woman sighed and turned to me. Too bad we can’t keep you out legally, she said. Cover’s five bucks, Mr. Friend of Somebody.
I gave her the money, and she stamped my hand with something out of a children’s printing set: the image of a giraffe. Then I was free to enter, but as I went by, the big woman pulled me aside and said, Be good, little buddy. I’m keeping my eye on you.
I found myself in a large, darkened room, standing before a crowded dance floor. A revolving mirrored ball hung from the ceiling, casting circling pinpoints of light on the dancers, as they too swirled about, so that for a moment I felt dizzy, as if it were the floor that was moving, not the ball or the dancers. The room was hot and smoky, throbbing with the beat of music I knew was called disco. And as my eyes became accustomed to the dim light, I could see that the dance floor was ringed with small tables, each one filled with a small group of women who crowded around the tiny circle of the table, holding cocktail glasses and bottles of beer. So many women! I thought, for there were perhaps two hundred or more in the room, filling not only the dance floor and the tables but also the bar area behind me, where ladies stood four deep as they pressed forward to place an order with the busy women bartenders.
And all of them are lesbians! came my next thought. For there were charming ladies of every variety, far outnumbering the “bull dykes” whom I had always imagined were the typical sort. There were women in neat pantsuits—businesswomen, they seemed. And many “old-style girls,” who looked just as delectable as the patient had said, in their tight sweaters and red lips, curvy, like lounge vamps of the fifties. There were tiny Asian women, who seemed to be in pairs in which one partner took the role of the man and one the woman. And women who simply looked fresh and athletic, as if they had just come from the clubhouse after a swim—could these be “Dinah Shore lesbians”?
By far the largest group were the “politicos”: women with short hair and flannel shirts who, to my mind, looked not like women but like tender preadolescents. Many had stripped off their shirts and danced in their undershirts, cotton muscle shirts, braless nipples bobbing sweetly beneath the surface of the cloth. The word “youths” came to mind as I gazed upon them—not “boys” or “girls” but “youths”—for they seemed to have stopped themselves at that delicate moment just before the terrible descent into the divide between male and female: girls who could still run around unashamed in their underwear, boys whose cheeks were still soft with down. And as I watched the couples sway on the dance floor—to a popular slow song, “Midnight Train to Georgia”—I could not understand why the patient was so resistant to their charms. For I found them adorably sexy, with their short haircuts with cut-in sideburns and cute little cowlicks, their tight blue jeans, bodies pressed tightly together as they moved to the rhythm of that aching, plaintive song. And, thrust between each other’s legs, a knee seeking a tender spot.
Was Charlotte here? I suddenly wondered. She might be relaxing amongst her goat-lady lesbians. Then again, about to find herself newly single, she might be one of those women in blue jeans, her knee already exploring the inner thigh of someone new. And which of these women had the patient flirted with, on those nights when she had had one too many: that woman wearing a dark, tailored pantsuit? Or, better yet, that one there: a blowzy vamp showing cleavage? It thrilled me to think that this is where the patient had stood, right on the edge of this dance floor, gazing into the many faces of female allure.
The room suddenly seemed very crowded, for all at once there was a cloud of women around me. Their bodies were so close that I could smell their perfumes and hair gels and sweat, and I did not try to move away, for I confess it was a very pleasant sensation: to be so surrounded by so much female flesh, the occasional brush of a breast against my arm, the rub of a backside, a hip to my thigh. Without actually dancing (which would have been strange, since I was alone), I tried to sway with