Рейчел Кушнер - The Mars Room

“Unfortunately you can’t drink it while you’re on the plane.”

Too late, he thought at her. He had drained both bottles, one at the gate, and the other just after takeoff.

He pressured her to bring him another drink. Pointed out that there was another hour to go and he had a dry thing with his mouth.

She was suddenly conciliatory, too much so. She’s scamming me, he knew, and indeed, she brought him a straight Coke, with no airplane bottle, claiming the drink had rum in it.

There was a couple next to him turned inward to each other like they didn’t really want to talk but he tried anyway. Sometimes shooting the breeze with people kills time. He told them about his boat and he didn’t actually have a boat but he’d been talking for so long like he did have a boat that he basically, at this point, owned a boat. But they weren’t interested. So he turned to the kid across the aisle, started telling him about his boat. Sometimes he thought of people as kid, called grown men kid, but this kid was a kid-kid, Kurt realized.

How old are you? he asked.

“Thirteen.”

“ Nice .” Kurt said it with a way-to-go, all right, kind of tone. Kids liked to be encouraged. He was rewarding this kid for being thirteen. Thirteen was puberty, old enough to get off. He’d like to show the kid a picture of Vanessa. Let him in on the marvel of women who know how to act like women. Not like this stewardess and probably most of the women on this airplane, women everywhere these days, who hardly acted like women at all. If he had a picture of her he would show the kid. There was a porn actress who looked a bit like her, but he didn’t have a photo of the actress, either.

A woman came up the aisle and leaned over the kid. Kid got up from his seat. A man came up the aisle and sat where the kid had been. They were a family and they were switching. Nice knowing you, Kurt said, and the kid said, You too.

No one would talk to him, or rather, listen, so he got his book out, Chickenhawk , a Vietnam thing he’d been trying to read for three years. It interested him because he had begun long ago telling people he was in combat, but he never was. He was stationed in Germany. The book was about a helicopter pilot and Kurt wasn’t even halfway through. Because it was taking him so long to read, and was a secondhand copy with cheap paper, he kept it in a Ziploc bag. He read a few pages on the airplane as he sipped his rum and Coke with no rum thanks to the cunt stewardess, but reading was difficult for him. The problem with reading was how relentless it was. You managed to concentrate long enough to read a whole paragraph and then there was another one, and they just kept coming. He did it mainly as an act, for the other people on the plane, except no one was watching him or noticing. He put Chickenhawk back in the Ziploc. He could not get his screen to work so he closed his eyes and planned for when he’d be home and could go see Vanessa.

Fog was barreling down the street as he got out of his cab that night in front of his apartment. Sometimes the city was cold like no place on earth. He was wearing shorts like the tourists who lined up for the cable car on Powell. Morons never got the news about the weather in San Francisco. He knew it was cold. He’d had to wear shorts on the plane because his only pair of long pants smelled of piss.

Next day he got up and went to the Mars Room. It was a Saturday and Vanessa always worked Saturdays.

She wasn’t there.

He had been gone one week in Cancún and while he was away, she apparently quit the Mars Room, according to the cashier in the lobby. Kurt didn’t know the cashier and figured the guy didn’t understand who he was, a regular who spent a lot of money in the club. He looked up—the cashier’s booth was on a platform like a chip dispensary at a casino—and told the cashier to get the manager. The platform dwarfed all who approached, and yet the cashier could have himself been a dwarf, the platform was that high, although it was unlikely. The manager came out and shook Kurt’s hand. Kurt was a regular and the manager wasn’t going to blow him off completely. But he said what the cashier said: we don’t have a Vanessa on the schedule. A Vanessa. As if there might be various Vanessas and none were working Saturdays, or even at all.

He went to Clown Alley for a burger, because he had nothing else to do. Clown Alley was in North Beach, around the corner from a place Kennedy used to frequent, when he didn’t know better. Didn’t know about the Mars Room, and about Vanessa.

The place near Clown Alley was a stage with private booths. The women pranced around and play-touched themselves, while the men, in private booths along the edges of the stage, watched the women play-touch while they touch-touched themselves in their private booths. You could pick if you wanted two-way glass or one-way glass, so that the women who play-touched could see you, or not see you, touch-touch. If you wanted eye contact or were some kind of Henry the Flasher you could get what you needed but it cost, like everything in life does. He liked that place okay because he didn’t know better. After he started going to the Mars Room, on Market Street, he never went back to the place with the booths, but he still ate at Clown Alley because they cooked a good burger and he could park his motorcycle, a BMW K100, in front of the glass windows and be on watch in case some shit-for-brains knocked it over, one of those people, and there were a lot of them, who careened around the sidewalk like a zombie.

He returned to the Mars Room that Saturday night, hoping she was working, but Vanessa was not on the schedule.

Could she have changed her stage name? Some girls changed frequently. One week they were Cherry, or Secret, and the next week they were Danger, or Versace or Lexus or something stupid like that. Vanessa was a traditional and believable woman’s name and it suited her and she had not changed it, he didn’t think, because he paid the entrance fee and went in, spent an hour scanning the room, and didn’t find her, not that night or the next day or night, or on any of the ones following those.

The first time Kurt ever saw her, he had been keeping company with a hothead named Angelique. He and Angelique were dancing in the tunnel-thing at the back of the Mars Room. They called it dancing but the whole time you’re just trying to rub up on them. There was another couple in the tunnel thing, a businessman and Vanessa. Her body was pressed against the businessman. She danced with the guy like she really meant it. She was glued to this man in a suit, in her bra and underwear. Angelique said loudly that Vanessa was breaking a rule and was she high, what drug was she on, because you can’t fuck in the tunnel. It was fine to massage men’s laps with your buttocks but if you did that frontally, other girls would get on your case.

“Yeah, I’m high,” Vanessa said, swaying into the businessman. “It’s a drug called happiness. You should try it sometime.” She continued to grind against the businessman, the man himself taking no notice of the argument between the two women and instead moving against pretty Vanessa like a man might dance with his wife on their golden anniversary, or in a TV commercial spotlighting an occasion like that, to sell Viagra.

Kurt thought it was funny. Later Vanessa passed him on the aisle and he told her so. She said I don’t like to talk but if you want a lap dance I’m twenty a song. So he gave her an Andrew Jackson, as the girls called them, and that’s how it started. The usual way it started with any girl at the Mars Room, except this chick was not just using him for the money. Something was happening between them.