“Well, I... I didn’t know I’d be...”
“If you’d prefer coming back some other time...”
“No, no. It’s just...”
“Whatever makes you comfortable,” he says.
Chris says.
“Well... did you want me to come back in here?” she asks. “After I’m dressed?”
“Yes.”
Undressed, she thinks.
“In the lingerie?” she says.
In my underwear, she thinks. Their underwear, actually, she thinks. Buttercup’s high-priced line of underwear. But thirty dollars an hour, she thinks.
“Yes,” Chris says. “Because that’s what you’d be doing, you know,” he says. “Modeling lingerie, you see. For upward of thirty dollars an hour.”
Still smiling.
Upward of thirty, she thinks.
“Well...” she says.
“Maybe you’d like to think it over?” Chris says, and starts to rise.
“No, no,” she says. “Hey, I guess you have to see what I look like.”
“Only if you feel comfortable about it.”
“Yes,” she says. “I do.”
“Shall I ask Clarice to come in then?”
“Sure.”
“Show you where the dressing room is?”
“Sure.”
Clarice, she learns, is a nineteen-year-old college dropout who is trying to earn enough money so she can go to Jackson, Wyoming, “away from this freakin heat,” she says, where she can become a ski instructor, though she’s never skied in her life. She tells Lainie that she only helps out here once a week because she and Chris have a sort of a thing going, but most of the time she models under the name of Kristal at a venue on the South Trail and Beaver Street, “appropriate, huh?” she says, and smiles a dazzling teenybopper smile, and still Lainie doesn’t catch on, sweet little cockeyed girl who grew up singing hymns in l’il ole Winfield, Alabama.
What is finally explained to her by Clarice is that Buttercup Enterprises, Inc., runs a string of lingerie-modeling shops along the Trail. These shops have names like Satin and Lace, or Midnight Lingerie, or Silk ‘n’ Garters, or Lace Fantasies, and their ostensible purpose is to sell lingerie. Toward that end, the chain employs what Clarice calls “a bevy of young girls” to model the lingerie for potential customers. All of these potential customers are men who pay an initial fee of fifty dollars a half hour for the privilege of seeing these girls in their scanties. Of this fifty, the house takes thirty-five and the girls get fifteen. An hour-long session costs ninety-five dollars, of which the house gets sixty-five. The modeling takes place in cubbyhole rooms — two at some locations, more at others — clustered around the main showroom. There are low platforms in these rooms and the girls stand on these platforms while they parade their wares. Nobody ever buys lingerie.
What the men who frequent these shops pay for is a variety of services...
“No touching allowed,” Clarice says, “supposedly.”
...ranging from a slow striptease for which every article of clothing dropped costs another ten dollars over the initial entrance fee, to stripping oneself while the girl gyrates, which costs another ten dollars, to masturbating while the girl lies on the platform and spreads her legs to you...
“Twenty dollars for that privilege,” Clarice explains,
...to allowing the girl to take your penis between her breasts...
“This is not considered touching,” Clarice explains, “since her hands never make contact with the organ.”
...subsequently stroking the client to climax mammillarily, to coin a phrase, which — speaking of coin — costs another fifty dollars. Since this usually occurs after the girl has taken off her bra for ten, this means she earns an additional sixty for a half-hour Tit Job, as it is known on the circuit, a total of seventy-five dollars all told, or ninety for a full hour. The girls prefer negotiating up front for whichever little service they’re going to perform, carefully explaining to the client that no one is selling sex here...
“Ha!” Clarice says.
...and that touching is strictly prohibited by law.
“Some of the men like the slow strip while they jack off,” she says, “they like being teased, you know, enjoy tossing the ten-dollar bills on the platform each time they order you to take off another piece of clothing, makes them feel like big financiers. Some of them like you to take off just the panties and spread for them while they do their number. There are girls who tell me they actually like the tit jobs, ick, because they’re not just gyrating while some guy does himself. Maybe they have sensitive breasts, which I don’t. Even so. I mean, ick. Some weeks, I go home with three, four thousand dollars, it depends on how many hours I want to work, and how far I want to go, because — just between you, me, and the lamppost — if nobody’s looking, a handjob or even a blowjob isn’t entirely out of the question provided the guy is nice and the price is right. This doesn’t mean you have to do anything you don’t want to do. “You’re hired to model lingerie, and if that’s all you want to do, the guy comes in and sits down in a chair, and you model whichever lingerie he asks you to put on — there’s a screen in the room, you dress and undress behind it and you get your fifteen bucks for the half, or thirty for the full, which is a lot better than you get at McDonald’s, honey, believe me. What’s your shoe size?”
At first, Lainie is astonished.
She listens to all this while she is putting on a black garter belt and sheer black panties and a black Wonderbra, fastening the garter snaps front and back to black nylons, listening in amazement to all that Clarice tells her, wondering what she’s supposed to do when she goes back into Mr. Wilson’s office. Chris’s office. Chris with whom Clarice has “a sort of a thing going.” Will she have to do a little dog and pony act for him, prove to him that she will be a moneymaker at one of his little sex emporiums called Nylon Legs or whatever the hell?
She has passed these little shops in the strip malls along the Trail, the discreet orange neon OPEN sign in the window, but she actually believed they were legitimately selling lingerie to women, and that the “models” advertised in the window were genuine models in some sort of trunk show that moved from store to store. Calusa is, after all, the city where women are arrested for wearing thong bikinis on the beach. It is also the city where a famous comedian was arrested for masturbating in a pornographic movie theater. So how can these thin disguises for whorehouses be allowed to stay in business? Because, yes, that is what these are. They are whorehouses. And, in effect, she is being asked to become a whore. That is, if she does anything more than merely pose for the nice gentlemen callers.
As she takes the size seven, very high-heeled pumps Clarice hands to her, she remembers that this is the nation where Dr. Jocelyn Elders was fired as Surgeon General because she dared to suggest that schoolchildren be taught the meaning of masturbation. Not taught how to masturbate, no one even remotely suggested that. And she remembers that right here in Calusa the famous comedian was convicted for the heinous crime he’d committed — whereas the theater was still open and still showing dirty movies. America.
Besides, she needs the money.
The following Monday night, she begins working as Lori Doone in a shop called Silken Secrets, and in six hours, from eight P.M. to two A.M., she earns ninety dollars without once having to take off a single article of clothing and certainly without once touching anyone, which she carefully explains is strictly prohibited by law.