Seven Days in Rio Read online

  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.

  On my way back into the hotel from one of my earlier excursions out to the Copa, I’d noticed busloads of scholarly looking men wearing horn-rimmed glasses, unloading outside the lobby. I later learned that the hotel was hosting an international convention of psychoanalysts, and that many of the events, which were to be held in English, would be open to the public. I have always been interested in psychoanalysis because it deals with two of the things I tend to obsess about: love and work. Maybe attending some of the lectures might be of help as I struggled to find the perfect Tiffany. My interest in psychoanalysis dated from my days as a Scout. I wanted to be an analyst the way some kids want to be rock stars, and I even stood in front of the mirror and had fantasies of being cheered on by the huge crowds that accompanied Freud’s first and only trip to the US, when he gave lectures at Clark University. Even after I became an accountant, I toyed with the idea of being a lay analyst, that is, someone who practices without an MD degree. I was young, and it seemed like a great way to get laid.

  Now, as I walked through the lobby, I noticed a chef splitting coconuts with a large machete in front of one of the auditoriums, where a poster advertised that morning’s lecture, “Ego Splitting, Homeopathy and Psychopathy in Adolescent and mid-life Peyronie’s Patients.” The abstract beneath read simply, “The effect of a crooked penis on the male psyche will be explored.” I decided to give it a try.

  Walking into the auditorium, I could see a lot of empty seats. The few people in attendance looked more like curious hotel staff than professionals, and I realized that most of the analysts had probably gone to the beach in search of sun and fun. While the presenter, Dr. Arnold Sunshine, was setting up his PowerPoint presentation, a short woman in what looked like a blond wig sat down next to me. She was wearing polka-dot hot pants, a tight halter-t
op, and heels so high they were feats of structural engineering. Most of the female analysts I had met back in Manhattan had severe-looking cropped hair and wore smock dresses. This being an international conference, I knew that many cultures would be represented, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to find that the distaff members of the Brazilian analytic establishment dressed like whores. I also wouldn’t have been the least surprised if they had names like Tiffany. The woman in the polka-dot hot pants leaned over and blew in my ear, murmuring something that I didn’t understand. Figuring that it was an important analytic issue having to do with the conference, I motioned her to follow me out to my concierge friend, who would be able to translate.

  She repeated to him what she had said to me.

  “Uh, the translation is: ‘Getting fucked in my hot cunt drives me crazy,’ ” Victor whispered slyly. I figured she must be a working girl, so I responded politely by saying, “Thank you, Tiffany, but I’m otherwise occupied.”

  When I got back to the ballroom, the lights had been turned down and Sunshine’s PowerPoint presentation had begun. On the screen was a picture of a crooked penis.

  I noticed that the audience, though small, seemed intent on Sunshine’s lecture. Did they allow themselves to feel any stimulation or to entertain any prurient thoughts of their own, even if as analysts they were supposed to be objective?

  After Sunshine had concluded his presentation, there was a little break in which the analysts gathered around a table to have schnecken and coffee. It was just like being in New York. Many stragglers must have come in during the slide show, because I noticed that the crowd had thickened and that there was even some degree of competition for the pastries, which seemed to be one of the main attractions for the hungry analysts.

  As I bit into a tasty cinnamon schnecken with raisins, I found myself staring into the eyes of a petite Asian woman whose breasts spilled out of her tight blouse. She was wearing highheeled platform shoes and a short skirt.

  “Hi, Tiffany,” I blurted. “I’m Kenny Cantor from New York.” I knew that Brazilians were a mixed race, made up of Portuguese, Spanish, Indian, and sometimes even Asian blood, so it wasn’t much of a leap to assume that she might be a Rio whore, even though she looked Chinese or Japanese.

  “Perhaps you are mistaking me for someone else. I’m Dr. Dentata. What institute are you with?”

  “Well I’m certifiable, if that’s any help.” Dr. Dentata didn’t seem to get the joke. “I’m a CPA.”

  “Oh, a CPA with analytic training, I find that very interesting. I think that more analysts need to take courses in accountancy. I remember that song that Pete Seeger used to sing: “Well, Doctor Freud, oh Doctor Freud/ How we wish you had been differently employed/ But the set of circumstances/ Still enhances the finances/ Of the followers of Doctor Sigmund Freud.”

  I don’t think Dr. Dentata realized how loudly she was singing, because a crowd had gathered around her, several of them humming along to the tune. I half expected one of them to pull out a Fender and start playing the bass line.

