The Year of Yes (7 page)

“You wanna go inside?” He grinned at me. Gold tooth.

“I’m supposed to meet someone. But is there a restaurant? I think I might be lost.”

“Yeah,” he said. “We have an all-you-can-eat buffet.” He winked, in a friendly manner. I looked at a sign posted next to the door, advertising the buffet. I felt happier. This was good news. Maybe it was one of those secret New York places. There was a club downtown, for example, that you had to access through a tunnel that started in the storage room of a grocery store. The clammy, dark passageway was the epitome of creepy, but if you had enough faith to get through the vault door at the end, you hit paradise: an old speakeasy, with swing music, velvet couches, and great martinis. I couldn’t imagine that the Boxer would actually take me somewhere sleazy. We had to go to school together, after all, and it’d be too embarrassing. I peered into the dark hallway beyond the door, but couldn’t see anything.

“Do you think he’s inside already?”

“Shit, I don’t know. You wanna go in, or you wanna stay out?” The bouncer was looking impatient.

“I guess I’ll go in.”

“That’s twenty bucks.” He stuck out a palm as big as my face.

I’d never been to a bar that had such a big cover charge before. I dug in my purse, but I only had eight dollars.

“Only because you’re a chick. Get in before I change my mind,” said the bouncer, waving me in for free. I wadded my money into my purse and ducked through a curtain.

AT THE END OF A SHORT HALLWAY I found a holiday inn dining room: metal chairs with wipe-clean burgundy upholstery, small fake-marble tables, and little fake-crystal vases with fake flowers in them. A steam table against one wall, loaded with metal trays of anonymous fried objects. It would’ve been the kind of place I’d often ended up at during family vacations, had it not been for the fact that it was strewn with naked women.

Freaked out, I looked around for the Boxer. No sign of him. I went and got a dangerously bargain-priced glass of wine, averting my eyes from a woman who was sitting with her essentially bare bottom on the bar. I surreptitiously wiped my glass with a cocktail napkin, drank it down, ordered another, and fled to a table for two, hoping that the Boxer would appear quickly. Maybe he’d misunderstood what kind of place this was.

I’d only been to one strip club, and it had been in Idaho. I’d been dragged by some vagabond acting intern who’d thought it was local color. He’d neglected to understand that I, too, was local color, that these were my people, and if those things were immaterial, that I’d also been drastically underage. The strip club had been converted from a finger steak restaurant, but the vinyl booths and sawdust floor
remained intact. The strippers had gyrated piteously around a PVC pole in the middle of the room. “Gyrated,” though, was too strong a word. Most of them had looked to be on serious drugs. They’d alternated between nodding off and racing about like wild ferrets. Sometimes they’d served as waitresses, bringing paper baskets of finger steaks. People ordered them. People ate them. People went to this place on purpose. There was a prominent sign posted:
the torch lounge assumes no responsibility for consequences of viewing.
I didn’t blame them.

The only other stripping I’d seen had been with Zak, at a downtown cabaret that had been wildly, briefly hip. There’d been a woman dressed in a couple of plastic holly leaves and a tutu, shaking her thing to an Ani DiFranco song. Another woman had dripped hot candle wax all over herself while chanting Hail Marys. A woman dressed all in white feathers had brought out a guitar and sung a country-western ballad entitled “Did I Shave My Vagina for This?” Most bizarrely, there’d been a woman who’d billed herself as the Last Burlesque Show. (“Oh no,” Zak had whispered. “Oh no, oh no, oh God no.”) She was in her eighties, and fully dressed, at first, in a Dale Evans cowgirl suit. The Last Burlesque Show did scary things with a baton. By the time she’d gotten down to her tasseled pasties and spun them in opposite directions, Zak and I were both paralyzed, I with wonder, he with horror. The next act had been a belligerent woman who’d held a flashlight beneath her chin, campfire-ghost story-style, angrily reciting Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy.” When she’d finished, she’d trolled the audience for tips, and, discovering Zak, shone her flashlight on him, and demanded his wallet, yelling that she’d noticed he was cheap. We’d fled
into the night, Zak fumbling for his asthma inhaler as we hit the street, me suspecting that it had been the last time he’d trust me to take him anywhere.

