Saviour Complex

I hate my life.

I pretend I don’t; try desperately to convince myself that I'm grateful and happy to be alive. By all measures, my life is wonderful.

I love my son. I don’t have to lie about that. I love my husband, Matt, but often wonder if I like him very much. I love my best friend, Jen.

After all that’s been said and done, I can’t help resenting her a bit. She knew I hated my life. That's exactly why she suggested we go to the strip club for a little excitement, and exactly why I jumped all over it.

So I go. I walk through those fake brass-doors, and I pretend it doesn’t flatter me as much as it does when the bouncer pulls the same trick of asking for ID that he must with every woman over 35. As if the concept of my slow march to the grave is a joke we’re all in on, a frivolous concern. Underneath the flush it elicits from my skin, the charade sickens me a little. Such hollow comforts I’m willing to gorge myself on now, a neglected houseplant mistaking fluorescents for sunlight.

I have to take what I can get.

I’m nervous, crossing the threshold from my child-proofed life into a world of gyrating bodies and hungry-eyed spectators. Long-legged women totter around like exotic birds in an open-air cage, clad in Stilettos and little else. Every man in the room transforms into a schoolboy on the edge of his seat, shoulders hunched forward in half-cocked anticipation, drawn by the invisible magnetism of the women in front of them. Jen shoots me a wry grin at their expense. It’s all a lark, those last few moments while I can still believe I’m above it. Until my husband gets me a private dance, unaware that this little joke of his will turn out far from funny, and suddenly it feels like all the shots I took are hitting at once and my heart is trying to escape my concave chest.

When a hand takes my own, I notice a tattoo on a wrist that looks far too small to be attached to someone in a place like this. An inken heart, simple like something a child would draw. I latch onto it like it’s the most captivating sight in the world. Partly because I’m scared of what else I might see in this place, but mostly because it gives me something– anything– to focus on other than the reality of my situation. I am being led by a strange little creature into a den of depravity.

(It will only occur to me later that I went willingly.)

When I reach the private room, she draws the curtains closed with a movement that says she’s done this a hundred times before and she’ll do it a hundred times after. Standing there, just the two of us, I swear I'm not going to fall for it.

But then she turns around, and her kewpie-doll mouth stretches into a dazzling grin. The tequila breath hitches in my throat. I’m falling for it, Alice through the looking glass down down down. That really is what I’m thinking of, a fairytale of all things. My head swims while a spritely young girl nudges me onto the plush bench against the back of my thighs, her elfin features heightened under red neon. When she touches me, pink acrylics like claws, I’m snapped out of the dreamworld and plunged into another one.

It seems enough like real life, yet here’s this girl– this glittering, cotton candy confection of a girl– and she’s on my lap. Of course I know this show she’s putting on isn’t real, I’m a grown woman, a married woman, but I forget that. I forget it when I realise that her body is warm against mine and she smells like sugar and her eyes are kind– I don’t really think it’s possible to fake kindness– but there’s something else there, too. I feel overwhelmed. Overheated. Like I can’t tell if I want her to look away, or to sink into those eyes like slowly sucking whirlpools and never resurface.

(Later, when I replay this moment for the thousandth time, I wonder if I was only seeing my own gaze reflected in hers.)

When she brazenly ghosts her lips over mine, the action both too much and not nearly enough, it takes everything in me not to close the gap. I’m surprised as much at my desire as my resistance. Vaguely, I wonder if I’ve ever understood the meaning of temptation before now. But I don’t kiss her, I stay rooted to the spot. Even as she parts my legs and runs her hands up my torso, long nails grazing my bare skin. A distinctly feminine scrape.

That’s when I snap out of it, if only briefly. I pull my shirt back down, urgently, muttering excuses about having had a baby and not wanting to subject innocent eyes to my flesh. As if I don’t know the girl before me would have lost all manner of innocence long ago. Like this whole encounter, it means a great deal more to me than it does to her. I want to hide the achingly private patterns wrought into my skin, lightning-strikes of shame cast across my hips, my stomach. Or maybe, I just don’t want to be reminded of myself.

I want the only thing that matters to be the girl in front of me; to indulge in the fantasy that I can stay here forever and all of the paradoxical, heavy nothingness of my own life will slip away with the closing of a curtain.

When she tells me she’s nineteen in a babydoll voice that I’m too concerned to notice is forced, it almost sickens me. Sitting there in such contrast. I wonder what it would be like; to be her. My gaze lingers over her body, skin much tighter than mine has been in years, made even more tantalizing by the glitter that hangs off of her and the red light she’s bathed in, turning her into something more fey than floozy. I've never looked at a woman like this. I wonder absently if I've ever looked at anyone like this. I watch the way she moves, like every inch of her body oozes sexuality– no, sensuality– without her even trying. I wonder if I ever even came close to having an effect like that, even before marriage and a baby and an empty nursery with paint swatches still hanging half-heartedly from the wall like a last-ditch plea to whoever is listening. If I pick the right shade of magenta will you finally give me a daughter?

When the stripper brings her hands to my face and looks into my eyes like I'm the most wonderful sight she’s ever beheld, I realize how long it’s been since anyone looked at me like that. Thick, hot shame creeps up the back of my throat, suddenly and violently.

