Besides sex, one of my obsessions is clean air, and I try to engage in sexual acts that don’t release any toxins into the atmosphere. So I was a little bit upset when, amidst all the telephoning, Tiffany pulled out a cigarette and lit up. Never mind that it was a non-smoking room, Tiffany was violating environmental standards that I frankly supported. This was the only moment during our night of thwarted passion that I felt serious tension, despite our differing ideas about the quid pro quo of the hooker/client transaction. It was just a night, but who’s to say that what we were experiencing was not a relationship? Like many couples, we were having a conflict over values, and I didn’t want to tell her (and couldn’t, since I didn’t speak Portuguese) that I was glad the extent of our issues was limited to smoking. Larger questions of religious affiliation or belief in God trip up so many couples. In fact, this is the benefit of the so-called one-night stand (especially when the sex is for hire): you get all the intimacy of a relationship without the side effects.
Tiffany’s negotiations with the Chinese pharmaceutical company continued late into the night, and even though she was kind enough to conduct most of her affairs while sitting on the toilet with the bathroom door closed, I could hear her scream out “O-la!” in disgust at what I supposed was some piece of bad news. The gorgeous sunrise over the Copa was, of course, not visible from my hotel room window, which, beyond the two ten-ton condensing units, faced another bank of hotel rooms whose occupants were also fated to miss the ocean view. I sometimes think that there should be a support group for people who, like myself, are always missing something.
I awakened to find Tiffany snoring softly next to me. We hadn’t negotiated how much of the night would be allotted to torrid sex and how much to sleep. In any case, we didn’t have a chance to complete the one sex act we had begun thanks to the distractions of the Chinese pharmaceutical industry. In the morning she slept late, and by the time she got up, I was already coming back from the gym. I returned to find her sitting in front of an enormous breakfast from room service, switching channels between Portuguese versions of the VH1 series “I Love New York” and HBO’s “In Treatment.”
I could have left Tiffany in the room all day. I’m sure she would have been happy to watch television while fielding calls from China, or wherever else she had invested her money. Tiffany was essentially offering phone sex, in that she was always on the phone and didn’t mind occasionally performing sexual acts while she was talking, as long as they didn’t interrupt her conversation. I was actually developing an affection for Tiffany, but knew there were other women to meet in Rio. I wanted to play the field, so I told her she had to leave. I didn’t want to be rude or hurt her feelings, so I just said, “Meine Mutter kommt,” and she got the idea.
Tiffany quickly packed up her things and, as she grabbed the money from my hands, I realized that she was probably annoyed with me because she wouldn’t be leaving the room with her phone fully charged.
Once she was gone, I breathed a deep sigh of relief and returned to the lobby. My concierge friend was no longer there, so I decided I would just go out onto the Copa and try my luck again. I saw several pretty senhoras in the signature swimwear I had come to expect in Rio. From a rational standpoint, the thongs that barely cover Brazilian women’s private parts make complete economic sense—if you want to sell goods, you have to display them. I walked out onto the beach, taking in a deep whiff of the early morning smells of garbage, diesel oil, and sewage that were blowing in from the city. Surely this was paradise.
I felt a little overdressed in my Brooks Brothers seersucker suit and bowtie, but I was hoping I might run into some old-fashioned hookers, the kind who didn’t go in for Brazilian waxing. I like prostitutes with hairy bushes and quaint values, and I was hoping that my formal attire might attract the kind of passionate, fulsome whores who were fixtures in Cuba during the Batista era, when Havana was a wide open city and the renowned Superman was displaying his outsized genitals in the nightclubs.
I passed a tall buxom woman with bleached blond hair who didn’t look like one of the natives at all. “Hi, Tiffany,” I said. She swung around in one quick, brutal movement. From the moment I saw her face, I could see that everything about her was fake. She had huge Botoxed lips that looked like they might explode. Even her nose, and in particular her nostrils, which flared like those of a horse, looked like they had been injected with some substance designed to counteract the sagging of age. She was the female version of Dorian Gray.
I don’t know what I expected. I’m aware there are some Latin women with fair complexions who have the look of tawdry Vegas showgirls, but I was totally taken aback by her accent, which placed her as a native of one of New York’s outer boroughs. If we hadn’t been in Rio, and she hadn’t camouflaged her age with Botox, I would have sworn that she was the grown-up version of a girl I made out with in Kew Gardens twenty-five years back. “How did you know my name?” she said with a nasal twang. “Are you a cop?”
“I thought you were someone else. You look like Tiffany Spears.” As I watched Tiffany walk away, I was going to call out to her. She was walking onto the beach, having forgotten to take off her stiletto heels, and before I could say anything she had gotten stuck in the sand. I noticed her kneeling down to pull her feet out of her shoes and then trying to extricate the shoes themselves, whose heels might as well have been nails.
When I returned to the lobby of the hotel to get my bearings, the concierge waved me over to tell me about a sexy promotional offer. If I changed my return ticket so that I flew back to New York on TAM, the airline of Brazil, I could upgrade the status of my hotel room.
“But I had a roundtrip ticket on Continental.”
“I know, Mr. Cantor.”
“Call me Ken.”
“Okay, Ken. If you change to the TAM flight, you get the room upgrade and you are still saving money. It’s a terrific promotion.”
This concierge’s name was Victor, and we were beginning to have the kind of relationship in which I grow close to someone because they are saving me money.
“Oh my God, there’s the French art critic who fucks everybody!” Victor yelped suddenly.
Victor’s eyes were like radar, helping me to hone in on a sexy woman in platform shoes and gold lamé skirt walking toward one of the elevator banks. I recognized her as the author of several sexually charged memoirs about her life in art. She would have looked just like a hooker if it weren’t for her peasant blouse. I was sure she wasn’t wearing a bra; it was the one thing that beatniks and whores from Rio had in common.
“Go run after her, Ken. She’s very hot. Sometimes she can’t even make it up to her room. If you’re lucky, she might even fuck you in the elevator on the way up. The other day we had to kick her out of the men’s room when she was reaching into the urinals for men’s penises. She’s very hot.”
I dutifully followed her, but I was hesitant because I tend to be more discriminating about my art criticism than I am about my whores, and I was afraid I might find myself in flagrante delicto with someone whose opinions I didn’t cotton to. While I covet the female figure, I don’t care for champions of figuration.
I managed to jump into the elevator right behind her. She was wearing sunglasses, and for a moment I thought she didn’t even notice me, though we had the elevator entirely to ourselves. One of her books was a bestseller about her experiences taking on truckloads of men in the