Most nights Devon’s set went two songs. The opening song would be the longer of them, giving her a chance to warm up the crowd with her bit behind the screen, and then come out and strip off her bikini top while dancing in the swell of lights and music. She called that her first reveal. At the pole Devon would work her flesh hard, sliding, pumping, swinging her body.
The second number in her set would have a quickened tempo, and midway through she would peel away the sarong.
Club Forreál had booze on its menu. This meant the house dancers could go topless but not nude. Under California law, nightclubs that entertained with full nudity were restricted to serving nonalcoholic drinks. The men who came to watch Devon and the other girls weren’t happy about it, but the alcohol loosened them up for a good time, and Devon, when she writhed free of her sarong, would leave little to the imagination in a G-string that was almost invisible, and that made for an easy tradeoff.
At his table in the third row from the stage, Tom Ricci finished his Chivas and water, caught the eye of his waitress, and made a pouring gesture over the glass, holding his thumb and forefinger apart to indicate he wanted his next one heavier on the scotch. She smiled her understanding and waggled toward the bar in her racer shorts.
Ricci turned to watch Devon emerge from behind the screen.
He had seen her dance perhaps twice since the night they had met here, when her name was still Carolina to him. Carolina was her professional alias. It was posted on the schedule outside the club’s entrance, and above her gallery photos on its elaborate Web site, and announced from the DJ booth as the music got cranked for her set. It was also the name that customers used when they tapped the maître d’s shoulder to request a private dance with her. Ricci had once asked how she had chosen it, and she’d told him it was borrowed from the state where she had grown up. She did not specify whether that was North or South Carolina, and he hadn’t pursued the subject. Their involvement was a fair give-and-take that sometimes relieved the emptiness inside each of them. But she gave away nothing extra, and neither did Ricci.
Now the waitress came over with his fresh drink. Ricci paid, tipped, noticed her lingering by the table. He raised the glass to his lips and swallowed. The scotch was warm in his mouth and then going down his throat. She’d done okay with the proportions, he thought, and nodded.
She smiled at him and left and he turned back toward the stage and watched Devon heat up her set.
The sarong in which she was costumed tonight was a dash of metallic fabric with black and blue horizontal bands and long, shiny fringes that would flap over her left thigh. In her bellybutton was a silver serpent pin, its tiny jewel-eyed head dangling downward. Ricci guessed between sixty and a hundred other men had their eyes on her as she slowly untied and shed the wrap. That didn’t bother him much. The woman up there in the colored lights almost could have been anybody. She seemed unsolid, a projected image. Only in glimpses could Ricci see Devon in her. Something she did on stage would remind him of something she had done when they were in bed together — a toss of her head, a contortion of her waist, a wanton curl of her lips — and Ricci would wonder whether it had been practiced even during their sex, and if it came from the inside out or the outside in.
Mostly that was the extent of his feelings as he watched. A curiosity rather than jealousy or possessiveness. It was an emotional remove not so different from what he felt toward Devon when they were together. The stage just seemed to frame and accentuate things for him.
He sat and drank more of his scotch.
Club Forreál was a garish island of neon and stucco outside Santa Clara on Highway 101, El Camino Real. For real, Ricci thought, and found himself having to smile a little at that. He had the sense that nothing in the place was what it seemed. Or if it was, that it wasn’t what he ought to be going out of his way to seek. He neither liked nor disliked watching Devon perform, and she seemed to pretty well match his indifference. He had no idea whether she had noticed him at his table, but he hadn’t intended to make a secret of it, or surprise her for any reason. He wasn’t even sure why he’d come. He’d simply gotten into his car and driven here intending to sit awhile, and it was all the same to him if she knew about it or didn’t. Either way, he would probably leave before she was ready to head out with him.
It was a working night for Devon, and the place was packed; she would want to stay on shift for several hours yet.
Ricci wondered if A.J. ever popped in without letting her know beforehand. He held onto the thought a minute, tried to picture what A.J. looked like, and glanced randomly at some of the men around him, their faces turned toward the stage, staring at Devon as they were swept by the crayon colors of the disco strobes. Any one of them might be A.J. All Ricci knew about him was that he had a wife and kids and a high credit line and, Devon had once casually mentioned, a boat that he liked to launch out of Monterey. It was a waste of time trying to figure out who was the strongest candidate, but so was a lot else.
Ricci played the game with himself awhile longer, grew tired of it, and drank. Then he heard a loud squall of laughter from a nearby table and turned to see what had provoked it. There were four men at the table. They were young, maybe in their early twenties. A look of hang-jawed arousal on his features, one of them had pushed himself back from the table’s edge and was getting a chair dance from a blonde who had finished her set right before Devon. His friends seemed boisterously amused and elated by the whole thing.
Ricci watched her bump and grind between his outspread legs, bare-breasted, wearing only a red sequined thong and high heels. Here again the law would have something to say about how far she could go. But while it prohibited physical contact between performer and client, and house rules declared they could come no closer to each other than six inches, nobody was holding a tape measure between the blonde and the guy at the table, and she seemed more than open to some occasional rubbing up against him.
The good money for dancers at Club Forreál was in chairs. Elsewhere in a room its owners called the VIP Lounge, the better money was in couches. Their maroon velvet cushions lined two of its walls, and the men who sat on them could get a private dance that was supposed to have the same restrictions on touching as the dances in the main hall. But the doors of the VIP Lounge were kept closed, and watched from the main room by security guards on the lookout for vice cops, and the girls inside the lounge, who would start out a couch dance straddling a customer’s lap, would bend the hell out of both legal and house regulations if the price was right.
Devon had told Ricci she preferred doing chairs to couches. They didn’t bring in nearly the same cash but let her stay within eyeshot of the bouncers at the front entrance, who would step in when guys got too touchy. She had told him she followed the six-inches-of-separation rule to the letter in the main room and, on the rare instances she worked the VIP, gave the rule just enough slack for her customer to feel “nice” about his experience. She had said that she could identify the ones who would be trouble and was careful to steer away from them. She claimed to likewise recognize the ones who were okay, and she looked at every situation from the perspective of whether it would let her stay in control.
Ricci hadn’t been certain if she honestly believed that. He knew the power of female sexuality but also understood the power of men with money. And he always gave an edge to the men when they kept their clothes on and paid women not to for their pleasure.
Once he had asked Devon exactly what she meant by control, and by a customer feeling nice, and she had remained quiet for a long while.