EXCHANGE STREET EXCHANGE STREETThey were living in Providence again after spending the summer in Wildwood, New Jersey. In Wildwood, Stephen worked on a fishing boat, a deep-sea charter named the Pied Piper. It was a bad name for a fishing boat, since it made people think of rats in the water. Families and businesses hired the boat for reunions and other celebrations when their members wanted to reaffirm their brotherhood. Occasionally, someone brought his wife along and it was a sore spot with the others. After a couple of weeks on the boat, Stephen’s burn turned deep bronze and he oiled his arms and chest every morning to enhance muscle definition.
While Stephen was on the boat, Venice worked at the Acme supermarket, which was giving double pay for inventory; then she stayed on to stock the shelves there. She’d been working an act on the boardwalk but Stephen wanted her out of that line of work. Venice agreed it was better to stock canned goods in Acme than to earn your money as a spectacle.
They both had problems at their jobs. Venice wasn’t careful with the Exacto knife when she opened cartons and she slit the boxes of cereal and crackers. Laundry soap sifted over the floor. Then she ruined crates of coffee and cigarettes and was caught when she tried to throw the damaged cartons in the Dumpster in back of the store. Stephen fared a little better in his job. He knew when to tell the captain to head in because of rough weather. He watched the clients getting queasy and they docked just in time, so that the people were seasick on shore instead of getting sick on the boat. He wouldn’t have to hose the deck and gunnels. He didn’t get along with the people who hired the charter. He was called a first mate, but they treated him like a slave. He had to fetch them cold beers, bait their lines, scale the catch, and the tips were sometimes insulting. At the end of the summer, just as the schoolkids started buying notebook paper at the Acme, Stephen and Venice left their jobs. They prowled the tourist attractions at Atlantic City before going back north.
Whenever Stephen was out of work he suffered an unpleasant mix of feelings. He had some anger about not working even if he himself had resigned, writing a short note to the boss, explaining that the work just wasn’t his “cup of tea.” Crewing for the Pied Piper was seasonal work, and when he was dismissed he took his freedom seriously and wasted none of it. He approached Venice three and four times a day, and when he wasn’t in that privacy with her, he was leading her somewhere else, strolling down the tide line or through the alleys behind the hotels searching for another place where it would happen again. Atlantic City was a perfect town for him. Outside the glitzy facades of the boardwalk and betting parlors, everyone minded his own business. No one talked to them except for the occasional hick who had to explain his lucky streak to passersby. There were losers everywhere, and this gave Stephen a combined sense of doom and gratitude. He wasn’t at the bottom. He was between jobs. He still had a wad of cash. After a week of roaming around, he got nervous again. He became cranky thinking about jobs. “I’d rather be digging a ditch than nothing,” he said.
Then they were back in New England. They found a furnished apartment on the fringes of College Hill, where the rents edged down near the Chinese section. Stephen liked to blend with the dispossessed; it was live and let live, and he was happy not to see all the university students nosing around. They found immediate employment, both worked days and they had the nights together.
Venice worked at Industrial National Bank, in credit card operations. Her job was in the Customer Service Department and she was on the telephone all day. She retrieved credit card statements on her computer, consulted celluloid microfiche or daily printouts. The telephone was heavy in her hand, like a clot of hot tar resting against her cheek. The tendon of her thumb became sore after pressing the receiver to her ear for eight hours, and she often had to stop to wiggle her thumb as if she was playing “Thumbelina.” Credit card customers called in to complain about their MasterCard accounts. A cardholder screamed at her about his trip to Mexico, where a hotel had submitted erroneous charges for numerous Papaya Softees and other blenderized drinks. He wasn’t paying for drinks he never had. Venice listened to the customer, but she couldn’t keep from questioning him about these Papaya Softees. What did they taste like?
Women called in to ask about charges on their statements which they couldn’t identify. The charges might be for “Fantasy Phone,” “Date Lite,” or “Miss Paula,” all dial-a-porn operations which the women’s husbands or sons had contacted. Venice liked to advise her customers to have a “family powwow.” “Bring it all out in the open,” she told them. When her customers complained about their MasterCard errors, Venice told them to use cash instead of plastic. There was the matter of the finance charges: twenty-one percent, accrued daily from the day the charge is posted to the account, before the customer even received a statement. “With plastic you lose your dignity. It’s out the window,” she said.
