Two Paths Converged in the Wood
She went by Cathy then. Cathy was all of two syllables, easier to say. Easier to chant.
She liked the chanting, but would only admit that to herself. Liked that men were looking at her, fantasying about her, memorizing her. Liked that they went home and let their sleeping wives sleep, creeping into their bathrooms, and, remembering her, held themselves, jerking off to the rhythm of her remembered hips.
She liked that.
Cathy. It didn't suit her, she knew, but it suited the image, the persona she slipped too easily into when she walked out through those heavy red velvet curtains and into the spot light she craved so much and found only here, on this wooden stage that had seen better days, even back when Frank was king, and Celine sounded like a kind of foreign car.
She liked the almost propositions, the stop gaps in conversations while the men were drinking amber liquids from thick bottomed tumblers and she sipped at what only they thought was vodka. Their eyes would find hers just for the first moment, then the gaze would drift down, seeing through the clothes she'd bought with a previous man's bills, wet and crumpled from being clutched in salty palms, bills that she'd plucked out from her g-string like she was picking wilted daisies from a patch of wild flowers.
Their eyes would linger on her breasts. Or her hips. Or her crotch, and she would watch them looking at her, memorizing her, a slight smile playing on her lips, as she imagines them hours later, when she would be at home, her husband plunging inside her, imagined them standing in the middle of their hotel room, pay per view porn on the television, while they imagined her underneath them.
She liked that.
She liked it until one night, when she'd had a huge blow out with the man she'd married, the man who she danced for even when he wasn't there. Coke had been coursing through their blood streams, seeping out through their pores, in their very breath, shooting out each of them like fireworks above Lake Mead, in voices that hurled across the room at each other. And she'd left the house in a cloak of anger and hatred, and ordered a real vodka when she got to work. The liquid did as she'd begged it to do, set fire to her veins at the same time it dulled her senses.
The Stray Cats filled the empty places in her, as she considered downing the half-inch left in her glass when she realized she was no longer alone. A man had sidled up next to her, a double-breasted pinstripe with a tie she was sure the wife he left back in Iowa or Illinois had bought him for his birthday. Her vodka drowned internal alarms going off much to late, and by the time she saw him, the almost muttered get lost stuck in her throat, barred behind teeth and gums and tongue, he'd held out his hand, an inch of folded money, stiff and clean, graced his palm as he offered it to her. More money than she'd make from shaking her ass in heels for a week. Money enough for more than just a lap dance. This much bought him a ticket to touch.
His eyes held the promise of no promises. Stranger sex in one of those hotel rooms she'd imagined so often, where he would fuck her husband right out of her mind.
This was it, she knew. The line that had been guaranteed to her by all those before her. Older, wiser women who wore too much eyeliner and chain-smoked long, skinny brown cigarettes. Women she'd dismissed with the flick of her hand as she walked –sauntered- away toward the heat of spotlight and warmth of the chanting. And now, as she sat here at the stained bar, on a stool with ripped vinyl, the duct tape patch grazing the back of her thigh though her thin skirt, one hand squeezing a glass of unfinished vodka, the other hand inches away from grasping his and the money, forcing him to make good on those unspoken promises, she wished she had listened to those women.
Fight or flight. Give in and put out, or take the long hard road, the one that led away from long and hard men.
She breathed deep, swallowed hard. He watched the muscles in her throat move, and she watched him watching her, watched him lick his lips in anticipation, his tongue in replay slow motion snaked out, running over desert dried lips, taste buds standing at attention, and she knew he was salivating.
She didn't like that.
He said her name. The two-syllable version she christened the persona she slid into when she had to slide out of her clothes. Cathy.
Two syllables breathed out through dry lips, soaked with saliva and martini. One word, one mist covered, stinking of vermouth word. And it changed her life.
"Sorry Mister" she slid off the bar stool, planting her feet firmly underneath herself, slung her purse over her shoulder, "Cathy doesn't live here anymore."