26. Butt Pirate or Pussy Hound
BROOKE FELT HERSELF GROWING pale and suddenly she could not hold up her body. She let herself slump down onto the burgundy leather club chair in Bill’s study.
“I’m sorry, Brooke, but it’s true,” Bill said, and then he reiterated the cold hard fact that had caused the blood to abandon Brooke’s cheeks and the strength to leave her legs. “Ever since you left I have thought of nothing except how we can make this relationship work. I need to change myself. And I’ve finally realized. I’m not homosexual. I’m not heterosexual. I’m just non-sexual. Sex simply isn’t that important to me anymore.”
“Bill,” Brooke said, “you’re either dead or lying. You’re still young and healthy and sexy. How can you say sex is not important to you?”
“It’s not worth it to me,” Bill said.
“Sometimes when I masturbate I use the thought of you naked to get myself going,” Brooke admitted. “You can’t look that good and be that dead. Maybe you should quit your job and move back to Paris.”
“Will you come with me?”
Brooke thought about it for a moment.
“You want me to move to Paris for your sex life?” she asked.
“I can’t live without you,” he said and then turned away as tears suddenly dropped off his pale eyelashes and fell into his drink with a tiny “plink” that only Bill could hear. He abandoned his ruined scotch on the windowsill, confident the maid would discover it there within the hour and return it to the kitchen.
“Are you ill?” Brooke asked. “Maybe there’s a better urologist.”
“I’m fine,” Bill said as he crossed to the cabinet, his right hand pulling out another crystal highball glass, while at the same time his left lifted the scotch and poured. “There’s nothing wrong with me. I had a full physical yesterday. Everything works. I am in top health. No genetic diseases. If we have a baby now I will be about sixty when he or she graduates from high school, and I’ll have plenty of time to be a father. I think I’ll be a great father. And you’d be a great…oh!”
Scotch in hand, Bill turned back to Brooke and found her sitting naked on his burgundy leather club chair. Her legs were crossed at the ankle and she was still sipping the cabernet he had poured for her.
“Ah, you see,” began Bill as he looked away, “I had rather imagined if we had a child, that we would do this part in a doctor’s office.”
“No, I’m sorry,” Brooke said as she uncrossed her ankles and then recrossed them, demure in spite of her nudity, “I don’t have any doctor’s office fantasies.”
Brooke began to absentmindedly play with her nipple as if it were a button on one of her cashmere cardigans. Bill remained unmoved. No interest. No erection. The closest he got to heavy breathing was a deep, sad sigh.
“I don’t want to have sex, Brooke. Sex, at best, only serves to define my loneliness,” Bill said, without allowing a trace of sadness to seep into his voice. “I’d rather just jettison it from my life.”
Brooke took a lot of air into her lungs and then let it release slowly. She reached down and picked her underwear up off the rug where she had shoved it quickly under the sofa. Underwear was followed by bra, slacks, and then her shirt. As she slipped back into her jacket she told him that he had a serious problem, and that this particular problem could no longer be hers also.
“It’s because your friend Lux said I was gay,” he said without malice.
“No,” said Brooke, “it’s because I deserve better than this. I’m forty years old. I have a great life and I want a child. I was thinking about doing it myself but here you are. Handsome, smart, tender. You love me and I think you’d make a great dad except for the fact that you’re really weird about sex. You have to be ok about sex to stay balanced. And I certainly don’t want this kind of selfloathing around my child. And really, Bill, I don’t think I want that around me, either.”
In her haste to get all her clothes off before Bill turned around, Brooke had pushed one of her pumps a little too far under the sofa. She had to lie down on the floor and grope among the dust bunnies to find her shoe.
“You need help?” Bill asked.
“I got it,” Brooke said.
“Ok then, we’re all set,” Bill said as if finding her shoe were the only problem they had. Brooke suddenly realized how often Bill used denial as a coping mechanism. Something deep and terrible had just happened. His best friend and longtime lover Brooke had just told him she could not love him anymore. But Bill chose to experience it on the shallowest level. Brooke felt a great pain for her old friend.
Bill watched her as she placed the exquisite shoe on her long, beautiful foot.
“Um, so next month I bought a table for the Sickle Cell Anemia party. We had a good time last year. Will you join me?”
Sickle Cell threw a cool party, good food, great band. It drew an interesting group of supporters including people from the arts. Last year they’d stayed till almost four in the morning, then continued the party at the home of some record producer.
“Can’t,” Brooke said. “I won’t be part of how you torture yourself.”
“Brooke, I love you so much,” Bill said even as she slipped out of his grasp.
“You lied to me for twenty years.”
“No, I thought it would go away.”
They stood there among the deep, gleaming mahogany Bill inherited from his family. They stood there long enough for the light in the window to move across the carpet and catch on one of his dad’s old sterling-silver golf trophies. It reflected a hard light into Brooke’s eyes and reminded her that it was time to go.
“I’m so sorry,” Bill said almost as a whisper, but she heard. Brooke found her purse on the sofa and headed towards the door.
“Friends?” Bill called after her as she left him.
“Can’t change that,” Brooke said. “But give me a month or two before you call me.”