Venice enjoyed finding the microfiche that had her ex-lover’s statement. It pleased her to read the list of businesses and to see just where he was putting his money. She could tell by her ex-lover’s purchases that he was certainly not someone to have second thoughts about, and the little bits of information revealed in the billing was affirming to Venice. She reported to Stephen that her ex had charged items at The Gentleman Farmer, a fancy garden-supply store for suburban types. “Shit. He’s changed his stripes, you know that? He’s scared himself completely into squaresville. He’s backed into a corner.”
They laughed about it. Sometimes her ex’s new wife would make charges at clothing stores called Ample Beauty and Added Dimensions.
“His wife can’t lose those pounds,” Venice told Stephen.
Even with these few laughs, the job in the credit card department was bad and she was always looking for something better. Stephen was at Sears, in the key center. He made keys for housewives who had had recent close calls locking themselves out of the house or locking their babies in the car. They came in to get backups, and they watched him carefully to make sure he wasn’t making a key for himself. Sometimes landlords Stephen recognized came in to get keys made. They said, “Are you still in town? Didn’t you ever graduate from the university? You’re at Sears?” When he wasn’t making keys, he was in kitchen appliances; sometimes they even made him sweep something up. Stephen wasn’t too happy about his position and together they looked at the Sunday paper.
There were always ads for couples in the paper. Couples were sought to run group homes and halfway houses for the retarded, for substance abusers, or for the elderly. Venice didn’t like the idea because it usually required residence in a place and the shifts were three days on, then three days off. She believed that kind of a cycle was disorienting. “You have to keep an overnight bag all the time. You have to sleep there with those kids,” she told Stephen.
“It’s worse to eat with them. They slobber,” he told her. “It’s like living with monkeys.”
“That’s probably not for us, even with my experience.”
He looked at her and smiled at her joke.
Before anything better came up, Venice had to quit her job at the bank. She couldn’t sit at her desk after she had had some reconstructive surgery. She tried using a rubber donut, but the pillow didn’t help much. She couldn’t sit because of the stitches. Worse than the stitches were the spasms. The doctor told her the sphincter would take a little longer to heal. As it healed, the stitches would trigger spasms. He told Venice that her body was having a spastic response to trauma. “It’s trying to tell you something,” the doctor said. “The natural contractions of the colon are solely for expulsion, it won’t tolerate invasive friction.”
The urology intern wanted to consult with her and Stephen. He said, maybe it was time to take another step towards their lifetime investment. The previous year, when Stephen had worked as a dealer at Merv Griffin’s Resorts Casino, he was able to put Venice on his insurance. Venice had some initial procedures done, implants and hormone therapy, but insurance complications postponed the final operation. Venice didn’t qualify as a spouse. It was a catch-22. Venice needed further surgery before she was card-carrying.
Having had some more time to think about it, she wasn’t a hundred percent certain she wanted it done.
The doctor who repaired her rectum told Venice, “In every law of engineering there’s the female and the male, the outlet and the prong. Until you have the right connection, you’re in harm’s way. How long are you going to be a banged-up decepticon, getting it in your sore ass?”
“That’s nice language,” she said.
“My apologies. But, with more surgery,” he told her, “you could have the correct ‘receptacle.’ ”
“I can wait for that,” Venice told the doctor.
“You’re halfway there already,” the doctor said.
“Just tell the boy not to jump me so much.”
“I’ll tell him to go easy for a while,” the doctor said, but when Stephen came to visit her in the hospital, the urologist was missing. His shift was over.
Venice stayed home for several weeks enjoying the apartment, letting her hair air dry, playing solitaire on the carpet while the TV hummed at her shoulder. Now and then, she experienced an overwhelming, narrow edge of pain slashing the same few central inches. She fell, twisted on the rug, and tried to breathe, then it would pass. It happened less and less and she began to feel better.
Being out of work, she had time to cellophane her hair and she did a full body wax. She rubbed estrogen cream on her upper lip and applied it to her nipples, massaging in a circular motion. Being at home so much made her see the flaws, the grime and stains of the place. She started to think she should fix up the apartment the way other women might try to do. The wallpaper in the kitchen depressed her. The pattern had dark vines upon which small tobacco-colored leaves seemed to wither. It was an ordinary ivy design over uniform bricks, and it might have been meant to reflect autumn, but it suggested a wasted landscape. The wallpaper reminded her of an O. Henry story she read in high school in which a sick girl stares out her window at an ivy-covered wall. This girl is dying and as the ivy disintegrates and the leaves drift past her window, her days dwindle down.
