“No,” he said simply, the syllable as much a small cry as it was an actual word. “No.”
The girl leaned forward on the bed and he thought she understood. She didn’t. Instead, she looked up with a smile—gloriously feigned wantonness—and raised an eyebrow knowingly. She leaned toward him, opening her mouth. Gently he pushed her away, two fingers on each of her temples. “Thank you,” he said, the words awkward and obvious and pathetic, “but no.” Already he feared that he had forever forfeited much of the self-esteem that came with the titles of husband and father. Were not those lap dances downstairs—those mind-blowing, frictive, erotically aerobic balletics—sufficiently incriminating? Of course they were. And this? Worse. Obviously worse. He was heaving inside with regret, regret at what he had already done and regret at what he was giving up. “I’m married.”
She shrugged. “I figured.”
“No. I meant…” and his voice trailed off. After a moment he began again: “I didn’t know this was going in…in this direction,” he said simply.
She seemed to think about what he had said, and he wondered if she didn’t speak enough English to understand the meaning of this direction. But before he had even started to elaborate, she asked, “Would you like to just talk?” She patted the mattress beside her, encouraging him to sit down.
“Maybe downstairs we can talk,” he mumbled. “I mean…we should return to the party.”
“You’re a sweet man,” she said, and weak-kneed he gave in and sat down beside her. He wrapped his arm around her, hoping to warm her. And there they did talk. He asked about her family and was saddened by the reality that she had none. He told her that his wife was a schoolteacher, and how the two of them loved to watch their daughter dance. How two years ago their daughter had been obsessed with Brownie badges. With Barbies, which already she had outgrown.
“Oh, I loved Barbies, too.”
“Even in Armenia?”
“Even in Armenia. I had lots of them.”
“Really? How?”
“It’s long story how I got them. How I got so many.”
“Tell me.”
But she hadn’t, because it was clear the party downstairs was growing especially feral, and he feared he had better return. They both felt the alarm from the internal clocks they’d set when they had started upstairs going off. She hopped off the bed first, leaned into him, her hands on his thighs, and kissed him on the cheek. “Your wife is lucky girl.”
He saw the goose bumps had returned to her thighs. “Can I get you a blanket? You could wear it like a shawl, maybe. You’re still cold.”
“Not really. I’m fine.”
And then she watched him get dressed, serene and unashamed by her own nakedness. She talked about what a lovely (she used that very word) man he was, and how kind he seemed. She said she liked the tone of his voice and his stories. She said she liked his smile. When he was done, she rose on her toes as if she were a ballerina and kissed him on the lips, though it was oddly chaste and Richard imagined it was the way a woman might kiss a former lover when she was saying good-bye for the last time. It was perfect in its own way, and Richard thought to himself with optative sadness that this was why men fell in love with strippers and escorts: it wasn’t the licentiousness, the dissembling, their craven willingness to do whatever you wanted. It was the way they would, out of the blue, surprise you with the psychic ability to know what you needed. He reached into the back pocket of his pants for his wallet, uncharacteristically bloated with bills, and pulled out the fifties and hundreds he had withdrawn from the bank that day for…for whatever…and gave her all that was left. Nine hundred dollars, he thought. She thanked him and joked that she really had no place to put it.
“When you get dressed, you will,” he said.
As they were walking down the stairs, her arm hooked in his as if they were promenading along some nineteenth-century boardwalk, she said, “You can tell everyone we fucked. They’ll think we did anyway.”