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 mdeterminate 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; 11:30 p.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."