I sat in the back of the Galaxy Club, moodily communing with Jack Daniels. It had been a rough day, culminating with my girlfriend moving out. I replayed our final conversation in my head.
"What's going on?" I'd asked, coming home after a hard day's work running piping and installing the kitchen sinks and bathroom fixtures in a new restaurant going in on Clermont. I needed a shower and a change of clothes badly, but not so badly that I didn't notice Debbie, pretty as always, coming down the stairs with a suitcase in hand. Two more sat just inside the front door.
"I'm leaving, John. I won't be back."
"But why? I thought you –
we
– were happy, that we were progressing nicely!"
"Well, you thought wrong, pal. My agent has signed me up for a six month southwest and West Coast club tour. Oil tycoons, Internet millionaires, doctors, athletes and movie stars. If I can't latch onto something good on this tour, I'm not the girl I think I am. This time next year, I'll be sunning myself by the pool and admiring my diamonds while I decide which wine to have with the truffles and the trout almandine.
"Don't take it so hard, Johnny. All you and I ever were was a convenience. You got to fuck a gorgeous exotic dancer and have all your tiresome blue collar buddies envy you; and I got someone to take care of things while I worked my way up into the majors. It never was serious. I'll just leave the keys on the hall table. Later!"
Perhaps our liaison hadn't been more than a passing convenience to Debbie, but I had fallen for her. Fallen hard. We'd met right here in the Galaxy between sets. She was the only singing terpsichorean ecdysiast I had ever heard about. Not a bad voice, a lush body with a healthy sexual appetite... and all the morals of a diamondback rattlesnake, apparently. I took a sip of my drink, trying to decide if I wanted to get drunk or not. I felt a hand on my shoulder.
"I heard what happened. You want to talk about it?"
I nodded.
"C'mon back into my office." I obediently got up and followed Lacey Starr, owner of the Galaxy, into her office.
It's a remarkable room. It stretches the width of the club and is walled on three sides with one-way mirror glass, half-height in the front and apparently paneled with full height mirrors alternating with oak panels in the corridors. From inside you can see into the two corridors leading to the restrooms, the coatroom and the ATM machines, and out over the bar and the side tables toward the pit and the stage. Lacey could monitor everything with security cameras and does in fact maintain them for insurance and legal purposes, but she prefers to rely on her own eyes and the bouncers who sit by those front windows ready to put a stop to trouble before it starts. There has never to my knowledge been a serious brawl in the Galaxy Club.
Lacey's real name is Natasha Rambova, Tasha to her friends. She was a headlining stripper and soft-porn star in her day, but unlike most women in that line of work she saved her money and invested it well. She has a head for business, which was why she is now comfortably well off when most of her contemporaries have faded into obscure poverty. She still has a fine figure and her hair is the same crown of flame it was when she was onstage. She has never admitted to using henna.
We met shortly after Tasha opened the Galaxy, when one of her dancers dropped a diamond ring down a sink and got her hand hopelessly stuck trying to get it back. JM Plumbing & Heating (the company I own) advertises 24 hour a day, 7 days a week service, which we take in turns after business hours and on weekends. I was the on-call plumber the night Lacey called. The fact that I'd been able to extricate her dancer without injury and recover the ring without having to destroy the plumbing had impressed her sufficiently that she'd given me a retainer as the club's plumber. The Galaxy had become my regular hangout and I'd done more than a little business here over the years. We sat down on a leather couch and I placed my drink on the coffee table. She looked compassionately at me; at least I thought that was her expression.
"John, I know you have Asperger's Syndrome and have a very hard time reading people's physical and social cues. But I never thought you would take that scheming little bitch for serious. She's after a position in society. Meaning no offense, my friend, but you just don't measure up to her vision of the ideal mate. She has a whole checklist of standards her husband must meet. You aren't rich enough, famous enough, in a profession with cachet enough or of high enough social standing to fit into her scheme to become a Very Important Person. If I'd known you were sweet on her *"
"Well, Tasha, you didn't!" I snapped, taking a gulp of my drink. Her eyes crinkled but I couldn't tell if she was amused, frightened or angry at my outburst. "I was laboring under the delusion I had something going with her, with marriage not beyond the realm of possibility in a year or two. I feel like four kinds of idiot. Reevaluating, my analysis is that in Debbie's mind I was an expedient measure. I can see now all I ever was to her was a free hotel and automatic teller machine. Conceding the sex was marvelous, that doesn't ease the mental anguish at the moment. Difficult as it is for me as an adult male to admit this, she used her wiles to keep the mark gulled. Intercourse meant less to her than inserting a tampon, and likely not as much."
