“It’s biodynamic,” he said.
She looked at him for a moment.
“I just feel,” she said, “like getting really drunk.”
She watched a change come over Bill’s face. He seemed to not quite know what to say, to be censoring himself, distrusting or testing something in the situation.
“Well,” he said, quietly. “I can join you in that. I mean, if I may.”
She raised her glass, another cheers. He smiled, drank, set his own glass down.
“So you’re not going to tell me, are you,” he said, “how it is that I’m with a completely different human being from the human being I was with a few days ago.”
“We’re all different, all the time, aren’t we?”
“Fuck the sophomore philosophy student horseshit!” he said. “What happened to you in between?”
She considered this. She could tell him, of course. Spin a sexy story that might also be true. A striking teenage girl, mistaken identity. Drugs. Rooftop. There’d be, she thought, some kind of power in that. But it was hers and she was keeping it. She became aware of her wrists. They seemed more alive than any other part of her.
“No interest, then,” she said, “in the woman who didn’t know what a rarebit was.”
He tipped his head as if weighing the matter with gentlemanly circumspection.
“Well, she was different. Afraid of asking any questions.”
He tried again. “You were afraid. Of yourself or what you were getting into.”
“And now?” she said. Being told what you were was irresistible, albeit in a slightly sickening way. She was feeling, yes, a little sick.
He shrugged, took another sip, and she saw she wasn’t getting any more.
“You were quite bored before,” she offered.
“And boring. I’m sure I was boring, too.”
A mild sort of cruelty to just let the statement sit there, to let him accuse himself. So she did, for a moment. Then: “Well, yes. But also odiously pleased with yourself. Which is much worse.”
He slapped his hands on the bar, a silent chuckle that shook his shoulders. He was being a good sport. But it didn’t quite satisfy her.
“Hey, Bill?” she said, faking urgency.
“What?”
She pointed to her wineglass and smacked her other hand to her heart.
“Tell me, is this . . . ? Please tell me, is this wine biodynamic?”
“Uh . . . yeah, it is.”
“Oh, thank god,” she said, pantomiming relief. “Thank god. For a moment I thought it wasn’t. Because heaven fucking forfend we drink anything nonbiodynamic.”
And now he got it.
“Ah, okay.” He laughed. “All right.” And again, “Okay, then.”
Then he seemed to spot something over her shoulder and the temperature changed.
“Oh, fuck.”
“What?” she said.
“Get ready.”
“For wh—”
A man was clapping Bill on the shoulder. A fat man, whiskered, jowly, looking at Bill as though he were a chocolate eclair. His linen suit was wrinkled and his belly was revealed in a series of convex windows between the straining buttons of his shirt. The panama hat topping his florid face made Kate think of a boiled egg.
“Marrero!” he growled, tipping his head down, drawing the syllables out, in that way men did with other men’s names in moments of salutation.
Kate caught bad breath, a rot beneath the booze. Bill nodded at him and then side-eyed the hand that still lay heavy on his shoulder. The hand’s owner hesitated, then removed it, with a surprising delicacy. Now he was turning to her.
“Don’t tell me you’re of legal drinking age already, dear!” the man said. “I could have sworn you were still knee-high! And all that lovely hair lopped off!”
Bill, with undisguised disgust, said, “This is my friend Kate, Bailey.”
And Kate watched the man barrel on, amazed, wonder-
struck even, at his apparent impermeability to Bill’s highly obvious dislike.
Once he was gone she said, “Bloody hell. Who was that?”
“A very rich old cunt,” Bill said.
She flinched at the word. He looked quietly furious in his embarrassment, then took a mouthful of wine and seemed to collect himself slightly. “People tolerate him only because he gives a shitload of money to so-called important literary magazines. I mean, the guy’s favorite book is The Great fucking Gatsby, for fuck sake.”
She considered this for a moment, made a mental note to work out what was wrong with The Great Gatsby.
