Re: [Strip club: Nel & Eames]
Eames didn't often think about gender off the clock. Surprised? He didn't need to. He occupied traditionally male spaces with the thoughtlessness of someone bred for them. He wasn't preoccupied with treatises on femininity and masculinity, Eames didn't read anything that wasn't worth the prolonged agony of doing so. He didn't agonize over the moments he did or didn't have tits in someone's dream, but he did have pinpoint focus on the reasons why a woman might have a better hand in a dream for someone on the receiving end than a man. He'd noticed, obviously, the way Laufey carried herself but it was automatic: the pickpocket's gleaning of loose change from the street's gutter. Far too easy not to.
"No," Eames said amiably, with the scent of the cigarette smoke curling into vintage lapels which would reek, darling, in the aftermath but the present was enjoyable and that was the limits of Eames' present cares. For a man who liked clothes, he was dreadful about looking after them and there was a pile of discarded items at the bottom of the wardrobe in the glass house in the woods. "I've not been chummy with too many legends. Arduous is it? The assistants, the entourages, all that adulation to perform." He examined the end of the cigarette, and watched the contrails of blue light sift through smoke, the undulation of the girl in the spotlight, her nipples cherry-dark.
"But if you're a legend yourself, does it cancel things out?" The card, the reputation, Laufey was as much legend as her subject matter, even if she made fewer people faint or snorted less of the Columbian marching powder. Idly, "I've always thought the secret was they were people. Dreams, hopes, secrets, jaded little perspectives. Some of them probably believe their own publicity, but they still piss with their knickers around their ankles. But I don't spend a lot of time with legends."
First class was comfortable, and the view from Eames' present chair was acceptable enough, the gyrations almost laudable. "You get much of that on a first class plane?" He gestured to the stage: Eames was smiling. "I'll have to go in for an upgrade next time."
The photographs. "Depends on the moment, I suppose." Comfortably. "What about you, darling? Truth, lies or somewhere inbetween?"