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Eighty Days Amber (Eight Days)

Page 9

by Jackson, Vina


  Quite the opposite of Chey. Who, right now, had left me scarred and empty and must have been, yet again, out of town on some illegal errand or job, or he would have otherwise been in the audience at the Grand tonight and made himself known, if not begged me to return to his fold.

  ‘Would you dance for me again?’ Lucian asked.

  ‘Not tonight?’ I said. ‘It was a one-off. I must stick to the rules.’

  ‘Tomorrow, then?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t work every day,’ I replied.

  ‘I’ll pay,’ he added.

  ‘It’s not a question of money,’ I said.

  ‘Oh . . .’

  He was just a man and right then I knew I was a puppet mistress.

  ‘Where are you from?’ I asked.

  ‘Omaha, Nebraska,’ he said. ‘But I now live in California.’

  As he said that, all of a sudden New York felt like a sad, cold and grey place, full of the memories of Chey and everything that hadn’t worked out, and I had a hunger for something new.

  ‘I will dance for you there,’ I said. ‘Take me to California and I will.’

  His eyes lit up.

  ‘Two conditions,’ I quickly improvised, noting his reaction. ‘We go tomorrow and I cannot promise that I will sleep with you. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. We’ll just see. Play it by ear, but we can always be friends.’

  He gulped.

  He was a nice man, but a voice inside me was whispering maliciously in my ear that good men would never prove enough and that only bad ones could now fill me and my soul. But Lucian, right then, was the next best thing and I was damn well seizing the opportunity.

  I knew he’d proven the highest bidder for the lap-dance auction, but never even guessed how wealthy he was.

  I only found out when we passed through the VIP terminal at JFK and were driven to a private hangar where he’d leased a private jet that stood in waiting for us.

  I stayed true to my word, and danced for Lucian in the enormous lounge in his Venice Beach house that overlooked a quiet canal. Every night.

  I became his private dancer.

  Daytimes, while he was working in his study at the back of the house, I would go for a walk along the boardwalk, sometimes reaching as far as Santa Monica, where I’d invariably reward myself with an ice-cream at the end of the pier. On every occasion, a different set of flavours to break up the monotony.

  I became a tourist in La-La Land. One of thousands of pretty women.

  After every dance, Lucian would leave a wad of notes for me, keeping our relationship as a strictly businesslike transaction.

  Behind his glasses, he watched me move like a kid in a candy shop, ever embarrassed by his erections. I told him he could touch himself if he wanted, but he was too shy to do so in my presence. After a week of this, I went to his room one night and slept with him. I owed him that.

  Lucian was adequate but no more. Tenderly clumsy, affectionate, annoyingly verbal, although every time his babbling flow of words became too soppy and sentimental I would promptly bring my fingers to my lips and quiet him.

  Apart from the sex, it felt as if I was living with the brother I’d never had. Once I’d moved into his bedroom, I continued dancing for him in the evenings, but refused to accept his money. It didn’t feel right any longer.

  But I was not made out to be a woman of leisure and the blandness of California and Lucian’s gentle personality soon began to tire me.

  ‘I’m a dancer,’ I told him as we were sipping mojitos on the terrace of a plush restaurant on Figueroa Boulevard one evening. I’d spent the afternoon shopping downtown but even the clothes in California failed to enthuse me. ‘I need to dance, for an audience, not just for one guy. Or I don’t feel whole . . .’

  He sighed, as if he sensed what I had in mind.

  ‘It’s your life, Luba. I won’t stop you.’

  I made him swear he would not try to come to the places where I might find work. Explained how I wanted to keep our private life and my professional dancing strictly apart. He reluctantly agreed.

  I found a gig at the White Flamingo near Burbank. It was a dive, and the tips were poor, but I could lose myself in the dance. The shady operators who ran the joint couldn’t keep their hands to themselves and insisted I play more cheerful music. I didn’t kid myself: it was stripping, not dancing any more.

