“I don’t think you understand,” I say in nervous and drunken Spanish, leading her away.

We sit down at one of the small drink tables next to the dance floor. The ice is melting in my Cuba Libre.

“I’m thirsty,” she says, pouting. “Buy me a drink.”

A waiter comes over and I buy her a cola. It’s $4, American. She places her hand on the bottom of my thigh and I can feel the blood shifting beneath the skin.

“What don’t I understand?” she says, leaning into me. The waiter comes back with the can and sets it on the table, but she doesn’t open it.

“Well — actually, it’s me who doesn’t understand.”

“Where are you staying?” she asks. “Let’s go there.”

“Um — I have a girlfriend.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Yeah, well — I do,” I say. “Look, I just wanted to dance. I didn’t know you were a — I just wanted to dance. Can’t we just dance?”

There’s a remixed version of the “Titanic” theme song hammering out of the speakers. I wonder where they came from, who bought them. On the dance floor are maybe 10 foreign, older men, barely dancing, each of them surrounded by six or seven women. Or maybe they’re girls. It’s dark and it’s hard to see. They’re dressed in spandex the color of popsicles, spinning around on a liquid axis. There’s a viscosity in their movement, as if the ratio of blood to bone, fluid to structure, is askew. Celine Dion’s voice is weaving through the creases in the miniskirts, floating on the humidity in the room, and I think Susana knows her chances with me are sinking.

“Don’t you think I’m beautiful?

“Yes, of course.”

“Then why don’t you want me?”

I don’t answer. I can feel the bass lurching in my lungs.

“Look,” she says. “Don’t think of it like that. Think of it like — I’m doing a favor for you and you’re doing a favor for me.”

I think about it. I think about taking her back to the room I am renting near Vedado, across from the Santeria herbero and the painted alleyway. I think about Lorna and Hortensia, the mother and grandmother who own the apartment, unlocking the door for me and us walking up the stairs together. I think about what favors she could do for me and I decide that I don’t want them. Then I ask myself what the best thing I could do for her is and I stroke her face.

“I’d be doing you the biggest favor by not taking you home with me,” I say.

That’s when she starts to cry. I can’t hear her because of the music, but I can see her face turn, like the sky above Havana churning in the onset of a small tropical storm.

“Please,” she says. “Buy me a sandwich. I’m starving. My daughter’s starving. Would you please give me money for a sandwich?”

I give her $10 and she disappears in the crowd gathered around the bar.

That’s when Miguel comes back.

“You gave her $10 to go away?! She would’ve done anything for that much!”

“I didn’t want anything,” I say. Then I tell him why.

He laughs. He laughs so loud that I can hear it over the techno music.

“You said that?! Don’t you know that your idealism isn’t worth anything here!”

Strobe lights flicker mechanically and smoke rises from the scuffed floor to the ceiling. Red lights swivel and deal out patterns to the walls.

“I didn’t know they were all — “

“Prostitutes?” he says. “Por favor, Daniel!”

I had met Miguel on the plane from Merida to Havana. Miguel was Mexican, but lived in Miami. He had started a “business” taking packages down to Cuba from family members who had either escaped to the U.S. or had hit the bombo, the lottery. He would take down clothes, money and toiletries and charge the families for doing it. It was a business of sorts, a business that offered free vacations and sex, and it was on one of these trips that he met Pilar, his Cuban girlfriend.

During the flight, he leaned over and told me about a woman who rented rooms in her apartment, and that it was right around the corner from his girlfriend’s place. While the engines were throttling, he whispered in my ear for me to wait outside the terminal after customs. I had just gotten on the plane in Mexico, after booking the ticket with a travel agency in the Yucatan. I didn’t have anywhere else to go, so that sounded swell to me.

His friend Egon picked us up at the airport in his ’72 Lada and drove us back to the city. It was night but even from the plane Havana couldn’t be seen. There were no lights on; the electricity, Miguel said, had been shut off.

The moon was strong and smeared itself across the oxidized hood of the Russian jalopy. Crude shadows of fallen buildings cut across the road to Havana Vieja and a few couples, doubling on their bicycles, pedaled slowly on the shoulder.

They dropped me off on a quiet street. A rusted Bel Air was up on blocks and a few boys were kicking around a piece of cardboard.

“This is Lorna’s,” said Miguel. “No. 153. Right there. Go up and take a look. She lives with her mother, Hortensia. They’re great people. They live very well here. Ring the bell.”

I got out of the car and knocked on the door. Dogs barked and a woman came to the balcony and looked down. Miguel said something to her in his quick and hyper Mexican accent and the door opened. I pushed it a little and saw a string attached to the lock that rose up the banister to the top floor.

Lorna and Hortensia showed me the apartment: my room, the bathroom, the TV, the toilet that flushed, the couch, the refrigerator that I could keep food in, the fan to blow away the heat. They said they would wash my clothes; $15 a night. I took it.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Egon picks us up outside the Copacabana along the western end of the Malecon, the seaside drive that winds along the Havana coastline. His Lada rumbles and ticks beneath the brown fronds of a hacked-up palm. Along the Malecon, and then along Fifth Avenue (the street that supposedly passes by one of Fidel Castro’s many houses), women stand on the medians in skirts and tops that stick to their skin in the humidity. They wave at us, trying to get us to slow down. Egon keeps driving; they’re road signs advertising a product he doesn’t care to buy.