  After her impromptu concert, Dr. Dentata held out her hand. “Well it was nice talking to you,” she said.

  “You too, Dr. Dentata.”

  “Just call me China.”

  “China Dentata, that sounds like Vagina Dentata, a syndrome in which the vagina is deemed to have teeth, which then turn it into an agent of castration.”

  “Yes, everyone says that. I don’t know what my parents were thinking. My grandparents were among the Japanese who were put in internment camps during the war, but that doesn’t explain why my parents didn’t name me something more common, like Yoko. They were ’60s hippies who took acid and practiced free love, and they were into giving their children unusual names. My father was Dick and they named my brother Moby.”

  “Well, it was nice to meet you. Goodbye, China.” I realized that she was an analyst, and that analysts usually don’t have sex with their patients unless they are suffering from very severe counter-transference. But I wasn’t her patient — yet.

  Despite my childhood fantasies, it may seem odd that a CPA would know so much about psychoanalysis, but I’m from New York, and all educated New Yorkers are experts in psychoanalysis, whether they undergo treatment or not. H. Rap Brown once said violence is as American as cherry pie. Well psychoanalysis is as New York as Pakistani cab drivers. Many German and Viennese analysts who had been refugees from the Nazis settled in Manhattan, which sports as many psychoanalytic institutes as England has soccer teams. The New York Psychoanalytic Institute is the Manchester United of the lot. Growing up in Manhattan in a family with aspirations to be culturally au courant, I amassed statistics about psychoanalytic stars like A.A. Brill, Ernest Jones, Sándor Ferenczi, Ernst Kris, and Phyllis Greenacre the way some kids memorized the batting averages of Joe Dimaggio, Yogi Berra, Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron. My favorite was the French analyst Janine Chasseguet-smirgel, author of the tome Creativity and Perversion. She was the equivalent of an excellent minor league player, to the extent that her work was only known to the relatively small coterie who collected psychoanalytic memorabilia.

  China was carrying one of those quart bottles of Volvic water, which she gulped lasciviously as she entered the central atrium of the hotel. I almost followed her, thinking I might find her turning tricks like so many of the other inhabitants of Rio. I was sure that China was a very good therapist. She was attentive and empathetic, but I was also certain that she could equal if not better her reputation by changing her name to Tiffany and adopting the life of a whore. She had the looks, and every bone in my body told me she had the talent.

  Our parting had felt a little like the last scene of Casablanca. There was no plane waiting to take her away from me, there was no heroic resistance leader standing between us, no war, and I wasn’t a hardened American expatriate named Rick. Yet I felt I could hear the strains of “As Time Goes By” playing on the piano in some beat-up North African café. China — the very name created a frisson.

  When would I ever see my China again? It didn’t take long to answer the question, as she walked right back into the auditorium, swigging from an even larger bottle of water. I still hadn’t decided what my approach was going to be. If I took it for free, we would be in a real relationship, where raw emotion was the currency. And if I became China’s patient, I would have to put her in the position of employing the transference in an unethical manner. I felt I needed a therapist just to work out the mess I’d gotten myself into.

  Unfortunately, I was again deviating from my plan. I was well into my second day in Rio without having enjoyed the abundance that was supposed to be everywhere, if I was to believe the sex tourism guides and online reviews of Rio nightlife. When I had first considered taking my vacation in Rio, I had simply Googled “Rio + prostitution.” The sheer number of results, along with the four-star ratings and exuberant descriptions, had played a large role in my booking a flight.

  But all was not lost. Even though I hadn’t yet gotten what I came for, the psychoanalytic conference being held at the hotel was a welcome, frequently titillating diversion. I had a lump in my throat as I read the notices for the afternoon panels: “The Oldest Profession: the Neuro-Anatomy of Streetwalking” and “Working Girls: Parallels in Phone Sex and Telephone Analysis.”

  Now is probably as good a time as any to talk about how a nice Jewish boy like me came to spend most of his adult life with prostitutes. It was really very simple. From an early age, I knew there was something wrong with me. I didn’t have any friends, and no girls seemed to like me. But the sluttiest girl in my high school class, Janet Borges, agreed to go to the senior prom with me. With thick lips, smudged from countless make-out sessions, and huge tits, she was crudely sexy. She always wore a short cheerleader skirt with no underpants, even though she wasn’t a cheerleader. Most of the members of the school’s varsity football team had fucked her, and no one considered her respectable prom material. I purchased the usual corsage, which was the price I had to pay for my first fuck in life.