Free Lizards: Short Story by Barbara Gowdy Page A

its twig legs ignite and burn down to ash.
    “I mean,” Marion says now, “I thought there’d be, you know, whatchamacallit, jock straps.” She extracts an embroidered handkerchief from her sleeve and blows her nose. “Why didn’t you warn me?”
    “I didn’t know,” Emma says. “The only other time I’ve seen guys doing this they wore G-strings.”
    That was seven years ago. On the same night Emma also saw female table dancers for the first and only time. She suspected that she was pregnant but hadn’t had the test yet and hadn’t told anyone, so she was still drinking, sharing a carafe of wine with Gerry on the patio of a downtown restaurant, right across the street from a new bar with a neon “25 Girls 25” sign. Gerry had heard about the bar from some guys in his office, and he said she wouldn’t be able to take it, but she said she was going over whether he did or not.
    It was like underwater in there, a murky pond. Dark, smoky. Quiet, since it was between stage acts. All around the room, like seaweed in the current, slender, naked women stood on little round tables and slowly writhed for men who sat right underneath them and looked up. The men hardly spoke or even moved except to reach for their drinks or their cigarettes.
    As if nobody could see her (and nobody seemed to), Emma twisted in her chair and stared, while Gerry tried to get the attention of a waitress wearing a tight T-shirt that said “Better A Blow Job Than No Job.” Emma asked him if he wanted to hire a dancer for their table.
    “Is this some kind of test?” he said. He took a quick glance around. “You’re the only woman in here who’s not a dancer or a waitress,” he said.
    “I don’t care.”
    He smiled at her and shook his head. She squeezed his leg. She was getting excited, not by the women’s bodies (they aroused in her nothing but a resolve to lose weight), and not by what some of the women might be feeling. It was the men who were turning her on, what
they
were feeling. “Feasting their eyes,” she thought, although they didn’t seem to be getting any pleasure out of it. They were almost grim, in fact. It was as if they had finally got down to the true, blunt business of their lives. “Are there male table dancers?” she asked.
    “Not that I know of,” Gerry said. “Just strippers.”
    “I wonder if there are any of those clubs around here.”
    “Why?”
    “Let’s go to one.”
    He laughed.
    “Why not?” She pushed the palm of her hand against his crotch. “Hey,” she said, smiling. He was hard.
    He smiled back but picked up her hand and returned it to her lap. “What’d you expect?” he said.
    “Sweetie,” she crooned, nuzzling his shoulder. He was still lean and ambitious then, in his stockbroker pinstripe suits. He still had an expectant look in his eyes. She is nostalgic for his eyes. She told her mother recently, and her mother said, “There was something lifeless about them, though. When he used to blink, I swear I could hear his lids click.”
    What Gerry would have said about his eyes was, “I was in paradise.”Any mention of his old self and he’ll claim to have been in a state of ecstasy then, before the accident. “The accident” is how he always refers to it, which strikes an odd note with Emma.
The
accident. She has noticed that he uses the definite article in a couple of other questionable places, for instance in reference to their marriage.
“The
marriage,” he says. Also,
“the
weight,” “when I lose
the
weight,” as if she and obesity were two more bolts out of the blue.
    When the waitress finally came over, Emma found out from her that there was a male strip club just two blocks away. The waitress took their orders but then disappeared for so long that Gerry said, “Let’s get out of here,” although a statuesque black dancer in horn-rimmed glasses was ascending the stairs to the stage.
    Emma held back. “Oh, come on,” she said. “This should be good.”
    “I