“What do they want?” I ask.

“A ride,” he says without turning his head. “Anything.”

None of the dials in the car works; the needles lie down at zero, like exhausted workers on a permanent siesta. A waist-high cement wall is crumbling next to the road, but the painted propaganda on it is still legible: “Patria o Muerte Venceremos” — “The fatherland or death, we will win.”

“What do you think of that, Egon?” I say, pointing to the wall.

“That,” he says. “Patria o muerte moriremos” — “The fatherland or death, we will die.”

- – - – - – - – - – - -

When I wake up in the morning, Lorna and Hortensia have made coffee. I’ve grown accustomed to not having milk; in Cuba there’s only milk for children under 7 and even that is powdered.

I stir the coarse sugar into my glass of coffee until it starts to dissolve while Lorna slices open a mammee on a plate. They’re nice women, and I’m feeling like a native already, although I know I’m not. It’s easy to enjoy a place when you know you can go back to wherever you’re from whenever you want. Comfort rides shotgun with the temporary.

Lorna asks me how my night went and Hortensia settles into a chair. I tell them about the dance club and the music and the movement, and then I tell them about the girl.

“Ay, Daniel, what did you expect?” Lorna says.

“I’m not sure,” I say, gnawing at a slice of mammee, and it’s the truth.

“It’s all set up, fixed. You know, like that drink you bought her. She didn’t open it, did she?”

“No, she didn’t,” I say.

“You buy it for $3. She doesn’t open it. After you leave, she sells it back to the bartender for $2.”

“Jesus, what a setup,” I say.

“Ay, Daniel,” she says. Lorna then lays it out for me, that most of the prostitutes come from El Oriente, an eastern province on the island, that they come to Havana for a couple of reasons. One, they want to make money. They’re starving out in the country. And two, because everyone wants to go to the big city. The city is where you can spend money, if you have it. So these girls come on the train, or hitch rides on state trucks, come to the clubs or the beaches. They do business only with foreigners because only foreigners have money.

In Cuba, it’s not a one-time thing. So far as I know, in the United States, it’s pretty much a 20-minute deal. You’re in, you’re out, thank you very much, help yourself to a mint as you leave. But in Cuba, it’s a different story. Women don’t want just one “session,” they want to milk the experience for all it’s worth. They’re smart capitalists, these socialists. They want you for the entire week. They want to dine with you, go to the pool with you, eat with you and shop with you. You don’t even have to pay them cash, just buy them things. It’s a barter system: sex for chicken, sex for three-speed electric fans, sex for canned soup, sex for place mats.

Hortensia, Lorna’s mother and a great-grandmother, has been quiet all this time, just nodding her head at everything Lorna says and shaking it at my naiveté. It’s quiet for a minute while I’m digesting the mammee and the explanation. Then she speaks. “Did you try one?” she asks.

“A cola?”

“No, a Cubana!” she says.

“Absolutely not,” I answer and blush the same color as the flesh of the fruit in my palm. “I have a girlfriend. I’m loyal.”

“Ay, Daniel — loyalty?!” says Lorna, and she says it like loyalty is so old-fashioned, like they’d proved it didn’t exist years ago and I was the only one in the world who hadn’t gotten the newspaper delivered to his conscience that day.

“You really should try one,” says Hortensia, spitting out some seeds into her fist. “You know, they’re — we’re incredible, the best in the world.”

Lorna is laughing and trying to hide behind her glass and a cigarette.

And I can’t believe it, because here I am, being told by a great-grandmother that I should sample a prostitute, as if it were akin to trying a regional dish, pig’s knuckles or baby eels.

“Say you’re a chemist,” she begins, “and you read a great chemistry book. You can say it’s the best chemistry book in the world, but if you haven’t read all the chemistry books in the world, then how do you know?”

“But what about loyalty?” I say.

“Loyalty?” says Hortensia, spitting a chunk of rind into her hand. “But you’re a man.”

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Is it just me? I’m not just talking about what Hortensia says. I’m talking about everything: the way the men and women interact, not only the different roles they hold but also what is expected of them, both by themselves and by others. I have to find out if it’s just Hortensia who has these views, or if it’s something deeper, ingrained in the culture.

Hortensia’s sister, Paloma, lives in Santa Cruz del Norte. I have an open invitation to get out of the city, where morals typically erode, and into the rural, where more often than not there is some preservation. Plus I have been told there is cheap lobster to be had — all in all, an irresistible travel menu. So I grab a bus to Santa Cruz.

The first thing I notice is that Paloma and her husband, Domingo, have a house. In Havana there are only apartments, and these apartments are about as stable as the set from a high school play produced 50 years ago. It’s said that more than 300 buildings crumble every year in Havana. While in most cities the fallen would be quickly rebuilt or replaced, in Cuba this has not been an option. The evidence of a crumbling country cannot be hidden. So it’s not only a saying, it’s a visual reality.

