by Tracy Quan
“And what about you? You’re not even Catholic.”
“I am so. I was baptized. I just didn’t go to church or take First Communion. But I’m still a Catholic. I haven’t been excommunicated or anything. I can return anytime. That’s how it works. It’s a very accepting religion.”
“Accepting? I don’t know about that. Do we have to decide this tonight? It’s a huge decision.”
“In what sense?”
“I know you have all these Catholic relatives but I don’t and I’m not even sure about God. Sometimes I believe and sometimes I don’t. I can’t tell my kids to follow a strict religion I don’t believe in. What happens when they start asking questions? Are you thinking Catholic school because that’s really insane. There is no way a child of mine—”
“How can you say that? Miranda went to Catholic school and she’s not insane.”
“She did?”
“Holy Name Convent in Port of Spain. I’m sure you know lots of Catholics and you don’t even realize it.”
“I didn’t realize you were.”
“How could you not? It’s hardly a family secret! I’ve never hidden it from you.”
“But you never talked about it.”
“So? You have this idea that Catholics have to go around talking up their religion? We’re just like everybody else. We’re not all fanatics. I can’t believe you’re so prejudiced!”
“I never thought of Miranda as a Catholic. Or you.” Matt looked up and frowned. “This is a very serious decision you’re asking me to make. And I am not a prejudiced person. Don’t say that.”
I’d better not—in case he caves, just to show that he’s not.
“What were you planning?” I asked. “On raising them with no religion at all?”
“I never gave it much thought. It’s not important to me.” He rolled onto his side and reached for the alarm clock. “I really don’t like the idea of our kids getting a Catholic education. It just feels wrong.”
“But children need a foundation, a system of belief. Are you serious about having kids? Or is this just a whim? It’s not just about getting me pregnant—there’s an entire lifetime of care and responsibility!”
“I don’t know.” He closed his eyes, massaged his temples briefly and said, “I really have to think about this, honey.”
This morning, I found him in the breakfast nook, sipping coffee, immersed in his Wall Street Journal. He looked up from the paper.
“I want to explain something about last night,” he began. I was still half-awake, clutching my first cup of the day. It was hard to respond. “I’m glad you take all that stuff seriously. I want you to be the mother of my children. I’ve known this for a long time.” The caffeine was hitting me and he seemed—oh no, to be coming around! “And you’re right about children. They need a foundation.”
I gulped more coffee and gazed at him with as little expression as I could muster.
“But,” he said, “I think you’re wrong about the Catholic church and I need to do some soul-searching. Figure out what my true feelings are. It’s really bothering me.”
Enough to start using condoms again?
WEDNESDAY, 5/30/01
This morning, a call from Jasmine, warning me about Allison’s latest project.
“She’s organizing a handbag drive. Well, she called at the right time. I was cleaning out my closets, and I have all this faux alligator. My starter bags. I haven’t worn them in years,” she boasted. “Now that I can afford the real thing. You must have some bags you don’t use anymore. Don’t you buy a new handbag every three months? I’m taking mine over tonight. You should come!”
“Charmaine won’t like it if I go up there to dig around in my closet for old handbags,” I said, remembering her outburst when we had to change the locks. But I called anyway to see if I could fit myself into her schedule. Then I called Allie.
“I might have some bags for you,” I told her. “But I can’t get to them right now. Maybe tomorrow? They’re, like, in the back of my closet.”
“Oh good!” The music has fully returned to Allie’s voice now that she’s exchanging e-mail every day with Lucho and getting occasional phone calls. If nothing else, his trip to Bogot?has made it possible for Allie to scale down her communication needs. She has discovered that you can, in fact, get by on one e-mail every twenty-four hours and one phone call every two days, and still feel like a love object. There is no way that intensity—five times a day!—can be sustained as your relationship progresses. “So I’ll tell Jasmine to come tomorrow,” she said. “The Nevada Three will really appreciate your donation. I just got an e-mail from Renee.”
“Nevada Three?” I asked. “Who’s, um, Renee?”
