“Fuck the slippers,” Paul says. “You’re saying you want to break up.”
“You’re right,” I say. “We shouldn’t talk about this here.”
“Well, it’s too late for that. I want to talk about it now.”
“I have to head to work soon.”
“OK. We’ll go for a walk. Could we get this out of the way first, though? If you do dump me, I’m not coming back here by myself.”
We leave with bags full of backpacks and stickers and emerge into Times Square. The sun sets like a long goodbye and the billboard glow is just starting to take effect. Everyone is in a line or in the push. Either way, it’s wall-to-wall bodies, looking ahead, looking up. We circle the same few blocks again and again. I steal glances at Paul as we talk. His carefully shined boots, something he does so they’ll let him wear them at work. The side of his strong jaw. The faintest touch of his stomach beneath a green sweater. I watch his parts as he listens to me drone on. He drones on in response, stuff we’ve been over before, long lists that boil down to shared unhappiness.
Times Square is dying out of its decay, being reborn into safe, fake glory. Used to be you couldn’t walk across Forty-second without getting your pocket picked or worse. Not that I miss that. But it’s like the whole city got a boob job. It used to be less than perfect, but definitely suckable. Now it’s this bigger-than-life, aerodynamic knockout, but without any feeling in its nipples. Paul’s less than perfect, but suckable. I’m nuts about Paul. I’m bored as Paul’s girlfriend.
We end up standing in front of the wonderful, ugly Port Authority, lingering there since my train stop is deep inside it. All kinds of young men prowl along the edges of the terminal.
“OK, we’re back where we started,” I say. “I like you but I don’t like us as a couple.”
“I can’t keep having this conversation, Ann,” he says.
“Do you want a break?”
“I don’t want to have this conversation any more. I want more time in the day. I want to do all the stuff we keep saying we’ll do.”
“Like?” A car hesitates in the taxi lane and everyone attacks it with honks and curses. The licence plate is New York. Go figure.
“I don’t know,” he continues over the cacophony. “Teach you chess. Go to the beach. Our jobs are just so fucked up…”
“Well, Show World’s right over there. That takes ten minutes.” I’m mostly kidding when I say this, watching the marquee wink at me from around the corner in red plastic letters. But I’ve always been curious and Paul knows it. Paul knows something else too. He’s staring at me like his grandmother just walked in on him having sex. Oh. “When’s the last time you went there?”
He looks around at the sidewalk, at the buses creaking out of Port Authority. “Three weeks ago.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. You know I do that.”
“Not lately,” I reply, sounding a little angrier than I want. “You could have told me.”
“Yeah,” he says. It’s a weird yeah, both yeah, I’m sorry, and yeah, right.
“No, It’s OK. I mean, you know I’d be into it. But I understand it’s like, your thing.”
The crowd continues to brush by us. We’re just a detour in their collective path. Paul stands with my hand in his. There are so many ways he could go. He looks past me at the marquee, at the many possibilities of taking his girlfriend with him into the small rooms he doesn’t discuss.
“I’ll go with you,” he says. Before I know what I’m doing, I say OK. If we’re going to break up, at least I’ll have been to Show World before it gets zoned out of existence.
We’re in a dark, empty hall on the third floor. Steps lead up to a large, bright room full of pool tables, but there aren’t any balls or cues. Not much left since the new laws took effect, re-zoning the sex clubs in favour of the citizens, or at least the tourists. Paul plays tour guide for what used to be the centre of Times Square sleaze. Now to stay open it has to shut down most of its operations and add in a dime store downstairs. We’ve already toured the fanciful circus sculptures, the long moaning hallway where the video booths still run, and a whole floor that is just empty and silent.
“What used to be up here?”
“A main stage with live performances, and a larger theatre with dancing.”
“Live performances?” I ask.
“Sex shows.”
“Oh. Really?”
“Well, yeah, but not that real. Pretty real, sometimes, people just going at it, a guy and a girl, two girls. But I was never into that so much. The booths are a whole different thing, but the shows were a real spectacle.”
“What are the booths like?” I ask.
“Hmm. They’re whatever you want with someone who’s only there for you, but you can’t connect with them. Sometimes it feels like you can, though.”
“Well, looks like the booths are all we’ve got,” I say. He asks me if I’m sure and I gesture toward the hall. Paul puts his arm around my shoulder and leads on.
“What do you want me to do?” Paul asks. He stands facing me in the dull black cubicle. Two people can come in here, but it’s obviously built for one.
“Oh, God,” I say. “Whatever you’d normally do. This isn’t for me.” The wall I’m pushed up against is like a cold hand on my back. His face doesn’t look that great in this light, a bare bulb hanging over us, but his body is tense and sweet beneath his clothes. A small stool sits in the corner.
“It’s for you,” he says, and smiles at me, a hint of hurt in a smile that could bloom into anything. There’s a surge of noise, like a subway car straining into motion after a mid-tunnel halt. The partition that separates us from the girl on the other side rises slowly with a mechanized clatter. I can feel the vibration of the rising screen in my feet. I can feel how many times it’s been cranked up before.
Her name is Miranda, at least that’s what she said when we chatted and chose her in a few moments of friendly negotiation. I see her in pieces as the partition goes up: arched bare feet with bright blue toenails, smooth calves, kind of chunky thighs, turquoise panties and lace bra that almost match, cute tits as she immediately strips off the bra. Her hair is in shiny, almost oily curls around a heart-shaped face. Her lipstick is bright pink and glossy, her smile seems genuine. She’s in another spare, closet-like room like ours, with a stool and a shelf full of toys and oils. Paul bought us eight minutes, no penetration on her. We can do whatever we want, she told him, although if we get caught she never said that. The digital clock on her side of the screen, facing us, changes from 0:00 to 8:00. “Hi,” she says wordlessly, pointedly to me. She’s done this a million times. Hell, so has Paul. I suddenly feel like maybe I should leave them alone. I smile weakly at her.
Paul watches for a moment, smiling, and then glances over at me. He doesn’t know what to do or which want to follow and neither do I, but, “Do it,” I say. He sighs as if someone’s touched him, and turns back to the glass and the girl behind it. Paul unzips his pants, quickly pulls out his cock. It is completely different how he does it here than when he’s done it for me. Not a striptease, just, boom, his cock. And we’re off.
What happens next is a delicious blur of acrobatics. Miranda immediately hops up on the stool and throws her legs up in the air. She parts them in a clean, cheerleader “V” – go team! – and peels her panties off. There is her pussy. Paul keeps stroking, accepting that I’m OK with this and just going with the fact that there’s a naked woman in front of him. She hangs her head to one side and grins crookedly, teeth just made for toothpaste, then puts her feet against the glass. She’s spread open, while I’m all crunched up in the corner. Miranda bends down, holds each of her ankles in one slim hand. Her knees are bent. Her wide smile is for my boyfriend, as if she were on her back in bed, holding her legs open wide for him. I’ve done that. With a deliberateness that makes me forget there’s only six and a half minutes left, she slides her slick, pink fingernails along her ankles, then inside her knees, then inside her thighs. The skin looks so soft there, like it’s nearly liquid.