Floating City

by Sudhir Venkatesh

  “Why don’t you come?” he said, grinning now. “That should be fun for you—you can see me work your crowd. Might even be some friends of yours there.”

  I said yes, of course.

  • • •

  This brings us back to where the story began, to the gallery opening when Shine and Analise first met and the shocking scene—shocking to me, at least—when Analise came to my house and told me she was in the same business as Margot. Of all the connections between high and low I could have imagined or desired, this was the least possible crossing of the last possible boundary.

  By that point, so much had already happened. In Hell’s Kitchen, I had learned the secrets of one New York neighborhood’s underground economy. I had seen people and places changed by the rapid globalization of New York. I’d determined that the sex trade would be a fitting way to write about the boundary crossings that defined contemporary New York and followed the natural connections that had led me out of the ghetto. Margot and Darlene and their friends were giving me a new perspective on the underground economy throughout the city. But Analise was about to remind me how little I knew.

  We didn’t see each other for a few weeks after her confession. Then she called with an unusual request. In all our time together, we’d rarely met outside of public places. This time, she wanted me to come directly to her place, a ground-floor two-bedroom just off Gramercy Park.

  When I got there, the decoration process was still under way. Framed prints and lithographs leaned against the wall, a paint can sat on spread newspaper, furniture had been shoved against walls waiting for placement. She immediately brought up J.B. He had left for Los Angeles to develop some new film projects. Her money had been “wasted on a movie that’s never going to get into Sundance.” Her face was drawn.

  Now she was trying to make a break. This apartment was part of it. She had asked her mother for a raise on her allowance and rented this place, a new place for a new life. “Look!” she said. “It even has a garden.” Ever hopeful—that was the Analise I’d known before. I grew hopeful too. She was going to dump the idiot boyfriend and abandon her life of crime.

  She made tea and took me out to the backyard.

  “Check this out,” she said, opening up a laptop on a small round cocktail table. On a second table pushed next to it sat a portable file box with about two dozen manila folders marked with different-colored tabs. Each sheet had a weekly revenue and a monthly “intake to date” sum scribbled, and scratched out and updated. That way, Analise didn’t have to flip through the pages inside the folder, which also provided data on historical revenue, biographical information, hotel rates, and services performed.

  These were the records for her escort service. “So you’re not going to quit,” I said.

  “I’m going to do it better,” she answered. “I have to winnow this down,” she said. “I’ve got about five or six reliables, I figure, and ten I don’t know if I can trust.”

  She started describing the challenges. These were privileged, willful young women long on looks and short on business sense. They were giving away “freebies” to potential clients, getting drunk, forgetting to cultivate relationships. It was ridiculous. She even tried sitting them down for some basic instructions on how to handle difficult situations, but they were too busy texting or dreaming about a trip to St. Barts to pay her any mind. So they kept making the same mistakes, kept losing money, and kept putting themselves through unnecessary dangers.

  “I really can’t help you,” I said. “I mean, I’m not sure exactly what it is you want me to do—or say.”

  “I just wanted you to see how I’m dealing with things,” she said. “I mean, I’m trying not to be stupid. I don’t want to do this forever, but …”

  She stopped, then narrowed her eyes as if she was looking at the truth behind the truth. “All I know is, the more money I make, the more confident I feel. Like, if I have money, I can finally talk back to my parents.”

  We laughed—who doesn’t know what that feels like? My story wasn’t so different. I was obsessed with data instead of money, but we both had chosen to focus our efforts on worlds far more hard-edged than those we were born into. The more I could penetrate the underground, the better I felt about myself. If it was marginal, criminal, or tinged with outsider status, count me in. The seedier, the better. My recent divorce had multiplied the impulse, pushing me to the margins among the outcast and the criminal. At times I told myself I was following in the footsteps of Robert Merton, examining the links between the deviant and the mainstream. But why so many risk takers, why so many criminals and class traitors? Since the day I walked into the Chicago projects, I’d felt more comfortable with those the rest of society had written off as expendable.

