used to waiting tables in six-hour shifts, dancing for fifteen minutes isn’t exactly a triathlon, either.”
“So you got into it on the arithmetic.”
She laughed. “Numbers were always my weakness. I was a little nervous about it the first time. I didn’t know what to expect. Even though I’d spent a night watching it from offstage, I wasn’t used to the men. I also didn’t know what to wear that first time, but then I realized I had the perfect thing hanging on the hook on the back of my closet door: my waitress uniform. I looked good in it. It was all starched and ready for Saturday dinner, and I had comfortable shoes that went with it. A lot of the girls try to dance in spike heels, and you can do it after a while, but at first it makes you clumsy and stiff. May Company was having a lingerie sale, so I went and bought some nice underthings—a slip and everything, because I figured I might need a lot to take off, just to kill time on stage. So what I took off was the waitress outfit I was supposed to wear to work that night. I won the contest, made fifteen hundred for fifteen minutes’ work, and got offered a job. I thought about it for a week, and realized it didn’t make any sense to do anything else.”
“How long have you been doing it?” asked Prescott.
“About twelve or thirteen years, on and off.”
“On and off?”
“Yeah. I got married once, and quit. I met him at the Harem. He was one of those young guys you see a lot, who go out on a tear on Friday night, drink too much, and celebrate something or other. He was with about five other guys from a car lot. He was a salesman, and they’d beaten their quota that month and set some record. I didn’t expect to see any of them again, but the next time I came on, there he was. A little while later, we were dating.”
“What made you decide to go out with him?”
“Did I say he wasn’t cute?” she retorted. “And he seemed to me to be the one I wanted. A few months later, he changed jobs so nobody at work would know me, and we got married in Las Vegas. It didn’t last.”
“Why not?”
“First he wanted me to quit stripping. I could understand that, so I quit. Things went on okay for about a year. We didn’t have a whole lot coming in, but I had saved a lot at the Harem. I went back to waiting tables. But then things started to fall apart. He bought a new car and put a down payment on a house with most of the money I had saved. Then one day, he came home and said he’d been laid off. He wanted me to go back to stripping, just for a little while, to make the mortgage payments and get ahead for good. I felt really sorry for him because I thought it must be killing him, knowing how he felt. But since he asked me, and I didn’t have any better ideas, I did it. By then, Hobart had bought Nolan’s and opened it as a strip club, so I got a job there. I figured I’d better make the most of it, so the time I was back at it would be as short as possible. I worked five nights, four shows a night, and five on weekends. Weekends are a rougher crowd, but the money is great. I was taking home at least a thousand a night, sometimes more, most of it in cash. After about two months, I noticed my husband wasn’t looking too hard for a job. I kept track of him for a week, and realized he wasn’t looking at all. I asked him about it, and he said he already was working. He was acting as my business manager. Investing my pay, making hair appointments for me, and all that was a full-time job. He said it was stupid for him to kill himself trying to sell cars when I could make much more just taking off my clothes. I put up with that for a while, not wanting to do anything too hasty while I was thinking things over. Then I took a look at the bank statements and the bills, and saw that there were no investments, no savings. He had been spending it all, a lot of it on other women. I filed for divorce. My lawyer did a search to see if I still had any money left, and he found no money, but a lot of things I didn’t know: that my husband hadn’t been laid off from the car lot at all. He had quit, and told them he’d inherited some money.”
“After the divorce, you had to go back to work, right?”
“Already was working, remember?” she said. “I paid off the debts, sold the house, sold the new car and bought a used one. I was a little better than broke. I worked nights for another year, saved every penny, and went back to school. I go to class at night, and work the business lunch now. As you know. The crowd then is a nice, quiet bunch, mostly older men, and no rowdy drunks. They tip at least as well, though, because they have more. I’m not going to be able to make a living forever going on a stage and shaking my bare ass, but I’m hoping I’ll get away with it long enough to be a licensed CPA.” She paused and looked at him with a calm smile. “See? It wasn’t very sad.”
“Borderline,” he said.
“Come on.”
“All right. You’re only twenty-eight or twenty-nine, right?”
“I wish. I’m thirty-six.”
“You look younger. You could do this for a long time yet.”
“Maybe,” she admitted. “But I’m not the only one getting older. The business is getting older too.”
“It is?”
“Sure. It’s an old-fashioned thing. Like magic shows, or circuses. It made a lot more sense when you hardly ever saw a woman’s legs, or something. But the world is different, and what we do at Nolan’s is pretty tame. When I’m done with my act, you’ve seen maybe ten square inches that I couldn’t show you on the beach. Hobart can tell you. He knows. If you turn on your TV, you can see attractive people having sex.” She amended it. “Some are attractive, anyway. On the Internet there are sites with girls living in a house where there are cameras on in every room, even the bathroom. You can e-mail them and ask them to do things.”
“So you think the clubs will go out of business?”
“I think they’ll last a little longer than I do, but not the way they are.”
“I’m not sure I follow that,” said Prescott.
“A place like Nolan’s will either be girls doing the same acts that made your grandma upset—just kind of quaint, making fun of what used to shock people—or it will be stuff that would make you barf.”
“Which way is Nolan’s going?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Hobart thinks like you. He’s a businessman. He got the place cheap and thought of a way to make it pay. While it pays, he’ll keep it. But he has no emotional investment in owning a club. He’s into money. If it brought in more money to replace us with men demonstrating power tools, he’d do it.” She considered. “I think he won’t go the next step to keep up with the times. He hates legal troubles, so he keeps things pretty conservative. I think he’ll just sell out at a profit someday.”
“Do you like him?”
She shrugged. “He’s okay, I guess. He works hard at keeping the place up and running it. He’s good about protecting the dancers: nobody ever gets pawed twice. I guess what I’d have to say is that I understand him, and that makes me comfortable.”
“You understand him?”
“Yeah. He’s the greediest man I ever met—no, the second greediest. I just told you about the first. But you only have to know one thing about Hobart: he’s there to make money. He uses the bar as an office for all kinds of side deals, people coming and going all the time. He looks at the acts, but only to see if they’re good enough to keep customers there buying drinks. If we all offered him a choice—our bodies or our purses—he’d take the purses.”
“And that makes you comfortable?”
“Yeah,” she said. “It does.”
He could see her watching him out of the corner of her eye the rest of the way to Cavender’s. When they pulled up in front of the restaurant Prescott had to stop and inch forward behind two big black cars, as the parking attendants opened doors to let passengers out. Only then did she look away from Prescott to study the fashionably dressed people stepping from their cars to the big wooden doors. In a moment, the attendant was opening her door, and she stood, catching a glimpse of the big crystal chandelier, giant old-fashioned rugs, and heavy antique furniture.
When the valet had taken the Corvette and Prescott and Jeanie were inside, she was like a cat studying her surroundings intensely, but through half-lidded eyes, without appearing to notice them at all. Cavender’s was one of the best restaurants in St. Louis, but it had been since the 1920s: the antiques had aged in place. Prescott ordered them both a glass of wine, which they sipped while they looked at the menu under the watchful eyes of the waiter. She closed hers, set it on the table and said, “I’ll just have a small salad, no dressing.”
The waiter looked expectantly at Prescott, but Prescott said, “Can you come back in a few minutes,