“How many days do we have left?” she asked Stephen, but he didn’t go along with it. Alone, she counted the ivy leaves on the wallpaper. She jotted the figure on a note pad so that on the following day, when she counted the leaves again, the figures could be contrasted and verified. Each time, Venice had a decreasing number. “It’s spooky,” she said.
“You’re crazy,” Stephen said.
While she wasn’t working, she borrowed a heavy book of wall-covering samples from a hardware store, but she didn’t find a pattern she liked. There were outlandish daisies, harsh plaids, cannons and militia, historic emblems, and baseball-team insignia. Painting over the ivy design might be the thing, but when she asked Stephen, he told her she was crazy to think he was going to pay for fixing up the apartment. “We can’t afford any face-lifts on our pad. Shit. We don’t own this property. Come back and talk to me when you can tell me we own something.”
It was disheartening to stay in the apartment all day. She got up with Stephen and poured cereal in a bowl, or she boiled an egg. Then he was gone and she had the whole day. She looked out the window, pressing her forehead against the cold glass. On the street, a neighbor was scraping frost from a car windshield. A cold daylight was ascending, a neutral illumination or off-whiteness Venice associated with views from inside institutions. Her neighbor finished clearing off his car and she watched him get behind the wheel, she followed the small hesitations the car made as he drove it away. Sometimes, her friend Jeannie would come by. Jeannie worked for a realtor and often dropped in if she was in the neighborhood. Venice made her tea and they talked about finding a decent job. They listed the pros and cons of working behind a desk or having to stand up all day like they did when they attended Top o’ the Morning Beauty College.
“I can’t wear more than a two-inch heel or my back starts to hurt,” Jeannie said.
“That’s right,” Venice said, “beauty college ruined us for life—standing over those sinks.”
“I only do Bobby’s hair anymore,” Jeannie said.
They looked out the window at the snow beginning to come down.
“Shit,” Jeannie told Venice. “I have two signs to put up and it’s murder when the ground is frozen. The posts have to be pounded into the ground or kids pull them out. In cold like this I can’t drive them in.”
Venice asked her if she wanted any help. She imagined hammering “For Sale” signs around the city. She believed that the brutal percussions of banging posts into the frozen ground might reverberate into her colon stitches. Her friend didn’t think it would look right if Venice came with her. “Face it, Venice, you attract attention.”
“I do not. I pass anywhere. Did I tell you I went to mass? Nothing. Not one double take.”
“Maybe. But I remember the old days, I guess. When you were you.”
Venice was feeling better and she took a part-time job transporting a carload of pets—cats, lap dogs, and several rabbits—to local nursing homes. Residents were encouraged to hold the animals for an hour, and after the hour was up, Venice collected the pets and put them back in their travel cages before driving to the next place. Venice accompanied a social worker who explained to her the purpose of the petting routine. “Stroking furred animals increases circulation, stimulates conversation, and generates a feeling of well-being. Holding a cat for just an hour every week can enhance short-term memory and cognitive function.”
“No kidding?” Venice said. Before distributing each of the shaggy guests, she ruffled their coats. She figured she could use a boost herself.
Several residents in the nursing homes had had mini-strokes and TIAs which left them confused and shaken. The petting routine worked directly on their neurological pathways, healing the damaged synapses. Venice realized that she, herself, often stroked her fluffy slippers absent-mindedly as she watched TV. She wondered if this provided the same benefits as the live animals.
Residents had specific names for the pets, but these names always changed. Fluffy, Whiskers, Snowball, Inky—residents named the animals for pets they had once owned. The MSW told Venice she should try to remember the correct names if she could. One rabbit had acquired more than twenty names; it was one of the original subjects. One favorite pet was losing its fur, probably from a skin disorder, but the residents blamed each other. “Don’t scratch its withers like that,” one woman scolded another. A resident told Venice that she didn’t wish to hold the rabbit with “the sad ears.”
“Which one is that?” Venice asked.