  I sat down and examined her color-coded file system. “I can’t believe how organized you are,” I said.

  She brought out a long, eleven-by-fourteen piece of paper marked up like a time line. On the top, in pencil, there were years that delineated columns: 2008, 2009, 2010, and so on. All the future dates were listed neatly, each a half inch apart, as if time moved in linear beats. There looked to be various milestones and markers of achievement, some indecipherable. On the sides, she had scribbled various notes, indicating rows: “Kate,” “India,” “Paris,” “Hamptons real estate,” “Cash,” “Trust.”

  “This is your future?”

  “I told you, I’m doing this for a year or so, and then I’m gone.”

  There was a blank space under “Cash.”

  My mind started racing. This was a golden opportunity, the leap into the upper classes I had dreamed of making, and it was coming through sex. It was too good to be true. At the same time, I felt terrible about it.

  “What’s the ideal number?” I asked. “For you to quit, I mean.”

  I was looking for an out, probably. Or at least a termination date.

  “Not sure,” she responded.

  Analise grabbed the client folders and started making piles. These eight were good. Clare, too temperamental, no dates this month. Jo Jo, always busy. Twice a week, trip to Miami.

  “Let’s call Amy. I’ll put her on speaker.”

  “Who’s Amy?” I asked.

  Amy was a possible new girl. She’d just come down from Connecticut College, a little young but she said she’d dated a bit already to get through school.

  The phone stopped ringing and a voice said hello.

  “Amy, how are you?” Analise shouted. She turned on the speaker and laid the phone on the table. “Listen, I’m putting you on speaker and my friend Sudhir is here, helping me figure stuff out. I want to talk to you about some things.”

  No problem, said Amy, but she had to take a minute to walk outside and find a private spot. Analise and I waited.

  “Hey! I’m back. Sorry, I’m at a press event for BMW.”

  “Oh, you’re still doing PR?”

  “Yeah, it’s my dad’s friend’s company. But they’re only hiring part-time right now.”

  “Well, so that’s what I wanted to talk with you about,” Analise said. “I’m a little worried you sounded unsure. You said you dated in Rhode Island?”

  “Yes, I did date in college a few times—”

  “But you realize it’s going to be different here,” Analise interrupted. “This is New York.”

  “Well, a lot of the men were from Boston,” Amy said.

  Analise snorted.

  “I think I’m ready,” Amy pleaded. “I know you probably need a firm commitment, but I want to do this and Kimberly said you were a great person to work for. I think I could really be good for you.”

  Analise came back with a tone of cold precision. “What I need to know is, how many days can I count on you?”

  “At least two,” Amy said. “Maybe three, I don’t know. And what I meant was, the men I dated, they weren’t off the street or anything. They took me to plays, to these amazing dinners. One took me to Maine for the weekend. They were serious men.”

/>   “So you can travel?”

  “Yes,” Amy replied quickly. “I can do that. I don’t have anything that I need to stay here for.”

  “Do you have a pet?”

  “Yes, a small cat.”

  “But you’re cool leaving it?”

  “Oh, yes—I just did. Went to St. Barts. I have a friend who cat-sits.”

  “What about friends? How are you going to deal with your friends?”

  “They know I date. My girlfriends, I mean. Some of them do it too, so it’s not a big deal. I don’t know. I guess I could do whatever you needed. I don’t have to tell them.”

  “Well, that worries me, to be honest. It’s never a good idea to talk about your business. Or my business.”

  “I would never do that,” Amy said. “But my girlfriends, they got me into it. But they weren’t very good at it. I was the best one.”

  “Why?” Analise asked.

  “Well, I really like to listen and have a good time. Guys at college are just so boring and these guys were taking me to all these amazing places.”

  Analise rolled her eyes. Infatuation with rich men bored her. “How much do you need to make?”

  “I live in Chelsea. My parents own the condo, so that’s all good. I get five grand from them for other stuff.”