The first thing that registers in my mind is that this girl is hardly more than a child. It probably should have been the fact that I’m married, or that I’m straight. But I’m not thinking of that. I’m thinking of how pathetic I am, a grown woman desperate to switch places with a girl who simulates sex for a living. Underneath that, I want to trade places not with her, but her customers. I want to spend the rest of my life in this room, being looked at like this.

I’m grateful when it’s finally over. At least, I tell myself that that’s the impression I’m left with. I stumble out from behind the curtain and into the car, hanging off Matt's arm until I make it home. I’m grateful too, when he tries to break our dry spell and initiate sex, and I throw up, violently. I can blame everything I’ve felt that night on the alcohol, and pretend that the feelings are expelled from my body and washed down the drain along with it.

I get better at lying. It becomes easy, almost second nature. The excuses slip right out of my mouth and slot neatly into place, an "oil change" here and a "massage appointment" there. I couldn't possibly tell my friends, my husband, the truth. I'm not even sure what the truth is. All I know is that one day I get in the car after dropping Nicky off at school, and find myself on the other side of town, trolling the streets and edging suspiciously close to the place where this all began. The strip club. I spend an exorbitant amount of time looking for a familiar silhouette in the rearview mirror or the corner of my eye, not knowing what the hell I'd do if I find it. I consider, for a moment, that maybe I wouldn’t even be able to find it, surely there wasn’t enough time spent together to breed familiarity– but I know that that’s not true. I’d recognize her anywhere. I know this with a certainty I haven’t felt in a very long time.

It's silly, but I just can't get her out of my head. Every day that's passed since that dance has seemed more monotonous than the last. It's almost unbearable, trying to find things to occupy my time with while Matt is at work and Nicky at school, scenes from that night running through my head like a twisted roll of film from an old VCR. I wonder absently if I'm truly going insane; being reduced to fantasizing and stalking after one dance from a stranger. I wonder what this means for my marriage, what Matt or my therapist would say if they found out about my… fascination with this girl. That’s the only word I have for it, really. I have no idea what I’m feeling.

I can never allow myself to dwell on it for too long, and certainly not to speak about it. The untruths I weave are not so much a deceit themselves, but strands in a larger web. Sticky like cotton candy.

When I tell the girl at the cafe that my name is Samantha, my mind does a somersault trying to convince itself that it really is. I am not Sarah, devoted wife and mother of one. Sarah would've said her own name. Sarah would not spend hours wondering about a stripper she met once, only to accidentally-on-purpose bump into her over coffee. Sarah would never be here at all.

I lie so well that I almost start to believe myself.

But then I start talking to her, and I find out that her name is Lily, and that she sends money home to her mother and she never knew her father. I tell her about my life, and she seems genuinely happy to listen.

I've gotten better at lying, but I don't lie to her.

It becomes a part of my routine. It, or rather, her. The hours we spend together, the barista’s bemused smile as I order the same coffee at the same time as yesterday. The way the world seems to lighten and brighten around her, like her mere existence has some sort of restorative property to it. I learn to expect but never take for granted the way her face lights up every time she sees me, the earnestness of those who aren’t yet old enough to want to hide it written all over her face. She makes me feel like there’s not a soul in the world she’d rather be speaking to right now more than my dusty old one.

Lily. She’s less of an enigma now and more of a real person. A friend. I relish that she's become the one thing I get to have all to myself. When I’m with her, the harsh lines that have defined my life for longer than I can remember don’t seem so rigid anymore. I can be anything I want, when she looks at me like that.

The routine I build with her reminds me of old ones. When she pulls out a cigarette and offers me one, probably nothing more than a casual courtesy to her, my first instinct is to refuse. I gave that up long ago. I have a husband and a child to stay healthy for.

When I watch her lips curl over her own and hear the flick of her lighter, watch the way she inhales, a flood of sensation hits me like a punch to the gut. Suddenly I’m 21 again, sitting on the porch of a friend of a friend of a friend and I don’t have that weight dragging down my bones, my skin, that I do now. So I ask her for one, and she acquiesces like it doesn’t matter at all. And I’m sure it doesn’t, to her. I love her for it and I hate her for it and above all, I ache because of it.

My hands shake when I try to light it, and I’m both charmed and mortified when Lily takes mine in hers. Her hands are warm, and the touch is foreign and familiar at once. It only serves to rattle me more. When she drags me away to a corner sheltered from the wind like she has to teach me how to do this and I don't have a twenty-year head start, I let her. Finally, finally the damn thing is lit, and I tell myself I didn’t even want it that much in the first place. I take a drag anyway.

When that old, pleasant burn of smoke hits my lungs, I’m grateful for something else to blame the heat that’s been flushing through me on. I sigh in contentment, and she looks at me with such tenderness that it catches me off guard. Lily doesn’t try to hide her expression once we lock eyes like I’d thought she would. Perhaps she hasn't learned yet that it doesn't do well to give out love for free– if I can call whatever has developed between us love. I still hardly know the girl, I remind myself with the sobering shock of cold water hitting my skin.

Or maybe she has learnt that lesson already, and she gives it to me in spite of it.