She had a nickname for her job. She told Stephen as she left for work, “I’m doing a shift at the Final Frontier.” Yet there were one or two individuals at the nursing homes whom Venice enjoyed seeing. An eighty-year-old named Abby amused Venice with her stories. She talked about her children with curdled disdain. If questioned about her offspring, she responded by saying, “They’re inhuman. One-celled organisms. Termites, at best.” It’s remarkable, Venice thought, how Abby had come to accept the truth of her situation. Other residents made excuses for their children.
Her own father was in Florida. The last time Venice saw him, he was dressed like an ice cream vendor. White stretch-belt slacks, creamy socks, and white imitation gator-skin loafers. She didn’t recognize him. She wondered if he would end up in a place like the homes she visited. She couldn’t imagine her father holding a rabbit in his lap. He had success with cats because he ignored them and they couldn’t stand his indifference. They perched on him like parrots. Yet, Venice couldn’t imagine her father forced into a structured routine, petting cats because a doctor prescribed it.
Abby complained to Venice that there weren’t any real cottontails amongst the pets.
“Cottontails are too wild for a petting zoo,” the MSW said.
“Peter? Wild?” Abby said. “Peter Cottontail is a pansy. Ask my daughter, she married him.” Abby cupped one side of her mouth with a papery, translucent hand. She leaned close to Venice. “My daughter says Peter can’t perform. Well, I told her Brer Rabbit was the better one, but did she listen? God’s gift to women, I told her. He had one longer than his ears—”
A neighboring oldster searched through the fur of her pet. “I can’t find it,” she said.
“You never could find it,” Abby stung the wrinkled deb. Everyone laughed with an edge.
Abby told Venice, “I know about you—I won’t tell anyone.”
Venice described her job to Stephen. He smiled, but he told her she should resign. “It doesn’t pay shit,” he said, emphasizing that last consonant to warn her that he meant what he said. “It’s for volunteers,” he said.
Venice quit the job after receiving only two small pay checks. “It’s not worth the glimpse into the future,” she told Stephen.
Stephen kept on at Sears, and at first he didn’t seem to mind being the only one holding a job. Maybe it was just her imagination, but Venice started to think he resented her time at the apartment. He came home from work and brushed by her, saying, “Kind of a mess. You could’ve done something.”
“What’s wrong with it?” She didn’t see a crumb or a milky tumbler left out.
“It’s a dump,” he said. “I guess you’re used to it.”
“What does that mean?”
He ran his finger down the full-length mirror in the bedroom. “You’re smoking too much. There’s tar on everything.”
“There’s tar? Where?”
“Nobody should have to live like this,” he said. He picked up her hairbrush and fooled with his short, blond hair. Venice looked at Stephen. Sometimes he seemed to mirror, quite perfectly, the overall costume of a white supremacist. His cornflower eyes, his fine profile looked chilling. He had a perfect crease in his trousers, which he pinched between his thumb and forefinger to keep fresh. This mannerism disturbed her more than any other.
He fell back on the bed. He arranged both pillows behind his head and he looked at his fingernails. She didn’t know whether she should lie down beside him, since he had taken both pillows and perhaps this was significant. She sat on the edge of the mattress and looked at him.
“Why don’t you clean the bugs out of that lamp?” he said. “It’s disgusting.”
She looked up at the dark plate of insects on the ceiling fixture. She was embarrassed by the sight of it, but it was just another thing for him to mention. The frosted glass revealed small bodies and exaggerated wings. Venice found these winged corpses repulsive. “Those bugs were there when we moved in. I’m not touching it.”
“I’m saying, clean it out.”
“You think when I get rid of my gear I’m the housewife? You wash it yourself.”
He was reading the job opportunities out loud to her. There were several openings in local jewelry factories. “That’s all assembly-line stuff,” he warned her. “You might have to insert itsy-bitsy earrings onto little squares of cardboard all day long, or maybe they’ll make you sort links of chain. Millions of links. Also, there’s some chemical hazards. Epoxy. Epoxy is wicked shit.”
“Okay, okay,” she said.
“You’re not desperate. Not yet,” he said.
She didn’t like it when he said you’re not desperate. Shouldn’t he have said, we’re not desperate?
