by Tracy Quan
“Times have changed!” I protested. “And I can’t turn my back on my friends. I don’t want to be alone on my wedding day.”
“Times never change,” Liane said, gendy rolling her eyes. “In 1959—or was it ’58?—I met a pair of sisters who worked together. Beautiful girls. But Daphne was so jealous of her older sister that she actually spilled the beans to Suki’s fiancé—and ruined their courtship. Suki would have been so much better off alone.”
“Her…sister? Did they actually do scenes together?”
I could almost see it. Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8 and Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly—doing all the things I’ve done with Allie! Or Jasmine! Sixty-nining, sometimes for real, sometimes not…but—sisters? Ick. Elizabeth Taylor would have to be the mean destructive one.
“They were a strange pair, from a small town in the Midwest, and I can’t remember exactly what they did in bed,” Liane said. “But they weren’t shy! And they were successful. I didn’t judge them. Apparently they were once very poor. But the worst thing is that after Suki’s fiance broke off the engagement—he was very upset, called her all sorts of horrible names, all because of Daphne’s poisonous tongue. After all that, Suki continued to work with her. Now that was hard to believe. Poor demented Suki, heartbroken and sleeping with the enemy! It made me wonder whether this routine of theirs was…perhaps a bit unhealthy?”
We both digested this horror story—Liane for the hundredth time, I for the first. Good grief.
“Well, there’s nothing like that going on with Allison and Jasmine. We’re not, um, related, and we have no reason to envy one another,” I said firmly. “And they both have very good reputations with all the girls.”
“True,” Liane mused. “Though Jasmine can be a bit pushy with her phone number.”
“But she won’t be giving her number out at my wedding!” I pointed out.
“Of course!” Liane agreed. “That was never a question. But let’s say somebody in Matt’s Wall Street circle recognizes Jasmine. She’s a striking girl; a man wouldn’t forget her. You know what a small world Manhattan can be.”
“Yes. I do.” (Last year, one of my clients had a daughter who was working for Matt’s boss as a summer associate! Now, that was weird.) “I don’t know what to do,” I confessed. “About this whole situation. I don’t know if I can bring myself to stop working, to stop seeing guys. And I’m having second thoughts about Matt—about settling down!”
“Second thoughts? Everybody has them, dear.”
“I can’t decide whether a boyfriend is a luxury or a professional liability!”
Liane looked exasperated. She put down her teacup and shook her head.
“Women’s lib has completely twisted your way of thinking,” she told me.
“Women’s…lib?”
“Yes. Why can’t a girl with your experience understand that a man who cares about you properly is not a liability or a luxury but a necessity?”
“Because it’s not! It’s easier to be alone. You know that.”
“When I was your age, if a working girl found a man who was husband material, she was ready to quit. She might have to work to pay for her wedding dress, but she would tell him the money came from her family, and most of my friends came from so far away that they could hide their families. Many of them had to, really. Or should have…” She was dwelling on Suki again. “In those days, when a working girl married, she devoted her energy to keeping the marriage alive. Now all the married girls want to work on the side. They call me up on their free days and they actually sound guilty if they can’t sneak away to see a client! Of course, I’m very happy to work with a girl if she’s right for the client, but I don’t know what today’s girls are thinking.”
“But if I quit—”
“When you quit.”
“—I won’t be one of the girls anymore. These are my real friends! It’s not the same when you retire.”
Despite what I’ve been through with my two best friends, the idea of leaving the fold makes me panic.
“You must outgrow this. You are facing a golden opportunity. Your fellow is how old? Thirty-five? He has a bright future that he hopes to share with you, and you can’t walk away from this man just because of some silly nostalgia that every girl feels about the girls she used to work with. Eventually you have to let go of these connections and form new ones. And you can do it,” Liane assured me. “You’re lovely, intelligent, and you’ve had a decent upbringing. Nobody has to know where you’ve been or what you’ve done, and you’ll be a wonderful example to girls like Allison who haven’t got as much sense as you. You’ll be a better example if you forget them, really.”
