“I guess I’m not used to hearing too many compliments.”
She looked me in the eye and added, “I’m sure you get many compliments. You just don’t know how to listen.”
I guess if I hear compliments in Russian, chances are I won’t understand them, but I knew that she was referring to something else. Could this Russian Madame who was trying to lure me into her comfort-providing agency be right about this? Did I not know how to hear compliments?
She realized that she was making a dent in my will, so, while I asked myself these and another thousand questions, she went for the kill.
“Look,” she said, “I have no time for this, I have a business to run. So why don’t we do this: One of my girls canceled an appointment tonight. It’s an old customer that I know very well. Why don’t you take over? See if you like it, and if this is for you or not.”
I stopped and thought about it for a second.
“What do I have to do?” I asked.
“Very little. Just hang out with him for an hour.”
“No sex?”
“No sex.”
“You swear?”
“You will never, ever, under any circumstances, be asked, made, or paid to have sex. This is not about sex, trust me.”
“You swear?” I asked again.
“On Stalin’s grave.”
“Wasn’t Stalin a son of a bitch?”
Madame laughed so hard that I thought she was going to choke and die. I guess she didn’t realize I knew who the Russian dictator was. Not to fit the stereotype or anything, but sometimes the fat chicks actually read a bit more than the cheerleaders. In any case, the fact that I caught her swearing in vain made no difference. I was in for the ride, and that night I was heading for my first date as a professional comfort provider.
“Do you want to know how much you are going to make?” she asked.
I thought for a second.
“No,” I replied.
“I knew it,” she said, smiling. “And that’s exactly why I chose you.”
I couldn’t understand what she meant by that, but her statement gave me goose bumps.
“So what do I wear?” was all I could ask.
“Something sexy…and comfortable,” she replied.
CHAPTER 6
I don’t know if this is a Catholic thing, or a Latin thing, or a my-family thing, but I have major issues when it comes to sex. I was raised to think that good women couldn’t enjoy sex. For my mother, any woman who enjoyed sex was little short of being a whore, so I carry that irrational notion with me, like an ugly tattoo that I can’t laser off.
The problem is that, in spite of my moral baggage, I’m still a girl of the twenty-first century, so I’ve tried to be as sexually active as any of my friends. The difference is that unlike my friends, I’ve been tormented with guilt every time I had sex.
I lost my virginity voluntarily when I was seventeen. I was the last of my circle of girlfriends to remain a virgin, so I went for it, basically, because I had the chance and I didn’t want be left behind by my cronies.
Losing my virginity wasn’t a terribly exciting event. It happened in Miami with a summer boyfriend called Darren, whom I met through one of my cousins.
The truth is that I wasn’t in love with Darren, I just wanted to be done with the whole virginity thing and move forward, so I orchestrated the evening with that goal in mind. I wish I could talk about the fear, or the pain, or the violins I heard, but unfortunately none of that really happened. It was all so unmemorable that I can’t really tell you much about it. What I do remember is that it was followed by a terrible remorse, which only subsided after I had discussed every single anticlimactic detail with my cousins.
When I went to college, I learned to talk about sex with my girlfriends in the same terms that men talk about it in: direct, unapologetic, and even a bit crude. We told each other stories of good dates and bad dates. We complained about men who moved too fast, but we also bitched about those who moved too slowly. We talked about getting horny—and even desperate—when a long time went by without getting laid, and, just like my friends, I had sex every once in a while “just to have it,” knowing beforehand that it would be a completely meaningless and empty experience.
But, unlike most of my friends, every time I had casual sex, I felt guilty as shit. Sometimes I would even develop this stupid attachment to the guy I had sex with, as if he were the man of my life. “Don’t confuse Mr. Right with Mr. Right Now,” my cousin Mariauxy always told me. But I kept falling in my own trap, over and over.
How could I act like a woman of my times and still feel like a woman of my mother’s times? I have no idea, but this duality between what I learned and what I did drove me nuts. It’s as if I was a virgin and a slut at the same time. How could I be so liberated on the one hand, and so prudish on the other? I suspect that it had a lot to do with my introduction to sex. Looking back, I can say that the experience was 50 percent funny and 50 percent traumatic, and it begins back in the days of elementary school.
I had a friend in second grade called Monique. She was the cutest, most innocent, angelic-looking blonde girl I’d ever encountered. I believe her parents were Belgian and Mexican, which added to her exotic allure. But behind Monique’s angelic face there was a filthy agitator in disguise.
Monique knew everything there was to know about sex. Apparently, this three-foot-tall Little House on the Prairie blonde had an older cousin, and that cousin had an older cousin who explained to them everything one needed to know about the ancient art of human reproduction. I must have been only eight when Monique told Gina—my other best friend—and me tons of technical information that to this day I’m still trying to cross-reference. We would spend every single recess sitting in a corner of the playground while Monique demonstrated Kama Sutra positions with our Barbie dolls.
Every day she would bring up one more dirty and fascinating piece of information that we obviously kept to ourselves. That was actually the best part: the fact that we kept it all secret. This made me feel that I had a life outside home, that I knew things that no one in my family would even suspect.