“They had their own escort service in Las Vegas,” Allie explained. “Nina’s still in prison and Barbie’s release date is coming up. Renee got out a month ago. After four years! She desperately needs some nice things. All their assets were confiscated by the authorities! Every thing they owned. It’s something to do with RICO.”
“Are you serious? You’re exchanging e-mail with a convicted felon? Do you have any idea—”
“I know what I’m doing,” Allie insisted. “You shouldn’t call them felons. These girls are victims of a terrible injustice! They were running an escorts’ co-op, just the three girls, and the Nevada prosecutors turned it into a racketeering thing. But they were just trying to make a living! And it’s not illegal to send handbags to Renee! She served her time. Can you imagine being in jail for four years and you don’t have a single handbag to your name? We’re helping her to reintegrate!”
It’s hard to argue with Allie’s logic sometimes.
THURSDAY, 5/31/01
This afternoon, while Charmaine stepped out for a call at the St. Regis, I did a major excavation of my front closet. When you hold on to the housing from your single years, you never get around to throwing things away. This apartment is my illicit insurance against the ups and downs of marriage. My secret workstation. My uptown attic. How many Manhattanites can lay claim to an attic of their own?
I almost broke two nails, moving a stack of plastic storage bins to reach my inactive handbags: a collection of designer fanny packs, convertible clutches, and some twentieth-century evening bags purchased at the height of the Reagan years. I peeped inside one bin and found a mangled cardboard box filled with clunky earthenware plates from a Pottery Barn sale.
I still wince at the memory of that day, when I had to leave my very first apartment—the first that was really mine—and move to a fading residential hotel where I shared the floor with an impoverished ex-milliner. I had been living in a small modern studio with a view of the Chelsea Hotel’s back wall for three weeks—overjoyed to have my own immaculate bathroom, my own tiny kitchen, my own address—when Jeannie’s Dream Dates abruptly closed shop. I never got around to unpacking all my stuff; evading the police was too urgent. I left my first apartment without a forwarding address, and my unopened boxes, badly organized, hastily retaped, went quickly into storage along with my furniture. It was a step backward but there was no other option.
My new neighbor at the Allerton Hotel for Women was convinced that people like me were the downfall of Manhattan: society had betrayed her by going hatless, destroying her business, and I—bare-headed—was part of the syndrome. After a few weeks of her ranting, I tried the George Washington Hotel, where I coexisted with some elderly women, a handful of street pimps, and young tourists with backpacks. I stood out in my little suits and almost-ladylike heels, running around at all hours, unable to hide what I was doing. One afternoon, I received a phone call from a friendly voice asking for “Suzy”—the name I was registered under. He suggested that I was the kind of girl who needs a “manager.” I yelled back like a juvenile fishwife: “How dare you talk to me like that! You’d better leave me alone! I’ll report you to the police!” A completely absurd threat, since I was actually hiding from the police, but he never called again.
When
I finally got resettled, the cardboard boxes had started to sag a little but they were still doing their job. Over the years, cardboard gave way to square plastic bins with lids. For some reason, I saved one cardboard box—while always tempted to discard its homely contents. My first dishes are nothing to be proud of—they’re horrible looking—but I can’t bring myself to get rid of them.
As for the box itself, I’m not against cardboard, but it doesn’t hold its shape. When I stored everything in cardboard boxes, I always imagined the strategy was short-term. Cardboard stacked upon cardboard, I’ve learned from those years of storage facilities and cheap hotel rooms, is scary looking. Cardboard symbolizes hope gone rotten. Plastic is the reality principle. Plastic is for people who can manage the past and confine it. Plastic persists. Cardboard is for dreamers, plastic for realists. But cardboard inside of plastic is hope everlasting. Very difficult to throw out.
FRIDAY, 6/1/01
Due to a last-minute date with Steven, I lost precious time hand washing my delicates and spot-cleaning the carpet. He’s supposed to come on my stocking but he was so excited—after so many failed attempts to see me—that his come splattered everywhere, unexpectedly.
I arrived at Allison’s apartment much later than planned. Jasmine was already there, hunched over Allie’s computer station, glued to the screen.
