The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [71]
Wayne noticed her, though. Before anyone else.
The bouncer waived the fifty-dollar cover after Wayne announced his business and then he found a seat on the main floor near the exit on a small sofa covered with paisley. Hundreds of directional spotlights, some covered with colored gels, lit the floor selectively, leaving most of the chairs in darkness or shadow. Across from him, a pair of empty chairs were separated by a shiny black cube. Maybe twenty customers were spread throughout the club, but the room was big enough to look empty. The music—some mash-up between Aerosmith and an old disco hit—seemed loud compared to the number of ears tuned to it.
Two topless women in G-strings were dancing, indifferent to each other, in the blue light on a stage some twenty yards to Wayne’s left. Others were floating about the room, stopping occasionally to let a customer buy them a club soda and a chat. After a brief prologue, the dancer would do a four-minute wriggle between the man’s knees that wasn’t supposed to approximate a sex act so much as ambiguously suggest one, firing the same synapses in the brain, releasing the same chemicals and adrenaline, without ever assuming the actual shape or mechanics of real intercourse. The lap dance, Wayne thought, recalling an art history course from college, is postmodernism brought to sex. Or maybe Impressionism. Expressionism. One of those.
“You don’t see with your eyes any more than you screw with your hips,” Nada had said. Strippers also seemed to know that was true. Sex happens all in the head.
Wayne hadn’t been seated a minute when a short blonde dropped down beside him on the couch. In addition to her pink thong, she wore a red half shirt that quarter-covered a pair of breasts as large and round as bocce balls.
“Do you mind if I take a break and sit here? I hate this song,” she said.
Wayne nodded once.
“What’s your name?”
“I thought you were on break.”
She threw up her hands, but the bocce balls on her chest didn’t move, as if the surgeon had attached them to her frame with bolts. “Just talking.”
“I’m Wayne.”
“I’m Anya. What do you do?”
“Security at the Colossus.”
“That sounds interesting.”
“Really?”
“I sometimes think about getting a hostess job, but the money is so good here.”
“A casino hostess can make good money.”
“Any of your hostesses drive a 335i?”
Wayne conceded with a laugh.
“I know a girl here who flies to Houston to work during the week—” Her big lids opened until the exposed eyeballs were almost higher than they were wide. “Oh, this song is awesome, but it’s so short.”
“Eagles of Death Metal,” Wayne said.
She seemed impressed but might have been faking. “You know it? Do you want a dance? I’ll give you the rest of this song and the next one, too. Because it’s so short.”
“That’s all right. I’m meeting David.”
Break over, she jumped to her feet, bocce balls steady as gyroscopes. “Okay, see you, Wayne.” He waved. She lip-synched the chorus at him: “Don’t waste your time cause the boy’s bad news.”
But Wayne already knew that.
A waitress stepped in and Wayne ordered a Heineken. It was just before 9:00 p.m. He guessed that in two hours there would be two hundred men in here with folds of ATM twenties in each fist and Anya would have few opportunities to sit out a song and chat up the awesomeness of the Eagles of Death Metal. Wayne had no moral objection to stripping. To his mind, much more demeaning than the nudity and even the discrete and cursory sexual activity exchanged on this busy trading floor were the dozens of monitors everywhere tuned to ESPN. As humiliating as some might think it was for a woman to dance naked in front of men for money, it had to be far worse to have to compete with the Arizona Cardinals for their attention.
When he’d arrived