by Tracy Quan
“I wouldn’t know how to love him! Eileen would. And I—I would be embarrassed to introduce him to my family! I realized that after Bob left.”
“And how did that make you feel?”
I blinked hard and forced myself to say it.
“I felt a little ashamed of myself.”
“Shame: Why?”
“Bob. He’s hustled all his life, he has a lot of money, and he hasn’t got good taste. But he knows that working girls have normal feelings.”
I told her how Bob had assured me that he thought I was a Nice Girl. I explained about how a pro shouldn’t care: “It really doesn’t matter what a john thinks of me. But when he told me I was a ‘Nice Girl,’ I did care. He wanted to say something kind. And he touched…some part of me.”
“Which part?”
“Well, some part,” I said stubbornly.
“He touched your heart,” Wendy said softly. “It’s normal and expectable.”
I made a frantic grab for the Kleenex and pulled out a wad of tissue.
“I think we’re really getting somewhere,” Wendy continued.
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore!” I wailed. Brown eye pencil was dripping all over the tissue.
“That’s okay, too,” she said. “We have to stop soon, but I want to pick up this thread next week. Can you spend some time with your journal and explore this? I think this is core material for you. Failure. Success. How we define these things…”
I sniffled my assent, came home, and turned off the business phone. Then changed into a flannel nightshirt and crept under the covers with a small pack of moisturizer-infused tissues. Better not to rip one’s nose to shreds. I should suggest this brand to Dr. Wendy if this keeps up.
I was napping when the phone next to my bed—my personal phone—began ringing. I let it go into voice mail, but it started again.
“Nancy? Are you coming?”
Allison, sounding like she was on a roller coaster. Or in a wind tunnel.
“Coming?” I was confused.
“You said you’d come with me to the radio station. I’m in a cab. I’ll stop in front of your building—”
“I never said—” I suddenly recalled a half-assed statement I had made at the gym some days ago. “Look, I can’t go out now. I’m sorry, but I can’t leave the apartment.”
“But I need your support!” she exclaimed. “I’ve got stage fright! And Roxana’s out of town! And you said you would come with me!”
“Allie, I just had a breakthrough in fucking therapy! Two hours ago! I can’t fucking handle it, okay?”
“Oh.” Her stage fright was trumped. “A—really? I didn’t know you were in therapy again. I think that’s—that’s so great, Nancy! Why do you sound so upset? Don’t you feel empowered now that you’ve had this breakthrough?”
“No!” I shrieked. “I’m lying in bed in my pajamas and I feel like I’ve been through a Cuisinart! Have you ever been in therapy? I mean real therapy—not those stupid twelve-step groups you used to attend—”
“Well, uh, therapy…I once had a very interesting encounter with a Jungian therapist—”
“Well, no fucking wonder you have no idea how I feel! I’m not some Jungian airhead! And neither is my shrink!” I half sobbed, half shouted.
I slammed the phone down and blew my nose. A minute later, the phone rang again.
“I just want you to know,” Allison burbled emphatically. “Two things. First, I think you should respect my choices. Every woman arrives at self-knowledge in her own way. And secondly, I realize this is not you talking—it’s your anger and pain talking.”
“Thanks,” I sniffled. “Thanks, Allie. Now, if you’ll just let me—”
“Three things, actually! I think I’m over my stage fright! Focusing on your emotions has cleared my—You don’t have to come with me. But I do want you to tape the radio show.”
“Oh, please.”
“I know you think this movement’s a waste of my time, but this is important to me. And I hope you’ll respect my feelings and honor our friendship enough to—”
“I’ll tape the fucking show!” I yelled.
“I have never heard you say the F word so many times in one conversation!” she exclaimed. And then, with a faint crackle, she was gone.
WEDNESDAY. 3/8/00
“Actually,” I told Allie, when I saw her at the gym this morning, “taping the show cheered me up. I was feeling very raw and—You know how people regress when—Well, anyway…”
Remembering that Jungian business, I suddenly didn’t feel like discussing therapy with Allie in the girls’ locker room.