Brooke let herself out of his huge matched front doors. She decided to take the stairs instead of the elevator. They started out nearly industrial in design at the top but turned into heavy marbled grandeur by the time they reached the lobby. Still, at both ends they were stairs, and Brooke found that comforting. She waved to the doorman and stepped out onto the street. She stood for a moment outside of Bill’s apartment building and then decided to walk south down Fifth Avenue towards the park.
27. 0 Fat Girl Needs a Job
LUX KERCHEW FITZPATRICK WALKED along lower Broadway looking for a bagel and a coffee. Maybe she would bring a bagel and coffee back to Aimee. Maybe Bill would call and say he’d found a great job for her, something with a solid salary that she could stash away until she had enough for a second allcash real estate purchase. Maybe everything was going to be ok in spite of how it had all started out.
Lux ducked into a café near the university. It looked appropriately inexpensive so she walked up to the counter and ordered some food.
“You’re in my psych class, right?” said the cashier as he rang up her order.
“Nah,” said Lux.
“Really? Well then you’ve got a doppelganger hanging out at NYU.”
Lux’s hand immediately flapped to the opening of her shirt to see what, if anything, was hanging out. If her boob slipped from the mooring of her brassiere, it would certainly explain the way this boy was looking at her. As she was, without makeup or spray or glitter, dressed in boxy, colorless clothes, Lux could not imagine any other reason this boy would seem so friendly.
“Did you want milk in those coffees?” he asked.
“Uh, aren’t they cappuccino? I mean, that has milk in it already, right?” Lux said, unsure of herself and the recipe for cappuccino.
“Oh yeah, right. Sorry. It’s just, ah you look so much like this other girl. In my psych class. Her name is Monica, I think.”
“Oh. My name is Lux.”
“Wow. That must have been really hard in middle school.”
“Why?”
“Well,
because it rhymes with…well, ducks.”
Lux laughed out loud. Not at the thought of how her name could be used in a dirty limerick, but because the boy had blushed so brightly red at the thought of how her name could be used in a dirty limerick. She looked into his eyes and saw that they weren’t really hazel, but rather brown with big flecks of green.
“Nah,” Lux said, “I had big brothers and a dangerous boyfriend. Nobody talked trash to me. I mean, other than the big brothers and the dangerous boyfriend.”
“Is he still around? I mean, the dangerous boyfriend.”
“His teeth fell out,” Lux said.
The phrase dropped out of her mouth. Immediately she wished she hadn’t said it. She assumed her comment about her ex-boyfriend’s metaphorical dental work would be the death knell of this suitor’s interest. In the past, guys who tried to hit on her were drawn in by her lips and turned off by what came out of her mouth.
“I think that happens a lot after high school,” the coffee boy said, sounding truly sympathetic. “I mean, I never thought I’d end up pushing cappuccino, but school is way more expensive than I thought. So I’m doing half-time, which is a drag, but it’s the best I can do. What about you?”
Lux was ready to lie. She was planning on telling him that she was out of school for a few semesters, but ready to go back in the fall. She liked who he thought she was, but before she could start reinventing herself for him a dark-haired woman in a white apron came out from the back of the café.
“Charlie!” his boss shouted, indicating the long line of customers queuing up behind Lux.
Charlie blushed again and Lux stepped away to allow him to take the order of the mousy woman standing patiently behind her. She stood to the side, finished her cappuccino and then started on the one she’d bought for Aimee. She hung out, hoping there would be a break in the line and she could talk to him again, but the café kept filling up. All the tables were taken and it wasn’t long before Lux felt foolish standing there, ogling a counter-boy named Charlie. Her ringing cell phone bought her a little more time. She stood near the door with the phone to her ear, listening to Jonella explain their financial future.
“We could both get jobs together,” Jonella was saying.
“I don’t know, Jonella,” Lux answered.
“Girl, if you ain’t interested in easy money, I ain’t gonna force it down you. Get your ass over here though. I’m getting this job, and I got stuff I need you to do.”
Charlie was looking away, taking an order. A second later he was busing a table. Would he ever stop and look at her? She felt stupid and so, turning her back on the café, Lux hit the street, jumped on the subway and headed back to Queens to help Jonella solve her financial crisis.
“You crazy!” Jonella shouted when Lux again rejected her pitch for their bright new future. “We should be strippers! It’s too freaking perfect for us! We could do it together. I mean, not on stage together cuz then we gotta share tips, but like work at the same club at the same time.”
“I dunno,” sighed Lux. “I’m hoping this gay guy comes through with an office job for me.”
“No girl, we gotta do this,” Jonella insisted.
“I don’t think it’s right for me. I don’t think it’s where I want to go with myself.”
“Whatchoo talking about? Where you going? You taking yourself on vacation? With what money, girl? Strippin’s big money. Girls like us need cash.”
“Nah, I don’t wanna.”
Jonella thought Lux was an idiot who couldn’t understand the big picture. She figured once Lux saw the benefits of stripping, she would jump right in.
“Well, jus come wit me then,” Jonella said gently. “You come hole my hand cuz the first time gotta be a little scary. Jonella’s gonna lay it down, rake in da green, and you come get with me when you ready, baby.”