The sex updates continued for a whole school year, but then it was all put on the back burner when we went away for our summer break, because when knowledge is not supported by hormonal activity, little matters what you know. Of course, when hormonal activity is not supported by knowledge, you somehow manage to figure it out anyway.
But we were eight going on nine, and when September came in and I went back to school to start third grade, someone threw a wrench in my tiny psyche.
We were standing in line outside, on our way to enter the school building, when Alix, another blonde, decided to share the sex facts that she knew. I was never a big fan of Alix, so I wasn’t really paying attention to her, but my ears perked up when she said something about sex and babies.
“What does sex have to do with babies?” I asked her.
That’s when, with one line, Alix disclosed the painful truth. “Babies come from sex, you silly! Where did you think they came from? Paris?”
Turns out that Monique had explained to me all the mysteries of sex, but she forgot one simple fact: babies were the direct result of sex.
Oh-my-total-God.
I wanted to faint, vomit, and run all at the same time. It’s a good thing I didn’t do any of those things, because I’ve seen people running, puking, and falling on their asses in a puddle of their own sick, and it’s not pretty.
Anyway, what threw me off so bad about Alix’s revelation was the realization that the secret, dirty things that Monique had explained to me in detail had been practiced at least four times by my parents.
Yep, there was no mistake about it: my parents must have been engaged in active intercourse to conceive my brothers and me. Worse, they were probably naked. Did they actually enjoy it? “Oh Lord!” I silently prayed as my little eight-year-old self tried to digest this information.
The more I thought ab
out it, the sicker I got. I simply couldn’t see my parents associated with the same depraved guilt that made me enjoy Monique’s forbidden stories. I came home that day and I couldn’t even look my mother in the face.
If a responsible adult had explained things to me early on, I would have known about it when Monique first arrived with her subversive ideas, and I could have said, “Old news, bitch!” If sex had been presented to me in a more natural way, I would have saved myself some serious trauma, and probably thousands of dollars in psychotherapy.
But my mother never talked to me about sex. However, when I had my first period, she automatically started throwing at me lines like “You better not show up pregnant” or “If you get knocked up, it will kill your father.”
I should have told her, “Mom! Aren’t you supposed to explain to me how to get pregnant, so I know what to avoid?” But my mother is not a sex talker, and the only evidence we have that she is a sex doer is that she gave birth to four kids.
Mom often referred to women who showed any sexual interest as putas, whores. For some reason it sounds even worse in Spanish. Puta—isn’t that an ugly word? Every time Mom talked about putas they were juxtaposed with good mothers, making me assume that a good woman could never enjoy sex.
“That woman upstairs,” Mom would say, referring to our divorced neighbor, “she goes out with her ‘boyfriends,’ all made up, with that mink coat, and she leaves her kids at home…Ugh! She should be ashamed of herself.” I didn’t know much about our upstairs neighbor, but the simple fact that she showed any romantic interest outside her motherly duties was enough to gross my mom out. Who knows? Maybe she was an exemplary mother, but by Mom’s standards she was automatically placed in the whore bin. And for me—as a child—the boyfriends, the makeup, and the mink coat all became symbols of whoredom.
As years went by, I realized how unfair society was to women, how it gave men license to be sexual and forward, and how it forced women to be shy and virginal. Eventually, I questioned and dismissed Mom’s arguments, but only intellectually. In my heart, I still carried the fear of that word: puta.
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz—the Mexican nun who in the seventeenth century wrote the most subversive feminist poetry—has a great poem about prostitution:
Who is guiltier?
The one who sins for the pay?
Or the one who pays for the sin?
A few months after my first night as a comfort provider, I gave Mom a book of Sor Juana’s poems. She took a long time reading it, and never made a comment about it, until one day while she was compulsively cleaning the kitchen cabinets.
“That book that you gave me…”
“Which one?” I asked, pretending I didn’t know which one she was referring to.
“The one by the nun.”
“What about it?” I asked, mortally afraid of hearing her take on it.
“It’s a good book,” Mom said. “She was smart.”
She didn’t say one more word, and I didn’t ask her anything else. There was a quiet understanding between us that has kept us together from that moment on.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. That night—my first night working for Madame—none of this had happened yet. So, while I was getting ready for my appointment, I was deeply tormented by my mother’s ideas, while I somehow felt empowered by Sor Juana’s words.
Who is guiltier?
The one who sins for the pay?
Or the one who pays for the sin?
I didn’t care about the pay, but I still wondered: Was I whore? Was this a sin?
It was certainly a big mind-fuck. That much I can tell you.
CHAPTER 7
I won’t lie to you. That first night I was shitting in my pants. I had a shot of anisette liquor—an old Cuban remedy to cure hiccups—to appease the butterflies in my stomach. Then I had another shot, and then another one. At the end, I was still nervous but also slightly buzzing.
I couldn’t even tell you how long it took me to get dressed, because I basically pulled out everything I had in the closet, searching for the right outfit. In this anorexic society, shopping for clothes is nothing less than torture for the fatties.
