(Please Note: This is a serialized follow-up essay to, and meant to be read after reading “Peep Show.” If you missed it, here’s part one)
The week somehow passes and it’s Tuesday night again. I perform the same ritual, shot and a beer at Mr. Bing’s, but this time I can only manage to stay put for maybe 15 minutes before I practically sprint across the street.
I get change, shove money in, coin drops, window up . . . and there she is. There she is, THERE SHE IS. She sees me right away, smiles big and comes right over and everything is wonderful – the same only not the same at all. By “the same” I just mean it is immediately still okay, more than okay, that I am there, and she, as Sassafras gives me the same show, the same eye contact, the same wonderfulness, as ever; by “not the same at all,” I mean that it’s much, much more exciting – charged, loaded, real – for my having exposed myself to her by reading “Close” at the benefit. For having seen her as a real person, in the real world, wearing clothes. I force myself not to hurry (In my shame at going to the peeps, I tend to rush once I’m there, and today, there are reasons beyond my usual shame why I might “finish” sooner than I’d like) and she dances and hums and kneels to be at my at eye level and looks me in the eyes and cups her breasts in her hands, and I look at her red-brown pubic hair and her sweet smooth belly and sweeter, heavy, round breasts and that gentle cat face, that slightly-too-small but cute ass and the elaborate tattoo that runs up her back above it. Initially, I could’ve done without that tat, but now it’s become a part of her, often the first thing I catch a glimpse of when I arrive and last thing I see as the window closes and I’m leaving and she’s walking away. She dances and turns and kneels and looks at me and dances again and finally she comes back down in front of me and holds her breasts in her hands one more time, comes as close to the window as she can and looks at me and keeps looking and I feel a hint of her watching, seeing me differently too, and she smiles and hums and I come and come and come.
When I’m done, and before the window closes, she says, “Meet me in the hall.” I leave the booth and wait outside and in a minute she comes out the stage door. She says something I can’t remember about how she can’t really chat here, hands me a small piece of paper and turns away before I can say anything. I put the paper in my pocket and walk outside. Immediately, I dig for the slip of paper, I can’t find it, and I’m sure that I dropped the tiny slip somewhere inside and I’ll never find it again and she’ll never give me another and I search all my pockets frantically again and finally find it. An email address and a name, a real name. I expected a phone number, but this is somehow even better, maintains the increasingly tenuous gap between fantasy and reality, a.k.a. adultery. I rush home to my computer.
***
I struggle to make up a name that will do no-longer-Sassafras justice. Her real name is a Californian, commune-given, four-word-amalgam, a lovely one that hints at wildlife and Native-American culture in a pleasant way that nearly avoids cliche. I can’t rival it, so I’m going to call her Triste. It’s odd, as is her real name, and it touches on sadness (“triste” is sad, in French) and romance (Tristan and Isolde) and secret sex (“tryst”).
***
That night, when I get home from the Lusty, I write my first Triste email quickly, rewrite it so many times that it feels as if it no longer has anything to do with me, then I delete it all and start from scratch. I tell her how thrilled I was that she was at the reading, how I felt horribly, wonderfully “naked” in front of her. I tell her how strange, different yet not, it was to see her at the club again afterwards. I tell her I am married.
The next day I check my email a dozen times. Okay, a few dozens of times. And the day after that. And the day after that. I begin to think I wrote something inappropriate or just boring or stupid, or that she just changed her mind. Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned the whole marriage bit yet. I reread and reread the email I sent her, looking for clues. On the fourth day, a response! A response beyond my wildest dreams (one that, sadly, I am not at liberty to reprint). She writes about her nervousness at seeing me read (wanting me to do well), about her attraction to me that night (her attraction to me). She tells me she noticed my wedding ring a while back, but says no more about it.
She tells me she’s a poet and a playwright. She includes a poem of hers that I immediately adore, that feels like magic. Sure, skeptical reader, I suppose almost any poem from Triste would’ve felt like magic right then, but now, years later, it’s still a magical poem, as are many others of hers, filled with sadness and clever, absurd and tawdry humor. A sexy epistolary friendship had begun; Sassafras had become Triste.
For a while, email was all it was beyond our commercial relationship, and email was plenty. I would see Triste (or was it Sassafras? Or both?) at the Lusty once or once or twice a week and we’d write every few days – sometimes sexy, sometimes literary, sometimes just shooting the shit. She would send me poems. She wrote extremely candidly and confidently. At first, I would stammer goofily, chattily back. After a while the stammer subsided, and became candid converstaion, discussion, flirtation. It was inspiring, it was challenging, it was sexy as all get out.
Sometime in those first weeks of emailing, Triste gives me her phone number. I memorize, but don’t dial it right away. What was already going on was so good, for one thing. And for another, as much as my wife not only tolerated but encouraged, even got off on my predilections, and knew about Sass being at the reading, I was married, monogamously so up until that point, and phone numbers on small slips of paper lead to phone calls, which in turn lead to meeting without a translucent barrier in between, which leads to touching and then to the use of a very different kind of translucent barrier, to sweaty nakedness in a small room with a bed: to actual adultery, that was the way my thinking went, anyway.
I’d told my wife that a stripper I recognized was at the reading. Now I told her that my stripper friend and I have been exchanging emails, that her real name is Triste. My wife is excited, intrigued by it all too. She asks if I am going to meet her in person. I hem and haw, then say no, I don’t think so. I am lying, I know I am lying, my wife must know I am lying, but the words still come out. No, honey, not gonna meet her, uh-uh, nope. She eggs me on, says she’d sure do it if she were in my shoes. I think she knows that encouraging me is a little dangerous, but that after five years together, maybe she wants a little danger. And still I hesitate, lying to myself as well that I really won’t call.
Finally, right after an especially sexy session at the Lusty, I dial her number knowing I’ll likely get voicemail. I leave a short hello message. The next day, she leaves me a message, plans are made, and the “tryst” part begins.