Santa Cruz is very different from the city. Many of the people, including Paloma and Domingo, are more content with the country and the system than the city people. Or maybe I should say less discontent. They have more space and a small garden filled with various fruit trees: mango, coconut and guava.

Domingo is hacking open the yellowed husk of a coco with a machete while Paloma and I eat eggs on the porch.

“This is a big house,” I say. “Is it just for you and Domingo or do you have any kids?”

Paloma breaks the egg yolk with a tine of her fork.

“We don’t have any kids,” she says, pausing. “But he has one.”

“Oh, from a previous marriage?”

“No,” she says and mops up some yolk with an edge of toast.

She explains to me how Domingo had gotten another woman pregnant years back, about how the mother couldn’t take care of the baby and how she, Paloma, had taken the baby in.

“But what about Domingo? How could you still stay married to him after that?”

“He’s a man,” she answers. “That’s what men do.”

The way she says it, the usage of the word “do” instead of “choose,” speaks to a nature that is acknowledged here. Domingo comes in with two glasses of agua de coco, sets them down on the end table and lumbers back outside to boil some milk on a makeshift stove.

“You’re talking about men like they don’t have a choice, like Domingo couldn’t help being with that woman.”

Paloma just shrugs and brings the glass up to her lips.

“He’s here, isn’t he?” she says, and takes a sip, straining the liquid through her teeth. “Look, Daniel, here it’s different. Maybe we put a different importance on things because we’re just struggle to survive. We don’t have the energy to focus on everything. Hortensia told me that you have trouble understanding the prostitutes here. Listen, take my niece. She has a degree in electrical engineering and it’s worthless, you know, there are no jobs. So she left for Havana to earn some money and she did, she does. Fidel gave us all education and now he wonders why no one will go back to the fields. Do you understand? We have to work with what we have, and that is so very little. Domingo’s daughter, I treat her like my own. We even help take care of her mother now. What are we going to do? There is no choice.”

I lean back in the rocking chair and watch Domingo stirring the milk in the backyard, stirring it so it wouldn’t burn. My mind stirs, too.

Three days later, I walk back up the stairs of Lorna and Hortensia’s apartment. It was a long bus ride and the bag of papayas I have brought has been reduced to mush from the heat and the cramming in the back of the bus, where everyone stood for three hours.

I need to use the bathroom. And while I have reevaluated and relinquished many of the things I think I need in my life since the trip began, I in fact do need to use the bathroom. Lorna and Hortensia are on the couch watching Fidel on TV. Fidel’s on TV every night, on both of the channels. Without thinking, I push open the bathroom door; after all, nobody else lives here.

There’s a girl on the toilet.

In that moment, that one speck of a second in which I see her on the toilet, I know what’s going on. She’s beautiful, even sitting on the toilet.

I close my eyes, then the door and walk back out to the living room.

The two women are smirking.

“Welcome back, Daniel,” says Lorna.

“Who’s that?” I say, pointing to the bathroom.

“Jenny,” says Hortensia. “She’s a nice girl, you be nice to her.”

Then I notice a light on in the room I had been renting before my trip.

“Who’s in there?”

“Klaus,” says Lorna.

“Klaus?”

“Yes, Klaus.”

Klaus and Jenny and I are going to be housemates.

Lorna can tell that I’m not in the best of moods, and that this isn’t because I badly need to urinate, although that doesn’t make the party any livelier.

But according to Lorna, this is how it works, how people get by in Cuba: Men come, like me, for a vacation. Only it’s not a lie-on-the-beach, drink-daquiris, send-postcards vacation. It’s a sex vacation. Klaus comes a couple of times every year, she says. Lorna puts him up, cleans up his girls and feeds them.

“How can you do that?” I ask. “Don’t you object to it at all? Don’t you think it’s bad?” The word “bad” — malo — echoes off the linoleum.

“Bad, what’s bad?” she says. “Daniel, you have a girlfriend, no?”

“Yes.”

“And there are things you like about her, no?”

“Of course. She laughs at my dumb jokes, she’s fearless, she makes me want to learn.”

“And if she didn’t have these things, if she didn’t make you feel these ways?”

“Then I guess we wouldn’t be a couple,” I say.

“You want things from her and she wants things from you. We all want things, certain things. This is all. They are just honest, maybe more honest than you about exactly what they want. You think in terms of good and bad. Things here aren’t good or bad, they are what they are. La lucha, the struggle, is everywhere. People do what they need to do to survive. You could have sympathy for that, you know. You are capable of sympathy.”

Hortensia nods.

We sit there on the couch. Fidel shouts out from the TV’s paper speaker. Outside, I can hear children playing, the sound of hot wind slipping through the streets, a hammer pounding on the hood of a car. I think about sympathy. What if everything I’ve learned — the things my parents taught me, my teachers taught me — what if all these weren’t right? Then I think about Paloma and Domingo, about them taking in the girl and then taking in the girl’s mother, how an act like that just shines.

The bathroom door opens and the girl sticks her head out.

“Does anyone have any soap? I’m so dirty, I’m embarrassed.”

