3

by Julie Hilden

  ‘Your wife’s so pretty,’ the stripper says to Ilan in a southern accent.

  ‘She is, isn’t she?’

  ‘Open your mouth for me,’ she tells him. ‘Open wide.’

  He does as she asks, and she puts her nipple inside his mouth. She must be able to feel his breath, I realize – and still his lips do not touch her at all, as he knows they cannot: the rules are clearly posted on the wall.

  She keeps her nipple almost immobile as she grinds against him. Still abiding by the rules, still without his lips touching it, Ilan smiles.

  As another song begins, she pulls away from him and leans over to kiss me. I am surprised – I assumed contact was forbidden for me, too – but I kiss her back. It is very much like kissing a man except her lips are smaller, softer, her tongue less insistent. Taller than I am, almost six feet in her stilettos, she cranes to kiss me just as a man would crane.

  She kisses me again. And she opens my dress – in front of the bouncers, I realize, excited and ashamed: right in front of them – revealing my breasts as if I were a stripper too.

  She touches my breasts, soft, imperfect, and at her invitation, I touch hers, hard and perfect, and Ilan leans back a little to have the right frame for the picture he sees.

  Then she caresses me for a few more minutes, kissing me with a lovely, feigned passion, fake and theatrical and yet somehow moving for all that. If I once wondered what men saw in this, now I see it clearly – that it is only a performance does not make it worse; it makes it better. I am disturbed to see why Ilan wants it, what he sees in it, even as I am glad to know him this way.

  As we kiss I feel the tip of the stripper’s tongue probe my lips and I realize it is a frisson of her technique, a small embellishment. I open my lips to her a little, to let her play. This must be what men want too: to push the girl beyond her job; to seem to take from her some intimate thing she has withheld. I feel it myself, the wanting; feel her lips on mine and what they mean: how they could go further, how much I would like it.

  The song ends and Ilan announces, ‘It’s time for us to go.’

  ‘You’re very good,’ he says to the stripper.

  ‘Come back and we’ll do a little more next time,’ she promises. I am afraid of the ‘more’ but I want to know, too, what it would be.

  ‘Can I touch you next time?’ Ilan asks her in a whisper.

  ‘May-be,’ she lilts. ‘You’ll just have to see.’

  Surreptitiously, she hands Ilan her calling card. He pays her in cash, and I notice that he tips well above the quoted rate. For the magazine, he writes down what he has spent.

  In the parking lot, he hands me the card. It reads ‘Lily – Professional Dancer and Entertainer’ and gives a cell phone number. I wonder if in addition to being a stripper, she is also a prostitute.

  On impulse I throw the card away in a trash can. While I can tell it annoys Ilan, he makes a show of not minding.

  ‘Our friend Lily was pretty good, don’t you think?’ he comments. ‘But I’m sure there are better.’

  We return to our hotel and order room service. Ravenous, we order decadently – for me, French toast with syrup, strawberries, a silver boat of cream; for Ilan, a thick steak. We bring our trays to bed. Wolfing down the food, I feel callous – maybe I am callous.

  Later Ilan goes out to ‘interview’ other strippers for his article. I know – I can visualize now – what it will be like, how close he will be to them and how they will invite him to get closer, to gradually take more and more as he gradually pays more and more.

  This time, though, he doesn’t ask me to accompany him. He says it will be too dangerous; he is going to the more low-rent clubs. Instead, he says, he’ll take notes, tell me all about it later.

  When he leaves, I think of him stopping at boarded-up buildings on the road that lies next to the glittery Strip like the paler, empty skin a glinting reptile has cast off. I think of him going alone to places he did not want to take me.

  I lie alone and awake in our vast bed at the hotel for several hours, wondering if I am going to cry but feeling no impulse to do so.

  When we return to the city, Ilan begins the Vegas article himself, but soon we fall into our old college pattern. One afternoon, he goes out to visit the magazine’s offices for an editorial meeting, and I begin to tinker with the story on his laptop – adding anecdotes; sharpening and ironizing the descriptions of the dancer, of our hotel.