“She’s analyzing the stalker mails!” Allie whispered. “Don’t disturb her. She’s trying to get inside the mind of the stalker.” She grabbed my collection of castoffs and placed my two Duane Reade shopping bags in her living room next to a pile of similar donations. “This is great! More than we ever expected. What’s wrong?”
I was frantically searching for my phone.
“I haven’t erased my Call History in two days!” I said, somewhat stricken. I found the phone in my makeup case and began to eliminate Incoming Calls. “I’m supposed to erase the history every day. What if Matt picks up my phone and sees all these calls coming from the Plaza? God knows what he might think.”
The thought that I’ve been sleeping soundly while my husband could, if he really wanted to, peek at every number I’ve called in the last forty-eight hours! The perils of advanced-level multitasking! Sometimes, you just lose track, putting your entire structure at risk.
“I can’t believe all the precautions you take with Matt!” Allie exclaimed. “And the lies you tell him! I’ll never have to erase my history for Lucho.”
“You might not have to,” I said, frowning at Missed Calls, “but maybe you should.”
Why do girls who Tell always feel so morally superior? Just because Lucho knows that Allie works doesn’t mean she’s never lied to him! It’s a little early for Allie to be preening about their emotional dynamic, but I suppressed this observation and tried to make nice.
“I just made a pot of raspberry leaf,” Allie said. “Have a Soy Newton. It’s my original recipe.”
“No thanks on the soy,” I said, accepting a cup of herbal tea.
“Excellent source of plant estrogen!” Jasmine called out. She didn’t turn around. “And we all need all the estrogen we can get. Do you know what happens to your supply once you hit thirty?” Allie rolled her eyes. “But,” Jasmine added, “I’m not so sure about the plant estrogens. I mean, we’re more like horses than plants when you think about it.”
She got up from the computer station.
“Speak for yourself!” Allie objected. “I, personally, feel a deep connection to the plant world.”
“You would,” Jasmine said, examining a Soy Newton. “For those who prefer to mainline their hormones, we have to exploit our fellow mammals. The best supplements are made from mares’ estrogen. In Europe they prescribe these premenopausal patches when you’re thirty-five so you never have to feel the estrogen slipping away. It’s one smooth painless joyride from red hot girlhood to enhanced seniority minus the senility.”
“I don’t want to hear any more about menopause!” Allison covered her ears. “You’ve been talking about estrogen for the last hour. We’re decades away from having to deal with this.”
Jasmine bit into her Soy Newton and washed it down quickly with some tea.
“You don’t just stay feminine, you know.” She flicked a crumb from her Jil Sander skirt. A skirt she only wears for outcalls since she prefers, on her own time, to emphasize her fat-free status in sleek pants. “You have to plan for it. Invest in your femininity. Like insulating your windows in September so you can save on your heating bills in January. Okay, so it’s still July but if you don’t do your homework now, you’ll be sorry come January. Well,” she announced abruptly, “it’s obvious who ‘Amy Hatchet’ is. And she’s not on that committee.”
“She has to be. How does she know about my relationship with Lucho? And my friendship with Noi? And my hometown? Can you believe she’s calling me a sex trafficker?”
“Of course,” Jasmine said. “She knows the lingo. She’s talking the talk. And she’s up on all your issues. And she knows you. So who do you think it must be!”
“What if it’s a guy?” I pointed out. “Isn’t stalking more of a guy thing?”
“Yeah, but this e-mailer’s got a mean streak. It’s some lowdown petty-minded chick. And you’re both myopic. It’s not a guy and she’s not what she appears to be. It’s someone in NYCOT,” she told Allie. “She’s jealous of the attention you’re getting. It could be Roxana. Weren’t you sort of edging her out? Speaking at too many events? I bet she wanted to be on that committee all along.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Allie said. “It can’t be Roxana. She’s my mentor! We had a meeting last night at Judson Church and there was so much solidarity among the members. And so much love in the room! If you had been there, you would understand. Roxana’s designing a website for the Nevada Three so people can send money, to help them when they get out. She’s a role model.”
“Have you consulted Barry Horowitz about this?” I asked. “I know you don’t like to hear it, but those girls are convicted felons.”