“You see?” she said happily. “You’ve made a contribution to the NYCOT archives! The process of political involvement empowers us at the most personal level. It made you feel better. NYCOT has added something of value to your life. And you have added something of value to the sex workers’ movement.”
“By taping your interview?”
“Well, we’re creating an archival record for future generations of sex workers. So they can see how stigmatized we were during the dark ages of patriarchal oppression.” Her face lit up at the prospect.
“Really?” I said. “Well, Jasmine missed the show because she was working. Can she borrow the tape?”
Allie frowned at the cassette, which was lying on the bench between us.
“I don’t want anything to happen to it,” she hinted.
“Oh, don’t worry. Jasmine—”
“I don’t trust her! She might erase the whole thing just to spite me! Or part of it. Like Nixon. The most important part.”
Suddenly Allie was bent over in knock-kneed agony, moaning quietly and rummaging through her gym bag.
“What’s wrong?” I said, holding the bag open for her. “What are you looking for? I’ll find it.”
“Ooh, ooh,” she gasped. “I—I have to pee and I can’t find my Quito sticks!”
“Quito—? What do they look like?”
Must be some Amazonian rain-forest rite that Allie’s into—but isn’t Quito in Ecuador? I looked for something sticklike and vaguely Amazonian or Ecuadorian. Maybe a bundle of tiny divining rods?
“Never mind,” she bleated, as she dashed off to a stall. I heard her tinkling and sighing. “You can just keep the tape until the next meeting.”
6 As Above, So Below
SATURDAY. 3/11/00
Allison’s sudden enthusiasm for things Latin American is unnerving. Today she proposed lunch at a Brazilian place called Circus, one block north of the Body Shop. When she finally showed, toting her cruelty-free unguents in a green bag, I was quietly nursing a caipirinha and meditating on a framed drawing showing a jury of twelve clowns deliberating over the fate of a clown in prison stripes.
Allie slid into the banquette, almost obliterating the clown court with her hair, then pulled out a container and rubbed some slimy goo onto the back of my hand. “Try this. It’s made with sesame seeds harvested in Guatemala by an indigent collective.”
I paused for a second.
“I think you mean…indigenous.”
“Oh!” She opened her menu. “Right! And a percentage of the profits goes into saving the rain forest. Or gets sent back to the collective! I can’t remember which.”
Snapping her menu shut, Allie announced: “My Quito sticks are deep purple. I’ve made it through the induction phase.”
Induction! Has Allie joined another cult? After last year’s bout with Prostitutes Anonymous and her recent conversion to activism, I know to steer clear of Allie’s new enthusiasms. When she was trying to recruit me for P.A., it was like having a reverse madam on my tail. Not something I care to repeat. So I was weirdly grateful when she changed the subject—though not for long.
“Jack asked me to think about a possible arrangement,” she told me. “I know you don’t think I should see him or talk to him, but he’s making a very serious offer.”
“Oh? Did he make this offer in person? Or on t
he phone?”
“On the…” She looked away. “In person,” she finally admitted. “I had to talk to him. He was leaving all these notes and flowers with my doorman. I told him it was getting to be too much and he agreed to stop, so we met for coffee at Starbucks. And,” she said optimistically, “I think everything’s fine, now.”
“In what sense is ‘everything fine’?” I wondered.
“Well, he stopped bothering my doorman when I agreed to meet with him again. And now we’re actually talking. About real things. He can’t be vulnerable at home or in his daily life, so he needs a relationship where he can be heard. I agreed to listen. We’re not having sex, though.”
“He should never have bothered your doorpeople in the first place,” I snapped. “You had to bribe him with your company to get him to stop?”
“Not exactly. But what harm can there be in my listening? I told him we could meet for lunch or coffee but not, you know, in my apartment. When I agreed to be part of this blacklisting thing, nobody said anything about denying Jack his most basic human rights.”
“His…what?”
“Well, his right to be heard by another,” Allison explained in a soft reverent voice. “To have coffee with a friend! Or lunch.”
“Nobody thought you would come up with such a ridiculous excuse for talking to him!” I exclaimed.
A plate arrived bearing my lunch: two baked acorn squash stuffed with shrimp. Their tops had been artfully opened, then replaced.
