Chapter 17 - The Christian Stripper

An Expensive Suit Still In Its Plastic, A Bowl of Lollies, A Word I Had Never Heard, and The One Thing I Thought Was Still Mine.

Dear Reader,

I have to tell you that it gets worse before it gets better. Part of me wants to spare you and a larger part wants to spare myself, but you have come this far on the understanding that I would tell you the truth, and the truth is that the road from here goes a long way down before it turns.

There is an old idea I came to lean on much later, when I needed something to hold. That some of us cannot find the way out of a thing until we have gone all the way down into it. I did not take that road because I was brave. I took it because by then I could not see any other.

I am still trying to understand how it happened. It visits me at ordinary moments, in the supermarket queue, at a red light with the indicator ticking, and I ask the question I cannot leave alone. How does a good woman become this. So, I am going to take you down there with me and tell it as honestly as I can, so you can look at it alongside me and perhaps see the thing I still cannot. Stay with me. It does turn. I promise you it turns.

Eva

By then our weeks had a shape, and the shape was a cycle, though it took me years to see it as one. It began with the hype. Caleb horny all week, grabbing, wanting, lit from the inside, his phone never down, a stream of messages flying back and forth with couples, photos coming in of orgies and strangers and things I had not known people sent each other. And he wanted ours to match. So I posed. I made photos and videos for him, for them, that I still cannot quite believe I made, explicit and compromising, my face always kept out of frame, and afterward I would feel sick with the fear of where they might end up and sicker with what I had become to make them. But in the hype he was happy, and his happiness was a drug. I was the best wife in the world, the funniest, the bravest. He was proud of me. Life was amazing. I would send a witty reply to some couple and he would glow at me, and for a day or two I would feel chosen, which was the only feeling I was still chasing by then.

Then we would actually go, and it would collapse. We had become the worst swingers in the state. Whatever the opposite of a natural talent is, we were it. A kiss, sometimes down to underwear, and then it would fall apart, every time. Caleb could not get hard. Or I would go somewhere behind my own eyes and start apologising, I’m sorry, I’m new, I’m still getting used to this, the brakes going on just as he tried to accelerate. It did not help that I did not much like the people, most of them strangers to everything I valued, people I could not have gelled with in daylight let alone undressed. Flop, fail, home. Much to my relief, though I could never say so. And then the crash, the silent drive, the argument, Caleb annoyed and frustrated and let down, and me apologising again, always the one apologising, lying awake beside him thick with guilt for a failure I was also secretly thanking God for. And then, a day or two later, a new message, and the light coming back on in him, and the hype starting over. I could have set a calendar by it.

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And I was doing things to myself to keep up. The hours I had once given my business I now gave to the gym, the mood boards gathering dust while briefs I would once have killed for went to other designers. There was the tan, the nails, the waxing, the Botox. I told myself it was self-care. I was not maintaining a body, I was building a weapon, and the war was for my own husband. I had also started doing something with food I did not have a name for then, eating less and less and calling it discipline, until some private hour the hunger won and the shame of it sent me to the bathroom to undo it. Before a meet it was worst. I would empty myself of the dinner and the dread together, fix my face, and go out and be charming. I thought I was managing myself. I was disappearing myself, one part at a time.

The drinking crept up alongside it, and I saw less of my family, because it was easier than holding my face together across a table from people who knew me. The children were at the age for other people’s houses, and they were always at them. I told myself it was ordinary, and was grateful, on the nights we went out, not to have to be fully there.

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And then Brie came back.

You will remember Brie. The wine tour, the bar, my husband’s mouth finding hers while I stood and watched and called it growth. One of the deepest betrayals so far, and the woman I had feared most since. What I had not told you was who she was. Brie had been a stripper, and her profile read like it, a wall of professional photographs that belonged in a magazine, lit and oiled and certain, not one of them featuring her husband. She was everything I was not, and as far as I could tell, everything Caleb wanted. She was my worst fear with a phone number.