“He once held a Gatsby-themed party.” Bill gave a nasty laugh. “As if he had to make sure that no one would go to his fucking funeral.”
“Did he think I was someone else?”
“Can you imagine? A Gatsby party. What a cretin.”
She didn’t repeat the question.
“Anyway. I’m sorry you had to encounter him.”
“Bill,” she said. It felt strangely audacious, to say his name out loud like this.
“What?”
She hesitated, feared this was going to sound odd, or stupid, or both, when spoken aloud.
“You’ve never been scared of people, have you?”
“Of that old . . . ?” he said.
“No. People. In general. Not scared of what they might do to you. I don’t mean that. I mean more, just, the presence of a person, their, sort of . . . heat, just how much they are.”
This wasn’t working, it sounded like nonsense.
“How much?”
“Yes. Like . . . just how much,” she said, words spinning out of her now that communication seemed a lost cause. “Ugh, like the black hole of it, you know? Does that make sense?”
“No,” he said, with no apparent unkindness. “But I’m interested. Keep going.”
She thought of him on the stage, casual and kingly. How he’d held that pause before he’d decimated the grad student; the orchestrated cruelty of it.
“No, that’s it, really.”
She felt the heat of his look.
“I really wanted you to ask a question,” he confessed.
“Earlier?”
“Yeah. I was sort of willing it.”
“I could not have stood up and sung Blondie for you,” she said. “I’m tone deaf.”
“That was pretty amazing,” he said.
“So did you? Get onstage with her?”
He flung his hands around, in a way that was both evasive and expressive.
“Oh, you have to know that you can do anything you want!”
“Not true!” she said. Bleated it, almost.
“True. No one ever tells you, but it’s true.”
He was testing her, perhaps.
“Are you serious?”
“To be honest,” he said, “I believe I can no longer distinguish between serious and nonserious.”
“I think there’s a difference.”
“Try telling me that in twenty years.”
That stunned her, for a moment. She did a quick calculation. To be forty-five—unthinkable. And then, before she could say anything more, he was ordering a round of martinis, dirty ones, translucent brine spinning slow helixes in the glass. The night thickened, its sounds multiplied, and they kept talking. She’d so abandoned herself to wherever the rhythm went that the question he asked next didn’t even surprise her: a joke he wasn’t joking about.
“What’s your opinion on strip clubs?”
“My opinion?”
The bar was loud and crowded now. He was saying something about urgency.
“Urgency?” she shouted.
“No, agency. Agency! It fucks me off when people assume strippers don’t have agency. What kind of feminism doesn’t
allow for male desire? Dworkin, go home, you know?”
Kate, with shame, heard herself snort.
“Shall we go, then?” he yelled.
“Home?” she said.
“No! No—here’s the thing about strip clubs,” he said. He seemed to be lit up now with some kind of avidity, the keenest student in a seminar. “They’re the realest place I know.”
“Real, like . . . ?”
“Sincere. Honest,” he shouted back. “You’ll see. Real.”
And if she’d had time to actually think about it, maybe she would have said no, she didn’t really want to go. But this was one of those times that did not seem to allow for no; it was a truth she had already digested.
He took her hand, a hard grasp, and then they were out on the sidewalk, in the unremitting heat. His other hand reached out and up into the stream of the road, to summon and stop a cab, and it worked with the clean efficiency of a baseball hitting the hollow of a glove. A cab murmured to a stop beside them. Inside, on ripped black pleather seats, watching him, enraged, stabbing the taxi TV with a finger to shut it up, she felt the slow surprise of actually being in this cab. Its obvious motion, the stop and start in the evening’s traffic, seemed to stymie the weird propulsion that had been carrying her, and now it seemed preposterous to be lurching west across the city, to a destination neither of them had foreseen. But maybe he had. Maybe he’d planned this.
