Tamara tugged on the edges of her thigh–high stockings, although they couldn't possibly slip from their place. The stage seemed like the edge of a tall building; she felt vertigo just picturing herself standing on it. "This is where I wanted to be," she thought. "This is what I've practiced for."
The DJ told the audience her stage name and she tottered into the spotlight, newly christened. She smiled, and breathed heavily, holding her frame erect; back arched, chest out. Standing in front of the crowd did seem like looking over the edge of a great precipice, but it wasn't as intimidating as she had envisioned. They all seemed to look up at her from far away, and the lights were bright, as though she had arisen into the night sky to dance among the stars.
She caught her cue late, but not so far as to make a difference as she began her routine. It was hard to hear in the narrow hall of the club – every sound reverberated, the raucous patrons and the waitresses shouting above the din, into a blended cacophony that was beaten into submission by the speaker system. She counted the beats to keep her time as the singer, speaking from a time before Tamara was born, sang about a red Corvette, about youth spent badly and exhausted too soon. It was a song she'd discovered in middle school, and taken to be empowering.
The song finished, to half-hearted applause. Orbs of green and red danced in front of Tamara's eyes where the stage lights flashed, and what she saw looked like baubles on a Christmas tree.
At first she wasn't sure what she'd expected, but the lukewarm reception fell so evenly between extremes, provoking neither pride nor shame, and was so predictable, that she felt foolish for considering the event noteworthy in the slightest degree beforehand. She didn't have much time for reflection as the opening chords of 'Kiss' cut in like a salvo of missiles to her thoughts, and she danced for the second time in front of an audience.
It wasn't that different than dancing alone. Staring at the miasma of ever–changing colour, the floodlights cycling through gels to pour over her in a panchromatic glow, she could see exactly how each motion had looked in her bedroom mirror. It wasn't real. Painted by spectacle, she became lost in another identity, a comic book in four–colour ink. Tamara was the artist, but the showgirl was someone unknowable; someone who had not existed off–stage and was free from context. Throwing herself into the performance, she easily put on a practiced face of enticement for the nebulae of anonymity, and allowed the straps of her bra to slide from her shoulders. She turned her back, and saw her shadow throw the vestment aside, the scrap gyrating like a twist of smoke in disturbed air.
Her arms folded across her cloistered chest, she turned round, making provocative motions with her hips and shoulders. As the song reached a crescendo in its chorus of acceptance and passionate love, she threw her arms open, spread wide and carefree, embracing the gaffer's flashes of orange, blue, yellow, green and magenta. She smiled, lost in this moment of selflessness. The song ended abruptly, as it does, and for a moment the lights went out.
Tamara was aware suddenly of the white pairs of eyes scattered innumerably throughout the unlit panorama, all fixed on her. The bodies were indistinct shapes in the murk of her vision, like creatures in a swamp. When the gleam of exhibition returned to blind her again, the stage seemed small and low. She swayed nervously, not attempting the same level of self-assure resplendence that had been so easy before. When the song ended, she gathered up her things and walked off stage.
Her own eyes stared back at her in the mirror, above the running water.
"You know, if you want to make any real money, you have to get back out there and do some private dances." The voice came from behind her. Tamara closed her eyes.
"I don't think I can take it."
"Nerves? You'll get used to it."
"They were all looking at me that way."
"What did you expect? They probably look at ballerinas that way, too."
"We're not ballerinas."
"Look, I don't care. You want to get cold feet, go ahead. But you don't have the right to judge me."
The interlocutor left and Tamara was alone again. Pulsing beats filled her ears as she willed her heart to slow down, to stop. She went back, in her mind, to what she had felt watching herself. That girl in the mirror, her entrancing, graceful movements, and the power she felt in them; the seductress, with her ability to command the desires of men.
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