“It’s so unfair! They’re only felons,” Allie told us, “because the licensed brothel owners in the other counties got together with the FBI to make an example of them! They’re victims of a patriarchal conspiracy! Against independent escorting!”
“They’re victims of legalization,” Jasmine retorted. “As soon as it’s legal in New York State, you’ll have the same problem. They’ll make it legal to sell your snatch in Rhinebeck. Or Plattsburg! Manhattan will be like Vegas, totally fucking illegal. The licensed whorehouses will have all the unlicensed whores thrown in jail and you’ll have a massive uprising of Manhattan girls trying to LYNCH the activists who caused all this to happen in the first place.”
Unlicensed…whores? Snatch?
“Do you have to use that kind of language?” I said.
“Sometimes you have to call a whorehouse a whorehouse,” Jasmine said. “But don’t worry,” she told Allie. “You can hide in my kitchen while I continue turning my tricks. Illegally. The way it’s supposed to be done.”
Allie was close to tears.
“There has to be an alternative to—to all this polarization!” she insisted.
“Cheer up,” Jasmine said, with a shrug. “The day of reckoning’s a long way off. They’ll never legalize it here.…And I bet the owner of the Midnight Honey Ranch is the chief troublemaker. Did you see that profile in the New Yorker? He’s buying up all the mom-and-pop whorehouses, taking over the entire state of Nevada. Calling for a crackdown on the escorts! He’s a total megalomaniac. It’s not enough to run one place. He wants every pussy in Nevada paying some kind of tax to him. That’s what happens when men become madams.”
The sun never sets on the Midnight’s empire!
“Well,” Allie suggested, “you should come to the NYCOT Regional Summit on Monday and talk about this. I wish Renee could come but she’s out on supervised release. She can’t leave Nevada without permission from her probation officer. They won’t give her permission to att
end a sex worker summit.” Allie sighed. “But all the NYCOT members are coming. And some girls from Philly! We’ll have performance art, opportunities for serious debate, and a cash bar! We’re taking over the space at True for the whole day. It’s going to be a very empowering event. We have sex workers coming from all over the Northeast.”
“Regional Summit?” Jasmine narrowed her eyes. “I. Am coming. To your so-called summit session,” she warned Allie. “And I’ll find out who’s been sending you these despicable e-mails.” I was surprised by her vehemence.
SATURDAY, 6/2/01
Today, a flurry of e-mails from Allie, thanking me profusely for my participation in the handbag drive:
I wish it were possible for NYCOT to offer a tax deduction for your contribution but we’re still outcasts for now. Our 501c3 status was denied!
bubbling over with excitement about Lucho’s return:
I feel like I’m getting ready for our first date ALL OVER AGAIN. Ever since he started e-mailing from the café, I can’t seem to stop self-pleasuring. It’s the total opposite of what I went through BEFORE, when I thought it was over. Lucho writes such beautiful e-mails…
and agonizing about Jasmine’s suspicions:
I can’t help wondering if she’s right about that stalker. The world’s a dangerous place. People in the industry CAN be vindictive. But I don’t think it’s a NYCOT member. I think it’s someone from Bad Girls Without Borders. Remember Molly? From Australia? She told Noi not to trust anyone from NYCOT. She thinks she’s the only blonde in the developed world who gets along with the Bangkok bar girls. Well she’s WRONG.
In a follow-up, she writes:
But maybe it IS Roxana? Jasmine just called. She thinks Roxana planned to get me so upset that she would have to replace me on the Open Society panel! Maybe she didn’t really want me to be on TV? But Roxana’s been such a mentor. I don’t understand why she would go to all that trouble to help me and then go to so much trouble to hurt me. Is that possible? Jasmine always sees the dark side of people. She says I’m in denial about Roxana’s unconscious potential for evil. Maybe I shouldn’t encourage Jas to come to our Regional Summit after all. She’s really negative! PS: Can’t stop thinking about Lucho! I’m working really late tonight. Have to! Because Lucho and I are planning a two-day “honeymoon”…Just picked up some cranberry capsules, extra lube, and a box of his favorite condoms.