the waning notes of the song. Familiar but better. “Sounds like our song’s almost over. We can do another, or if you want to save some money we can talk at your seat, but I may not be able to stand there too long.” This sounds bad. “I mean there may be other guys asking me for a table.” She nods her head a few times rapidly: my hands are tied. She wouldn’t mind if he took another dance. That wouldn’t be so bad. It’s a nice break. He’s a sweet guy.

  “Oh, another!” Relax. “I’ve got plenty of money tonight—I don’t mean to brag, just so you know it’s okay. Please stay. I’d like another.” In his excitement he moves his hands to the top of the counter, gripping, something to hold on to the way he wants to hold the moment.

  “Good, that’s great, I’d like to stay.” Plenty of money, she thinks. Sweet. Just hope you never really do have plenty of money. I bet it’s easier than that, I bet you don’t even want plenty of money. I bet you’re a safe bet. I bet you’re okay. She wants him to understand, “I’m sorry, about the money, but they watch and they count—”

  “It’s okay, really. I know, I understand, I know,” he interrupts. Even turns his palms out in a matching gesture, but drops them quickly back to the counter when he realizes how close they are to her breasts. He reddens, not much, it goes away. She understands too.

  The next song is picking up, but they barely notice it. “What did you want to ask me?” she says.

  He remembers. It should be okay. “Sometimes when I’m watching the table dances from across the room . . . (eyes wide, waits for her nod), sometimes it looks like the dancer dips so far into the booth that she must be touching the guy . . . you know . . . with her front. (encouraged by her grin) I’m sure she isn’t. It’s just that it looks that way from back there.” (nod at the room behind Stevie) He’s unsure of how to wrap up his question; it sounds to him like he didn’t really ask anything at all. “So I was just wondering: do the dancers ever touch the customers?”

  “Not allowed,” she says, still grinning at his word front. “And why would we want to? It would have to be someone—at least for me—it would have to be someone that I really liked.” And she rises with the building music, leans into the booth, and gives a touch of a nipple to the tip of his nose. “Like a friend,” she adds, withdrawing to a more standard posture, swaying back into the general beat of the music that fills the general place.

  A nipple to the nose would normally incapacitate Carroll, but in the context of this already overwhelming situation he manages to roll with it, file it for later prayerful collapse on his bed. This is wonderful. This makes up for everything. “I bet you have a lot of friends,” he says, innocently following.

  Didn’t her boyfriend accuse her of this not long ago, the jerk? But she knows this is not a snide remark coming from Carroll. Does she have a lot of friends? “No, not really. Other strippers. But they’re not friends, not really,” she answers, lips pursed: answer in progress. Keeping in policy and keeping mostly in motion, she sweeps his face with her hair. Does she want a lot of friends? “You?” she asks.

  “No. Are you kidding? I talk to people at work, but I never see them after. I feel funny with people (not you). Sometimes. . . . I don’t know (you). Nobody (you).” He’d give anything to be frozen in the moment forever with her, like maybe a Twilight Zone thing, or an old Bewitched where Samantha freezes the humans so she can fix what ever trouble Endora’s stirred up. Always sounded neat, only now Carroll wants to be one of the frozen ones. Let Samantha take care of business.

  “They like us to keep moving,” Stevie explains as she turns and beats out a sway or two in reverse. Then around and back on her haunches: “I know what you mean. It’s nice to spend time alone.”

  He knows he should do something, say something. Maybe too soon now, but eventually he’ll be out of money and there’ll be no more table dances. Of course they’re friends now—she pretty much said so—and he doesn’t want to spoil the mood. Can’t risk scaring her away. So new at this, so much to know. Be casual. He says, “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  No. “Yeah,” she says dejectedly, as if she were responding to Do you have a lot of homework to do tonight? “Part-time, you could say.” Then after some quick consideration: “He’s okay, I’ve known him for a while.” Final word. That’s it. Resolved. “You?” she asks, hopes yes, hopes no.

  “Are you kidding?” Are you kidding? didn’t he just say that? “I mean, no. I mean, girls don’t seem to like me. I mean, I haven’t met anybody yet. Once I saw a movie with a girl in high school, then we had lunch the next day. It was sort of an assignment. The movie, I mean.”

  “What movie was it?” she asks, because she has to say something, because she has to confirm for him that it was all right to mention this, because she has to let him know that if this is the best he can come up with for a romantic history, then it’s good enough for her.

  He concentrates, but it won’t help. “I don’t remember. Some French thing. See, that was the assignment—it was for French class—to understand this movie. I didn’t. I wasn’t where you were supposed to be in the class. I could never understand any of the language. She told me after it. The girl told me what it was called in English, but it was too late and I didn’t care. It was black and white. It was people in dark rooms saying things to each other that made no sense to me. I guess now I would be able to rent it in English and cheat. But you couldn’t rent movies then. You had to be . . . you know . . . (he looks around the small booth as if therein lies the word he is seeking). Clever! that’s it. You had to be clever to cheat then. I’m not clever.”

  The second song is winding down. She taps his hand twice with her fingers, then leaves them resting there, in contact.

  He gets it. “Could we do
another? Do you have time for another?” The feel of her fingers on the back of his hand, it’s wonderful.

  Glad to be in one of those effortless little conversations that spring up out of nowhere in the oddest places, she is. “Absolutely,” she says. “Gotta tell you that this’ll be three, just so you know.” Off his nod she rises, silence between songs now, and straightens her panties. She’s done fives before. Five’s about the limit. It is the limit technically, and it’s about the most you can do and still have time to catch your breath before your next set. Of course five songs can be endless with most of the customers who have the bread to blow like that. Catch twenty-two. Catch two-two. Catch too-too. This is nice, hardly ever get five out of a guy you don’t mind talking with. Even if it stays only three—but guessing five—nice.

  Their third song begins. Stevie rises and does some standard dipping, breast swinging ultra close to Carroll, and really, because she knows that he won’t do anything out of line, her attitude is: anything goes. She’s right, right? Stay true to form. He’s a good boy, smart enough to know that sometimes one has to preserve the future, the five-minute future. A new trick for him, this easy talk down a two-way street, yet he apprehends the gossamer fabric of it all, the way it can be savored but not bitten, the way it can’t be forced, the way it will always be his, the way it will metamorphose into a precious memory, the way her diaphanous panties cling to her skin like breath on a mirror. For want of protection it isn’t enough.