My own will was flagging because of the incident with Suzanne, and I was beginning to consider going home early. All in all, I’d had an active vacation. I’d seen Rio and had gotten to know some of its people. Rio had more than lived up to its reputation, and I wasn’t the least bit disappointed. But I started to think that despite the chain of events that led to Suzanne storming out of my room and calling me a pig, I wanted to leave on a positive note, preserving at least my good memories of The Catwalk, Uva, and my first sessions with China, which had left an indelible impression on me.
I succeeded in getting Joneszzzz set up with a real floozie. This Tiffany even had puta, the Portuguese word for whore, tattooed on her back, in case anyone needed to identify the item they were purchasing. Like the medieval scholastics, who weighed questions like how many angels can stand on the head of a pin, I often find myself adjudicating ridiculous questions. So I asked myself, if I wanted to import a Tiffany like the one I had purchased for Joneszzzz, would I have to declare her at customs, like a watch or a piece of jewelry? As I gnawed idly on this intellectual cud, it struck me that I had completely lost touch with reality, both in the literal and figurative senses of the word. If I kept buying expensive hookers, I was going to go broke. I had a nice accountancy practice, but most of my net worth was invested in hedge funds, which had been experiencing some alarming fluctuations in value. You can invest and hope for the best, but no matter how big a commission or advisory fee you pay, there is no way of predicting whether the market is heading up or plunging into a nose-dive. Money could buy sex, and even love, but money itself offered no guarantees for its own future. Yet seeing the look of gratitude on Joneszzzz’s face when he emerged from the elevator and returned my room key after a good lay would have been worth all of my money, or at the very least a million dollars.
Joneszzzz turned out to be even more grateful for my generosity than I could have ever expected. “Just between you and me, I haven’t been able to get it up with my old lady lately,” he said, shaking my hand in his enthusiastic, salesman-like way. “Now I feel like a man again.” He actually puffed out his chest in such a way that for a moment he looked like Popeye. After meeting his wife, I wasn’t surprised he couldn’t get it up. Her personality alone could have wilted a titanium dildo.
“If you ever need a condo in Yorkville, lemme know. I’m known as the Condo King,” he said as he left, then leaned in to whisper, “It’s a license to print money, believe me. But you don’t look like you’re doing so bad yourself. Hey, I like those jeans. Don’t show them to your mother.”
For a moment I considered Joneszzzz’s offer of a Yorkville condo. I’d heard that elegant Tiffanys regularly frequented the East Side high-rises, and that most of the new buildings had health clubs that were filled with whores. My Upper West Side building, with its clanging radiators, was filled with old Jewish widows who tenaciously held onto the rent-controlled apartments they had occupied for millennia. Of course, a few of these Yiddishe mamas had been Tiffanys when they were young. You find Tiffanys in all walks of life. For instance, I heard that one of the librarians at my local public library, a scholarly-looking young lady who talked softy and wore bifocals, gave hand jobs behind the checkout desk on Saturday afternoons.
However, I preferred the idea of going home to a place that was close to my intellectual roots. I was only blocks from my alma mater and from the world of Isaac Bashevis Singer (another great whoremonger), Hannah Arendt (Martin Heidegger’s whore), and the spawning ground of the Partisan Review and the other great intellectual journals of the ’50s, with their coteries of whoremongers (Edmund Wilson) and sluts (Mary McCarthy). I could also hop on the Broadway local, change at 72nd Street and find myself with a scholarly prostitute in a matter of minutes.
I’d succeeded in getting what I had come for, and would return home to New York while I was still ahead of the game. Rio had been as close as I’d ever come to paradise. It wasn’t only the high quality of the whores and the fact that they were so easy to find (especially after I improved my wardrobe), it was also the quality of the therapy. Obviously, there was a lot to say about China, but I couldn’t fault her for the excellent quality of her analytic work and the freshness of her insights. I had a feeling there were lots of good analysts in Rio — perhaps as many analysts hung out their shingles as whores. I’d already booked my following year’s vacation in Bangkok, and the year after that I was planning to attend the international convention of sex workers, which is held biannually in Amsterdam. I’ve been to those meetings before, and many of the presentations are quite enlightening in describing the prospects for prostitution in the twenty-first century.
Some people go to see the Taj Mahal, or the other six wonders of the world, but I’m a committed sex tourist who never tires of seeing beautiful Tiffanys in exotic locales. Over the years, I’ve heard many articulate, well-educated prostitutes speak about their trade. They are autodidacts accustomed to self-stimulation (they prefer mental masturbation when they are not working), and their presentations are well informed, with a mixture of practical experience and theory. I’ll never forget one lecture I heard, entitled “How Much is That Doggy in the Window: the Role of the Prostitute in the Free Market Economy.” It was written by a full professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley whose supply-side analysis of prostitution was based on her own experiences as a streetwalker in San Francisco’s Tenderloin.
I got my courage up and went to the concierge’s desk, which was now staffed by a fabulous-looking young woman whose badge identified her as Martine. I might have been tempted to arrange one last fling if I hadn’t noticed the prominent Adam’s apple that was a dead give-away of her true gender. Some transsexuals talk freely about their operations, and for a moment I toyed with the notion of asking her if she had gotten her vagina yet or if she was still a pre-op transvestite with a pair of breasts. It’s easy enough to get breasts, but it’s the vagina that’s complicated and expensive. I could have been just another tourist asking a guide about the Pyramids or the Parthenon, but I put my curiosity on the back burner so that I could change my flight arrangements.
Martine spoke softly but had the voice of a tenor. Our eyes met as she looked up from the schedule of flights she was studying on her computer screen, and I could almost see her thinking, “Yes, in answer to your question, Mr. Cantor, I still have a penis.” Instead, she said politely, “Okay, Mr. Cantor, with your kind of ticket I have no seats for the direct flight back to New York, but there is room on a flight to Miami early tomorrow morning, with a connecting flight to New York that gets you home by early evening.” I had an immediate desire to inquire about Suzanne, as if Suzanne and I were long-lost lovers and Martine was the go-between who would tell me how she was faring and what kind of life she was leading after our breakup. I guess this was just my way of dealing with my lingering upset about Suzanne calling me a pig. I could easily have bonded with Martine about Suzanne’s unjustified cruelty, but I have learned to practice restraint in foreign countries, where there are all kinds of powerful underworld gangs, religious fanatics, and sometimes even arcane laws against slander. I didn’t want to start up any kind of vendetta against Suzanne that might have resulted in a price being put on my head.