I knew neither Lorna nor Hortensia can afford soap. They have empty soap cases and empty shampoo bottles on the shelves as decorations. I have soap, though, tons of it. Lorna is looking at me and I can feel it.

“I have some in my backpack,” I say. “Just give me a minute.”

I come back with a travel bottle and push my hand through the gap between the open door and the frame.

“Here,” I say. “You can use this.”

I feel her hand take the bottle from my fingers. I can’t say it’s a romantic moment, exactly; it’s not. But I do feel something: two people making a connection, making the best in a world where many buildings and many more relationships have fallen.

It’s a small gesture, I know. It’s just soap, but to me it’s something more, a small bottle of understanding maybe.

I can hear the water dropping on the floor of the tub. Lorna and Hortensia are smiling on the couch.

“It smells so good, like peppermint,” says the girl in the shower.

“I know,” I say. “You can keep it.”

So it was with some fascination that I found myself sitting in a fluorescent-lit Mount Holyoke dance studio a few weeks ago, waiting to observe the school’s erotic dance class for the first time. The class has been taught since October by Susan Scotto, a professor of Russian. It takes place a few evenings a month in a space borrowed from the dance department. It isn’t formally accredited. But I’d heard that it was wildly popular with students and had raised eyebrows in the still-conservative academic community.

Scattered around me in the studio, also waiting for class to begin, were eight or nine young women. They were a wholesome, scrubbed-looking bunch, with freckled noses and short, well-groomed hair, their razor-stubbled ankles and unpolished toenails peeking out from beneath skirts and sweatpants. A few had glasses; one had a Band-Aid wrapped around her big toe. Why, I wondered, did girls like these — who I couldn’t even imagine wearing makeup, much less pasties — want to learn to how dance with their clothes off?

“It’s something I would never ordinarily see myself doing,” Patty McCarthy, a sophomore, told me. “But it’s good to be adventurous. Just the fact that there’s a class like this, at this school — how could I not try it?”

A senior, Sara Lawrence, was more philosophical: “The thing I like about going to an all-women’s school is that you get the chance to define yourself independently of your connection to men,” she said. “This class seems like an extension of that. It’s a way to explore being sexy just for yourself.”

The reflective mood was abandoned when Professor Scotto suddenly entered the room, cutting a svelte figure in high-heeled Mary Janes and a pair of skintight pedal-pushers. Dumping two huge shopping bags onto the floor, she tossed her long red hair over one shoulder and smiled at everyone.

“Hi, guys!” she said. “Ready to boogie?”

Scotto likes to wear racy clothes — not just for this class, but in her Russian classes and around campus as well. And if other faculty members whisper that she dresses like a stripper — well, she is a stripper. After putting herself through graduate school in the late ’70s and early ’80s by dancing professionally (near the University of California at Berkeley, where she received her master’s and Ph.D.), Scotto found she liked the business enough to stick with it. Even now, at age 42 and with a husband, two children and a hectic teaching schedule, she still finds the time to work weekend shifts at a local nudie bar.

“I’m an erotic, sensual person by nature,” Scotto told me. “And I find dancing very relaxing. Mount Holyoke can be a stressful place. There’s a pretty strict idea of how you have to conduct yourself here; there are a lot of expectations you have to conform to. It’s nice, after all that, to go somewhere where all people ask of you is that you take off your clothes.”

Her goal in starting the class, however, was not to train professional strippers.

“So many young women are so obsessed about their appearance, so worried about measuring up to this cultural ideal of what’s attractive,” she said. “I wanted to create a space where it’s safe for them to undress and look at their bodies with pleasure.”

Before stripping down, though, the girls in class were keen on decking themselves out. Flocking around the shopping bags Scotto had brought, they dumped out the contents: feather boas, shimmery wraps, filmy scarves and several pairs of high-heeled platform shoes. At first, they giggled as they decorated themselves, flouncing around and striking poses for each other. But after a few moments, as I watched, they became more serious. Moving in front of the wall mirrors, they began to walk back and forth slowly, rolling their hips in a way that good girls usually don’t.

“Oh, my God,” Patty murmured, mesmerized by the image of herself wearing a pair of four-inch stilettos. “I feel like a different person.”

Class, once it began, seemed like less of an instructive course than a slightly irreverent free-for-all. After showing a few video clips and discussing them with the students (Natalie Wood in “Gypsy” got a unanimous thumbs up, as opposed to Elizabeth Berkley in “Showgirls”), Scotto turned down the lights in the studio and asked everyone to find their own space in the room. Putting some “trance music” on the stereo, she waited for the hypnotic, pulsing sounds of sitars and tabla to fill the studio. Then she moved in front of the room.

“Just do whatever feels comfortable,” she told everyone, beginning to sway back and forth. “Watch yourself in the mirror. If you’re using a wrap, you can try tying it different ways, or sliding it across your body. What looks sexy to you?”

The girls got into it immediately. A few started to slowly gyrate their hips, raising their arms over their heads belly dancer-style; others imitated Scotto, who was arching her back and rolling her shoulders. Sara, clearly a trained dancer, pirouetted around the room and swirled a multicolored scarf around her body, while two of the more self-conscious girls shyly swished their boas around their shoulders, standing close to one another as if for support.