Now I’m boring him, she thought, calmly. And as she thought it, she felt him dig his fingertips into her palm, still staring out the window, as though he were doing it unconsciously. She imagined the series of half-moon indents his nails were leaving in her flesh and she tightened her hand in return, happy to be hurt.
It was a low, bronze-colored block of a building out on the West Side Highway, facing the lights of New Jersey across the water. A man the size and shape of a refrigerator—suited, headsetted, hands clasped over his groin as if what he was truly guarding were his very own genitals—nodded them in. Bass juddered up the stairs. A mirrorball swept a steady constellation around the black walls.
Bill had a way of summoning drinks at a bar that mirrored his talent with taxis: a chin lift, two fingers raised lightly.
Behind him, women moved around the poles lazily, as though they’d happened upon them and were idly testing them—housewives from a past generation, considering new appliances in a department store. The same was true of their own bodies, the way they’d occasionally run a hand over and around their breasts with a kind of unconsciousness. Their clothing made her think of childhood toys: the aquamarine and sugary pinks of Polly Pockets, the sweet, plasticky smell of doll limbs. Underwear as costume, ruffles and sequins and flounces, dress me up, undress me. Rounded surfaces that feigned to invite touch, but denied possession.
As though responding to an unseen signal, one of them kicked stacked inches of heel up in the air and spun horizontally, electric with speed, legs wrapped, hair flashing. She thought of the boys on the subway, in daylight, eons ago—WHAT TIME IS IT? SHOWTIME!
This is real, she cautioned herself. But this hard-faced bartender, those corpulent men enthroned with their champagne and unlit cigars, absurd and menacing in their sunglasses—all of them seemed like CGI figures. She turned to look at Bill, crackling and unkempt, crumpled over his drink, ignoring the scene behind him.
“What?” he said, smiling at her. Across the room a middle-aged, heavyset white woman, her blond hair an enormous, stiff confection, was dancing with a black guy whose gut protruded coyly, apologetically, over the top of his belt. They moved clumsily, their arms around each other as much from the need for ballast as from an indulgence of affection. Tripping a little, and swaying, and laughing, they stayed afloat, finding brief moments of grace.
Kate thought of the couple she and Inez had watched dancing in Washington Square, in the sunlight, and how they were echoed here, and how there seemed to be a consonance in things, in everything. How tempting to think this. And then she thought of George. The world was not a symphony.
Watching the dancers carried her into a kind of hypnosis. The movements they made were the same, the rhythms constant and recurring, as though all of them were animated by the same algorithm. The squat dip, the hip flick, the pole kick. Different bodies all enacting the same moves, over and over. She stared, drunk.
There were so many things to unlearn. The last room of breasts and thighs she remembered was the swimming pool changing room at school, where counteroffensive lesbophobia, the hysterical vigilance of its pitch, cut through the thick atmosphere and stuck in the back of your throat, sharp as cheap body spray.
He rested his fingers on her thigh, tentative.
“Is this okay?”
She was unsure whether he meant the situation or the touch. Being desired felt like desire. Recently, she’d registered that her sexual fantasies were all about being desired, and she felt bad about this. It seemed fucked—unfeministic. But then how could you call a fantasy fucked? You wanted what you wanted, didn’t you?
She remembered the lipstick in her bag, imagined its tight little capsule. Then she remembered the other thing in her bag, tucked tight between two bank cards.
“You okay?” he said. “We can go if you want.”
“No. Let’s stay.”
The hunger in his eyes looked almost like fear. With some startled reflex, a wish to stamp out that look, she kissed him. He kissed back—surprised, then pleased? He grabbed her hair.
She pulled away and stared.
“Too much,” he said.
She looked away, to the stage. Look at them, she instructed herself. Look at their bodies. Like them. There was a group by the stage’s edge, where a woman customer with a dark bob sat stiffly in her chair, knees clamped flush together, heavy-handed and embarrassed while a dancer bounced vigorously on her lap. Men watched.
“Is there someone you like?” he asked.
