In fact, the guy was so into the place that he didn’t want me to write about it because he was afraid that, like most decent places in New York, it would be ruined by publicity.
I started imagining all sorts of things: Beautiful young hardbody couples. Shy touching. Girls with long, wavy blond hair wearing wreaths made of grape leaves. Boys with perfect white teeth wearing loincloths made of grape leaves. Me, wearing a super-short, over-one-shoulder, grape-leaf dress. We would walk in with our clothes on and walk out enlightened.
The club’s answering machine brought me back to reality with a thump.
“At Le Trapeze, there are no strangers, only friends you haven’t met yet,” said a voice of indeterminate gender, which added that there was “a juice bar and a hot and cold buffet”—things I rarely associate with sex or nudity. In celebration of Thanksgiving, “Oriental Night” would be held on November 19. That sounded interesting, except it turned out that Oriental Night meant oriental food, not oriental people.
I should have dropped the whole idea right then. I shouldn’t have listened to the scarily horny Sallie Tisdale, who in her yuppie-porn book, Talk Dirty to Me, enthuses about public, group sex: “This is a taboo in the truest sense of the word. . . . If sex clubs do what they aim to do, then a falling away will happen. Yes, as is feared, a crumbling of boundaries. . . . The center will not hold.” I should have asked myself, What’s fun about that?
But I had to see for myself. And so, on a recent Wednesday night, my calendar listed two events: 9:00 P.M., dinner for the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, Bowery Bar; 11:30P.M., Le Trapeze sex club, East 27th Street.
MESSY WOMEN; KNEE SOCKS
Everyone, it seems, likes to talk about sex, and the Karl Lagerfeld dinner, packed with glam-models and expense-accounted fashion editors, was no exception. In fact, it got our end of the table worked up into a near frenzy. One stunning young woman, with dark curly hair and the sort of Seen-It-All attitude that only twenty year olds can pull off claimed she liked to spend her time going to topless bars, but only “seedy ones like Billy’s Topless” because the girls were “real.”
Then everyone agreed that small breasts were better than fake breasts, and a survey was taken: Who, among the men at the table, had actually been with a woman who had silicone implants? While no one admitted it, one man, an artist in his mid-thirties, didn’t deny it strongly enough. “You’ve been there,” accused another man, a cherub-faced and very successful hotelier, “and the worst thing is . . . you . . . liked. . . it.”
“No, I didn’t,” the artist protested. “But I didn’t mind it.”
Luckily, the first course arrived, and everyone filled up their wineglasses.
Next round: Are messy women better in bed? The hotelier had a theory. “If you walk into a woman’s apartment and nothing’s out of place, you know she’s not going to want to stay in bed all day and order in Chinese food and eat it in bed. She’s going to make you get up and eat toast at the kitchen table.”
I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to this, because I’m literally the messiest person in the world. And I probably have some old containers of General Tso’s Special Chicken lying under my bed at this moment. Unfortunately, all of it was eaten alone. So much for that theory.
Steaks were served. “The thing that really drives me crazy,” said the artist, “is when I see a woman wearing one of those tartan skirts and high knee socks. I can’t work all day.”
“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?”
“That was the worst part,” I said. “Half of them looked like shrinks. I’ll never be able to go to therapy again without imagining a bearded fat man lying naked and glassy-eyed on a mat on the floor, getting an hour-long blow job. And still not being able to come.”
Yes, I told Charlotte, we did take our clothes off—but we wore towels. No, we didn’t have sex. No, I didn’t get turned on, even when a tall, attractive, dark-haired woman in her mid-thirties entered the rumpus room and caused a stir. She exposed her bottom like a monkey, and within minutes, she was lost in a tangle of arms and legs. It should have been sexy, but all I could think about were those National Geographic nature films of mating baboons.
