Seven Days in Rio (2 page)

“I take it you are natives of Rio, real Brazilians. Carnival, the Copacabana…”

“Carnival is funny,” the shorter one said. “Samba!” She started to dance with me, pushing me toward the elevator door just as it was opening, so that I lost my balance and almost careened into several hookers who were already in the elevator. The old whores were still laughing as the door shut without our even having had a chance to say goodbye.

I could have propositioned the girls coming down from their assignations, but I employ the same attitude toward prostitutes that I do toward baked goods—
get ’em while they’re hot
. I had wanted to get to know the two old pros because I was sure they could tell me where all the fresh, young women congregated, where the supply was greater than the demand. I wanted to start my visit with a woman who hadn’t become jaded and stale from overuse. I sincerely hoped that my first experience had been an anomaly and that the prostitutes of Rio were not like New York cabbies, constantly speaking to people in other countries.

With the advent of the Blackberry and the iPhone, it was going to become very difficult to find prostitutes who were free of the multi-tasking that had become a fixture of modern life. The old-fashioned streetwalker was obsolete. Paying for sex was becoming more like a promotional transaction, with the constant incentive to purchase a host of related services. Who knows what would have happened had I asked Tiffany if I could use her phone?

Just as I was beginning to put these thoughts to rest, the concierge of the hotel waved me over to his desk. He was dressed in a tuxedo, high-collared shirt, and bowtie, although his five o’clock shadow made him look like he had recently been making wanton love.

“Sir, it’s the girl you were with. She says she likes you and asks if she can come back up to your room. She is sorry that she had to be on the phone so much, but she promises that if she comes back she won’t take any long-distance calls.”

I couldn’t help myself.

“Oh, of course. Tiffany.” He was nonplussed. He plainly wasn’t familiar with my pet name for prostitutes. I wanted to explain to him that it was a little like the euro, that having a universal name for all sex workers was a form of globalism that facilitated commerce.

“Is she for real?” I asked.

“Yes, for
reals
,” he misinterpreted. “She’s a working girl, but I can tell she really likes you. I know that girl and she wouldn’t give up her long-distance calls for just anyone.”

I knew there were a million girls who would love to have my
reals
. Brazil is a land where flesh is cheap, but I was afraid that despite all the possibilities available, I could end up emptyhanded after my first day in Rio, waking up in the morning to an empty bed. I would be like the Buridan’s ass of medieval philosophy, which ended up starving or dying of thirst because it couldn’t decide whether it wanted hay or water. “Send her up,” I told the concierge.

Before I knew it, Tiffany was back in my room guaranteeing in broken English that she only had three more phone calls to make. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and with all my waiting I was now ready for a hot night of lovemaking. I called down to the concierge and told him that I would need Tiffany for the whole night, no matter what the cost. I figured that despite the language barrier, I couldn’t get bored with all the activities — fellatio, nude dancing, doggy style, missionary — I had picked from the menu. I didn’t count on the fact that Tiffany would treat my room like it was her office.

In fact, by the end of the evening Tiffany had so many calls coming in, and was carrying on so much business with swarthy teenaged boys who dropped off packages that looked like everything from stock certificates to hard drugs, that I seriously thought of taking another room just so I could get some sleep. The most interesting part of our evening together was that it was very much like a real relationship. I wanted sex and Tiffany was continually too busy for it. The one time we actually did try to have sexual intercourse in the doggy style that I prefer, she was, from what I could tell, on the phone with a Chinese pharmaceutical company in which she apparently owned a small interest. She shook free of me during a particularly heated exchange with her Chinese counterparts, before I had time to finish. I couldn’t help remarking how the circumstances reflected our new global economy. The only word of Chinese that Tiffany knew was something that sounded like “gong,” and from what I could tell, her counterparts weren’t fluent in Portuguese, so both sides were forced to speak broken English. There had been several news reports about contaminated shipments of the blood thinner Heparin, which was produced in China, and I hoped for Tiffany’s sake that the company she had invested in was not one of those involved.

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 parking lots of museums. Maybe seeing art put her into a heightened state — what some psychoanalysts have termed the Stendhal Syndrome or hyperkulturemia. Apparently she needed to get gangbanged every time she reviewed a show. After five or six floors of her seeming indifference, I began to fear I was the exception, the one man she didn’t feel compelled to use for sexual relief. It was only after we zoomed past the fifteenth floor and my eardrums began to pop that she pulled up her skirt and asked, “Do you want to play with my twat?” in a heavy French accent.

“Oh, you speak English!”

“Yes. So you’ll understand what I mean when I say I want your balls in my mouth.”

I felt embarrassed to say no, but I suddenly realized I had come to Brazil for the prostitution, not to have free sex with a French intellectual. I wanted a Rio whore. When she saw that I was not interested, she hiked her skirt up even higher and started to jerk herself off, which created the requisite degree of excitement in me. For a moment I toyed with the notion of a circle jerk, but I was committed to enjoying the manners and mores of the country I was visiting, and I didn’t want to do in the heart of Rio what I could readily accomplish in an elevator in New York. Before I could make any decisions about how to proceed, the elevator reached my floor and I decided to leave her to her own devices.

I’d fucked street whores all over the world, and whether in Paris, London, Prague, or Dublin, I’d only been with whores who were in it for the money. Only Rio had a reputation for having prostitutes who really
enjoyed
making love to their customers, and who were capable of forming true relationships, in which money, albeit important, was not the only part of the picture. They often say women marry men for money, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t love them. Of course the prostitutes in Rio wanted to be paid, just like anywhere else, but this wasn’t proof that at some point along the way they couldn’t create a loving relationship, however brief. For every Tiffany there was a john, and, hopefully, a Ken. Now that I was on the verge of being upgraded to more sumptuous digs, I could get down to the real purpose of my visit, which was to find a satisfactory, even ecstatic form of love for hire.