She knew he meant want. But could you want without liking? Didn’t they have to go together? Unlearn that, maybe. Her thoughts were bumping into each other.
“I’ll be right back,” she said.
The bathroom was a tiny red hole, one stall, one basin beneath a dim mirror scuffed and blackened around its edges. Inside the cubicle, she drew the lock and marveled that something as small as this modest rod of metal could seal a space into secrecy and safety. Shining her phone down on the ziplock bag, she keyed out a delicate fingernail. Leftovers, a gift from Inez. She’d gone with her to meet one of her men in black Lincolns, who murmured things like “How we doing, ladies,” when they got in, and “Y’all have a beautiful night now” when they left—professional niceties, asinine as “have a nice day,” but they made Kate happy. She emerged and angled her face into the mirror to see her pupils widen. It no longer made her feel like her lungs were exploding. They were only growing, church organs to fill cathedrals with sound. Light and noise erupted as the door swung open and belched a woman toward her, then closed, sealing the hush. It was the one with the frosted corona of hair that she’d seen dancing with the paunchy man.
Kate smiled at her in the mirror, and the woman returned the smile and said, “Oh, you’re so pretty,” as she collapsed a bit against the wall.
“It’s just mascara!”
Womanhood, its rules. The nonacceptance of compliments. Kate found the wand in her purse, flourished it, and cried, “Have some!” giddy with her own Maybelline munificence, and the woman joined her beside the mirror in a space hardly big enough for their bodies. They settled into a convivial intimacy, talking to each other’s reflection as they primped.
“You having a good night, sweetheart?” the woman asked. She was English, Kate realized. Essex, it sounded like.
“I am,” Kate declared, but the woman was talking on, letting out a lovely loose jumble of words.
“I’m here with this feller and h
e’s been buying me drinks all night and says he wants to marry me.”
“Oh, I saw you two dancing!” Kate cried, smoothing away some Surrey with a patina of Brooklyn, since it was important, somehow, that she not be revealed as a compatriot. “I saw you dancing and I thought, they love each other!”
She inhaled deeply now because here it came, and to enjoy it you had to go with it, otherwise you’d get left behind. And then the woman turned, so she was right up against Kate, and put her hand heavily on Kate’s shoulder. Rum and coke on her breath was rich and sweet. Kate steadied her.
“I do love him, you know? I really love him.” She shook her head messily for emphasis, tipping forward so that her hair fell against her half-closed eyes. Kate prized the mascara from her hand.
“Oh, thank you, darling,” the woman said. “I love him. You know?”
“I know.” Kate nodded. “That’s really great.”
“It’s really great,” she repeated, patting Kate’s shoulder. Then: “You’re a love. You’re so pretty. So pretty! Young thing like you. Wait till you get all old and fat like me.”
“No!” Kate said. “No! You’re gorgeous, really gorgeous.”
She was, in a way. Her magnificent hair, her black sequins. Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s made.
“You,” the woman began, then caught herself, swallowed.
“You need to be sick?” Kate asked.
“No, no, I’m all right, sweetheart.” She looked up at Kate’s face again, her eyes sliding until they fastened into focus. “All right,” said the woman. “Time to go in here.” She jerked her head in the direction of the cubicle.
“You,” she said, “you have a really, really great night, okay?”
“I will,” Kate said. “And you, too. Have a really wonderful night.”
Here she was, granting benedictions from the ladies’ room! And it was sincere. She meant them as truly as she’d ever meant anything: it mattered enormously that this drunk blonde have a really wonderful night. Felt nothing but love for her, and love, too, for all those women outside. She was rushing with it, with generosity and magnitude. As she opened the bathroom door the noise and movement of the club hit her. Brighter, sharper, more alive. All of it—in this grand delusion—made and heightened for her. She moved through it thinking, The sisterhood of strip club toilets. A proverb. The sisterhood of toilets is strongest in strip clubs. She would carry it to him like a cat with a dead thing to lay
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