Kindle Notes & Highlights
wrong thing for me? If only I knew what I wanted! His questions, his offer, made me feel like a total amateur, flustered and needy, instead of the sneaky professional I like to be.
Am I hooked on having secrets? On getting away with something? Do I ever, really, give myself to him? Or is he just one of the more emotional rides in a working girl’s erotic Disneyland?
Would they be able to withstand all that compassion? From a thirty-something call girl with a weakness for middle-aged stalkers—who thinks of herself as the right-on “peer” of a street urchin?
If he’s helping me to achieve my goals, I can help Jack to be a better person,”
Now, if I were a guy, I’d be persuaded by Allie’s voice alone. But unfortunately, being a girl, I hear the actual words, not just the ear candy of her breathless babble.
She was blushing with pride, and who could blame her? It’s not every day that a john becomes your sugar daddy.
I am growing financially, and he is being challenged emotionally. I feel so blessed!”
How long has this sugar-daddy arrangement been going on? A little longer than Allie cares to admit. I decided not to say anything about that—for now.
Inspired by her dialogue? Dead sister? No name? This sounds weird.
I remember when he was on trial and all these moms were gathering at the courthouse, telling the reporters that their dead daughters weren’t hookers.
“Typical,” Jasmine said at the time. “A serial killer
chops you up into fifty different pieces and your mom’s worrying about yo...
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“Gretchen says they’re afraid of a dildo scandal because they get funding from the Health Department. The project manager made her use a banana!”
“We’re taking a van over to Tenth Avenue tomorrow night. With two boxes of free condoms. Maybe we could give the bras to the girls who need them most.” In a low voice, I explained, “They’re water bras. Not very good for work.”
“Why,” I asked, cutting into my own juicy steak, “are you lying to your doctor about what you eat? That’s like lying to your lawyer about what you do for a living! It’s crazy.”
“Being on Atkins is sort of like joining the Resistance,” Jasmine explained. “When you go to the doctor you’re, like, underground. You have to think like a fugitive. The medical establishment’s totally against what we’re doing. These people are the food police.” Food police? Could Jasmine be projecting just a wee bit?
I have no interest in decorating rich people’s homes. I want to help the people who don’t have homes.
If I go back to school, I can help those women full-time, and I’ll be taken more seriously.” “Taken seriously. What do you mean? By who?” “Everyone. Well, people like Gretchen.”
“They have access to jobs and U.N. health funding! You can’t get paid unless you have all the right credentials!
The professional activists never have to pay!”
Clearly, it’s the principle of the thing—being wanted, being paid for—not the price of the ticket.
Now that I’m engaged to a guy who’s an up-and-coming player, I can’t exactly run around town cultivating Wall Street sugar daddies, enticing men into buying me love trinkets.
“Look, it’s one thing to be intimidated when a building wants fifty percent down. But I can’t admit to Matt that I’m afraid to face the board at a building that only requires ten percent. He won’t understand!”
since he’s buying, that if you’re turned down, he will be the cause.
Matt’s not acting like a john or a boyfriend.” “No. He’s treating you like his future partner.” “But I don’t know what I’m supposed to do!” “There’s no script,” Wendy assured me. “There must be!”
But maintaining a Good Attitude—a better one than you need to have—keeps a working girl young.
reached into my panties, a look of quiet desperation on my face.
It’s okay to take a john away from one body part if he thinks he’ll gain access to another. I kept up the bait and switch, moving his hand every time he got too intrusive.
And don’t let any of your friends in the business get near him or his family before the wedding.”
“I can’t decide whether a boyfriend is a luxury or a professional liability!”
You’ll be a better example if you forget them, really.”
What is Liane saying? She bought this duplex in the ’60s during a downturn— it must be worth almost two million dollars! If she hasn’t sold it by now, why not? Because she doesn’t have to and because it’s her trophy. She bought it with her bedroom manners
Despite her weirder ideas, her mind is sharp. She goes to all the concerts and plays and gets the best seats.
How can she say life has been unkind? Does she have any idea how other women her age live? How they look?
How can you talk this way? How can you sit here and tell me that settling down with a man is a necessity? It wasn’t true for you.”
“Sometimes people have to go without necessities.”
It’s one thing for people to think you do this, it’s another thing for them to know.
Jasmine and Allie are part of my emotional background noise. He doesn’t see them much, but he’s met them briefly, and he takes their existence for granted.
Liane makes marriage—love between a man and a woman—sound so lonely. And she’s in favor of it! Yet there’s a certain wisdom to her advice.
“Oh! That! I agreed to stop seeing other clients—if he would stop talking about interior decorating school. And now everything’s okay! I’m going ahead with my MSW.”
But if Jack is such a great provider why does she sound so . . . cornered? Shouldn’t she be proud of her good fortune?
Like hookers, they have to know that some “client lies” are harmless, part of the ongoing relationship. And even smart people get fooled.
If you’re just trying to protect your real ID, you don’t make up soldier of fortune stories.
A girl who plays along with a john’s lifestyle fantasy is giving him his money’s worth, while a girl who lies to her shrink is just wasting her own hard-earned money.
“That has nothing to do with it. I don’t have volume. This is the kind of volume that gives a building a reputation!”
charge enough so I don’t have to see twenty guys a day in my own apartment! What kind of operation
traffic these other people cause—” That set her off. “Guys don’t like to think they’re going to a building where there’s a hooker on every floor!
There’s a moral here. If archaeologists, a hundred years later, can figure out what you were up to, well, think of the present! You can’t be too careful about separating your trash.
Never mix the sex trash with old bills or junk mail!
Your landlord might be snooping around the incinerator room. Like the D.C. archaeologist, he’s looking for something else. An illegal subletter.