The truth is, exhibitionism and voyeurism are not mainstream events. And neither, for that matter, is S&M, despite what you may have recently read elsewhere. The problem, in the clubs, anyway, always comes down to the people. They’re the actresses who can never find work; the failed opera singers, painters, and writers; the lower-management men who will never get to the middle. People who, should they corner you in a bar, will keep you hostage with tales of their ex-spouses and their digestive troubles. They’re the people who can’t negotiate the system. They’re on the fringes, sexually and in life. They’re not necessarily the people with whom you want to share your intimate fantasies.
Well, the people at Le Trapeze weren’t all pale, pudgy sex zombies: Before we left the club, Sam and I ran into the attention-grabbing tall woman and her date in the locker room. The man had a clean-cut, all-American face and was talkative: He was from Manhattan, he said, and had recently started his own business. He and the woman had been colleagues, he said. As the woman slipped into a yellow business suit, the man smiled and said, “She fulfilled her fantasy tonight.” The woman glared at him and stalked out of the locker room.
A few days later, Sam called and I screamed at him. Then he asked, hadn’t the whole thing been my idea?
Then he asked, hadn’t I learned anything?
And I said yes, I had. I told him I had learned that when it comes to sex, there’s no place like home.
But then you knew that, didn’t you? Didn’t you? Sam?
3
We Loved a Serial Dater
On a recent afternoon, seven women gathered in Manhattan, over wine, cheese, and cigarettes, to animatedly discuss the one thing they had in common: a man. Specifically, an Eligible Man of Manhattan, a man we’ll call “Tom Peri.”
Tom Peri is forty-three years old, five feet, ten inches tall, with straight brown hair. There is nothing remarkable about his appearance, save for a penchant, a few years ago, for dressing in black Armani suits paired with wacky suspenders. He comes from a wealthy manufacturing family and grew up on Fifth Avenue and in Bedford, New York. He lives in a modern high-rise on Fifth Avenue.
Over the last fifteen years, Peri, who is almost always referred to by his last name only, has become something of a legend in New York. He’s not exactly a womanizer, because he’s always trying to get married. Peri is, rather, one of the city’s most accomplished serial daters, engaging in up to twelve “relationships” a year. But after two days or two months, the inevitable happens. Something goes wrong, and, he says, “I get dumped.”
For a certain type of woman—thirtyish, ambitious, well placed socially—dating Peri, or avoiding his attentions, has become nothing less than a rite of passage, sort of like your first limo ride and your first robbery, combined.
Even among the city’s other notorious ladies’ men, Peri stands out. For one thing, he appears to be holding far fewer cards. He has neither the well-bred good looks of Count Erik Wachtmeister nor the free-flowing cash of Mort Zuckerman.
I wanted to know, What’s Peri got?
Each of the women I contacted had been involved with Peri—either intimately or as an object of his ardent affections—and each said she had dumped him. None refused my request to get together for a session of Talking about Peri. Each woman, perhaps, had something . . . unresolved about Peri. Maybe they wanted him back. Maybe they wanted him dead.
“LIKE DARYL VAN HORNE”
We met at the home of Sarah, a filmmaker who used to be a model, “until I got sick of the bullshit and gained twenty pounds.” She wore a dark pinstripe suit. “When you look over the list of guys you’ve dated, Peri is the one guy that doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “You think, What was that about?”
But before we could even get to the juicy bits, we made a disturbing discovery. Although none of the women had heard from Peri for months, that morning he had called four of them.
“I don’t think he knows anything, I think it was just coincidence,” said Magda. Magda has been friends with Peri for years—in fact, most of her girlfriends are former dates of Peri’s, whom she met through him.
“He knows everything about us,” one woman said. “He’s like Daryl Van Horne in The Witches of Eastwick.”
“Van Horney is more like it,” said another. We opened the wine.
“The thing with Peri is this,” said Sarah. “The reason he’s so charming is, when you first meet him, he is articulate, he is funny—and, he’s available at all times, because he doesn’t work. What’s more fun than a guy who says, ‘Meet me for lunch,’ then you go back to work, then he says ‘Meet me for cocktails at six?’ When was the last time you went out with a guy who actually wanted to see you three times a day?”
