The Art of Undressing

by Stephanie Lehmann

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Art of Undressing

  A New American Library Book / published by arrangement with the author

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2005 by Stephanie Lehmann

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

  For information address:

  The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

  http://www.penguinputnam.com

  ISBN: 0-7865-5440-1

  A NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY BOOK®

  New American Library Books first published by The New American Library Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY and the “NAL” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  Electronic edition: February, 2005

  acknowledgments

  w riting about a stripper means doing all sorts of grueling research, and since I couldn’t do it alone, I want to thank my friends who went with me on field trips to enjoy, complain, giggle, analyze, and turn down lap dances: Wendy Walker, Andrea Schell, Shannon Mullen, her friend who hurt her back falling off a bar, and Franny Silverman. I also want to thank my husband for staying home.

  The following people had the less enjoyable task of reading early drafts and giving me invaluable feedback: Julie Carpenter, Anne Galin, Leah Pike, Elizabeth Audley, and Minnette. Thank you, thank you.

  The following people were an important part of my research on stripping and/or the sex industry: Annie Sprinkle, Sky London, Elisabeth Eaves, Lily Burana, Matt Sycamore, Heidi Mattson, Tim Keefe, Leah Stauffer, Sheila Kelley, Jill Nagle, Shay Stephen, Merri Lisa Johnson, and Katherine Frank. Their inspiring and informative books, performances, classes, and conversations helped me immensely in my imaginings.

  I also want to acknowledge the following food experts who have written about and shared their experiences in restaurant kitchens: Andrew MacLauchlan, Jeremiah Tower, Anthony Bourdain, Michael Ruhlman, Helen Studley, and Karen Hubert Allison. Also, thanks to Lisa Hazen for loaning me those books. And Simon Feil for the last-minute read.

  I want to express my appreciation to Elaine Koster for teaching me so much about the publishing business, Rian Montgomery for her enthusiasm and support, and Elizabeth Kandall for helping me think again, as always, and especially for that conversation about “sex objects.”

  I also want to thank my daughter, Madeleine, and my son, David, for tolerating me when I’m grumpy about having a lot of work to do. Because you constantly distract me from my writing to watch Austin Powers on DVD, to shop for clothes, to remind me to call the dentist, and to defrost frozen meals, I’m always able to return to my work with a fresh sense of urgency. What more could a mom want?

  And, finally, I want to express gratitude to my agent, Stephanie Kip Rostan, and my editor, Kara Cesare, for joining me on this project. Thanks for seeing what this could be from the beginning, and for being so great to work with.

  chapter one

  “ s o you all think I’m a whore!”

  Thirty-three students of all ages, shapes, and sizes had shown up for my mother’s beginner class on how to strip. “And you all wanna be whores too!” An ex-stripper who goes by the name Coco Winters, my mom was well of aware of the irony. She’d always been considered a slut, and now it was fashionable to be a slut. Women flocked to her classes so they could learn from a professional.

  It was my job to start the Madonna CD when she did her demo and sell the products when class was over. Feathery fans, hot pink boas, plastic pearl necklaces, vibrators, autographed copies of her self-published book How to Strip for Your Lover.

  I really did not want to be there.

  But her assistant Sunny was on vacation in Greece, and when Coco asked me to fill in for July, I couldn’t say no. Then Sunny kept extending her vacation, and now it was almost September. As I stood in back watching, I couldn’t help but feel foolish. The good little daughter—helping her mom sell vibrators.

  I was feeling especially sensitive about it because that day, I’d moved back in with her. Yes, moved back in with my mom. Hired a “Man with Van named Stan” and driven from One Hundred and Fifteenth Street to Forty-eighth Street with all my stuff. Boom. There I was. Twenty-five years old. Back in my childhood bedroom.

  “So,” Stan had asked me, “you’re shacking up with your mom?” We were speeding down Broadway catching one yellow light after another. “I hope you get along.”

  “We do okay.” Coco and I had our problems, but nothing I couldn’t handle. At least I wouldn’t have to pay rent.

  “I’d live on the streets before moving in with my mom,” Stan had said. “But she’s uptight.”

  “My mom is the opposite of uptight.” Familiar stores slipped past. “Which does present its own problems.”

  At the huge intersection across from Lincoln Center, we stopped for a red light. That’s when my bureau, which was stacked on top of my other stuff, slid forward and bumped me in the back of my head. Not hard, but it was disconcerting. I turned around and pushed it back. The light changed. Stan sped up only to brake quickly for another red light, so I leaned forward to make sure I didn’t get hit again. “You sure this stuff is packed in okay?”

  “It’s fine. Everything is under control.”

  I had no reason to believe him, seeing as he didn’t appear to be under control. Unshaven, greasy hair, red-rimmed eyes. It didn’t take a degree in physics to figure if he slammed on his brakes, the bureau would shoot forward and smash into perhaps both our skulls. I could’ve gotten out of the van, wounded his pride, and let him get decapitated by himself. But maybe he’d decide to ride off with all my belongings, and I’d never be able to track him down. Not that it would’ve been the worst thing. My most valuable possession was my set of knives. I was particularly fond of my eight-inch Global chef’s knife. It was Japanese-made—cheaper but more user-friendly than the heavy, high-carbon, hard-to-sharpen Henckels and Wusthofs. It had become like a natural extension of my right hand. Most exciting of all, it had a spiffy stainless steel handle.