She and the husband had been after us since the wine tour, the messages never stopping, and more than once a meeting had fallen through, the relief going through me each time like cool water. Then came the invitation to their formal party, and Caleb bought a suit. You have to understand what that meant. Caleb was a surf-shop man, jeans and a t-shirt, the occasional good shirt dragged out under protest. In all our years together I had never known him spend more than fifty dollars on a piece of clothing, and he would wince doing it. For this he spent two thousand. It was a black-tie thing, a fancy dinner Brie and the husband were hosting at a posh hotel in the city, and he went all out.

It was not just a dinner. It was billed as an exclusive event, hand-picked, the hottest swingers in the state, that was the phrase, with erotic dancers and some kind of six-poster bed and what the invitation called sensual games, and the whole thing sounded so intense and so far beyond me that I felt ill just reading it. I lay awake the nights before it sick with dread, and on the evening itself I was so nervous I genuinely thought I might be sick in the car. We parked. We crossed the lobby. We got into the lift. And as the doors began to close Caleb’s phone buzzed, and it was Brie, cancelling, at the literal last second, because she and the husband had both come down with a savage gastro bug. I stood in that mirrored lift going up to a party that no longer existed, and the relief was so complete I almost folded in half. We rode back down and drove home, Caleb mourning a party I had prayed we would never reach, me arranging my face into sympathy while I could have sung. I have never been so grateful to a stomach virus in my life. The suit hung in its plastic on the back of the bedroom door for weeks, two thousand dollars he had never spent on me, waiting for the night I dreaded to come back around.

The reprieve did not hold. The dinner invitation came, and this time there was no failing of nerve to hide behind, no convenient illness. I did not want to go. I said so. And Caleb looked at me with something close to wounded reason and said, ‘We owe it to them. We were so embarrassing on the wine tour.’

Owe. As though there were a debt, and I was the currency.

So I put the armour on. The dress, the face, the emptied stomach, the bright voice. And we went to meet the one woman I had prayed for months I would never sit across from.

The seating was no accident. She had arranged herself beside Caleb, which left me next to the husband, a man who reminded me of nothing so much as a codfish, wet and faintly cold, with no joke in him and no thought worth finishing, just a soggy presence whose hand kept finding my thigh under the table as though it had drifted there on a tide. Beside her he was barely a person. She fizzed and he leaked. I asked him once what he did for work and the answer was so long and so grey that I lost consciousness somewhere in the middle and came back to find him still going, Brie’s hand on my husband’s forearm, and the dawning understanding that I was the only person at the table doing any work at all. I had even apologised to them over the entrees, for the wine tour, for losing my nerve and leaving, told them I was new to this, please bear with me. I made myself small before a single thing had happened. It was the reflex that had carried me here.

Back at their place she told us her story, and Caleb fell into it like a man recognising himself in it. She had grown up Christian, properly Christian, rules stitched into every hour, and had not been able to breathe in it, so she left and became a stripper and found there a thing she kept calling freedom, saying the word the way some people say the name of someone they love. When she got too old for the stage she stayed near it, and that was where she met the husband, and here they all were.

Then she told us about compersion. The word was new to me. It was, she explained, the opposite of jealousy, the empathetic joy you feel watching the person you love take pleasure with someone else. She and the husband had built their life on it, and she set it down between us across the lollies and the candlelight like a sacrament. And Caleb nodded slowly and said yes, that was exactly how he felt. That he loved watching me with someone else. And I sat very still, because I was not sure I believed him. He had not glowed watching Lucas, he had gone soft and sullen. So either he had reached a height of love I had not, or he just liked the word because it unlocked what he wanted. I did not let myself finish the thought. They offered compersion as a higher thing, an enlightenment, the next rung up, and I privately took it as a verdict on me. That my inability to feel it was the shortfall. That everyone at this table had evolved to a place I had not, and the failure was mine.

But here is what I could not say on that lounge. Caleb and I had years behind us, a real bond once, the kind that should have been able to hold a feeling like that if it were truly love’s summit. I felt none of it here, because nothing in this candlelit room was love. It was cheap and tacky, all performance and appetite and the cold bright word freedom, and not one second of it felt like being treasured. I did love Caleb. That was never in question. What I could not understand was why loving him now meant sitting and watching his face light up for a stranger, and hearing my own heartbreak described as a feeling I had not yet grown enough to have.