“‘Cocktails’ is such a loaded word,” said Magda. “It’s like Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant.”
Jackie, a magazine editor, said, “When I met him, we started seeing each other instantly—five nights a week. He won’t leave you alone.”
“He’s smart, because the thing that he does is, he loves the phone,” said Sarah. “Which to a woman, you think, He must really be into me, because he calls you ten times a day. And then you start to disregard the fact that he’s like a funny-looking little thing.”
“Then you start to look at his suspenders, and you think, My God,” said Maeve, a poet who is half Irish.
“Then you begin to realize he’s not funny,” said Sarah. “He has a good stack of jokes, but once you’ve heard them a million times, they get really annoying. It’s like a loop. He’s looping himself.”
“He told me that I was the only girl he ever went out with who got his jokes,” said Maeve, “and I didn’t think they were funny.”
“And then you see his apartment. Those twenty-five door-men—what’s that about?”
“You wonder why he doesn’t just throw out all his furniture and go to the Door Store instead.”
“Once he showed me these napkin holders he had gotten. They were in the shape of handcuffs. Like this was how he was going to seduce a girl, with napkin holders.”
FIRST DATE: 44
So how does it all start?
Jackie’s story was typical. “I was waiting for a table at Blue Ribbon,” she said. “He walked up to me and started talking. He was instantly funny. I thought, Omigod, we’re really clicking. But I’ll probably never hear from him again.” Everyone nodded. After all, hadn’t we all been there?
“He called at something like eight the next morning,” Jackie said.
“‘Want to go out to lunch?’ he asked. He asks you to lunch at 44 the next day.”
Sapphire, a blond divorced mom, laughed. “He didn’t take me to 44 until the second day.”
“While you think he’s still funny and clever, he asks you to go away with him for the weekend,” said Jackie.
“He asked me to marry him on something like the tenth day,” said Sarah. “That was pretty quick, even for him.”
“He took me to dinner at his parents’ house on like the third date,” said Britta, a tall, rangy brunette who works as a photo rep and is now happily married. “It was just me and his parents and the butler. The
next day, I remember I was sitting on his bed, and he was showing me home movies of him as a kid. He was begging me to marry him. He was saying, ‘See, I can be a serious guy.’ And then he ordered some cheesy Chinese food. I thought, Marry you? What, are you smoking something?”
Ramona sighed. “On the other hand, I had just broken up with someone, and I was pretty upset. He was always there.”
A pattern emerged. The women who had dated Peri had all just left their husbands or long-term boyfriends when Peri found them. Or, was it they who found him?
“He’s rebound man,” Sarah said, definitively. “It’s like, ‘Excuse me, are you broken? Let’s get intimate.’”
“He’s the emotional Mayflower,” said Maeve. “He gets women from point A to point B. You arrive at Plymouth Rock feeling enormously better.”
His ability to empathize was a strong point. The phrase “He’s just like a girl” came up over and over again. “He reads more fashion magazines than most women,” said Sapphire, “and he’s much more willing to fight your battles than he is his own.”
“He’s extremely confident,” Maeve continued. “I think it’s a mistake when men present themselves as helpless idiots who can’t even find their socks. Peri says, ‘I’m totally secure. Lean on me.’ And you think, What a relief! Really, it’s all that women want. Most men don’t understand that. At least Peri is clever enough to affect that.”
And then there’s the sex. “He’s awesome in bed,” said Sarah.
“He’s unbelievably great at making out,” said Sapphire.
“You thought he was awesome?” Jackie asked. “I thought he was awful. Can we please talk about his feet?”
Nevertheless, so far, Peri seemed to be the embodiment of the two things women always say they want most—a guy who can talk and be understanding like a woman, but who also knows how to be a man in the sack. So what went wrong?