The next song that came on was faster, with a sexy bass beat. A few of the girls had loosened up enough by then to take off a few pieces of clothing. One, who’d arrived at class dressed like an accountant (calf-length navy skirt, white dress shirt, low-heeled loafers) watched herself in the mirror as she teasingly unbuttoned her blouse, toying with each button before undoing it, then finally shrugging the shirt to the floor to reveal a pink bra. Another tall, muscular girl slowly unzipped the fly of her denim shorts, and then forcefully kicked them off over her clunky high heels.

“Oh, no!” she cried, as the shorts flew through the air and landed on Scotto’s shoulder. “Sorry!”

“No problem,” purred Scotto, who was expertly skimming a gold lami wrap over her breasts. Somehow, she had managed to strip down to nothing but her heels and a shiny black G-string.

Within the next 15 minutes, all but a few of the girls had shed their outer layers of clothing and were wriggling around in their underwear. Scotto and a few others had grabbed plastic chairs from the sides of the room to practice “chair work”: They straddled the chair seats, bent over them with their butts in the air, leaned back in them and shook their hair around. The girl who had come dressed like an accountant was on her back doing “floor moves,” undulating her hips and kicking her legs in the air, wearing just her white cotton panties.

Although what I was witnessing wasn’t technically so different from the post-shower dancing I sometimes engaged in myself (in the privacy of my own apartment, of course), I was starting to understand why certain people, especially parents, might find it distressing. After all, this probably wasn’t what most of them had in mind when they imagined their daughters getting a Mount Holyoke education.

“There are a few people here who are worried word will get out about this, that people will start saying, ‘Send your daughter to Mount Holyoke and she’ll come home a stripper,’” said Donal O’Shea, dean of the faculty.

But the more I watched the girls dance, and they did so for the better part of an hour, the more harmless their frolicking began to seem to me. What was actually so bad about dancing around naked, or nearly so, and practicing how to act and move seductively in a room full of other women? Most of the students I spoke to couldn’t imagine dancing in the buff in front of anyone. Instead, like the good girls they were, they seemed to enjoy just admiring themselves in the mirror and trying on the sexy-siren roles they saw in movies and on television — without having to worry about consequences.

“It’s easy to be playful here, because we have the privilege of being able to do that,” Sara told me, as the class began to wind down. “All of us here are white, educated, from pretty financially secure families. None of us have to dance for a living, to get by. So it’s fun.”

When Scotto finally turned the music down and the studio lights back up, the girls slowly, almost reluctantly, put their clothes back on. But once their sweaters were buttoned up, their shoes and socks pulled on and their hair smoothed, they looked as virtuous and guileless as they had at the beginning of class. They waved goodbye to Scotto and hurried off into the evening, except for one girl, pretty and heavyset, who dawdled behind, watching Scotto stuff abandoned boas, scarves and heels back into her shopping bags.

“We need to learn this,” the girl told me. “Just like you talk to your friends to learn what to do on dates, and practice putting on makeup in the mirror — this is something we need to learn how to do.”

In other words, even for girls who are the type “to wed,” it doesn’t hurt to know a few tricks — for bed.

A friend sat down next to me, by chance one of the only people I know who has actually known prostitutes. Of her adolescence, she once said to me, “We were all having fun, and the next thing I know my best friend’s being sold down the shore for little to nothing!” My friend had no patience for my “ideological reservations,” however.

“Would you have reservations if a bunch of people wanted to get drunk and pretend to be accountants?” she asked, exasperated. I replied that I wouldn’t have reservations, but that I was confident that would never happen. “Of course not,” she said, “it wouldn’t be fun.”

It was supposed to be fun. I knew this in some way right from the
beginning, but it still somehow seemed unethical, insensitive or at the
very least peculiar. My only reliable descriptions of actual pimps
are from a friend who comes in contact with them in her work at a needle
exchange in Philadelphia, and they seem from those descriptions to be
miserable and despicable people.

One other person — my roommate Cassandra — seemed to feel that the theme
required some kind of ethical exertion. She wanted to make a connection to
the reality of prostitution. She costumed herself with unwashed hair,
bruises on her arms and a black eye. For a final touch, she stuffed three
T-shirts near her belly to simulate pregnancy. When she asked me if the
bruises looked real, I said I thought so but didn’t pimps more commonly beat their “sex workers” in the stomach, where the evidence would be less apparent and the retail value thus not so much degraded? My other roommate, Stephen, perfecting his own image in the mirror, shouted out that he was appalled I even knew this. That was when I realized that my friends had a highly manufactured image of “pimps and ho’s” and one that I hadn’t been exposed to much. I asked about its origins. Blaxploitation films, I was told. Blaxploitation films and Puff Daddy and Notorious B.I.G. videos. This added racial stereotyping to my list of things to be angsty about for the evening, so it didn’t particularly
reassure me that I was going to have fun.