  ‘What is this?’ he demands when he returns, and sees what I have done.

  ‘Some edits.’

  ‘You think I can’t write this myself?’

  ‘Of course I do. I just thought it would be faster this way – like in college,’ I dare to remind him.

  ‘I want to do it myself. Take out what you added.’

  I remove it all, but even then I know how this will end. Later that night, when he is almost in tears with frustration, I take over again, and he contents himself with working on something else. I put back much of what he has forced me to remove, and he says nothing when the old material reappears in the final draft I show him.

  He submits the piece, and his father loves it, and Ilan takes credit. But on the phone with his father, accepting the compliments, he looks at me warily, as if I am somehow a threat to him now.

  A few weeks later, Ilan shows me an ad he has placed in the Village Voice:

  A LOVE AFFAIR IN A DAY. My wife and I will meet you, love you, and leave you forever. We won’t betray your secrets. We won’t even know each other’s names. She’s beautiful, if it matters. You must be 5'9", 130, a redhead – like her. You won’t regret it.

  Beneath the ad, there is a voice mailbox number. Noticing the Voice’s ad submission deadlines, set off in a black box near the ad, I realize that Ilan must have been drafting the ad at the same time I was writing his Vegas article – as if this were his vocation now, his life’s work. The thought scares me.

  The ad itself scares me a little too. It makes me wonder if he wants me in multiples because he loves me so much, or so little. Was there some way that by myself, I could have been enough – a path, but I couldn’t find it? Isn’t there some way we can go on as we have been – perhaps just with strippers, going only as far as we went last time? I have been so happy, and I am so afraid of losing that feeling. Perhaps I should plead with him to change his mind.

  Thinking about it more carefully, though, I decide to keep quiet. I know how serious this promise is to him; after all, our marriage is predicated on it. And one thing about the ad did strangely reassure me: at least if the women look just like me, they cannot be that much prettier.

  ‘You won’t regret it,’ I murmur to myself, parroting Ilan’s ad.

  * * *

  Ilan arranges to meet each of the women who leave a message in response to the ad – providing the address of a bar or museum, and telling her when he’ll be there.

  I am always there too, a few yards away, with my red hair concealed under a cap. The women never seem to notice me – perhaps because Ilan has assured them beforehand that he will be alone.

  If Ilan doesn’t find a woman attractive, he leaves before she even knows he’s there, subtly motioning for me to leave with him. Since the women are redheads, they are always simple to pick out. So if he does not want her, he simply walks away.

  But if he does want the woman, if he thinks her pretty, hell introduce himself, giving a false name, and linger to talk with her, test her. I stay to watch, judging from afar. If we are in a museum, I’ll appear to be intent on a sculpture; if it is a bar, I’ll pretend to read a book as I sip my drink. I eavesdrop, picking up as much of their conversation as I can.

  As I watch, I have the same feeling I did when I came upon Ilan with that first woman in the summerhouse: I’m a ghost now. I am dead and this is the first woman he has met whom he really likes, after he has mourned me. I like being a ghost. It is so much easier than being alive.

  Always, Ilan only considers women for whom this will be a scar
y departure, a first time. The ‘alternative-lifestyle’ ones can go to hell, he says, with their shoulder tattoos, their swinging and the accompanying silly jargon. He wants the straight, the even ones. The good, the sweet ones. The girls like me are the ones he likes, he confesses – the ones where you would never think, to look at them, that they would even consider this. They are the ones Ilan wants, the ones he waits for.

  I have to admit, it is so sexy – all these slender, pretty women, often with husbands who don’t know. We will take them home, I imagine, and they will open for us like clocks, their delicate inner workings revealed. We will see their pieces, see inside.

  It is lovely for Ilan to choose among the women; he does not want it to stop. He takes a long time to decide on the first one. There are several women I approve, but he finds an eleventh-hour reason to reject each of them.

  ‘The first one has to be perfect,’ he explains.