  I get excited by stainless steel the way most women get excited about diamonds. Its solid silver shine makes me feel so secure. I love the way every time you wipe it down it looks all new again.

  I checked to make sure my knives were okay. Yes. There they were, right behind me, wrapped inside a thick piece of blue canvas that rolled up like a pirouette cookie. I could just grab them and get out, couldn’t I?

  But no, I wanted to be polite. So I sat there and silently pleaded with the powers that be to allow me to make my sixty-seven-block journey without a spinal cord injury.

  “So may I ask why you’re moving?” Stan asked. “I like to hear people’s stories. Usually it means they’re going through a major change for the better—or worse. Sounds like you’re on the downhill side.” He chuckled. “Am I right?”

  I’d gotten his name off a flier stapled to a telephone pole, but I still felt the need to defend myself. “My roommate’s boyfriend is moving in. She has the lease, so I have to go. And I’m about to start at a culinary school that’s just a few blocks from my mom, so it mad
e sense to move back in with her. After graduation, I’ll get a job somewhere and move on. It’s just temporary.”

  There was something reassuring about making a “pit stop” in the apartment I grew up in before getting back out in the race. Even if Coco did drive me crazy, it was a familiar kind of crazy, and there was something comforting in that.

  “That’s cool. Those cooking schools are expensive, aren’t they?”

  “Yep.” When I’d first looked into it, I couldn’t believe how expensive. The one that seemed to have the best program for me (and wasn’t even the most expensive) was ten thousand dollars per semester. They had a scholarship that knocked off some of that, but still. Coco was on a budget, and I didn’t want to ask my father for help, so it wasn’t clear how I’d be able to pull it off. My parents had been divorced since I was a baby. Coco had always been too proud to take alimony, and, other than college, I’d never asked for anything beyond my child support. But I gritted my teeth and asked, and he said yes, even though I could tell he wasn’t thrilled to finance my decision to get a “degree” (certificate) that would only help me get a “substandard” (crummy-paying low-status) job.

  “That’s something I’ve thought of doing too,” Stan said.

  It seemed like everyone (other than my dad) wanted to go to cooking school when they heard I was going. Even Coco. I could still hear her voice in my head when I told her. That’s no fair. I want to go too! When I told her I was thinking of specializing in pastry, she was even more jealous. Desserts, she liked to say, are “sex on a plate.” In my opinion, sex was “dessert in bed.”

  When we were ten blocks from my building, I called my boyfriend, Ian, on my cell. He was supposed to be stationed in front of my building.

  “I didn’t forget,” he said.

  “So you’re there?”

  “On my way. I got stuck downtown.”

  “How long will you be?”

  “A half hour?”

  “We need you there now!”

  “Start without me. I’ll get there as fast as I can.”

  I hung up on him and tried not to be angry. No one wants to help you move, right? That’s why you pay a complete stranger to do it. Still, I knew it wasn’t just that. Our relationship was dying a slow death, and neither of us was able to put an end to it.

  I called my mom to see if she was around, but just got her voice mail. I didn’t leave a message. “My boyfriend is late,” I confessed to Stan, “we’ll have to start without him.”

  “One of us has to stay in the van or I’ll get towed.”

  “We can take turns taking things up.”

  I could tell he was annoyed. And really, twenty dollars an hour did not seem like enough to compensate him for having to do this. We pulled in front of my building. Coco had inherited the apartment on the third floor from my grandma, who got it at an insider’s price in the seventies when the building went co-op. Even though it was just a crummy old tenement on a noisy street in midtown, that was too good a deal to pass up. The totally central location made it convenient to everything.

  There was no legal parking on the street. If a cop came by, we’d get a ticket. “Let’s do this fast,” Stan said. The apartment was in one of four walk-ups that had managed to escape being torn down for office buildings. At the eastern end of the block there were huge, modern high-rises. Rockefeller Center was right around the corner. But as you headed west towards Eighth Avenue, the street became more run-down, with lots of small businesses catering to the people who flooded the area on weekdays. On my block alone there was a theater, a parking garage, a nail salon, a Duane Reade Pharmacy, a tarot card reader, a pawn shop, and a guy who sold ties and baseball caps against the side of a building under an awning. Plus almost every variety of food: Chinese, Indian, an Irish bar, a small grocery. On the ground floor of my building was a deli where they made fresh bagels. The street was totally congested with traffic, and police cruised the area like crazy.

  We propped the back door open, loaded up, dodged through the never-ending pedestrian parade, and got everything we could up the front stoop stairs. I stayed in the van (feeling guilty) while Stan took it all up. Then we had to deal with the bureau. It was too bulky for him to take by himself, so we both had to carry it up, and it was heavy, even with the drawers out. Then we ran down to see if his van was still there. Thank god it was. No ticket. We’d done it!