Tasha sat back and motioned to one of her bouncers, miming to pour her a drink and bring it over. She took a sip of it and looked at me over the rim of the glass.
"How old are you, John?"
"I passed the big four-oh last birthday," I said. Without a girlfriend in sight or prospect, I'd observed the day by completing a particularly difficult furnace repair for the elementary school necessitated by a winter power failure and subsequent freeze-up so the school could open on time on Monday.
"How many girls have you lived with?"
"Three, counting her, but never of long duration. Never longer than a few months."
"Why did your other girlfriends leave?"
"They alleged I wasn't sensitive to them, that I did not pay proper attention to obvious signals or look soulfully into their eyes. And they all got upset over incidents I thought were trivial. That sort of thing."
"And were you sensitive to them?"
I shrugged. "I don't know. I did not forget anniversaries, even silly ones like having first made their acquaintance three months ago, or that it was a month since they had first cohabited with me. I was always giving them little gifts, so they'd know I cared. I even remembered to put down the toilet seat every time." I tried to smile to show I was making a joke, the way the books say you should.
Tasha frowned and stared into her drink. At last she said, "Have you considered looking at some of the mail-order bride sites online? That was how I got to America. Back then it was a slow process compared to now.
"You paid a fee to the agency and they would take pictures and put them in a book they would send to men in America. The Americans would look you over and read your biography and if they liked you, they would write to you. Eventually, maybe one or two would like you well enough from your letters that they would come and visit you over there. One of them asked me to marry him and I leaped at the chance to come to America. I took American citizenship when I married him. It was fine for a couple of months. Then he took to beating and raping me. Finally I fled to a woman's shelter and I hooked up with an agent and become a dancer far from the city he lived in. At that, I was lucky.
"Today, it is faster and there are more checks on the would-be grooms. Before these agencies will set up meetings, they run background checks on the men and on the women too, to weed out the bad apples. Maybe you should give that a try. There are lots of beauties from behind the old Iron Curtain who would go for a guy like you, John."
"Not so many as you might think, Tasha. I actually have looked at two or three of those websites. If the pictures and the short form biographical information looked good, I would buy their addresses and write to them, either email or airmail depending on their computer access.
"The first thing the women wanted to know, each and every time, was what kind of car I drove. Next, how large a house I owned. Then, what kind of work I did. Then, how much money I make, a question I find greedy bordering on mercenary and would not answer except in the most general terms. Such exchanges always ended with them telling me they weren't interested in taking things further; forget about joining one of those headlong meet-and-greet tours and making actual contact. I just don't have the prestige they want in their dream Western husband, even though I own my own business, a piece of another successful company, and netted half a million dollars free and clear last year after taxes, salaries, bonuses, insurance payments, buying two new trucks, replenishing stock and whatnot."
I looked Tasha right in the eye, not without difficulty. "Maybe I should just hire hookers. At least there I won't have any illusions about their giving a single solitary damn about me– about anything but the money I am paying for their services."
Tasha patted my hand. "Don't give up, John. The poets say that for every man, there is a woman. You know how many boyfriends I have?"
"Three, last time I checked. Betting in the shop is 5 to 3 on Richard the lawyer, 4 to 1 on Donald the broker, and 9 to 1 on Emilio, that new doctor at the hospital; with me a 1000 to 1 longshot purely to round out the field. The smart money is on Richard, with the wedding taking place before the end of next year." The deadpan delivery of this information made her laugh, but my expression didn't change.
"Well, don't give up on yourself yet. Your social skills aren't the greatest even with all the coaching I've given you, but you are neither hopeless nor undesirable from a female point of view. The thing is, you need to do a few things.
