Free Lizards: Short Story by Barbara Gowdy Page B

can’t watch with you right beside me,” Gerry said, pushing his chair back.
    “Why not? It doesn’t bother me.”
    “But I wouldn’t even come here by myself,” Gerry said. He sounded unhappy.
    So they left, but she steered him down the street to the male strip club. “You know, watching isn’t fucking,” she told him as they were going inside. “Dancing isn’t fucking either.”
    “Right,” he said. “And fantasizing isn’t fucking. Foreplay certainly isn’t fucking.” He sounded as if he couldn’t imagine what he was talking about.
    The place was packed. Mostly women, but there were a few men. Emma and Gerry sat with four flashy black women at a table near the exit. The women were all using identical silvery cigarette holders, which they gripped in their teeth to free up their hands for clapping to the music—the theme song from “Quick Draw McGraw,” Emma realized after a minute. On the stage, two men wearing cowboy hats, chaps, spurred boots andleather-fringed G-strings twirled lassoes and rode phantom bucking broncos and slapped their own asses.
    “Gay,” Gerry said in Emma’s ear. He looked gratified.
    Emma shrugged—maybe. That wasn’t it, though. The fact that the dancers seemed gay wasn’t why there was nothing erotic going on here. She folded her arms, disappointed. She tried to lose herself in the dancers’ bodies, but their outfits distracted her. She could feel her whole self folding in, retreating from the light and noise, the idiotic music, the laughing.
    The next act was a stripping admiral whose big finale was turning away from the audience, removing his G-string, then turning back around with his white glove waving on the end of his erection. Gerry laughed and applauded.
    “Can we go now?” Emma said.
    In the car they had an argument about whether the women in the club had been turned on. “They were sure acting like it,” Gerry said. Emma said they were having a good time, but it was parody, it was women acting the way they thought men did.
    “I’m a woman, I know how women feel,” she said, and he granted her that, although she suddenly realized it wasn’t true. She had no idea how other women felt. It occurred to her that she could be missing entire traits—irony and caution.
    After leaving the Bear Pit, Emma and Marion go back to Marion’s apartment above the pet store, and Marion admits that those are the only human penises she’s ever seen other than Craig’s and her ex-husband’s. She says they make her appreciate Craig’s. “So what if it’s not all that big?” she says. “Who wants a Hot Rod or a Submarine—”
    “There was no Submarine,” Emma says.
    “Well, what was the red-haired guy called?”
    “Torpedo.”
    “Oh yeah, Torpedo.” Marion pours coffee into china cupswith saucers. “I mean, who wants a torpedo in their vagina, anyway?”
    “Not me,” Emma lies.
    Later, driving home, Emma thinks of Gerry’s perfect penis and can’t help wishing that he still had his perfect body, more for his sake than for hers, though, because the truth is she’d still be fooling around on him. Gerry suspects, but he thinks it’s Len Forsythe, and he thinks it’s over. He has no idea that it’s still Len, and six months ago it was Len’s twin brother, Hen, and last week it was a gorgeous nitwit who wore a hard hat (not in bed, but everything else came off first) because he believed that jet stream thinned your hair. Gerry wouldn’t believe so many guys if she showed him pictures, and what’s the point in him believing it? she asks herself. How would that much truth make a man like Gerry happier, or better equipped to sell debentures?
    In the three-person branch office where Gerry works, he collects less than two hundred a week in commissions. Emma means to cheer him up when she says, “It’s not as if you’re knocking yourself out,” but he blames the fact that all his clients, inherited from a guy who retired, are dropping like flies. He