  I thanked Stan profusely and gave him three twenties plus a ten-dollar tip. He wished me luck and drove away. That’s when Ian sauntered up the street in his baggy green khakis and navy blue T-shirt. Tall, tan, wiry, and slightly grungy-looking with his unshaven face and spiky, short dirty-blond hair. Looking at him still had the power to make me go soft inside.

  “I’m here! How can I help?”

  “Your timing is amazing.”

  Ian’s reason for being late: He was at Tower Records on East Fourth Street. “I was listening to some tracks and lost track of time. Sorry!”

  We went up to the apartment, a small two-bedroom with one hallway running the length of the apartment. The kitchen faced the street. A big blue sign for HOT BAGELS was right outside the two front windows. Then there was the living room, my room, then the bathroom, then Coco’s room in the back. The place was run-down and cramped and a perpetual mess. Home sweet home.

  My room was unchanged from when I’d left for college. Same collection of stuffed Tweety Birds lined up on a shelf, a poster of Alanis Morissette, and my worn-out old braided blue rug on the floor. One thing I’d always loved about growing up there was how all that life and activity was going on right outside, while inside, in my quiet windowless room, I had my own cozy, safe and serene little world.

  I shut the door and began to unpack. Ian stretched out on my childhood bed, a twin, and neither of us spoke to the fact that I was moving in with my mom instead of, say, my boyfriend, who had his own one-bedroom in Washington Heights. I’d suggested the possibility, but he’d nixed it. He was a musician, that’s where he worked, he needed the place to himself . . . His instrument? A computer. He was obsessed with mastering this program where he composed on his PC and could “play” all the instruments himself. I’d been prepared to give him his space. I wouldn’t be demanding. After all, I’d be busy with school. The idea was incredibly attractive to me. Without actually being newlyweds, we could pretend to be newlyweds. Play house. Be there for each other at the end of the day. Didn’t that sound fun?

  Evidently not.

  Still. He was so damn cute. Maybe there was hope. Maybe he would come to appreciate me. I stretched out next to him on the narrow mattress. I wanted to rest my cheek on the soft T-shirt of his chest. Wrap my legs around his legs. But I was feeling insecure. Wishing he would touch me first. “I wish my mom didn’t have a class tonight.”

  “Can I come?”

  “No.” I’d let him come once before. Always regretted it.

  “What’s the big deal?”

  “I just don’t enjoy watching you watching my mother take her clothes off.”

  “Don’t you think it’s kind of funny . . . how different you are from Coco?”

  He was referring to my modesty. In the beginning of our relationship, I’d made sure to get into bed before all my clothes were off and wanted the lights out by the time I was naked. I was better now. Could actually, for example, make it across the room naked in front of him. Still, I had to pretend to both of us that I felt casual letting him see me “in all my glory.”

  “You wish I would do a striptease?”

  “That would be fun.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Why?”

  “If only I could be more like my mother, then we’d all be happy.”

  “No one expects that.”

  “You do.”

  He chuckled. “You are not by any stretch of the imagination like your mother.”

  The front door of the apartment opened and closed. Had to be her. “Hello!” she yelled, coming straight back to my room. I sat up. �
�Knock, knock! Can I come in?”

  Coco opened the door without waiting. I was just getting off the bed.

  “Whoops! Sorry. You two aren’t having sex already, are you?”

  I gritted my teeth and went to set up my bureau. If she knew how infrequently we were doing it these days, she’d be sadly disappointed. “Hi, Mom.”

  Mom. Forty-three years old. Tall and gorgeous. Long, thick auburn hair with flaming red highlights. Pale, milky skin lightly salted with freckles. Luscious lips, big green eyes. I was a slightly plainer or should I say understated version of her. Not very pleasant to witness Ian enjoying my mother’s ultratight burgundy stretch top with implants spilling out all over.

  “Hi, Coco, how are you?”

  “Great! So how’s it going here? The move went okay?” She lifted a foot and unstrapped a hot pink sequined T-strap sandal.

  “Yes.” I pushed my bureau up against the wall.

  “Ginger’s a little annoyed. I was supposed to help, but I was too late,” Ian said.

  Coco removed her other sandal. “As long as she’s mad at you and not me.”

  “She’s not mad,” I said, sliding an empty drawer back into the bureau.

  “Okay. Well then, come ’ere!”

  She opened her arms to me. I went to her.

  “Welcome home!” She gave me a big hug and our breasts collided. “Mwah!” She gave me a big, sloppy kiss on the forehead. I caught a whiff of her Chanel.

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  It did feel good to hear her say that. I was aware that she might not be completely thrilled to have her space invaded.

  “So if you’ll excuse me, I’ll leave you two alone. Gotta get ready for class.” She hooked both sandals on the crook of an index finger. Ian checked out her toned, bare legs as she left the room.

  I closed the door behind her and went to the closet. It seemed smaller than I remembered. Good thing I didn’t have many clothes. Some of my old games were still in there. Life. Risk. Sorry. Trouble.