  It was like living in two separate worlds, both carefully insulated from each other. The gaudy lights of the Burbank club at night and the peaceful byways of Venice Beach and Lucian’s house throughout the day. Any girl would have yearned for the latter, but something inside me was madly attracted to the danger and glamour of the former.

  Lucian had to go to Canada for a conference in London, Ontario, and I accompanied him to the airport. He had arranged for the hire limo to drive me back home after we’d parted. Barely five minutes away from LAX, the driver had just come off Airport Boulevard and had taken a minor road that would lead us to the coast when I spotted a large ram-shackle building on our right. A sign outside flickered feebly in the daylight sun. ‘SIN CITY’ and below the capital letters: ‘Dancers Badly Needed’. It was more of a sprawling shack, with whitewashed walls and a corrugated-iron roof. I asked the driver to stop, got out and dismissed him.

  The manager was Russian. His accent was from the Baltic regions.

  ‘You know how to dance?’ he asked. His breath smelled of vodka.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Ah, Russki . . .’ There was no hiding the fact once I opened my mouth.

  ‘I’m in America. I speak English here.’

  He nodded and gave me a familiar look. I stripped and faced him.

  ‘Small tits,’ he remarked, grabbing hold of one and checking its firmness. His hand was strong and calloused. ‘The Americans, they like bigger. If you want, we can pay for operation, and then you pay back over a few months, no?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I stay this way. Big is not my style.’ I stared at him defiantly.

  ‘You have a name?’ he asked.

  ‘Luba.’

  He purred in appreciation, and recited the house rules. For what they were worth – apparently almost anything went here.

  The devil in me wanted to know how low I could stoop. Would I go full circle and end up giving blow jobs at the back of the club against its whitewashed walls?

  I agreed to start the following day. Final shift of the day. There was a bus stop round the corner of Sin City, and the bus took me all the way to the Venice Beach seafront, with its gaudy parade of T-shirt stands, parading roller skaters and run-down bars. I was about to take one of the streets that led inland to the canals and Lucian’s house when my attention was caught by the imposing silhouette of a tall blond man in running gear exiting a store. For a moment my heart stopped, but I focused my gaze and realised he was nothing like Chey, just the same height and build.

  As my breath returned to its natural rhythm, I noted the colourful images spread across the shop window. It was a tattoo parlour.

  Had it been a sign? A further indication that my life was about to change? For good or for bad.

  I walked in.

  ‘I want a tattoo.’

  The guy, all long hippie hair in dreads, looked up at me. When he asked where I wanted the tattoo, my response was immediate.

  I knew I was a creature formed by sex and that it would always be a part of me.

  I slipped out of my skirt and panties.

  ‘Here.’ I pointed to the area of my cunt.

  He was not taken aback in the slightest and handed me a sheet of possible illustrations.

  ‘Most popular images there are roses or dolphins. You choose the size. I’ll price accordingly.’

  I declined the examples. ‘I know what I want,’ I said. And fell silent.

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘A gun,’ I said.

  I sat in a worn leather chair at the back of the store, which reminded me of a dentist’s. But the rest of the room was surpr
isingly light, clean and sterile, almost high tech in its clean lines. I had expected something sordid.

  It hurt like hell. Like nothing I had ever felt before.

  A little like how it might feel to have a scalpel slowly cut across heavy sunburn. Halfway between the pain of severe heat and severe cold. But it also felt terribly erotic, and the wetness spread between my legs as the skilful but apparently indifferent tattooist went about his job, his touch as light as feather and delicate.

  He stepped back and handed me a small rectangular mirror in which my naked cunt stared back at me.

  And the closely adjoining new tattoo.

  The minuscule gun.

  It even looked like Chey’s Sieg Sauer.

  I was whole, no longer empty, and Chey was forever a part of me.

  The tattoo opened something up inside me. It was as if the tattooist had tapped into a vein, marked my soul as well as my skin.

