“Tiffany, before we make love, I just wanted to settle up,” I gasped. “That way we can enjoy ourselves without having to think about money.” Despite my romantic feelings toward most Tiffanys, and my willingness to pay anything for a woman I loved, I also have a pragmatic side.
“My nickname’s not really Tiffany,” Suzanne corrected me. Was I hearing correctly or was she just teasing? “I don’t have a whore name. I was kidding. I just really love sex.”
I could hardly breathe. It was Cinderella in reverse. The beautiful princess turned into an old crone before my eyes. The thought that she wasn’t a prostitute and that I didn’t have to pay for sex was so repugnant to me that I lost all interest in her. I prayed that there was some sort of misunderstanding, but in the meantime the erection I’d been massaging contentedly ever since she took off her top immediately faded. My penis wilted like a rotted carrot, seeming to disintegrate between my fingers. I knew there was no way I was going to get it back up. All I could think of was how to get rid of her. You can just give a common whore a dose of reality, tell her you don’t feel like it, and send her on her way. But the average woman doesn’t like it when she comes to your room and reveals her naked body only to be told you’re no longer interested. As I was to find out, Brazilians are a particularly passionate lot who don’t tolerate rejection well.
“Since you’re not a Tiffany, I am no longer interested,” I sniffed. I decided that to compensate for the language barrier I should be as emphatic as possible. Suzanne might as well have been a man. That’s how little attraction I had for a woman who wasn’t a whore.
Suzanne pleaded with me, saying, “I’m as good as a whore. I’ll sleep with almost anybody. Isn’t that enough?” But her pleading soon turned into insistent demands. I had learned the difference between a request and a demand in therapy, and I tried to communicate this distinction to her, but it was already too late. She wouldn’t listen to reason. When I made it emphatically clear that I had no intention of fucking her, she quickly got dressed, slapped me across the face, and cried out, “I never met such a pig in my whole life,” before slamming the door behind her. If she had been a man, and we had been in 19th-century Russia, her behavior might have resulted in a duel. Instead, I was simply left in my room trying to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my evening, particularly since I had no intention of going down to the concierge’s desk and running the risk of encountering the enraged Suzanne.
I tend to feel guilty even when I haven’t done anything wrong. It’s something I’ve long dealt with in analysis, particularly with regards to my attitude toward women. I know there are people who feel that it’s wrong for a woman to sell her body, and that men who pay for sex are complicit in a crime both against women and society. I can be made to endorse someone’s worldview if they are forceful enough in their opinions. To me, the critic has a certain authority, while the person who praises and supports is merely a flatterer. I can go to a party filled with happy, contented whores who are glad to see me and eager to sell their bodies for sex, but end up obsessing about the one radical feminist who shows her opposition to prostitution by refusing to talk to me. But I had to stick to my guns before it was too late. I realized that although my stay in Rio was coming to an end, I had a right, nay an obligation, to run out and find a real Tiffany to take Suzanne’s place. Feeling vulnerable, I decided to put my jeans back on, despite how shapeless they’d become, and head back downstairs.
The sublime experience of talking about my Oedipal feelings toward my mother while staring up China’s twat reconfirmed my notion that the best things in life aren’t free. There are certain experiences you are only going to have if you are willing to pay for them. My problems with Suzanne’s sexual altruism, which had dulled my interest in sex for all of five minutes, made me think that there might be other things besides women and psychoanalysis that are worth paying for. One of them was friendship. I’d always had trouble making friends because of my control issues, but I realized that buying friendship might be one way to stay in control. It was like buying shares in a company. If you had a controlling interest, you were able to influence the decisionmaking process. However, being just another shareholder was no fun, unless of course the company was reporting quarterly gains and had a significant price-earnings ratio.
As these thoughts streamed through my mind, my eyes alighted on what I thought was an apparition. I blinked several times to make sure my vision wasn’t blurred. Sure enough, it was my old pal John Joneszzzz, a severely delayed kid I had hung out with in elementary school. John was one of those kids who made up with willpower what he lacked in brains. I always knew he was going places, and I was right — here he was in Rio. John Jones is a very common name, so his parents, wanting to add some excitement to his life, had added the z’s, naming him after a comic book character who was a little different because he was from outer space. While legend had it that Schmucker had been one of the smartest kids in Yorkville, graduating from PS 6 and going on to do what most super-smart kids did in those days, which is to become a high priced psychoanalyst, Joneszzzz went into real estate sales, which is what all the dumb kids did.
He went on to make more money selling condos during the gentrification of his old Yorkville neighborhood than the stuckup Schmucker would see in a lifetime of dozing while his patients complained about their miserable childhoods.
“Hey, old buddy! You haven’t changed a bit,” I said, as I girded myself for his simian embrace. It was the same old enthusiastic John. I was sure he would displace one of my vertebrae as he clamped me in his vice-like arms. He had piercing blue eyes and a face as flat as a frying pan. “Great to see you, bud,” I wheezed, as he nearly squeezed the life out of me.
“The name’s John. John Joneszzzz with four z’s!” he hollered jovially. John was still a little slow.
“How could I ever forget John Joneszzzz with four z’s! I meant bud as an endearment.”
“A what? You always did use big words. I heard you went to Columbia. They use a lot of big words up there I bet.”
“Forget it. It’s just great to see you. How long are you here for?”
“I don’t know. My wife takes care of that kind of stuff.” John was always a happy-go-lucky guy who didn’t bother with anything he couldn’t understand, which was just about everything.
John’s wife was a breed apart from the girls who wandered along the Copa in string bikinis. She was walking through the lobby of the hotel with a kerchief around her head and her hair still in curlers, in a style still popular in certain parts of Yorkville.
“John, where the hell have you been?” she bellowed. “You were supposed to pick the kids up by the pool at five so I could get my nails done!” She didn’t pay any attention to me, and she didn’t seem to care that her husband had run into an old friend in the middle of Rio. John tried to interrupt her to explain the chance circumstances of our encounter, but she refused to listen. As she dragged him away by the sleeve, he whispered, “Have you seen any of the hookers?”
I felt that getting John a hooker was the least I could do. It was like sending a care package to Myanmar. Considering the irrational phobia I had developed about the concierge’s desk, and the fact that John’s wife would likely watch over him vigilantly, I had my work cut out for me. But my grandfather, an immigrant who had fled the pogroms in Russia and made his way to America by way of South Africa when he was only 14, always said, “Where there’s a vill, there’s a vay!” Those words have never left me, even in the most difficult situations I’ve confronted in life. I decided to go down to the Copa. Once I had located the merchandise, I would come back to the lobby, call up to John Joneszzzz’s room, and tell him there was a little business venture I needed to discuss with him. When he came down, I would hand over the girl and my own room key. I felt strongly that as alumni of PS 6, we needed to stick together, and I was actually feeling bad for the fact that Joneszzzz was pussy-whipped by his petty tyrant of a wife, despite all his hard work and success.