  “That’s not enough for a girl in the city!”

  “Tell me about it!” Amy said.

  “Long term?”

  “Well, I guess I want to be an agent. My aunts, they’re both agents. One does actors. I think I could really be good at that.”

  “I would need you to make me the priority,” Analise said. “At least for six months. I mean, I can’t have you not show up for shit. I won’t take that, okay?”

  “Of course.”

  With that, Analise signed off. To me, it seemed that Amy was perfect and Analise was on the verge of hiring her.

  Instead, her expression turned to scorn. “Really, does she really think I’m going to give her a shot?”

  Amy seemed smart, devoted, able to put off peer pressure. What more did Analise want?

  “I don’t hire whores,” Analise said.

  Sometimes Analise and her friends used the phrase “in the middle” for women who liked to hang out with elites but who were not elite themselves. It was considered the height of gaucherie. Analise walked toward the kitchen and opened up a cabinet in search of vodka. “I can’t do anything with that. Except worry. I’d rather have a bunch of Brittanys than that boring girl.”

  The problem with Brittany, she continued, was that she was wild and willful and despised the men she dated.

  “That can’t be good for business,” I said.

  “Are you kidding? It drives them wild. They can’t wait to get her naked and put her in her place.”

  But Brittany was starting to act increasingly unstable—throwing up, passing out, fighting with clients and bartenders and cab drivers and even police officers. Analise was going to have to do something about it. And even with that, she was still worth a dozen Amys. “I don’t want to hear a girl say she dates ’serious’ men from Boston,” she said in a withering voice.

  This disappointed me. Analise had been so welcoming, so open. She was the one rich girl I knew who was—speaking of class traitors—always ready to open her arms to outsiders. Now she was policing the very boundaries that kept women like Carla and Angela on the bottom.

  Under the loose pages before us, Analise’s brand-new cell phone began to vibrate toward the edge of the table like some kind of burrowing animal trying to escape.

  As Analise reached for her phone, two women came through the patio door. I wasn’t sure if they had just arrived or if they’d been in the apartment all along.

  “It’s freezing out there!” one of them shouted.

  Analise didn’t look up. “Yes, that’s right. I’ll need a large—no, a large. Yes, I know, but last time you gave me the smallest room in the hotel. A large. Okay, how many times do I have to say this? Do you speak English?”

  The rest of us laughed. Analise could be so unforgiving.

  “I want the room on the sixth floor, 623. Okay? And if you don’t give it to me, then the three nights I book each week will go down to zero.”

  Analise looked up at us, rubbing her hands through her hair. “I give these idiots five thousand dollars a month. No appreciation.” Then she made a quick introduction. “Kimberly, Jo Jo, Sudhir.”

  Both women had blond hair with dark roots; both were dressed casually in sweats and tights and leggings as if they’d just come from the gym or a revival of Flashdance. Jo Jo was smoking one of those long Nat Sherman cigarettes. We shook hands and exchanged rote smiles.

  “I worked three nights this week,” Jo Jo said. “I need a break. I’m going to Aruba.”

  “Too bad. Mr. X wants you Friday,” Analise said.

  Jo Jo pouted unconvincingly—apparently Mr. X was a valued customer.

  “And me?” Kimberly said.

  “I’m on the phone,” Analise answered, waving Kimberly away.

  “This bitch gets a full week, and you can’t get me anything?”

  Interrupted once again, Analise widened her eyes and cupped the phone. “Those are all return visits,” she said, her voice cutting.

  Kimberly glared at Jo Jo, who laughed and preened a little. “What can I say? They like my style.”

  “Fuck you,” Kimberly said, taking a cigarette from the brown box on the table without asking.

  There was a moment of silence; then Analise started talking on the phone again. “Hello? Yes, hi! Yes, it’s me—you recognized my voice? Oh, Lord, that’s so lovely in this day and age. Thank you. I’d like two tickets, but they have to be in the box—my client can’t see very well and his hearing is not so great. Of course, five hundred sounds reasonable. Just hold them at the box office and I’ll have a car come by in an hour to pick them up.”