  It was a tiny drawing. A gun, unremarkable from a distance. To the patrons who sat at the tables metres from the stages I danced on, it could have been anything. A Chinese symbol, my star sign (I was an Aries), a flower. But any man, or woman for that matter, who got close enough would recognise the barrel of the Sieg Sauer that pointed directly at my sex.

  I noticed a change both in me and in my customers from the moment that I was inked.

  My movements became more athletic, riskier. I chose darker music, danced to Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ and Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Voodoo Child’. I sashayed like a femme fatale, twisted like a woman possessed and showed as much pink as I damn well pleased, and if management didn’t like it, they soon changed their tune when I became the star performer every night.

  The men at the bars and downmarket clubs I now found myself dancing in loved it. I was the dangerous one, the wild girl, and the more wild they believed me to be, the wilder I became.

  Inevitably, Lucian began to bore me. He fucked in one of the same three ways each and every time: missionary, doggy style, or me on top. Always in the bedroom at the same time three or four evenings per week with the same feeble expression on his face and he thrust only until he was spent, never bothering to check whether I had also orgasmed.

  I didn’t fake it, like the girls in the dormitories had always insisted was the polite thing to do if you wanted to keep your man happy. I didn’t give a damn. Instead, I waited for him to roll off me and fall asleep and then I turned over and teased myself to climax, wetting my fingers with the seed he’d spilled inside me and then performing a familiar dance across my clitoris until I felt the customary fire surge through my loins and into my mind and heart.

  When I wasn’t dancing, or masturbating, I felt vacant. California was too sanguine for me. Once the fun wore off, I found the city and its inhabitants vacuous. I missed the cold winters and the melancholy of New York, and even of St Petersburg. And, not being able to drive, I was forced to use cabs everywhere, which, despite Lucian’s generosity, irked and cost me.

  I was empty.

  Naturally I could have turned to drugs and alcohol like the other girls at the clubs who numbed their senses before and after every shift to make the time pass and the undressing easier, but I pitied them, and then began to find them pitiful, snorting their earnings up their noses each night to get them through the next.

  But very quickly, the whole bright Californian tackiness got to me badly, the flat light, the anomie, and I realised that even my dancing was suffering and I was all too often going through the motions and, possibly, stooping to the vulgar levels of the other dancers. I was on a downwards path.

  The men I was beginning to accept into my bed whenever I felt in need of something more substantial than Lucian weren’t even exciting any longer. Or bad enough. They were just indifferent.

  Maybe it’s something about being Russian.

  You become philosophical about things, pragmatic even.

  I knew something would come up.

  And it did.

  Following a run-of-the-mill set performed to a house full of surfers and leather-clad bikers and mechanics in a joint close to LAX, I met Madame Denoux.

  She’d been in town scouting for talent in the classier places off Beverly Hills and Hollywood, after a fruitless trek through the silicone-infested stages of Orange County, where the girls were getting younger and more artificial by the day. Her flight back to New Orleans had been delayed due to bad weather conditions in the north-west and, put up in one of airport hotels, she was killing time visiting the nearest clubs in the area for want of anything better to do.

  I’d already showered and dressed after my dance, the club was only half full by then with most of the surfers in search of an early night to catch the prime dawn waves and the bikers back with their wife and kids. I was heading for the exit, clad in just an old T-shirt and a pair of cut-off shorts when I heard a woman’s voice calling out to me.

  ‘Hey!’

  I stopped in my tracks and faced the older woman standing at the bar, nursing what looked like whiskey or bourbon.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You’re Luba, the Russian?’

  I nodded.

  ‘You’re wasted in a place like this, girl.’

  She had an unusual accent, American but with a slow drawl, which I would later find out was not only Southern but from New Orleans. She was fifth-generation Cajun.

  Her form was voluptuous, held tight inside a green velvet dress, plump white breasts spilling from its elegant sheath.

