“No,” countered the hotelier, “the worst thing is when you sort of follow a woman down the street and she turns around and she is as beautiful as you thought she was going to be. It represents everything you’ll never have in your life.”
The artist leaned forward. “I once stopped working for five years because of a woman,” he said.
Silence. No one could top that.
The chocolate mousse arrived, and so did my date for Le Trapeze. Since Le Trapeze admits couples only—meaning a man and a woman—I had asked my most recent ex-date, Sam, an investment banker, to accompany me. Sam was a good choice because, number one, he was the only man I could get to go with me; number two, he’d already had experience with this kind of thing: A million years ago he had gone to Plato’s Retreat. A strange woman had come up to him and pulled out his unmentionable. His girlfriend, whose idea it had been to go there, ran screaming from the club.
The talk turned to the inevitable: What kind of people go to a sex club? I seemed to be the only one who didn’t have a clue. Although no one had been to a sex club, everyone at dinner firmly asserted that the clubgoers would generally be “losers from New Jersey.” Someone pointed out that going to a sex club is not the kind of thing you can just do, without a pretty good excuse, e.g. it’s part of your job. This talk wasn’t making me feel any better. I asked the waiter to bring me a shot of tequila.
Sam and I stood up to go. A writer who covers popular culture gave us a last piece of advice. “It’s going to be pretty awful,” he warned, though he had never been to such a place himself. “Unless you take control. You’ve got to take control of the place. You’ve got to make it happen.”
NIGHT OF THE SEX ZOMBIES
Le Trapeze was located in a white stone building covered with graffiti. The entrance was discreet, with a rounded metal railing, a downmarket version of the entrance to the Royalton Hotel. A couple was coming out as we were going in, and when the woman saw us, she covered her face with the collar of her coat.
“Is it fun?” I asked.
She looked at me in horror and ran into a taxi.
Inside, a dark-haired young man, wearing a striped rugby shirt, was sitting in a small booth. He looked like he was about eighteen. He didn’t look up.
“Do we pay you?”
“It’s eighty-five dollars a couple.”
“Do you take credit cards?”
“Cash only.”
“Can I have a receipt?”
“No.”
We had to sign cards saying that we’d abide by the rules of safe sex. We got temporary membership cards, which reminded us that no prostitution, no cameras, and no recording devices were allowed inside.
While I was expecting steamy sex, the first thing we saw were steaming tables—i.e., the aforementioned hot and cold buffet. Nobody was eating, and there was a sign above the buffet table that said, YOU MUST HAVE YOUR LOWER TORSO COVERED TO EAT. Then we saw the manager, Bob, a burly, bearded man in a plaid shirt and jeans who looked like he should have been managing a Pets ‘R’ Us store in Vermont. Bob told us the club had survived for fifteen years, because of its “discretion.” “Also,” he said, “here, no means no.” He told us not to be worried about being voyeurs, that most people start off that way.
What did we see? Well, there was a big room with a huge air mattress, upon which a few blobby couples gamely went at it; there was a “sex chair” (unoccupied) that looked like a spider; there was a chubby woman in a robe, sitting next to a Jacuzzi, smoking; there were couples with glazed eyes (Night of the Living Sex Zombies, I thought); and there were many men who appeared to be having trouble keeping up their end of the bargain. But mostly, there were those damn steaming buffet tables (containing what—mini–hot dogs?), and unfortunately, that’s pretty much all you need to know.
Le Trapeze was, as the French say, Le Rip-Off.
By one A.M., people were going home. A woman in a robe informed us she was from Nassau County and said we should come back Saturday night. “Saturday night,” the woman said, “is a smorgasbord.” I didn’t ask if she was talking about the clientele—I was afraid she meant the buffet.
TALKING DIRTY AT MORTIMERS
A couple of days later I was at a ladies’ lunch at Mortimers. Once again, the talk turned to sex and my experiences at the sex club.
“Didn’t you love it?” asked Charlotte, the English journalist. “I’d love to go to a place like that. Didn’t it turn you on, watching all those people having sex?”
“Nope,” I said, stuffing my mouth with a corn
fritter topped with salmon eggs.
“Why not?”
“You couldn’t really see anything,” I explained.
“And the men?”