Luckily for me, Stephen added some less politically charged academic
explanations. “The pimp is a pure image of power,” he said. “He controls
people, hurts people, satisfies people.” I kept this in mind as I tried
out a couple of outfits: shirtless with vest (showed my scrawny upper body
too much), checked dress pants with unbuttoned shirt (too closely matched
my usual attire). I settled on black jeans and a brightly printed
synthetic top with outlandish lapels, originally intended as pajamas. I
worked on my facial hair (shaving my Trotskyite goatee down to a mustache
and a vertical dark strip under my lower lip) and tried to figure out who I
could control, who satisfy and how that would be fun. My prudishness was
starting to disintegrate. It was time to go to the party.

It was quite a scene. Most of the men were dressed more or less like me; none of the women were dressed anything like Cassandra. I was issued a bottle of malt liquor by someone sporting a mesh dress and a leash around her neck.
Trying to flirt and generally to get what I believe is called “my groove” on, I looked her up and down as seedily as I knew how and said, “I would definitely pay $25 for that.” “Three hundred to get in the door,” she replied dismissively, and turned to speak with someone else.

Moralizing definitely follows rejection, and I would have started to think about real prostitution in a new light again if I hadn’t been distracted by a loud knot of people near the refrigerator.

A guy from another school was talking to Cassandra, convinced that her
pregnancy was real, and remonstrating with her about the drink in her hand.
He was obviously kind, concerned, insistent and a little bit
befuddled — whether by alcohol, the surreal context or some combination of
the two, I have no idea. He looked askance at Cassandra’s bruises, and
then at me when she explained I was her pimp and had created them when I
found out she’d conceived. I said it wasn’t true, then agreed
with another bystander when I was contradicted, laughing all the time. We
were certainly unfair to this man in his confusion, and he looked horrified
when Cassandra offered to remove the T-shirts-cum-fetus and demonstrate
that her condition was only part of the costume.

The party was a success. The hostess appeared as a madam in an astonishing
kimono. Athletes tore away their tear-away running suits to great
applause. More people arrived; the stairway and eventually even the
bathrooms were converted into social areas.

We finally left, and Cassandra filled me in on the details of her
interlocutor’s behavior. He apparently followed her around the house for
some time, trying to protect the health of her child and to find out in
some noninvasive way if it was really real. I thought of the quick shifts
between truth and imagination in the conversation around him all night, and
of his bewilderment; I remembered my own shuttling between prostitution’s
“image” and “reality” all week. There was a kind of kinship between these
phenomena, and there in that man but for the grace of God went
I. I felt glad to have abandoned my inadequate and partially formed
scruples at the door.

But is it the same for male clients?

I heard Cookie and Carrie before I met them. Every day, their salon, which was located across from my office, jangled with the clatter of their profession: the whine of hair dryers, the clanging bell of their extra-loud phone and then the hoots and laughter of Cookie and Carrie themselves. These sounds confirmed it was indeed a hair salon, because I’d had my suspicions. A steady stream of men — mostly in suits, over the age of 40 — came and went in 30-minute intervals. I’d run into them in the elevator, and those who were leaving all seemed happier and more relaxed than those who were arriving. When I finally poked my head in the salon to introduce myself, I was almost disappointed to see the two barber’s chairs facing the floor-to-ceiling mirror, the shampoo sinks in the back and the magazine racks filled to bursting with Playboy, Penthouse, George and Sports Illustrated.

A few weeks after that, I sat on one of their ’70s-style brown armchairs, under a fern, leafing through a year-old issue of Playboy. “What do you think?” I unfolded the centerfold, pointing “Penny” and her breasts in Cookie’s direction. “Is it real or is it Memorex?”

Cookie was readjusting her multicolored turban, tucking in braids here and there. She stopped and squinted. “Real,” she said. “See how they flop over? That’s how you can tell.”

“I never can tell,” I said, examining Penny’s breasts. “Then again, I can never tell if a man’s wearing a toupee.”

“Oh, God,” Carrie said. She was sweeping up some gray bits of hair and leaned on her broom. “Ask Cookie about doing toupees for men.” She shouted with laughter, “Ask her!”

“We had a little velvet-curtained area set up,” Cookie said. “Like a private room. You put Saran Wrap on the man’s head, and you tape it down, under his chin. Then you take a black marker and draw where the hairpiece is going to be, so you make a template, and cut it out! It is so funny. Then you send it off to the company, and when it comes back you have to style it and dye the real hair to match.” She laughed again. “You can make a lot of money doing hairpieces for men.”

“Do you cut hair for any women at all?” I asked.

Both women let out a phheeewww at the same time. “A few,” said Carrie, the more discreet of the two. “But –” she wrinkled her nose.

“Women are a pain in the ass,” said Cookie loudly. “They are so damn moody. Give me a man any day of the week.”

I stretched out on the comfy armchair and propped my head on my elbow. “So — what do men talk about when they’re in the chair?”

Carrie nodded over to Cookie. “She gets the ones that talk about personal things.”

Cookie groaned. “And I get the ones who still live with their mother. And Jews. All the Jewish clients come to me, I think because I’m black. Jews and blacks have this understanding, you know? Because we’re both oppressed groups I guess.”