My glass stuck to my table. My ass stuck to my chair. I didn’t want to stand up and walk out because I was hoping that I’d become invisible. I was completely embarrassed. If this was not just a miscommunication, if this was intentional, it was because the Boxer had assumed me to be wilder than I really was. I regretted that red dress. He probably thought that I was this kind of girl. What kind of girl was this, though? I had no idea. I was on my third, desperate glass of wine, and I’d graduated to drinking it with a straw to avoid touching my mouth to the glass.

I was the only woman in the room who wasn’t a stripper. Not that the strippers were really stripping. They were dangling from poles, looking bored. They all had boob jobs. Breasts the size of cannonballs. My imagination launched to images of enormous false bosoms being shot at enemies. Civil War-era costumes. Screaming men. I squinched my eyes shut and tried not to think about exploding tits.

BEHIND ME, THERE WAS SOME ACTIVITY, and it didn’t take long to figure out that it was a table full of kids, daring each other to approach me. School uniforms, like beacons shining out of the dark. Faces scarred by inept shaving. No one in their right mind would think these prep-school boys were done with puberty. I could hear them poking each other, trying to get up their courage. I was wearing a white wrap-around sweater and jeans, and I couldn’t
imagine they really thought I was a stripper. The strippers looked to have been allotted three inches of cloth each. That, and as much silicone as their hearts desired.

A skinny, freckled kid plunked himself down at my table. He blinked at me for a moment, then suddenly grabbed my glass of wine and slugged a sip. He looked triumphant. He weighed ninety pounds, at most. I grabbed it back, imagining my arrest for providing alcohol to a minor.

“Who are you?” I said.

“Peter.”

“Peter what?”

“VanHeu…” He reconsidered. “You wish.”

“Peter YouWish,” I said, “you’re too young to be here.”

“My friends want to know if you’re…” He dissolved into stammering giggles.

I gave him the best evil eye I could muster. Not so hot, considering my lower lip was starting to tremble.

“They want to know if you’re wearing a bra.”

“None of your business.” A lacy bra that had cost too much money. I’d bought it that afternoon, and put it on in the dressing room, full of optimism for the evening.

“Like, would you, like, give my friend Matt a lap dance?” he blurted, shoving a wad of ones at me. I shoved them back, but not before I noticed that there was a platinum card tucked into the cash.

“No. Never. Absolutely not.” I decided then that the yes policy definitely did not include the underage. I hadn’t realized that I’d needed to make a rule about ninth graders.

“The girls won’t. They say they’ll get arrested. We’re only allowed to sit quietly and drink soda.”

“I don’t even know how you got in here.”

“Bribed the bouncer. Duh.”

I could see one of the kids doing homework at the table. Maybe this was what you did after school, if you were a kid in New York City.

They were all clustered around my table now, sweating and shuffling their feet. Being surrounded by adolescent boys is like being surrounded by a flock of seriously awkward hummingbirds, and discovering, belatedly, that you are the feeder.

“What’d she say?” they clamored.

“She’ll do it,” said Peter YouWish.

“She won’t,” I said. “Move it.”

“I have my allowance,” offered another kid.

“Me too,” said another.

I wondered blurrily if there was a niche market in stripping for schoolboys. You’d travel from private school to private school, disguised as a substitute teacher. Four-inch-long plaid skirts and knee socks would hold no appeal for these kids. They saw them all the time. A Sexy Substitute, though, could make a killing.

Finally, the Boxer arrived, holding a beer. The kids scattered like marbles. He looked at them, bemused, and then leaned across the table.

“Need a drink?” The kids had managed to siphon my entire glass. The Boxer, for some reason, acted like this was perfectly normal. My pride hurt. If this was a test, if he thought I couldn’t deal with this, he was wrong. I was brave. And maybe he was going to apologize. And maybe he was going to morph suddenly into someone he wasn’t. In a foolish little corner of my mind, I still had hope. The alternative was too depressing.

“Wine,” I said. I was already half-drunk. I might as well keep going.

A stripper in a neon pink G-string had started to twirl, sensing the arrival of someone who might actually tip her. Over the God mic, a voice informed us that this girl was a stockbroker during the day and a stripper at night. Cannonballs. Or bowling balls. My brain dragged me to a bowling alley, where a guy in an embroidered shirt and rented shoes was hooking his fingers into the stripper’s breast, and tossing it, girl and all, down the lane. Strike! I cringed.

“Are you okay?”

“Fine. Terrific!” I nodded like a convert. “Great stripper!” Great was a misnomer. She had rigor mortits, and looked maybe seventeen. I felt like my wine might have poisoned me.