Then she stood and began to deploy her stripper techniques, such as they were. She sauntered to the drinks, changed the music to Pony by Ginuwine, which, I mean, my god, the cliche of it, and then, as if by accident, slipped one sleeve off her shoulder.

‘Oops.’ A giggle. Hand to her mouth.

The other sleeve. ‘Oops.’ Another giggle, another surprised little hand.

‘Oohh yes, that’s my baby,’ said the husband, and he leered at me and nodded toward her, then took the strap of my dress between his fingers and rubbed it. ‘You should join her.’ I stammered something and shrank back. I was not ready for this, and I could feel the air in the room thickening, the whole night tilting toward something.

Brie peeled the dress the rest of the way and wiggled out of it like a budget Betty Boop, pleased with herself, standing there in her underwear going, ‘Oh my, I’ve lost my dress.’ Caleb said nothing. His eyes were huge. He rubbed my leg and said, encouraging, ‘Yeah, babe, you should take yours off too.’ I was frozen. I could not find a single word.

Then she came over to me, all warmth and purr and pout. ‘Let me help you, babe.’ She lifted me up and began peeling the dress from my body, slow and seductive, pretending to be wild for me, because she was clever enough to know that two women together would send both men out of their minds. ‘It’s okay,’ I said, ‘I can do it.’ I did not like this woman. I peeled it off myself, clumsy and stiff and graceless, with none of the moves she had, and I hated how inadequate it made me feel, and hated more that I cared.

And there it was in one image. A stripper in her own lounge room in her underwear, gently letting me understand that the reluctance was mine, that I was the one who had failed to climb some rung everyone else had. I had the most athletic body of my life, taller than her and younger in the face, every part of it paid for with hours I would never get back, and beside her I felt like nothing, because she had the one thing I never would, the willingness to do this without dying inside. Her moves were not even good. They were forced and silly and obvious. But Caleb was lit up watching them, and I knew with total clarity that I would never be that person, and that this was the disqualifying flaw.

I stood facing her, the two of us in our underwear and heels. She leaned in to kiss me, and I knew exactly what she was doing, and I wriggled back from her mouth. He was behind me by then, hands settling on my backside, murmuring ‘mmm, delicious,’ because to him this was how it began. Caleb had stood too, moving into the little circle. Fuck, I thought, while Brie giggled and ignored my face turning away from hers. I was not going to play my part in the Brie show.

‘Come on, let’s go to the bedroom, guys,’ she said, and winked, and took my wrist.

I said I needed the bathroom first. I shut the door and stayed as long as I dared, looking at the woman in the mirror with the perfect body and no idea who she was, and when I came out Caleb was waiting in the corridor. For one second I thought it was rescue. I said it low and fast. ‘I can’t do this. I really can’t. I don’t want to. Can we go.’

His eyes went hard and cold, and he stood over me. ‘Then you go in there and tell them. You tell everyone you’re ruining the night.’

He knew I couldn’t. That was the whole of it. He knew my politeness and my shame and my horror of a scene better than I knew them myself, and he set them against me like a lock. He had found the one door I could not walk through and stood me in front of it. So I did the thing he knew I would do. I went back in.

After that the night comes to me in pieces, and I will give it to you the way I have it, because the pieces not fitting is the truest part. We were all on the bed, Brie with Caleb, me with her gormless husband. He arranged himself beside me and set his hands going over my body, kissing at me, praising me, telling me how good I felt, and I lay there revolted by him and trying, at the very same time, to do my part. That is the thing I cannot make anyone understand who was not inside it. I was disgusted, and I was still trying. His hands moved toward my knickers and I made myself reach for him, made myself kiss him back, and when he took my hand and placed it on himself and moved it, I tried, I honestly tried, and my whole body said no. I could not. I pulled my hand away and wriggled back from him and turned over, needing Caleb, needing this to somehow be the two of us, reaching for the one familiar face the way you do in a crowd.

His pants were down. She was astride him, still in her underwear, and he was hard.

He was hard. His hand was on her breast and he was looking at her, and the room slid sideways and went far away. The one thing. The single stupid comfort I had carried out of every other wreck, that his body only answered to me, that this at least had stayed mine. I watched it leave the world while a former stripper bounced on my husband and looked proud of it, with no idea what she had just taken, because how could she know.