“But, Liane, you haven’t done any of this. You still run your business and you know these girls and you’re telling me to forget them!”
“Well,” Liane said, “life hasn’t been as kind to me as it may be to you if you play your cards right.”
I gazed at the paintings. Okay, they’re not multimillion-dollar old masters, but she’s got some valuable stuff. At the Brunschwig & Fils wallpaper and her beautifully upholstered, yet perfectly mismatched chairs. The chandelier on her ceiling. What is Liane saying? She bought this duplex in the ’60s during a downturn—it must be worth almost two million dollars! If she hasn’t sold it by now, why not? Because she doesn’t have to and because it’s her trophy. She bought it with her bedroom manners and the money she earned. And she looks healthy—delicate but not frail. Despite her weirder ideas, her mind is sharp. She goes to all the concerts and plays and gets the best seats. She traveled all over the world—and did it in style.
How can she say life has been unkind? Does she have any idea how other women her age live? How they look? My grandmother, for example. Her life was all about sacrifice and childbearing and she’s helpless now, completely dependent on her six adult daughters and her oldest son.
“But you own this place,” I said. “You make it sound as though…How can you talk this way? How can you sit here and tell me that settling down with a man is a necessity? It wasn’t true for you.”
“I’ve earned the right to sit where I sit and to say what I think.” She sipped some tea. “Sometimes people have to go without necessities.”
There was a look of brave suffering before she got down to business. Liane often makes poignant allusions to a past tragedy, but she’s never gotten specific. I can’t figure out whether she had a hysterectomy at thirty-five or a boyfriend who died in combat or a married lover who promised her the moon and stars and delivered only the stars—or all three!
She pulled some folded hundreds out of her skirt pocket and handed me exactly half. When you see a guy on her premises, she takes half; when it’s an outcall, you get exactly 60 percent. It’s pretty much the same deal when I work with Jasmine or Eileen or Allison—except that we always do a 60-40 split. The 50 percent cut is a madam thing.
“Promise me one thing,” she insisted with a vehemence that surprised me. “Whatever mood you might be in, whatever doubts you’re having, don’t ever tell him you see men for money. It’s one thing for people to think you do this, it’s another thing for them to know. People may occasionally guess. Let them wonder, but you never have to admit to it. And after you’re married, you can introduce Allison or Jasmine to your new circle and his friends won’t be able to hurt you.”
LATER
Liane doesn’t see it, but I’d be attracting more attention to my situation by dropping my best friends! Matt would find it bizarre. Jasmine and Allie are part of my emotional background noise. He doesn’t see them much, but he’s met them briefly, and he takes their existence for granted.
They’re my alibis when I have to sneak off to work!
If they don’t get involved in my wedding party, he’ll think something is wrong—like I’ve lost both of my best friends! And what guy in his right mind wouldn’t find that suspicious, even scary? A girl with no close friends looks distinctly unpleasant. Or he’ll wonder why I suddenly
have to hide or avoid them. If he doesn’t ask questions, his sister will.
Not a good idea, even if I had the ability to pull it off. Avoiding my friends for, what, a year? Two years? And then somehow rekindling ties with girls you’ve abandoned? I don’t think so.
Maybe in Liane’s day this somehow worked. Maybe in the fifties you could get away with being that ruthless; maybe Liane’s girlfriends accepted it. Liane doesn’t see that “normal,” today, means being respectable and open-minded. You can’t just drop people! Extreme prudes don’t blend in; their behavior, no matter how subtle, is noticed.
Jasmine and Allie would view me as an uptight snob, not a crossover success, if I treated them like that. Allison would be hurt. Jasmine, well, she’d be disgusted. Not so much with the hypocrisy, but with my cowardice. Jasmine figures she can finesse just about any situation if she has enough nerve; and she expects no less of me.
