BEAUTIFUL MODELS WILL MODEL THE FINEST LINGERIE FOR YOU
A Monologue by J.J. Steinfeld
BEAUTIFUL MODELS WILL MODEL THE FINEST LINGERIE FOR YOU
A Monologue
Graduate PhD Student, twenty-hour, casually dressed and wearing a large backpack,
about to enter an “adult entertainment” room in a seedy building.
“BEAUTIFUL MODELS WILL MODEL THE FINEST LINGERIE FOR YOU.” I saw that alluring ad online when I was a teaching assistant working on my PhD inEnglish Lit. I didn’t know it at the time, but it would be the start of what I now consider my “consumption” of non-academic sex, an irresistible guilty pleasure, to contextualize the experience euphemistically.
I remember how nervous I was when I opened the door. The door to a cheap private eye's office in a low-budget movie that had pretensions to being an art film. I touched the door knob and thought that I was leaving fingerprints, but so what. I opened the door, and inside it was more like a waiting room in a doctor's office, a doctor who had fallen on hard times, was perhaps involved in a malpractice suit. A woman stood behind the counter, the reception desk, wearing an oversized robe—more like a man's smoking jacket. She smiled at me and said her name was Lucetta. I told her it was a lovely name, that I had never known anyone named Lucetta. Her mother loved Shakespeare, could quote from any of the plays at the drop of a hat, Lucetta explained—her name, for my information, was from Shakespeare. Which play, I asked? thinking that I should know, having read most of Shakespeare's plays as an undergraduate. I told her I was a PhD grad student in English Lit, but she didn't appear impressed at all, a woman named after a Shakespearean character. Guess, she said. I just couldn't place the name—All's Well that Ends Well? Wrong. Much Ado About Nothing? Wrong again—and she told me to brush up on my Shakespeare, and then she asked me if I'd ever been here before, and after I told her this was terra incognita for me, she asked my name, which I said was Stephen, like the writer Stephen Crane. The Red Badge of Courage, she said, and told me she had read the book in high school. That's the strangest coincidence I've ever encountered, I said, and Lucetta said she had encountered stranger ones, like the country doctor who had delivered her, retired and visiting the big city, showing up as a customer. Tell her about coincidences. Then she asked me what was in the backpack, it looked heavy, and I told her it was a year's worth of work on my thesis, but I didn't tell her what my thesis was really about, simply telling her it was on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which had been a friend of mine's thesis topic, a friend who had quit before finishing his thesis.
While I was going on about the transcendence of Coleridge, Lucetta walked me to a room, told me to get comfortable, and informed me of the ground rules, as clear as any introductory university lecture: no touching her, but I could do anything else I wanted—she pointed out the box of tissues, next to a small music player and three even stacks of about twenty CDs, on a rickety old table. Then we discussed prices. I wanted to say, How much for a good time? just as a joke, but the corniness of it made me cringe. I settled on a half-hour session—the deal was thirty-minute or sixty-minute modelling sessions, and she had a wide variety of CDs, from classical to show tunes, terrific blues and jazz, hard rock and disco—and she left me, I don't know to do what, and I was alone in the room. I felt like I was waiting to take an exam, an exam I hadn't studied for. Lucetta, Lucetta, I said into the room, fighting off my nervousness. I questioned her name. When you modelled for strangers you needed an exotic alias. And I had my alias; what a delightful couple we were, Lucetta and Stephen.
She returned, wearing a different robe, shorter, silkier, brighter, and it was open to reveal a nylons-and-garter-belt, silky red nightie outfit, a cliché that lost none of its impact on me despite its unimaginativeness. My critical faculties were a few blocks away. She took off her robe, turned on the little music player on the rickety old table, and started to dance. Maybe I should have asked for jazz or blues, but I felt that show tunes somehow fit the mood of her workplace, and she immediately corrected me when I said Man of La Mancha—“Brigadoon”— not that I know musical theatre.
I felt like talking, as if a little chitchat would make my visit less lascivious or something. She had no trouble modelling and dancing and talking. She had the sweetest, strangest voice—mellifluous, I thought, that was the perfect word to describe her voice—and I almost expected her to start singing, and it would be the sweetest song, the lyrics hard to understand, but when you did pick out a word or phrase, it would make you think of something you might hear on the radio late at night, listening to an alternative music station. One of those songs that make you feel not alone.
I wanted to ask Lucetta her age, but I wound up saying I would be turning twenty-five in exactly two weeks, and I was months behind in finishing my PhD thesis, but I liked to work deep into the night and was hoping to get back to work after this wonderful lingerie show. She said I was older than her, but not by much.
All the time Lucetta was dancing to the music I selected, and I wanted to change my selection, and soon she had nothing on except for plain panties and surprisingly comfortable looking slippers—I guess I was expecting stiletto-heeled shoes or something—even though this is lingerie modelling, but no touching. My erection emerged in all its non-academic glory. I wanted to pick up her discarded clothing—the bunched-up dark stockings and silky red nightie— to hold the discarded clothing close to me and unravel her secrets, and then there was a knock at the door. A loud, angry knock. I turned to the door and when I turned back to her, there was a second knock—louder, angrier—and she had stopped dancing.
“Who's that?” I said. I thought it might be the police. Or the English Department faculty. Or my family. “I hope it is not a law enforcement officer,” I improvised, wanting to sound humorous and unafraid. A voice shouted, “Open the door!” It didn’t take long for my erection to dissolve into a footnote.
“I'm with a client,” Lucetta said, that mellifluous voice, not strange anymore, dealing with a problem no more complicated than an irate, belligerent neighbour.
That was the end of my first thirty-minute visit, but not the last. I allow myself one visit at the beginning of each month, no more, no less. That’s as guilty as I want to feel for my irresistible guilty pleasure.
CURTAIN