  ‘Don’t I know it?’ I said. ‘So what?’

  Was she hitting on me? Recently, it had been happening more and more. Was it a West Coast thing? On occasions I had been tempted to experiment, but as most of the other women who’d taken a shine to me had been baristas at the various clubs or, more rarely, other dancers, it would have made matters awkward. Never mix pleasure with business, someone had once told me.

  ‘I own a place. Down home in the French Quarter, in New Orleans,’ she said. She handed me a card. It was pale red with the type in black italics. All it said was ‘The Place’, and listed a telephone number. I raised it to my eyes and gave it a quizzical glance.

  ‘It’s very exclusive,’ she added. ‘Not open to the general public. Usually by invitation only. Classy.’

  I waved at the late-night bar attendant and ordered an iced tea.

  ‘You have my attention,’ I told Madame Denoux, after we’d formally shaken hands and she’d told me her name.

  ‘Luba. It’s a great name. Real one?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There were rumours floating around about you, you know. You were in New York, mostly danced at the Grand, no? Then you just vanished off the face of the earth. My good friend Blanca was distraught, I hear. Any reason?’

  ‘I had my reasons,’ I commented.

  ‘It’s usually man trouble, no?’

  ‘How perceptive of you.’ I grinned.

  ‘Anyway, none of my business. But dancers are my business. What a coincidence to find you here . . .’

  I smiled. ‘We Russians believe in fate. Always have.’

  She set her glass down on her counter decisively.

  ‘I would like you to work for me,’ she declared.

  ‘The Place?’

  ‘Yes. We’re in a quiet, discreet area in the Vieux Carré. One dance per night, only four days a week. Say a three-month contract. We’d certainly make it worth your while. After that, you might wish to stay or I have international contacts if you intend to move on. You have class, although I don’t think you were at your best tonight, were you?’

  ‘I wasn’t. Just dancing? No obligatory extra-curricular business?’

  ‘The occasional lap dance, for certain clients. There are added possibilities, but that’s something for a later discussion. I think you have class and realise that what we provide can also be artful. So much more than just nudity.’

  She looked me up and down, not like a butcher assessing a piece of meat, but like a connoisseur in search of intang
ible things.

  One week later I was in New Orleans, my clothes and handbag full of amber pieces stored away in the rickety bamboo cupboard of a clean bedroom in a family-run bed and breakfast in Métairie.

  When I informed Lucian I was leaving him, he didn’t appear surprised. It was almost as if he was expecting my departure. I think that, deep in his heart, he’d always known I was just passing through and that I had only stayed with him this long because of his money. He wasn’t entirely wrong, of course, but I held him in much affection nonetheless. He had been the right man at the right time, but the times had quickly changed and my demons had taken over, acknowledging the fact he was not my future. He generously gave me his blessing and wished me good luck. We agreed to stay in touch, but never did.

  Once again, I was living to dance, reverting to my classical ambience and music, no longer even trying to titillate, at ease with myself and what I was doing.

  It was New Year’s Eve, just a few hours into the last day of December. I could almost touch January. I was ending my set, the music slowly fading, impressionistic, like isolated dots in a landscape. I awoke from the dream of my past and my eyes fell upon the pretty redhead sitting with her man amongst the sparse audience. And I saw the way she looked at me, as if I were a mirror.

  5

  Dancing with Lovers

  She had the demeanour of an animal straining on a leash.

  She was a simmering and barely contained pool of energy, an arrangement of chemicals just waiting for an igniting spark.

  I had no further time to play spy, as the final notes of Debussy drifted out of the loudspeakers and into the ether, and the spotlight plunged from bright white into black.

  A hush spread through the audience as it always did in response to the erotic physicality of my set, its abrupt ending and the sudden darkness that seemed to move from the stage and across the small audience like a fog, surprise muffling speech for a few moments as I scooped up my dress and quickly ducked behind the backstage curtain, careful not to make a sound.

 

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