“They look so sweet, almost like little faces!” Allie said. “The stem is just like the top of a beret! And the body of the squash—”
Catching my horrified expression, the waiter placed Allie’s salmon dish in front of her. “And this,” he said with a wink, “looks just like salmon.”
Allie peered at my caipirinha.
“I think I’ll try one of those,” she said. “What’s in it?”
“Rum, lime juice…it’s good.” The waiter smiled engagingly.
“One for me, too. For the vitamin C! Do they drink them in Costa Rica? I’m going in the fall!” she told him.
“To Brazil?”
“No—Costa Rica.”
Costa Rica? Oddly enough, she didn’t elaborate.
“Well,” Allie said, “the Quito sticks are reassuring. I’m allowed to have a very small helping of rice and beans. And a drink. And maybe some french fries.”
With that we tacitly agreed to cease discussing Jack—a circular topic if ever there was one—for the rest of our meal.
MONDAY. 3/13/00
Today I felt a trifle guilty, listening to Allison’s taped radio show with Jasmine—who couldn’t stop chuckling at “the blondness of it all.” Allie was waxing enthusiastic about the Joy of Hooking in that smooth yet breathless voice that has inspired so many other kinds of calls.
“This,” Allie was saying, “is an empowering career. I see this as goddess work. I don’t do it just for the money. Society benefits from the healing sexuality of women like me! We are responsible for relieving countless headaches, for teaching men about safe sex. We are not just sexual healers. We are social healers. And yet we’re being persecuted. By the patriarchy!”
“But,” Doug Henwood, the host, replied in an earnest tone, “I think we have to acknowledge that many people, not as privileged or attractive as you, are forced into it by circumstance. How healing is it for them?”
“The New York Council of Trollops represents all the sex workers in this city!” she simpered. “And we’re collecting used clothing in good condition for the NYCOT Street Project.” She spelled out NYCOT’s website for Henwood’s listeners. “We accept shoes, clothing, accessories. A pair of designer boots can help a sex worker in Hunts Point command a higher price for her services! And a pair of pajamas will keep a homeless sex worker warm when she’s not working. If you have blankets, coats, mittens—”
“What about the darker side of your industry?” the host asked. “Have you ever had a problem with a customer?”
There was an awkward pause.
“Well, for those of us who freely choose to be sex workers,” she finally chirped, “we have learned to define our own boundaries. You see, Doug, this is an integral part of our job. We define the terms!”
My jaw dropped as I pictured Jack importuning Allie’s doorman, overloading her voice-mail box, plotting a “surprise” orgy behind her back—all because Allie was foolish enough to take money for services not rendered. So much for Allie’s terms and definitions.
“I’ve heard enough,” Jasmine cackled. “The boundaried one has spoken.”
“Wait, wait, you have to hear the phone calls!”
We listened to a few abbreviated calls from lewd listeners. The host cut them off quickly.
“As I was telling Allison, there are seven words you can’t use around here—we’ll lose our license,” he remarked dryly. “Bye for now.”
Then a sweet-sounding elderly widower from Queens bemoaned a recent roundup of street girls in his neighborhood. “It’s been a lonely two weeks,” he told Allie. “Maybe your organization could send some ladies out to Roosevelt Avenue?”
“Oh, I wish we could,” Allie burbled, “but that’s illegal. We don’t want to be charged with promoting prostitution. We’re a support group for sex workers at every stage of their sexual and political evolution. Not an outcall service.”
“Sexual evolution, eh? Well, you sound like a very interesting young woman. Good night.”
Jasmine’s response to all this was, at first, predictable. “Allison’s throwing away the best years of her life! She wouldn’t be wasting her time on this movement if she had any sense.” Then she looked pleased. “She’s giving that ex-hooker Roxana what’s-her-name a run for her money! Has Roxana ever seen All About Eve? She’d better watch out! Allison’s no brainiac but she’s more plausible than the current leadership. For one thing, she’s good-looking. And she waxes her snatch!” A partisan note was creeping in here. “That’s more than we can say for Roxana! I mean, if there has to be a hookers’ movement, I’d rather be represented by a chick who waxes. Wouldn’t you?”