9 A Hooker’s Home Is Her Castle
FRIDAY. 3/31/00
I should have “called in sick” last night and stayed out of Matt’s way. He would have understood if I had stayed home with a headache. But instead, we got together. At his place.
I wanted to reassure myself. After that ghastly tête-à-tête with Liane, I wanted to believe that things with Matt were essentially modern—and normal. And they were—until midnight, when we were lying in bed, sipping brandy, reading our respective magazines and listening to Diana Krall on his new speakers: “Someday,” went the song, “we’ll build a home on a hilltop high, you and I, shiny and new…A cottage that two can fill…”
“Talk of the Town” wasn’t holding my attention. Respectability, looming large on my landscape, now seemed tempting yet remote.
“Someday we may be adding…a wing or two…a thing or two…we will make changes as any family will…But we will always be called ‘the folks who live on the hill.’”
As the words drifted through my head, I tried to banish Liane’s dark warnings about back-stabbing call girls. Those twisted sisters and their tragic perversity. Liane makes marriage—love between a man and a woman—sound so lonely. And she’s in favor of it! Yet there’s a certain wisdom to her advice. Working girls today want to do it all, and you really can’t.
I felt a terrible, confused longing, and I desperately wanted my boyfriend to hold me.
“What’s wrong? You look like”—he kissed my shoulder—“a sad kitten.”
This tender reference just made me sadder.
“It’s what this song is all about.”
“What it’s about?”
And what is it about? Two people who want to be prosperous, married, with kids and architectural plans. A love song for social climbers. But it’s tender and sweet and full of longing, and somehow you think these two ambitious wannabes have every right to want to be. To wish they had always been called…
“‘The Folks Who Live on the Hill,’” he mused. “Who wrote this?” He turned to me with a concerned frown. “Why are you crying?” he said, putting his arms around me—finally, letting his copy of FYI slide to the floor.
“Because I think that’s what I want. The extra wing and the kids and the house on the hill. Except maybe—not on a hilltop. I think I’d rather be in the city.”
And not so shiny and new. What I really yearn for is a prewar apartment with some character…and infinite bathrooms. Or the impression of infinite bathrooms. And I wish those apartments weren’t all co-ops. It’s the condos that are shiny and new.
“But I know that’s what I want—with you. So what’s wrong?” he asked.
“You don’t really want it with me,” I blubbered.
“But I do!”
“You don’t,” I insisted.
“Honey, you’re wearing a ring, and everyone knows we’re engaged, so there’s no reason for you to be insecure about me,” he said.
“That’s what you think.”
“Hang on.” He reached for the clock. “I have a seven o’clock breakfast—” Staccato beeps interrupted his comments as he set the alarm. “And I have to look at Gary’s spreadsheets…”
Curling up into a ball, I sniffled against a pillow.
“Honey,” he said, with an edge of worry, “what is this all about?”
“I can’t tell you,” I wailed.
“What do you mean? Why not?”
“Because it’s—I don’t know how to tell you!”
“Look, you have to tell me what’s bothering you. What have I done? Why do you say that? You don’t believe I want to spend the rest of my life with you?”
“You don’t.” Fresh tears poured out of my eyes, and now he was sitting up, trying to find a tissue. You can never find the tissues in his bedroom. “You don’t really want to spend it with—with someone like me,” I sobbed.
“Someone like you? What have I done to make you think that way?”
“Nothing.”
“Then why are you saying that—or even thinking this way? Is this about the apartment? Just tell me if you don’t like it, and we’ll find something you like. I can withdraw the offer.”
There was a long silence as I sobbed into the pillow. My tears felt like proxies for words or explanations never offered. My body was aching for the enormous relief that might come if I suddenly told him everything. But, of course, I wasn’t ready to tell him anything.
Finally he said, “If you want to wait until we’re married to buy something, we’ll do that. But you have to set a date—this market is just going to keep climbing. We should buy soon. I can understand that you’d feel more secure if the apartment was in your name too, from the start—”
“That’s so typical of you!” I cried, in frustration. “You think everything is about money!”