“MIND IF I GO GET A LAP DANCE? There’s this Russian girl here, Masha…”

The Boxer thumped me on the back, like I was a buddy.

My mind flipped forcibly to Chekhov. Moscow! Moscow! I yanked it back.

“Not at all,” I said, much too loudly.

Why would I mind? We were on a date. Sure, go and get some unknown Masha to squirm in your lap, and I’ll just sit here and fight off the fourteen-year-olds. Great! Exactly how I wanted to spend my evening! Unless, it suddenly occurred to me, we weren’t on a date? Maybe he really
did
want to be buddies. Maybe he wasn’t attracted to me at all! I could feel myself turning red. Oh God. I’d completely
misinterpreted everything. He didn’t like me. Obviously. Anyone who liked me would not leave me sitting at a wobbly little table in a room full of pubescents on the prowl.

I watched the Boxer put his arm around the tattooed shoulder of a girl I’d noticed before, a skinny girl, with long black hair and iridescent blue eyes. She smiled, fake adoration appearing on her face. I could see the Boxer grinning. I could see him believing her.

I put a handful of ice cubes in my mouth and crunched them until they melted away. I put my face down onto the sticky table and let my eyes overflow.

SOME UNFORTUNATE SIDE EFFECTS of humiliation: Three drinks later, I lost my senses and went home with the Boxer. I climbed five flights of his stairs, and ended up in his bedroom, participating in some truly awful sex. The Boxer, startlingly, ended up crying on my neck. I thought I knew why. Who wanted this to be their life? Not me, and apparently not him, either.

I thumped him on the shoulder. We were buddies, after all. But we weren’t. We were two people making a naked mistake. I called a car service at 5:00 a.m. Some knight came in a shining white car and took me home.

I dabbed at my eyes the whole time I dressed for work. Things already sucked, and they got even suckier. I went looking for Vic, but she wasn’t in her bedroom. Her diary was open on her bed, though, and I glimpsed my name. I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t pick the book up, but I read
what was on the page, and it wasn’t pretty. I knew Vic was annoyed at my yes policy, but I hadn’t known she thought I was an irredeemable, arrogant slut. Apparently so. I walked to the train, sleepless and sad.

That afternoon in class, the Boxer acted perfectly normal, and I was relieved. I thought maybe I’d been wrong about him. Afterward, however, the whole class went to the basement bar, ordered drinks, and got down to bitching about the state of the universe. Suddenly, the Boxer slammed his glass down and announced, in his booming voice, “Do I have a story for you.”

I cringed. Somehow, I knew what was coming.

“So, I was having sex with
this girl
last night, who actually came home with me after we went to a strip club…”

Here’s the thing about sitting at a table where someone is telling a story about you, in the third person. It sucks. Not that I’d never done it, but I’d never done it in a kiss-and-tell vein. It had only been eight hours.

Pause for a short discussion with the male members of the group about strip clubs in New York City, advantages and disadvantages of going to same, and a small story from an otherwise shy member of the group about the broken finger suffered by his brother-in-law while attempting to stuff dollar bills down the G-string of a stripper in New Orleans during a bachelor party. Pause for a short discussion with the female members of the group about feminism versus stripping, G-strings, comfortable or not, and, “What the hell kind of girl goes with a guy to a strip club, anyway? None of us! Where do you find your girls?”

Pause for me, unnoticed, turning purple, drowning my misery in Maker’s Mark and wondering if there was any way
to make a graceful exit without everyone figuring out what was going on.

And back to the point, the Boxer declaiming like William Jennings Bryan.

“It just wasn’t happening, no matter how much I wanted it to. I was on top of her, and she was looking at me like she didn’t really know me, which she didn’t. And halfway through, I looked at her and it hit me. I actually wasn’t even into her. What was I doing there? I was in love with Masha. This girl, there’s nothing wrong with her, per se, but she’s not Masha. I mean, this girl, she’s pretty and smart, but not like Masha.”

For a moment, I clung to the fact that at least he’d said that I was pretty and smart. Unfortunately, there was the rest of the sentence to consider. I wanted to scream nasty things, statistics on the small size of both his penis and his soul, but I didn’t. It wasn’t like I was blameless. I’d gone home with him. It was me who’d made that stupid choice, and now I was getting a little bit of just reward. I stayed silent.