“I’m not sure Allison’s going to be in this movement for much longer,” I said skeptically.
“Oh? Roxana’s edging her out? Well, that’s to be expected—I always knew power sharing wasn’t Roxana’s bag. She’s probably jealous of the way Allison looks!”
“No,” I interrupted. “It’s something else. Allison joined a new cult. She said something about her induction the other day. I’m afraid to ask.”
“Really! So that was a short love affair with social justice. More like”—Jasmine looked vaguely disappointed—“a one-night stand! What’s this new cult?”
“No idea. She got into a panic when she misplaced her—She’s got these ritualistic skewers. Or stalks or something.”
“Skewers?” Jasmine was intrigued. “What kind of…skewers?”
“I’ve never seen them. I think she uses them to tell the future. They’re like yarrow sticks, I guess, but they’re purple. She calls them her Quito sticks. Do you know anything about Ecuadorian folklore? Because I don’t. And she’s going to Costa Rica for some reason—”
Jasmine let out a sharp yelp.
“What did you say? What kind of sticks?”
“Quito—”
“You fucking idiot, she’s on Atkins!”
“Atkins?”
“Here, let me show you.”
Jasmine marched off to the bathroom and I followed, fearing the worst. “See?” She was holding a small white cylindrical jar, which she rattled in my face. I looked at the yellow label—“KETOSTIX”—and noticed some pink and purple squares.
“What are they?” I said blankly.
“They turn purple if you’re burning fat.”
“Excuse me? Have you lost your mind as well?”
“Oh!” Jasmine laughed. “No, I mean, you have to dip them in your pee—then they turn purple.”
“Why do you have t
hem?”
“You’re kidding. You really don’t know about the Atkins diet?”
Could my two best friends be on the Atkins diet without my noticing? Could I be that self-centered?
“Bunless hamburgers? Fried eggs? But Allison was eating salmon this weekend.”
“Atkins is misunderstood,” she said airily. “It’s the best way to burn fat. And you can eat all kinds of stuff—veal, salmon tartare, lobster bisque, pastrami. You can’t drink Kir Royales, but you can drink vodka martinis. My kind of diet.”
“But you have no fat to burn. You never did.”
“I do Atkins just before my period. You should try it. It gets rid of food cravings. And water retention. You have a terrible problem with water retention.”
“Thanks.”
“Hey! Water retention happens! I used to have it too! This is the diet that resembles what our carnivorous ancestors ate. Before they yoked themselves to the plow and got hooked on wheat and potatoes.” Jasmine paused and gave my waistline a critical appraisal. “And rice, in the case of your ancestors. But it’s likely that our prehistoric grandmothers never suffered premenstrual bloating. Because they didn’t eat starch.”
I rolled my eyes. “And what did they eat? Lobster bisque? I seem to recall a recent excavation of Absolut vodka etchings on a cave wall somewhere…”
“Well, mankind has adapted! Now we have cream-based soups and hard liquor! Back then, we had the freshly killed meat of some hunted beast. Prehistoric pastrami! So now that we’re all becoming hunter-gatherers again—think about it! Of course we’re returning to our original high-powered, high-protein, beast-hunting, fat-burning diet.”
Of course. But…what’s for dessert? Or should I say who?
“Hey. That’s the most sensible thing Allison’s done in years!” Jasmine was saying. “I may actually develop some respect for that girl.” She hardly noticed how miffed I was at the prospect.
TUESDAY. 3/14/00
Another misunderstanding was revealed today, when I unwrapped a box of six identical push-up bras, ordered recently from Bloomie’s online. I was hoping to model one of these new acquisitions for my two o’clock—Ted, the undies voyeur. But the new bra I ordered is all wrong! It’s filled with “lifelike” liquid cups that weigh so much I can feel my deltoids working when I try it on. A good work bra has to reflect your actual shape. Your breasts must live up to the promise of the underwire. Plus, you might have to remove it while performing a blow job, and how can you gracefully slip out of a lingerie item that weighs five pounds? What if, god forbid, a john should take it into his head to “help you out of” your bra?