When they didn’t have the capital to invest in a Payless shoe-store franchise, Venice suggested the Del’s Lemonade truck idea. She thought it would be pleasant to drive around the beaches and sell frozen lemonade; the citrus SnoCones reminded her of the Papaya Softees she had learned about at the bank job. She had always liked the Del’s vendors she had met. They stood at the window, tanned and friendly, with a little white swatch of zinc oxide across the bridge of their noses.
“It’s the middle of winter,” Stephen said. “Wake up to reality.” He didn’t often use such clichéd speech—wake up to reality. He was shooting her a signal, implying that she was dipping to a low level in his eyes, she was bottoming out. She deserved these phrases.
She went for an interview at a fish-processing plant down in Newport. It was a half-time position, dependent on when the huge offshore boats came into port to offload, but the salary was above average and they said she could work day or evening shifts, however she wanted. The plant was right on Narragansett Bay, where there was a nice view of both the Newport and the Mount Hope bridges, and she thought that working by the water might be invigorating after being in the apartment. A woman gave her a tour of the plant, which was built right against the shore where they could suction seawater into the operation and spew it out at the other end. Fish kept moving up and down fast-moving belts. The job didn’t appear difficult. She would arrange fish fillets in plastic trays and prepare them for freezing. Venice was ready to accept the position. The interviewer told Venice that, of course, all her initial medical costs would be reimbursed.
“You mean I get back on insurance?”
“We pay your medical appointments the first six months.”
“Just six months?”
“Most people don’t have too much trouble after the first few weeks. We pay for any prescriptions you might get.”
“What kind of trouble are we talking about?”
“It’s normal until you become desensitized.”
“Shit, what are you trying to say—”
The woman sighed, she saw she was losing her candidate. “Just a rash. A rash from the brine. Even with rubber gloves, you’ll get some kind of reaction. But after you get used to the brine, it’s clear sailing.”
Venice had jumped at the news there might be insurance, but it wasn’t to be. The processing plant would pay for office visits and cortisone cream, nothing more. She didn’t want to arrange fish in plastic trays if it meant her skin was going to erupt. When she told Stephen about this, he looked at her as if she had made up the story about the brine.
“I’m not lying,” she said. “You think I don’t want to get a job? I want to work. I want to bring in money, but not if it gives me a rash—”
“Maybe you have an allergic reaction to anything that’s nine-to-five.” He might have been teasing her, but he walked away. With his back to her, she couldn’t tell if he was finding fault with her or not. He came back into the room and took her hand. He led her to the bedroom, where they lay down together. He wanted to enter her where her stitches tugged her sphincter together like a sausage casing. Venice told him, “I’m probably going to faint, you understand?”
“You’re not going to faint.” It wasn’t a reassurance, it was more in the nature of an order. He rested the heel of one hand on her tailbone as he fitted himself inside her, then he gripped her hips. She felt the first slicing motion, then the full progression of his disregard. He weighted her upon her own pain and placed her worth in it. She permitted it to happen and believed in its judgment.
The lounge at the Marriott had solid brass doors. Venice had to polish the tarnished metal with industrial-strength paste. The lounge had a slimy fountain. Two cherubs squirted a few gallons of stale water to which Venice had added a half-cup of bleach to cut down on the algae. It wasn’t a great place to work, but she was making tips along with the free stuff she crammed into her oversized shoulder bag. She was waiting tables in the lounge and pushing the carpet sweeper over the floors. A vacuum would have done a better job, but the carpet sweeper was more discreet.
The hotel was always busy with conventioneers since it was located only a couple of blocks from the Providence Civic Center. Washington Street whores had duplicate keys to the rooms, which caused the chambermaids trouble because the cleaning personnel were the first to be accused of any thefts. This was bad enough, but it was also the hotel where the New England Patriots stayed on the nights before home games. They showed up in their limousines and sports cars at the last minute before the curfew. They had to follow a pregame diet of some kind, but they often took racks of ribs into their rooms from House of Bar-B-Que and left a big mess. They came into the lounge for fruit juices and Cokes; they weren’t allowed to spike their drinks when it was a pregame countdown. The lounge filled up with Pat fans and groupies leaving their fingerprints on the brass doors she had just finished buffing. These trashy women ordered drinks but tipped cheap in their search to glimpse a quarterback.