  When Analise hung up, Kimberly asked in a sullen voice who was getting to go to a Broadway show.

  Mercilessly, Analise shook her head. “The tickets are for Brittany, and not for Broadway—the Met.”

  Kimberly looked puzzled. “They’re going to a museum?”

  “To the opera,” Analise said.

  Her cutting tone made me fear for Kimberly’s future as an escort, which snapped me awake. All of this was so sudden and novel, such a peculiar and fascinating new revelation about this remarkable person I thought I knew. This wasn’t some happy little clubhouse for rich kids.

  “I think maybe I should take off,” I said. “You guys are—”

  Analise frowned. “Oh, don’t worry so much. No secrets here.”

  No secrets? It was all secrets. “I can’t just sit here unless they know that I have certain professional obligations regarding confidentiality and—”

  Analise launched into a fairly precise version of my standard predisclaimer disclaimer: “Although Sudhir is not currently engaged in a formal study, he is a university researcher,” etc. It was impressive. She even parodied my formal diction. And of course, neither of the two women blinked a false eyelash. She was their boss. What did she expect them to say?

  Letting out a sigh, I reached into Analise’s cigarette box myself. If you can’t beat ’em …

  Jo Jo winked at me. “Long day?” she said. I shrugged a little, acknowledging that it had been, and Jo Jo scooted her chair over closer to me. “Analise told me what you do—gangs, drugs, women of the night. You must have an exciting life.”

  At this point, she actually batted her eyes. She wasn’t trying to be subtle.

  “I’m in bed by nine,” I said.

  “Why are we so interesting to you? It’s just sex. Sex and money—oldest things in the world.”

  “Yeah, except it’s a lot of money. And you’re already rich. You’re white, you take vacations around the world. I bet you have maids.”

  “Of course,” Jo Jo said.

  “That doesn’t mean anything,” Kimberly said. “Everybody has
a cleaning lady. Even my cleaning lady has a cleaning lady.”

  “Still, you have so many other options.”

  Kimberly took over. “You seem pretty judgmental for a sociologist. I’m not sure why anyone talks to you when you say shit like that.”

  Fascinating, I thought. On the lower economic rungs, the reaction to direct questions like mine is much more humble. But Manjun didn’t have a cleaning lady. Angela didn’t have a cleaning lady. “Objectively, you have other options,” I said. “Most of the women I study don’t.”

  “Whatever,” Kimberly said.

  Jo Jo said things were complicated, launching into a meandering history of her family that went back to the American Revolution. “I went to Yale,” she said. “Got my degree, came to New York, tried the nine-to-five thing. No, thank you. Jesus, that was a living hell. So my dad cut me off. He says it’s good for my character.”

  She cackled.

  With Analise, she was making ten thousand dollars a month.

  “Are we fucked up? Probably. I take Vicodin, snort coke, get drunk off my ass. But who doesn’t? I don’t see a lot of psychological masterpieces out in the straight world.”

  Listening to them made me think about Angela and the problem of the “soft” assets she didn’t seem to possess. Relative wealth and the accompanying sense of privilege gave these women something cultural that was important for succeeding in this world—simple nonchalance, a sense of entitlement that nothing could threaten. The critical difference was that it came so naturally, while Angela and Carla and even Margot had to make an effort. I could relate. Just as I had learned about wine and opera to look like less of a fool in Harvard’s eating clubs, those women had to study the ways of the rich men they wanted to attract. But Kimberly and Jo Jo were like creatures from another planet, exuding a sense of privilege so serene it seemed to justify itself. My first thought was that money could never buy this, but then I realized that only money could buy it. My Columbia colleague Shamus Khan captured its essence in a study of the boarding school elite: ease and privilege.

  But that was my take. What did Jo Jo and Kimberly think separated them from other women? I wondered. If another woman wanted to work for Analise, what qualities would she need?