  Finally, though, he does choose a woman, and he sets a date, in mid-December. The name she has given us is Rebecca, but I know it is probably false, like the names we have given her, John and Jane.

  On the night he has chosen, I wait for them in the loft. I draw the curtains over its huge windows in preparation. In the darkness the apartment feels smaller and closer. I cannot remember when my heart has raced like this before – except when it did so for Ilan. Now, again, my heart pounds as if it is gulping blood.

  But as nervous as I am, I am almost glad it is finally happening: since we married, this promise has been with me like my marriage vow itself, like the ring I wear.

  Finally the key turns in the lock and they enter. He places a bottle of champagne on the sideboard and helps her with her coat.

  I have approved her, have been part of choosing her, but it is difficult actually to have her here, with Ilan lifting her coat from her shoulders – as he always does for me.

  Rebecca is a tomboy of a woman, incredibly lithe – once upon a time a dancer, she has told Ilan. Though she is my height and weight, as Ilan’s ad ensured, she is smaller than I, with tiny wrists and little hands, so thin-skinned their blue veins are visible. She is pretty but not beautiful, and that is how I prefer it. If she were beautiful, and I were to watch him with her, I might have to cry.

  She wears a dark evening dress cut high at the neck. I am in a T-shirt and skirt, as if this weren’t particularly important, as if we do this all the time.

  She strides up to me confidently and stands there, considering me. Ilan introduces us, and for a second she takes my hand. We say hello quietly.

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ she asks me as she deftly uncorks the bottle of champagne. It feels strangely presumptuous: shouldn’t Ilan have been the one to open it? Then I realize we are outside etiquette here, outside society and the rules of its life.

  ‘You go ahead,’ I say, and she does – taking a glass from the sideboard, she fills it and sips it in front of me.

  ‘It’s really good,’ she says.

  ‘No thanks.’ I want and need to do this cold sober; I need it to be different from Las Vegas.

  Ilan is visibly restless, intuiting that I may change my mind – in a moment I could dash out and our marriage could be over. I can feel his fear. It somehow makes me more comfortable that he too is afraid.

  ‘Really, have some champagne,’ Rebecca urges me. She must feel it too, my urge to bolt like a spooked colt. Ilan stays back, watching.

  ‘No thanks,’ I repeat stiffly.

  Putting her drink down, she shoves me a little, slipping to the side of me and shouldering me a bit. ‘Cut it out,’ she says. ‘Why are you making it so hard?’

  I shove her back playfully. ‘You cut it out.’

  She shoves me again, but this time not quite so hard. It recalls to me the rough-and-tumble of childhood, where sexuality was always just underneath, the force that drove the horseplay, the clambering and climbing.

  I think suddenly of all the girls who touched me then, with never even a question in their touch, and I think of how, when boys and later men had touched me, there was always a question, a proposition, a dare. Who drew that line for me – the line between the two kinds of touch? And can I cross it now?

  Ilan seems worried, about to say something. But he steps farther back from us, just when I think he may step in. Leaning against the sideboard, he waits.

  Rebecca shoves me once more. And then she has permission to kiss me and knows it, and she kisses me hard.

  We kiss over and over, and I lead her to the writing room. Ilan and I have agreed that everything with the women will happen in this room, the one I dream will be a child’s someday – never in our bedroom.

  Soon she has me lying on the bed there. As I lower my head to the pillow, a sweet dizziness rushes in, a feeling that seems to lift off of me like fizz. A giddiness, as if I have been drinking after all.

  It’s in me, I know that from her first rough touch. I can be with her, I can want to. I am crossing the line and as I cross it, it disappears, until it is as if it never existed at all. I am going to like what I’ve been required to do, and for once, not merely because I have been required to do it.

  Rebecca slips my clothes off in a moment and shimmies down the bed until her mouth is at my waist.

  I open to her as I would to a man – meaning, I suppose, as I would to Ilan, for the sex with the two boys who preceded him he has long ago erased.

  It is not so very different to have her lick me – though I twist to the thrill of the smaller tongue, its finer point. But I know what is expected of me – I must do to her what she is doing to me – and I fear it.