Venice had been doing well there for over a month. The hotel had a big carve-up of the city’s local ass peddling, and once or twice she was mistaken for a business girl. She sympathetically declined, pleased to see she was passing. Once or twice someone had her number. A man said to his pal, “Look at the grand duchess behind the bar.” Venice was peeling the rind from limes and lemons to make twists. Her fingers were long and delicate, but her hands were just too large, and despite her pretty face and all her toil and grooming, it was usually her hands that told the tale.
They had the Providence Sunday Journal and their pencils. They didn’t talk to each other as they read the tiny print and marked the descriptions of possible jobs. Venice looked over at Stephen and watched his eyes descend one column and then another.
“Here’s something,” Stephen said, and he brought the newspaper up close to his face.
“What?”
“This sounds good. It’s right down the street. We could walk to work,” he said.
“We can walk? Walk where?”
“It’s a management slot.”
“That same Walgreen’s ad? They still want assistant managers?”
“No, the Cheaters Club on North Main. It says here, ‘Couple wanted to manage club.’ ”
“That strip joint wants a couple?” she said. “Isn’t that the place with the runway right up the bar? It has a wrestling pit with hoses and a drain?” She watched his face.
“They probably need people to manage the bar. You know, ordering liquor. The back room has video games, pool tables I think. We would have to keep that up. It’s a small setup, really, it’d be okay. It would be mostly nights, don’t you think? You’d have to miss Letterman.”
“That place? Shit, that place is buzzing in the morning, for God’s sake. They’re loitering around in broad daylight. You ever been there?” she asked.
“A few times,” he told her.
“That’s a straight bar. I didn’t know you ever went in there. Is that a twenty-four-hour place?”
“Hey, I looked in from the sidewalk,” he said. “Tell me you haven’t looked in.”
“Never. I’m not interested in those ‘happy girls.’ Are you?”
They decided to go see the place before applying for the positions advertised.
Venice said, “I think I’m being pretty flexible, aren’t I? Speaking for myself, I’d say that’s an understatement. Shit, I’m burned out with sex clubs, aren’t you?”
“Say the word, we won’t pursue it.”
She didn’t say the word. She wasn’t going to be a prude about it. “I’d like to talk to the talent,” she said.
“Talent?” He laughed. “Shit, this isn’t your premium drag palace, honey. Lower your standards. This is just a flesh room. These are mostly college kids who flunked out of their pastry arts class at Johnson and Wales cooking school. They’re going to get more cash from one lap dance than they would get in their food service careers. These are wised-up Kelly Girls.”
“And you want to be their boss?”
“They’re self-governed.”
“The ad says they want a couple?” she said.
“We’re a couple. Since when aren’t we a couple?” he asked her.
He knew what to say to her, but she was glad to hear him say it, just the same.
He told her, “Look, the mom-and-pop thing is just what these stripfests need to keep an even keel. We could do it. With your stage experience and my bartender’s certificate, we’re perfect. Like any bar, the money’s in the alcohol. Difference being, the girls are walking around in thongs. It’s just a public-awareness problem. We could improve that.”
Venice didn’t care about any girls wearing tired old thongs. She was curious about Stephen’s sudden mood shift. The managing opportunity had electrified him after weeks in the doldrums. In order to decide what she felt, she needed to see him seeing the strippers. She wasn’t ashamed of this.
The clientele was enough to make Venice turn right around. Pods of men wore orange hunting jackets and camouflage overalls as if they had just come in from the woods after blowing away a herd of deer. Venice sat down next to Stephen at a small table near the runway. She noticed her lover remove his jacket. He put the jacket in her lap. “Hold this,” he told her. This alarmed her. He was settling in to watch the girls. He looked as if he were giving in to something, to an old ache. Once or twice he lifted his arms over his head to stretch, as if he was trying to curb his anticipation.
They drank some house bourbon. “This is like a razor,” he told her. “I’ll order something smooth for our regular stock.” Then he pointed to an imitation Tiffany lamp that hung over the bar. “It’s cracked, see? We’ll have to replace that.”