Carrie, who’s Korean-American, nodded. “I get the young guys. ‘The new men,’ I call them. The ones that are sensitive. They seem like they really want to understand women. The ones that cook and clean and stuff. But my clients won’t tell me anything really personal –”

“Because you don’t ask!” Cookie yelled. “I come right out and say, ‘What do you feel about that?’ I had one client who was going on about his secretary. About how he was having an affair with his secretary, and his wife almost caught him one night in the boardroom. I just glared at him and, holding my scissors up, said, ‘Uh huh. You’re lucky I’m not no Lorena Bobbitt.’ He stopped talking about his affairs after that.”

Carrie giggled. “Tell her about Irene.”

Cookie barked, “That idiot!” She turned to me. “She was our manicurist. This guy used to come in to have his nails done and he said he’d take her on a trip, take her out to dinner, all this crap. She goes out with him once and — boom! He’s gone. Doesn’t ask her out again. She quits soon after that. Then he comes in here recently and asks, ‘How’s that Irish girl?’ He says he had a good time with her. Took her out for dinner, and then he goes, ‘Afterwards, she brought me back here.’ He’s pointing to my chair. ‘She gave me a blow job right in this seat.’”

Carrie chuckled and Cookie rolled her eyes.

“And then,” Cookie continued, “there was the guy who used to rub my ass while I was working on his hairpiece.”

“Did you slap him?” I asked.

“Ah, no! I let’m.” She shook her head. “The poor guy was 80 or something. He was so cute! He lived with his mother. I could have gotten upset, but oh, it just gave him such a thrill. And I didn’t really care, he just sort of had his hands on me. It wasn’t a big deal.”

“That happened to me too, with Mr. Watson,” said Carrie, and Cookie nodded. “I was shampooing him, and he started putting his hand on my butt. I said, ‘You know, I don’t really like that, Mr. Watson.’ He says, ‘Well, Patty’ — that’s our shampooist from about five years ago — ‘used to let me do it.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m not Patty.’ So he stopped. I could never figure out why Patty used to have so much money. Then she told me that she’d go hang out in bars in the Financial District and slip her card into men’s pockets — you know, put her hand right down the front of their trousers — and say, ‘Come and let us cut your hair.’”

“Patty really believed in marketing herself,” Cookie said dryly. Both women chortled, and Carrie leaned over to press the Brew button on the coffee machine.

“Does Mr. Watson still come here?”

“Oh, sure,” Carrie said, “he’s been coming for 10 years or so. His son is a client now, too.”

“We pretty much love all our guys,” Cookie said.

As if on cue, a man in a wrinkled suit and a worried expression suddenly opened the door. “Mr. Robertson!” Cookie shrieked. “Robb-ey! Come over here. I’ve been looking forward to this all day. Is that a tan I see?” She grabbed his hand and led him across the room to the sink as I stood up and gathered my things.

“I’ve been in Bermuda with my wife and daughter and son-in-law,” I heard Mr. Robertson say as I waved to Carrie and left them to their version of BoysTown. “It was, oh, not so great. I don’t know what I think about that son-in-law.”

“I’m glad you’re back,” Cookie shouted.

“Oh, so am I,” he said, with great relief. “You have no idea.”

The secrets Blier spilled in films like the raw, brazen “Going Places” and
the playful, Mozartean “Get Our Your Handkerchiefs” were the secrets of
male sexual attitudes, which he parodied even as he reveled in them. Those
movies upset plenty of people who couldn’t get past their outrage to see
that the men were always the butt of Blier’s jokes. In last year’s “Mon
Homme,” Blier tries seeing things from a woman’s point of view.

Blier’s hooker heroine, Marie (Anouk Grinberg), worries about the same thing
that has always bedeviled his male characters: confusion about what the
opposite sex wants. The scenes where Grinberg and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi
pour out their frustrations is like hearing a female version of the male
griping that made Blier’s earlier movies so explosively funny. You can feel Blier exulting in the discovery that women are just as puzzled by men as
men are by women. But, while reclaiming the daring that had become
calculated in his later movies, he adds a melancholy gravity. “Mon Homme”
is, on the surface, a lyrical sex farce. But Pierre Lhomme’s rich,
dark-hued photography conveys the movie’s emotional depths. “Mon Homme”
hits the fullest, saddest notes of any of the director’s films.

Blier makes erotic fairy tales in which desire contains the power of an
ecstatic and terrible enchantment. To Marie, hooking is a sacred calling.
Appalled when a novice asks her how much she should charge, Marie reminds
the woman that her first duty is to pleasure. What she offers, she claims,
is true love, and she has a point. In her warm, cozy apartment at the top
of a six-story walk-up, Marie offers her clients devotion and excitement
devoid of love’s grievances, disappointments and flagging desire. When an
elderly gent is too exhausted after his climb to make love, Marie makes him
happy by allowing him to watch her pee. A few days later, he’s back at
Marie’s pickup spot wearing a dreamy smile and telling her, “I’d like to
climb the stairs again.” Heaven is upward.