When skinny people buy clothes, they look in the mirror to see how they look; when the heavy ones shop, we only look at the size that’s written on the label. It doesn’t matter how good or bad I look in a dress, what really matters to me is the label on the back. Is it a twelve? A fourteen? A sixteen? That’s what hurts me or rejoices me.
As a consequence, I shop for practical purposes. I don’t look for clothes for work, or leisure, or an elegant soirée. My goal is simply to cover my body with the garment that has the most generous label. In other words: if in reality I’m a sixteen but the label says twelve and the dress fits anyway, I buy several of those in different colors.
I understand that the garment industry is well aware of the psychological effect of their labels, and they’re mislabeling everything they do to hook the fatties. I know that it’s a marketing scam, but it works on me. It makes me think I’m thinner, and that makes me—sadly—happy.
I usually go for blazers, and tunics, always conservative, always vertical lines, lots of blacks, and grays, and dark blues. That’s the New York palette, but it’s also a fat thing. We all know that dark colors make you look skinnier.
Anyway, there I was, looking at this closet full of black and blue fake size-twelves, but with not one sexy thing to wear.
“What the hell do you wear on your first night as a whore?” I caught myself saying—half joking, half serious—as I grew more and more impatient with my wardrobe. After much browsing, I ended up picking something black—duh!—a little skirt ensemble that comes with a short jacket, and a red silk blouse that’s a bit too much to wear to the office, but not terribly trashy either.
Pearls? No pearls? I settled for a gold chain with a crystal pendant that was supposed to keep evil away. My aunt Carmita gave it to me when I turned fifteen and everyone thought I could get pregnant at the drop of a hat.
For me, turning fifteen wasn’t the thrill that you would expect in a Cuban American girl. Instead of throwing a big quinceañera party, we went to church and then a Cuban restaurant for a big meal—as if we didn’t eat Cuban food every day of the year. My father, who was a very conservative guy, gave me a choice: either they would throw me a party, or they would give me the money for my college tuition. I was smart enough to choose college, which turned out to be a relief for my parents, first because it demonstrated that I was an intelligent and mature girl, and second because the last thing they wanted was to celebrate my quince with a bunch of teenage boys who—given the excuse of a waltz—could rub themselves up against me.
As I recalled these “fond” memories, I stood in front of my bedroom mirror and pulled my hair up in a tight bun, chose a pair of small gold hoops, threw my cell, my Mace, and my lipstick in my bag, and headed out of my apartment, carefully leaving the proverbial note for Lillian and the police on the coffee table: “Lillian, if you are reading this, it’s because I have disappeared. Please tell the cops to track down Natasha Sokolov…” In a nutshell, I wrote the equivalent of “The Russian Madame made me do it,” but as I was writing it I realized that the note wasn’t fair. I was an adult, and whatever I decided to do that night—out of curiosity, desperation, or stupidity—was very much my responsibility. This thought made me feel empowered. I was in charge of my destiny, and that felt good. If I had the balls to descend into hell, I should have them also to fight my way out of it.
I stepped out of my building and found a black and elegant limo waiting for me. It had a sign with the letter “B” posted on the window. As soon as I approached it, the driver rushed out of the car to open the door for me.
“Good evening, Miss B. My name is Alberto, and I will be your driver,” he said respectfully.
“Nice to meet you, Alberto.”
I immediately realized that Alberto was Latino and probably in his early forties. He was
dark-skinned, tall, and well built. He looked like one of those Dominican baseball players that sports fans worship. He was nice and proper—not chummy, like some of us can be when we run into another Latino. As a matter of fact, he was so serious that I wondered if he knew what I was doing and maybe disapproved of it. Damn the guilt! I was too scared to talk, so I kept quiet. I simultaneously wanted to do this and not to do it. The antagonizing voices in my head were enough distraction to keep me company as we traveled from my apartment in the West Village to the Upper West Side.
“I will be waiting for you downstairs to bring you back home after you are done,” Alberto told me briefly, making eye contact with me through the rearview mirror.
“How long do you think this will take?” I asked, trying to get more information than the cryptic Madame had given me.
“I’ll be waiting for you no matter how long it takes,” he responded.
His answer made me feel good and protected, but it didn’t disclose one bit of information on what I was about to encounter. So far, all I knew was that my customer had money, because Madame had said “top dollar” in our conversation, but when the limo pulled over at the fanciest building on Central Park West, this confirmed that my customer had to be loaded.
Only extremely rich people could live in a place like this, I thought to myself. People who take about eighty years to amass their fortune. This guy has to be eighty years old at least. He’s probably as old as the guy who complimented me on the boardwalk. But it didn’t matter how old he was; I was already there, and I was going to go for it, so there was no point in speculating.
The doorman opened the door of the car for me.
“Good evening, madam. Mr. Rauscher is waiting for you.”
I rose out of the car with wobbly steps, but as soon as I started crossing the lobby escorted by the doorman, I felt the blood rushing back into my limbs. Yeah, I was scared, but I could pull this off.
B as in Beauty Page 7