She put her arms in the sleeves of his jacket, but the lining was icy. Then the house lights dimmed and Stephen’s face deepened. A spotlight fell on the stage and washed over Stephen’s profile and farther into the crowd. The pale blue light reminded her of Atlantic City where she had performed at the Exchange Street Bar. She had been famous for her eclectic concentration of blondes: Carol Lynley, Jean Seberg, Tippi Hedren, Piper Laurie, Eva Marie Saint, even Peggy Lipton. She preferred the svelte examples and avoided cows like Monroe and Mansfield. Every night after her show, she went with Stephen as he shopped for boys on the boardwalk. Stephen trailed the local coin collectors who strutted their stuff until a juvenile curfew drove them inside. Venice watched their young faces change color under the purple bug lights—their skin looked unnaturally radiant and fuzzy like velvet pictures of Elvis. Stephen took his time with the kiddies, buying chances at arcades and shooting galleries, pinging a line of severely perforated targets to win jackknives and neck chains for the teens. He could pick and choose. Venice knew Stephen’s routine as he slipped another trinket deep into a boy’s pocket. Next came the cash, flashed open and closed like a dinner napkin, and the boy went home with them.
The show started. A girl executed a slow and delicate cartwheel onto the runway and into the circle of blue light. She was wearing a United States Olympic Team sweater. She danced to the right and to the left and then she did some somersaults. She made gestures like a swimmer and then she pretended she was throwing the shot put. She pulled the sweater over her head, and her breasts lifted higher and higher until the sweater was off and her breasts jiggled back to their appropriate level. The girl folded the sweater neatly and placed it to one side of the runway. She was naked except for a transparent g-string fashioned from ordinary panty hose.
“She’s cute,” Stephen said.
“Sort of,” Venice said.
“No, I like the idea.”
“What idea?” she asked.
“The Olympic theme.”
“That’s an old standard.”
“If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.”
Stephen was watching the stripper as if she was already in his stable. Her eyes seemed blank, like in archive photographs of sweatshop girls sitting at their sewing machines. She smiled haphazardly in one direction or another, into the dark. Soon the men started to give the stripper money. They inserted dollar bills in the girl’s elastic g-string. Wary of paper cuts, she assisted them when they tried to poke the crisp bills in her muff. She stood at the edge of the bar and turned her back on the men. She bent over, touched her toes and waited. A man rolled a twenty into a tight tube and tucked it in her crack, but she had a glittered cork in her ass and he couldn’t sink it.
Venice had expected to see just what she saw, but she couldn’t help reminding Stephen that in all her months on stage, she had never stooped so low as to be a mere coin slot.
Stephen was making a business appraisal, but Venice thought he should still hand this girl some cash. Her months on a runway gave her a feeling of solidarity with the plain-faced coed on stage. She didn’t want the girl to think Stephen might be trying to get something for nothing. When the music stopped, the girl walked off the stage. There was scattered applause and a wave of lewd discussion about her. Stephen applauded the stripper. He said to Venice, “That girl is making a living.”
“No kidding.”
“I mean, she’s doing something. You could work this hard for your money. You could do what she has to do,” he told her.
“Hey, it was your idea for me to get out of it. I was happy at Exchange Street, but I don’t want this end of it. I don’t want to sightsee.”
“You’ll get used to it.”
“I don’t think so. I’m finished with these gropers and oglers.”
“Well, I could do it on my own,” he said.
“You want to work here every day for a living? It’s not my idea of a real life’s work.” She looked at him. He was trying to look back at her, at her face, but he followed the next act. Then he turned to look straight at her. He told her she didn’t have to be part of the plan, she might not be included in his decision making. He wasn’t forcing her into it.
Venice recognized a threat. Since her surgery, she had lost her resilience to his icy warnings, they were harder to brush off.
“I have to use the ladies’ room,” she said. He nodded his head at her. He fondled his chin and rubbed his shave as he watched a new girl on the stage. He smoothed his palm over his face in a new dreaminess she hadn’t seen before.
On her way to the lavatory she passed the dressing room, where the girls were arranging their scanty costumes. One of the girls looked up at her and smiled.
“Where’s the john?” Venice said.
The stripper told her how to get to the lavatory and she warned Venice that one of the toilets didn’t work. She told Venice which toilet she should use.
“We all use that one toilet,” another girl said.
Venice thanked the girls, wondering at her inclusion in such an odd, protective detail. One stripper helped another get dressed. She used a pliers to tug a zipper. “Getting it up is one thing, getting it down is a scream. Every guy has to give it a shot,” the girl said.
