Eighty Days Amber (11 page)

I declined the out-of-town option.

‘No, I want to work the Grand again,’ I told Blanca. ‘If they’ll have me. I like the place and no man is going to stop me doing what I want. Anyway, they have sturdy bouncers . . .’

‘Oh, that they have, my dear,’ Blanca said.

My resolve had returned, and together with Blanca, we plotted my grand return to the dance floor. I perfected a new routine. Fine-tuned the music. Acquired the perfect outfit and discreet accessories for the occasion.

‘Luba’s Grand Return to the Grand.’

We giddily devised a small leaflet advertising my initial appearance and it was decided that following my one-off set on the Saturday night, I would only grant a single lap dance. To the highest bidder.

I was defiant, confident Chey would not dare come along and get involved.

And if he did, I would flaunt myself with every wanton sinew in my body, show him what he was now missing, provoke him even, display to every man all the things I would never grant him again. To prove I was no longer just his pony girl, but a woman every man desired.

There was a big corporate IT convention on in town, at the Javits Center, and the club that night was packed, lines of limos parked at the kerb, powerful engines roaring softly, chauffeurs at the ready, and a multitude of sharply dressed and suited executives lining up to enter the premises once they had satisfied the scrutiny of our bunker-sized bouncers.

While the other dancers did their thing, I sat in the
dressing room, all dressed up, made up and with nowhere to go, with a posse of butterflies doing the tango inside my stomach. Still wondering whether his eyes would be in the audience, watching, lusting after me, missing me, maybe?

There was a resounding hush as the lights went out and I took my place on the dark stage.

The loudspeakers awoke and released my spoken introduction: ‘My name is Luba . . .’ My voice, my Russian lilt, my huskiness. It had taken me over an hour to perfect those four words as an overture for the Debussy music. I’d wanted to sound mysterious, remote, alluring, the very essence of me.

The performance went by in a dream.

It felt as if I was the only person present.

Buried deep within the cocoon of the dance, a prisoner of the searing spotlight, a white body connected to the red-hot circle of a private sun. I’d even got the management to dismantle the dance pole so that nothing obscured the sightlines or distracted the men’s implacable gaze while I performed.

I was flesh incarnate. I was the queen of the night. I was sex, breasts, cunt and arse. Every moment I had rehearsed was planned so that every single man present would desire me with a vengeance, would gasp, pant, grow hard like rock, lust uncontrollably for me with every atom in his body. I wanted them all to yearn, to want me more than they had ever wanted anything in their life before I had walked on the Grand stage and opened their eyes.

But, at the same time, I also danced for myself, alone, ignoring the waves of sexual greed washing across me, as they journeyed from the audience in sheer red heat across the stage, my domain.

It worked.

As I flew from the stage when the darkness returned and provided me with a safe harbour, sweat pouring from me, my cheeks burning, my scalp itching in sympathy, my insides literally on fire with sexual need, Blanca gave me a sideways glance and whispered, ‘That was on the borderline of totally obscene and beautiful, Luba . . . You keep on surprising me . . .’ And she winked at me in complicity.

The other dancers gave me curious looks, as if I had overstepped the bounds or personally offended them. It did not bother me. For them, dancing was just a job. For me, it was now an extension of who I was.

Over the Tannoy, I could hear Blanca back on stage enthusiastically orchestrating the auction for my unique lap dance.

His name was Lucian and he became my first millionaire and my second fuck.

From afar, in Russia, or more specifically in a shithole like Donetsk and the Ukraine, California was an unreachable paradise. An idealised place where the sun shone continuously over a landscape of blue seas, palm trees and ostentatious affluence. Much like the Caribbean, where Chey had taken me, but without the inescapable, surrounding poverty. A promised land that only gangsters and their molls could reach outside of their dreams.

And now I was there.

Courtesy of Lucian, my software geek extraordinaire.

I don’t know how much he paid for his private audience with me in the club’s lap-dance room; later Blanca just handed me a wad of notes which I didn’t even bother counting, not only the proceeds of the auction but also the
barrage of green bills that had been thrown onto the stage by appreciative male members of the audience at the end of my set. I never bothered to stay around and pick up these tips, as I found it both undignified and degrading to have to crouch there still naked with the glaring lights back on and gather the notes. Blanca always took care of that for me. Said it gave me a sort of unapproachable mystique, another aspect of mine the other dancers heartily resented.

The lap dance was unexceptional. He did not attempt to touch me, and I barely ground against him as he seemed satisfied just watching me shimmy and squirm a few inches away from him, wearing my white bikini and my pale skin, allowing my own hands to travel seductively across my breasts, belly and thighs in a form of self-loving that I knew men appreciated, his eyes agog in a parody of worship, not even a faint smile on his closed lips. The music I had selected – a track by the English trip hop group Archive – faded to a halt and I stepped back from him. In the semi-darkness there was no way he could conceal the pronounced tent of his erection inside his khaki slacks. He wore his old-fashioned heavy-framed glasses slightly askew.

‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘I hope you liked it.’

‘You really are Russian?’ he stated.

‘One hundred per cent.’

‘I think Russian women are beautiful,’ he said. ‘Different.’

‘Exotic?’

‘No, that’s not what I meant,’ he added. He paused, as if struggling for words. I came to his rescue.

‘We are all different. Like women everywhere, you know. I’m actually from the Ukraine. Girls from the other republics sometimes look very different. Some of us have very
long legs, others have prominent cheekbones and those from the Asian borders can have slightly slanting eyes and low-slung arses. There is so much variety. You mustn’t generalise.’

‘I realise that,’ he said. ‘But . . .’

He fell silent. I was about to walk away and he called after me.

‘Is Luba your real name, or just a stage one?’

‘It’s my birth name, yes. Actually, it’s a diminutive for Lubov, but no one uses that much.’

‘Luba,’ he said, as he if was savouring every letter of the name on the tip of his tongue like a culinary delicacy.

He was in his mid to late forties but looked, and dressed, ten years younger, had made his fortune developing software and then licensing it to some of the leading corporations in the field. He had then invested some of the proceeds in other start-ups, including Google and Facebook, and no longer needed to work for the rest of his existence. He spent much of his ample spare time devising role-playing games, mostly for his own edification, seldom bothering even to take them to market. He had a large, rambling canalside house in Venice Beach where friends and hangers-on came and went at leisure. His soul had never grown up and he was still a worshipper at the altar of beauty and found it difficult to relate to women.

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.