To her credit, Jonella had already done a lot of the research necessary to apply for the job she wanted. She found out from talking to one of the girls that worked at the Tip Top Club that the “strip” in stripping no longer included the tantalizing act of removing clothing. Rather, a girl simply appeared naked on stage and danced around. And, that very afternoon at the open audition, that is exactly what Jonella did. She did not make the first cut.
“Who do I gotta fuck to take my clothes off around here?” Jonella demanded. Lux came with Jonella, for moral support. She held Jonella’s hand and her clothes. Lux thought her old friend had done an admiral job of gyrating naked across the stage, but the manager did not agree with that assessment.
“Listen,” the manager said gently as he gave Jonella the bad news, “o fat girl like you, she need to do more than just shake her shit around the floor. Come back tonight you see my show, you see what my girls do.”
It took Lux a minute to understand that the manager’s heavily accented “o” in “o fat girl” meant “old.” Jonella, like Lux, was all of twenty-three years old.
“You ain’t old, girl,” Lux whispered to Jonella as they stood in the dressing room of the strip club. Jonella waved it away as she threw on her clothes. She didn’t care if some strip club manager thought she was old or fat. She just wanted money.
That night Jonella and Lux returned to the strip club to see what strippers actually did in lieu of removing clothes. The manager remembered the girls and waived the cover charge and two-drink minimum. The atmosphere in the bar was jovial and the audience coed. Jonella watched the stage with serious concentration as almostnaked women filled in the not-stripping part of stripping with some serious and athletic tricks that included flinging themselves towards the audience and then catching themselves on the pole in the center of the dance floor.
One woman hung upside down from the pole, her feet in the air. Then she shook her shoulders so her breasts wobbled. The second to last dancer was a very pretty girl with large young breasts who did very little other than dance around naked. The last girl on, the evening’s finale, was a scarred, heavyset brunette who looked about forty years old. She stood on her head and breathed cigarette smoke out of her vagina. She got a huge round of applause and both the men and women in the audience inundated her with sweaty crinkled dollar bills.
As Lux watched the continuing parade of naked women shake the money tree, she tried to imagine what Charlie the Coffee Boy would say about a stripper whose name rhymed with “ducks.” Would a guy who blushed like that understand how much she wanted to buy a second apartment? Should she care about what a guy like that was capable of understanding? In the end it was Auntie Who-ah gravely voice that growled the loudest. “Do what makes you happy,” was always Auntie Whoah’s cryptic advice.
“I gotta work on my upper body strength,” Jonella said as she pushed Lux out of the strip club and into the subway. “And I gotta get me some of them shoes. Them girls all had serious shoes. Wonder where you get shoes like that?”
“We’ll look on the Net,” Lux told her as the train took them home.
“What net?” Jonella asked.
“Internet. We’ll Google ‘shoes for strippers.’”
Jonella had no freaking idea what Lux was talking about, but that wasn’t unusual. It sounded from Lux’s tone of voice that she was planning to help Jonella find stripper shoes and even had an idea about where to start looking. That was enough for Jonella so she smiled and nodded in agreement.
Lux figured after this rejection Jonella would forget the whole stripping thing, but the next morning, Jonella showed up at Lux’s mother’s house earlier than usual. She insisted that Lux begin helping her search for stripper shoes.
“Take me to the net,” Jonella said happily as she jumped into Lux’s twin bed.
“Ok. We gotta get over to the public library,” Lux said sleepily.
“They got stripper shoes at the lieberry?”
“Yeah.”
Sitting at the library’s computer, Lux quickly found Google, typed in “Stripper Shoes” and got more than ten pages of companies with websites that sold sho
es for strippers.
“Hey, do that again and see what they got for cheap stripper shoes,” Jonella suggested as she leaned over Lux’s shoulder.
“Discount Stripper Shoes” brought up only three entries. Lux picked the first website and scrolled down to show Jonella what was available in her size. Jonella picked out two pairs that seemed good to her and then they proceeded to the checkout.
“You got a credit card?” Lux asked.
“Girl, I ain’t even got a bank account.”
Lux thought about it for a moment and then decided to go out on a limb.
“Uh, hi Brooke. This is Lux,” she said into her cell phone. She explained the situation, that neither she nor Jonella had a credit card, and that Lux would promise to pay her back quickly. Brooke was delighted to help and, rolling out of her bed and over to her computer, she found the website and completed the ladies’ transaction. She even bought a pair for herself.
“So?” Brooke asked lazily, “what do you need stripper shoes for?”
When Lux told Brooke that Jonella was trying to talk her into being a stripper, Brooke suddenly shouted into the phone, “No! Don’t! Where are you? The public library? Which public library? Don’t move.”
“Why?” Lux asked.
“Because I am coming over there right now!”
Lux had never heard Brooke shout before. Her voice was surprisingly big with a bit of a growl. Jonella said the library gave her the willies, and she wasn’t going to wait there all day to meet some bitch from the other side of the river. Jonella had scored her shoes and wanted to do other things with her day. In the end, Brooke agreed to meet Lux at Aimee’s house.
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