“Can they get it down?” Venice asked.
“Only after I’m stuffed with loot. Then I decide when.”
“Oh,” Venice was smiling, “it’s a trick?”
“A technological miracle,” the stripper said, “that’s what I’d call it.”
“There’s a lot of science in this,” one of the other girls said.
“It’s not just bump and grind. It has to do with centrifugal force. Centrifugal force is behind every move you make.”
Venice laughed, remembering that her basic high school science didn’t prepare her for what really lay ahead.
“I bet you’d like to try it,” one of girls told Venice. They all turned to watch her face.
“There’s a cash advance if you decide.”
“An advance?”
“Henry will give you a cherry popper. Two-hundred-dollar stipend on your first night.”
Venice smiled at the word stipend. She recognized how these initiates might want to whitewash their everyday commerce with fancy words.
“In a little while, Cindy takes a shower.”
“You take a shower out there?” Venice asked.
“About ten times a night.”
“Hence the drain,” Venice said.
“That’s right, the drain. Who needs Liquid Plumr?”
“Forty dollars, they can soap us up. That’s forty dollars per customer.”
Venice said, “I guess you really clean up.”
The girls had heard this a lot.
Venice enjoyed the farce.
The one named Cindy unscrewed the cap from a big bottle of Spring Green Vitabath. She invited Venice to sniff the fragrant contents.
“That’s nice.”
“It costs me, but it’s extra emollient. Five showers in here and your skin gets chapped. We have to look out for ourselves.”
In the lavatory, Venice noticed the roach tape along the baseboards. She saw it the way an accountant follows the diagonal line through graph paper. For some reason she could not urinate. That part of her body wouldn’t open. Her whole pelvic triangle was tender. She stood over the sink. A tiny mirror framed only her eyes. Seeing her eyes like that, without the rest of her face, was unnerving. Her eyes revealed something which her mouth, her lips would have erased with a quick smile.
She sat down beside Stephen. Another girl had climbed onto the runway. She said her name was Pepper. Pepper had red hair. She wore a minuscule g-string and she had combed her red frizz over the tight border of nylon. The men were calling her “Spicedrop” and “Fireball” because of her red hair. The men kept proposing new names relating to the combustion metaphor, drifting over to an arson theme, and everyone laughed. Venice thought of the rabbit with the twenty names. Stephen was laughing with the crowd, a short, disciplined bleat that was easy to discern.
She walked back to the dressing room. “Well. Where’s this Henry guy?”
“He’s in Atlantic City.”
“No kidding? I was there last summer.”
“So, you want to dance tonight?”
“That’s right.”
“You need to change into something. There’s a rack of stuff in here.”
Venice pulled the hangers across the rod until she saw a prom item, a floor-length gown in peach-colored satin.
She tugged the dress over her head and borrowed the lip pencil and mascara left out on the table. “You need one of these thongs,” a girl said holding out a wastebasket full of panty-hose sashes.
“I don’t need it,” Venice said. “I’m wearing a string, à la Calvin Klein.”
Venice was ready. “I’ll go next,” she said.
The music churned on. Venice flounced down the runway, swinging her hips and paddling the air with her forearms, breaking her wrists in haughty birdlike gestures just like Bette Davis. The audience seemed stunned by the sudden shift from the continuous nude mural to this higher plateau of entertainment. They chided the new “actress,” for stalling. The men yelled at her to disrobe.
Venice started to peel the satin neckline off her shoulders, then tugged it back on. She rolled her shoulder free, then covered it up again. This went on for a while. She searched the bar rail for Stephen, but the tables were too dark to see him. She minced up and down the stage. Her fluid gait perpetuated a pendulum effect; she allowed her hips to slip left, then lock, slip right, then lock. She tossed her hair, wiped her bangs from her forehead with exaggerated pathos, like the crone in Sunset Boulevard. Again she looked for Stephen to see how she should proceed. Behind the runway, there was a screen with projections. Slides of sandy beaches alternated with slides of pinto horses. A single moth followed the cone of light back and forth, dipping from one end to the other. The insect landed on the screen, fanning its wings. Once it became the white eye of a horse, then the slide flipped and it was gone in the foam of the sea. The moth pulsed forward again. Instinctively it climbed the smoky column above Venice and its shadow grew monstrous against her.