As in many fairy tales, a mysterious stranger sends things topsy-turvy.
Returning home from a job one night, Marie finds a homeless man sleeping in
the lobby of her building. She feeds him, gives him a place to stay and
finally winds up offering him sex. Instead of responding with the
gratefulness with which he’s accepted her food and hospitality, he takes
charge, handling her roughly, usurping the control she’s always had with
her clients. She asks what his name is, and he tells her he can’t remember.
He asks if she knows who she is, and she replies, “I can’t remember who I
am, but I think I’m a whore.” Her only certainty is, by the end of their
session, that she’s in love with him.

That’s Blier’s way of saying that sexual attraction makes nonsense of
logic, upsets all our most deeply held beliefs about who we are and what we
want. “Mon Homme” sets up the idealistic notion of “true love” that Marie
offers her customers, the rose without the thorns, against the chaos of
real desire, with its outrageous capacity for pain. She’s not blind to that
possibility. While her new lover is sleeping, she kneels beside him and
gives thanks “for this break that may not be one.”

As always, Blier plays with sex roles, both the female in thrall as well as
the male who thinks he has to take charge to be a “real man.” Thinking that
she’s hit on a way to hold on to her identity and at least a little bit of
control, Marie suggests to Jeannot (that’s his name; he’s played by Gerard
Lanvin) that he become her pimp. “That way I’ll belong to you,” she says.
He agrees, but he’s both attracted to and repulsed by his new role. He
likes his stylish new suits, the chance to shave and change his underwear
every day. But he can’t stand being separated from Marie every day,
wandering from cafe to cafe while she conducts business. Jeannot’s got
money, clothes, a woman at his beck and call and a nagging feeling that
something will go wrong. So he begins toying with real pimp behavior,
smacking Marie around (she hits him back — right where it counts), and
picking up women.

He tries to persuade one of his lovers, a manicurist named Sarah (the
radiant Tedeschi), to work for him, but Sarah’s notion of true love isn’t
Marie’s. Her conflicted response sets up the events that send the ménage
spinning into the separations and recombinations of the second half of the
movie. One of the hallmarks of Blier’s work is his ability to maintain an
inner logic as events get wilder and wilder, and “Mon Homme” is no
exception. The common thread is the yearning that draws the sexes toward
the edge of the gulf that separates them.

Insecurity is the catalyst for almost all male stupidity in Blier’s movies.
This isn’t some ’70s sensitive-male critique, though. Blier sees male folly
from the inside. He’s saying to his audience, “Look at what asses we can
be.” By contrast — without pretending that he understands women — Blier
has always treated the pain of his female characters solemnly. Marie and
Jeannot’s initial lovemaking is scored to Polish composer Gorecki’s
Second Symphony, a dark, mournful-sounding thing. Something grave and
wondrous is going on, Blier tells us, the simultaneous potential for the
zenith of pleasure and the depths of pain. He adores the women he puts on
screen. The camera basks in Tedeschi’s voluptuous
tentativeness. The moments before her huge smile appears feel like seeing
the sun peek shyly out from behind a cloud. And certainly, we couldn’t get
any closer to Grinberg’s Marie. She’s an almost birdlike creature,
with her long neck and soft spikes of hair. Grinberg’s features are both
crystalline and pliable, betraying every emotion. At times, the movie’s
deep sadness seems to be welling up out of her huge eyes. The hooker with
“a happy mind and a happy ass” may be a male fantasy, but Marie brings
dignity to her work. It’s women who abide in Blier’s world. For all of
Marie’s delicacy, she’s the strong one here. Grinberg’s performance is
utterly fearless.

In “Going Places” and “Get Out Your Handkerchiefs,” the teamwork of Gerard
Depardieu and the late Patrick Dewaere seemed to embody male comic
potential. Dewaere’s impetuous nervousness, a flutter disguised beneath
sudden bluster, complemented the slower, more ruminative Depardieu with his
hulking, regular-Joe brawn. Watching Lanvin’s Jeannot is like seeing
Dewaere’s spirit reincarnated in Depardieu’s physique. Lanvin is a great
simian sad sack. He has the drooping eyes of a silent-movie clown. The
Barry White songs on the soundtrack (taken from White’s 1994 album “The
Icon Is Love”), with their rumbling sexuality, both aggressive and
supplicating, embody the spirit of his performance. Making us feel sorry
for a bastard is one of the hardest things an actor can do, but Lanvin
accesses Jeannot’s roiling doubt, the self-loathing that comes over him
when he goes too far. Blier’s movies can be rueful experiences for the men
in the audience. You may have lived your life without resorting to the
extremes of his characters and still, seeing the anger that comes out of
their confusion, think, “My God, that’s me.”

Men have traditionally wound up outcasts in Blier’s movies, going down the
road like Chaplin’s Little Tramp reimagined by Henry Miller, still unsure
how they got that way. The terrible gift Blier bestows on Jeannot here is
self-knowledge. He delivers the movie’s final line: “Forgive me, women,”
with a bottomless pathos. He knows how he went wrong, but not how to make
it right. In “Mon Homme,” that’s the story of, that’s the glory of love.