My face must have done something terrible, because he saw it. ‘I couldn’t help it, babe,’ he said. Almost teasing. As though I had caught him reaching for a second biscuit.

I heard myself ask, from very far off, if we could slow down, have a little break, I was feeling funny. And in the same blurred stretch the husband behind me made a sound and I felt it across my back, warm and appalling. He had finished on me. A stranger had branded me while I was turned away watching my marriage end, and somehow he had got there first.

Then Caleb, to the room, explaining me. ‘She doesn’t like me sleeping with other people yet. We haven’t done that.’ My boundary, the one we had agreed on together, recited to strangers as my hang-up, the odd little rule he was sorry about.

‘Oh my goodness,’ Brie gushed, ‘I’m so sorry, babe, I’m so sorry,’ and she leapt off him and made a little flourish with her hand over him, presenting my husband back to me like a dish returned to the kitchen. ‘He’s all yours.’ And then, the soul of tact, ‘We’ll leave you two alone,’ and she gathered up the codfish and steered him out, and the door clicked shut, and it was just Caleb and me and the candle smoke and the cooling shame on my back.

‘What the fuck, Eva,’ he said. ‘My god.’

‘You were about to have sex with her.’

‘I wasn’t. I told her I wasn’t going to.’

‘Then why,’ I said, ‘did you have to say it like that, in front of everyone, like I’m the problem.’

He did not answer. He just looked at me the way you look at the one broken thing in a room, and I understood that as far as he was concerned, the problem in that apartment had never been Brie, or her husband, or the rules. It had been me.

I was crying before we left the car park. I told him the truth, the plainest I had ever managed. ‘I can’t do this. It feels like I’m watching you cheat on me, and worse, like I’m holding the door open while you do it. It makes me feel sick. I feel betrayed. I know it’s what we signed up for, but I can’t get past it, and I don’t know how to.’

And he said, ‘Of course you can’t. God, you’re so selfish.’ He said it almost sadly, which was worse than shouting. ‘You were happy enough to have Justin all over you. But you can’t let me be free. You can’t stand to see me happy, to see me pleasured. You’ve locked this relationship in a box, Eva. You’ve trapped me inside it and thrown away the key. That’s not love. If you loved me you wouldn’t cage me like this.’

‘I do love you,’ I said. ‘I just can’t do this. I don’t know how to do this.’

But he had stopped hearing me by then, or had decided not to. Here is the thing I have never said out loud, because it is the thing that kept me from leaving. As he talked, he did not look like a man being cruel. He looked like a man in genuine pain. He looked trapped. He looked at his own life and saw a cage and saw me holding the bars, and he believed it, completely. And the terrible thing, the thing that bent my mind in that dark car, was that I started to believe it too. That my inability to watch my husband aroused by other women was not a wound but a defect. A meanness in me. A smallness. He felt trapped by my limits, and I felt trapped by his needs, and we sat in the same small car pointing at each other across an inch of dark, each of us certain the other one held the key.

I looked out the window and thought, with a flatness that frightened me, I can’t do this anymore. I have to leave. And then the thought closed over the way it always did, and by the time we pulled into the driveway I had put it away again, because I could not yet imagine the shape of a life on the other side of him.

And it was not only the betrayal that sat on me. It was that I had let a man I did not know finish on my back. It was that I had apologised to these people for the crime of having feelings. It was that I had stood in a corridor asking to go home and been told to announce my own unworthiness to a room, and had chosen the room over the sentence. I did not know who Caleb was. Worse, I did not know who I was, this woman who kept saying yes with her body while everything in her screamed no. I wanted to leave him, and in the same breath I was so ashamed of who I had become that I could not imagine anyone wanting me. Where do you go when you cannot stand the person you are leaving and cannot stand the person you would be leaving as.

I want to be honest about the dark of it. By then I did not trust Caleb, or men, or the bright free world she had been selling, or my own judgement, which had brought me here one reasonable step at a time. I had lost the last thing. My dignity had gone a while back. What went that night was the last illusion that any of this had ever been about love.

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Next Week - The Pilots Party

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