Small Town

Chloe giggled, and yanked down the front of her scoop-necked blouse, and there were two plump and pert and very charming breasts, and one of them had a gold stud in the nipple.

She looked around in alarm, but the gallery’s only customer, an out-of-towner with schoolmarm glasses and a fanny pack, was on the far side of the room, trying to make sense out of one of Jeffcoate Walker’s monsters. By the time she looked at Chloe, the girl had tucked her treasures safely away.

She said, “When did you—”

“Friday, right after I left here.”

“How on earth—”

“I know,” Chloe said. “I didn’t think I could go through with it. I thought, oh, shit, this is going to hurt like a motherfucker. But it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”

“But why?”

“Well, she puts ice on it first, and that numbs it a little, and—”

“No, that’s not what I mean. Why do it? Why have it done?”

The question seemed hard for the girl to grasp, as if she’d never learned to think in those terms. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve just been wanting to do it for ages. And I heard about this woman, that she’s really good, and like the person to go to if you’re serious about piercing.”

“You’re not concerned about infection?”

“I never had any problems before.”

“But the location...”

“You just turn it once a day, same as with an earring, and, you know, put alcohol on it. It’s easier, because you can see what you’re doing.”

She let it go at that, but later, when Chloe was getting ready to leave for the day, she told her she still couldn’t understand why she’d had the urge to get her nipple pierced in the first place. It wasn’t a fashion statement, after all, because in the ordinary course of things it would go unseen, except perhaps at a topless beach, and—

“It’s exciting, Susan. It’s like this secret thing. But you could do your navel and it’d be just as much of a secret, but it wouldn’t be the same thing.”

“Why?”

“Because your tit’s not the same as your navel, I guess. It’s tender and intimate, so that makes it scarier to do in the first place, and it’s not just a secret, it’s like a sex secret.”

“Okay.”

“Plus,” she said, “it’s just plain hot.”

“A turn-on for guys, you mean.”

“Probably, if only because of what it says. Hey, look at me, I’m hot. But it’s a turn-on just having it. Physically, I mean.”

“Physically? Knowing it’s there, I suppose, but—”

“No, physically, Susan. You know how it feels when someone plays with your nipple and it gets hard? Or you do it yourself? That’s how you feel all the time.”

She didn’t want to miss anything.

And there were things she’d missed just by being born when she was. When she was a kid, safe sex meant your parents wouldn’t find out what you did, or it meant being on the pill. But by the time she was old enough, out of high school and ready to check out the world, safe sex meant being careful what you did and whom you did it with, because there was suddenly this new disease and if you got it you died. Penicillin didn’t help, nothing helped, you just died.

When she was married, when it began to dawn on her and Gary that they both had urges that extended beyond their own double bed, they’d speculated about partying with other couples, about orgies, about clubs where you could just take off your clothes and have sex with strangers. There used to be clubs like that, there was Plato’s Retreat, for one, and it was supposed to be a hip thing to go there in the late seventies and early eighties, before AIDS, before safe sex. She’d heard stories about it, in high school, in college, and there were different movie stars who were supposed to show up now and then, and by the time she’d have been ready for it, the place was closed.

Gary had wanted to see her with another woman, and somehow he found another couple similarly inclined, and she and the other wife spent an awkward half hour doing things, both of them for the first time, and she might have enjoyed it if it hadn’t been abundantly clear that the other woman was just there to keep her husband happy.

The men didn’t notice the difference, or didn’t care, and when she and Donna had run out of new things to pretend to enjoy, Gary, fiercely tumescent, was on her at once, even as the other man — she couldn’t remember his name — mounted his own wife. Gary would have been happier taking a shot at Donna, that was obvious, but that had not been part of the original game plan, and she was just as glad, finding Donna’s husband singularly unappealing.

They’d met them through a personal ad Gary had answered (or perhaps he’d placed the ad himself, she was never sure) and of course they never saw them again. He was funny afterward, annoyed with her for not having gotten into the spirit of the thing, then concerned that she had been having such a good time with the other woman. Deep down inside, was she really a lesbian?