He pulled away. “Look,” he said angrily. “I can’t do this anymore. I have to get up in five hours and I’m—you can’t do this to me when I have a fucking meeting at seven in the morning! I’m giving you everything I can possibly give you at this point in my life and you refuse to set a date, and now you tell me you don’t trust me or something—I don’t know what you want! If it’s not about the apartment, then what is it? I have to get up at five-thirty and you’re carrying on like a child! If you don’t stop this self-indulgent bullshit, I’m sleeping on the fucking couch! My biggest mistake was getting engaged to a goddamn attention junkie!”
Suddenly, I felt like a woman who’s been lingering all afternoon at the makeup counter while her husband is hard at work, trying to construct a gigantic pyramid from scratch.
Then I got up and pulled open the top drawer of his dresser. I covered my nakedness with one of his freshly laundered shirts, spitefully hoping it would inconvenience him to be short one clean dress shirt. Exiting into the living room, I ignored Matt’s objections.
“For god’s sake,” he said plaintively. “Don’t turn this into—I have to get some sleep, Nancy. Don’t do this.”
I rested on the couch, still burning from his accusation. Attention junkie! Am I? Well, he really doesn’t want to build his life with me, with an attention junkie, with…I cried for a while, wiping my cheeks off with one of his floppy French cuffs. Then I drifted off, exhausted and horrified by my own behavior. At some point, I felt a layer of warmth enveloping my naked legs, and Matt was tucking a sheet around my torso.
I opened my eyes and started to reach out for him, but my arm was caught in the sheet.
LATER
After last night’s tear-strewn disaster, getting back into work mode wasn’t easy. It took me three hours to prepare for a half-hour date. I switched all my phones off while I transformed myself from paranoid wreck into frolicsome sex kitten. In between facial masks—a yeast mask for my pores followed by a renewing pack for that tingly confident feeling—I reread Matt’s note, the note he left behind when he tiptoed out of his apartment to make the breakfast meeting. “Sleep tight. I love you very much,” he had written in small letters on a Post-it note. I found it on his bathroom mirror. I slipped the note into my souvenir
box, then lay on my couch with cucumber slices on my puffy eyelids.
My personal phone started ringing, followed by my cell phone. I wanted to pick up but had to lie still for the sake of my swollen eyes. A professional must never look unhappy on the job. And misshapen eyelids are a sure sign of mishap. When I got up, there was voice mail on my home phone: “Sweetheart, I’m sorry. I lost my temper last night. I didn’t mean to hurt you. We’ll find the right place, don’t worry.”
He really believes this anxiety can all be pinned on the co-op crisis. The sound of his message made me teary again, but I forced myself to stop. Twenty minutes before Etienne arrives!
I applied more eye makeup than usual—even mascara, which I hardly ever wear—then slipped into a new pair of Bottega Veneta heels and smoothed out my silk robe. I loosened the top—the better to flash my lacy cleavage when I open the door—and studied myself in the mirror. I checked my Ramses supply. Only three condoms left! By the time I rushed to the intercom, to buzz Etienne into my lobby, I was feeling—and looking—like myself again.
MONDAY. 4/3/00
Today, a call from Howard, urging me to set up a three-way with Allison. We’re still his favorite show. But when I got through to Allie, she was evasive.
“I don’t know if I can. I may have to see Jack that day.”
“Oh, come on. Can’t you move Jack around? You know Howard likes to see us together and I hate to disappoint him. Anyway, I need to set this up—and I need to know.”
“Well, the thing is…” There was an awkward silence. “I promised Jack I wouldn’t, you know, see other guys.”
I was taken aback. “After all that nonsense about not wanting to pay for your tuition—? What are you thinking?”
“Oh! That! I agreed to stop seeing other clients—if he would stop talking about interior decorating school. And now everything’s okay! I’m going ahead with my MSW.”