  It will have to be a giving over, I tell myself; I will have to give myself over to this, without my second-guessing mind. Still, my heart is rampantly beating as if it will never slow.

  The body that scares me so much is just like my own, I think to myself. Why should I fear it? This should be easy for me; I ought to know the very touch that is likely to prostrate, to disarm.

  As she licks me, I become wet. She arouses me, and thinking about licking her arouses me as well. The fear itself, I realize, makes me wet.

  I fold my tongue into a U in my mouth, thinking of what I soon must do to her – as I squirm beneath her tongue, and beneath her touch.

  I switch places with her. I have to start instantly or I’ll never start at all – and I do start.

  It feels like licking a wound when it is still soft, still touchy and tender – with that much tentativeness – licking the red soft cut that is exposed, reinflicted as the scab is torn off. I fall in love with that softness in a moment; there is nothing so soft, I realize, on a man.

  I begin to lick her harder, to recognize in her flinches my own. And as I flick and tongue and rub Rebecca, I learn for the first time what Ilan must see when he goes down on me: she is splayed above me, small and thin but in a way also huge and curved – hilly as a Botero sculpture, and vulnerable as it is possible to be. Writhing in pain and pleasure, she is powerful and lost, as if a force is working its way through her. It is an exorcism, an imbuement, a leave-taking, an arrival.

  With my hands on her thighs, I feel the strong muscles there flex as she bicycles her feet into the mattress, as agitated as she is aroused.

  For a second I raise my head to look at Ilan, like a thirsty animal interrupted drinking. I smile and in my smile there is a clear message: ‘You were not sure if I could do this, but I have.’

  Taking my look as an invitation, he moves in to kiss Rebecca. It surprises me that he is kissing her first – not kissing me, as I thought he would, to reassure me. For an instant it galls me to see it, but then he turns to me and kisses me instead, and again I’m in his thrall.

  Rebecca slips down between my legs again, and in a moment Ilan is on my breasts, tonguing them as she licks my clitoris. It is too much for me, I come even though I don’t want to – even though I do not want to give that last thing up yet, not now. I would prefer to keep watching this, to keep myself apart from it for now. But I
can’t – not anymore.

  I give myself up to it, lose myself in it. I know I look as Rebecca just looked to me, and I do not mind it. I want her and I want him. I feel shame and do not care.

  I come hard, the orgasm is like a wind tearing me away from myself. It has a kick, a backlash. It leaves me coughing with tears. I hate myself, but I cannot stop coming, and in a way I love it too.

  Then Ilan watches as I make Rebecca come. He helps me draw her closer and, toward the end, bring her over the edge. It takes me a long time, I am still inexpert – but he helps me only a little. He kisses her but he leaves it to me to touch her, and then he moves away from us, to watch us together. He does not come, himself, while she is there.

  As she is leaving, Rebecca raises her eyebrows at us and says, ‘I had a great time. Would you be interested in a second date?’

  But Ilan says quickly, ‘We have a rule that we don’t see anyone twice.’

  ‘I understand,’ she says, looking at us both. ‘I’m sure it’s hard enough.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Ilan says coolly.

  ‘Good night, then.’ Rebecca looks embarrassed to have suggested the strain this must put on our marriage. She slips out, quietly shutting the door.

  Once she has left, Ilan begins to touch me, and soon he enters me. I am still wet but my arousal feels compromised, for I know Rebecca, not Ilan, made me that way. Being with him feels fraught, strange, but only for a moment; in a moment, it feels normal again. Sex with her was a dream, and sex with him is my life – at least, that is what I tell myself.

  Afterward we lie in bed for a while. In pajamas, we drink tea Ilan has made.

  I sit calmly beside him, with my toes under his thighs on the couch, the way we used to sit at school. And I realize, all at once, that we’ve done this, it’s over, and I have not left him. Yet I am still unsure whether I want this, at least a little, or whether only he does; whether I like it or only he does. Whether it is an acquired taste he has truly taught me, or only a way in which I am trying to resemble him.