“You’re late,” Corinne said.
I was just a few minutes late, but late nevertheless, and bleary-eyed. The morning was so alien, I had become infatuated with the wash of light on the buildings, the cars, and the concrete sidewalk studded with shiny stones. My observations slowed my pace as I walked uptown to Corinne’s. She answered the door already prepared for the day in one of her flowing caftans, shaking her head in open disapproval.
“There’s a few things I want to make clear to you. Then, after you’ve thought it over, if you’re sure this is the life for you, I’ll book you.”
“Oh, Corinne, I didn’t realize this was an interview,” I said.
Corinne ignored this and plunged on. “Number one, no decent man is ever going to marry you. Might as well kiss that good-bye. Number two, once you’re in the Life, you’re in. No way out. Blue money’s too easy and it’s too good. Understand?”
A decent man? I had no sense of what kind of man that was. A dull man, is that what Corinne meant by “decent”? No dull man would ever marry me. Oh well.
“But I know all this, Corinne. I’ve thought it over. Honestly I have,” I said.
I started to look around her living room, which I had never seen in daylight. Corinne had pulled the curtains; a blast of piercing noonday sun assaulted the room, exposing every wrinkle and stain on the satin-covered furniture. The place looked like it had a hangover.
“So you think you got it all figured. Well, I’m gonna give it to you straight: if you really did, a girl like you wouldn’t be here. I was a shanty-Irish lunk of a kid from the Jersey Shore. Grew up in a house crammed with people. I had to get out. Finally, one day, I walked onto the boardwalk and turned a trick. You, there’s no point. With your background, you should be up at Columbia or somewhere hustling the intellectuals,” she said.
“I’m sorry if you don’t approve, but I can’t stand intellectuals. Columbia gives me the creeps. I’ll do whatever you want.”
“All right, if you’re that determined, come back tomorrow morning at ten sharp. I mean sharp. If you want to do this the right way, not like some flake, first of all, you have got to have discipline. That means regular hours,” Corinne said as she pushed me out the door. The kid gloves were off.
“I won’t be late again,” I called out from the hallway.
And I wasn’t. I went on a maintenance program, confining myself to a few Dexamyl in the daytime, a few drinks and a ten-milligram Valium at night.
Corinne visited the Coventry, and she approved. My L-shaped studio faced the East River on Sutton Place, and that was good. The dressing room, the indirect spotlights on the ceiling, and the mirrored wall, which looked out on the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge and the open sky above the river from the height of the seventeenth floor, all of that was good. But she suggested it might be time to furnish the place, especially if I planned to run a business out of there.
My apartment still stood empty, except for a queen-sized bed, a lamp, opaque window shades, and a white Princess phone, but if anything, I thought the bareness of it, like a gessoed canvas waiting for its masterpiece, only added to the sense of impending glory. I loved to stand looking out my large, clean window at the bridge and the boats, feeling vindicated, feeling, for the first time in a long time, blessed.
Next, Corinne took me shopping on the second floor of Bloomingdale’s, home to a maze of designer-boutiques. We tore through the racks, and I managed to spend practically all I had saved over the past few months on a summer wardrobe: designer bell-bottom jeans; fancy shorts; a formal-looking Ralph Lauren summer pants-suit of brushed cotton; a long, fitted skirt; several cotton and silk button-down shirts; a floral-print, chiffon blouse; a black cocktail dress; one midi-dress with dolman sleeves; the new cork platform sandals, and the dreaded high-heeled shoes.
I couldn’t bear to have my new wardrobe sent, so together, Corinne and I piled the big Bloomingdale’s shopping bags into a cab. With the help of the doorman, we got everything upstairs, where we heaped it onto the fluffy new quilt on my bed. The Bloomingdale’s shopping bags sported that month’s theme, which was a celebration of Mexico. Stick men in ruffled shirts, round women in bright shawls, and a childlike orange sun scrawled overhead decorated each of these magical packages. We dove into them, freeing the contents from yards of tissue paper, which we threw high in the air. We took turns holding the clothes up to my body.
“Well, pal, you’re starting to get it together,” Corinne said, her broad Cheshire cat face beaming at me over my shoulder in the mirror.
Finally, my mentor sent me to her upper-out-of-sight beauty salon on Fifty Seventh Street where they actually did make me over. The stylist performed his slight-of-hand miracle, snipping while we chatted in front of the mirror. He shaped my fine hair, layering it subtly around the face, introducing a long, wispy bang that thrilled me. Then he shooed me on to the colorist, who decided what I needed was streaks of tawny-blond, not so light that the outlines of my face would disappear, but fair enough to bring out the green in my eyes. Instead of a cap, he wrapped small sections of my hair in tinfoil that had been cut into strips, because, he said, it would look more natural. The two men consulted each other. They hovered around me and whispered.
“I think her brows need shaping,” the stylist said.
“He’s done a marvelous job on that baby-fine hair, hasn’t he?” the colorist asked me, addressing my image in the mirror.
This was exactly the sort of experience that gave me the keenest pleasure, two grown men fussing over my hair, my skin color, and the angles of my face, which ordinarily I spent hours staring at all by myself. When they finished with me, my hair fell in rich, shiny tendrils down my neck. When I moved, it shimmered and bounced gently around my head. My hair was an asset! At last, a real asset! I understood then that beauty is nothing more than the expression of energy, someone’s energy.
After Bloomingdale’s and Frederico and company got through with me, I looked so well-heeled I had become a stranger to myself. No more picking at my fingernails, which were now a perfect rose pink; no more bare-faced afternoons—it was seamless and streamlined, this existence. I felt like a greased pig.
“Never mind, you’ll get used to it,” Corinne said. “Think you’re ready to hustle?”
“Sure,” I said, of course not feeling ready at all.
“This is in case you lose your book and every client in it, or you have to move to a new town; whatever the circumstance, you’ll always have hustling to fall back on.
“First, you stake out one of the toniest hotel bars, the more conservative, the better. Then you go there, maybe carrying a shopping bag or two from Bergdorf’s, dressed as demurely as is humanly possible. Then you discreetly, and I mean discreetly, hit on the likeliest-looking mark. But always watch your back. The house dicks work these places like jailhouse guards. They’re out looking for trouble, and they don’t want their nice, family-men-type guests to be exploited.”
“What do I say to the mark? How do I open? And if I’m disguised as some super-conservative dame, how am I going to let him know I’m peddling my ass?”
“That’s up to you. No two girls use exactly the same approach. Hustling takes some skill, I have to admit, but everybody finds their own gimmick eventually. You just have to figure out what yours is,” she said.
So I learned how to solicit the visiting businessmen who dropped into the dark, cool, wood-paneled lounges during the afternoons at the cushier hotels on the Upper East Side. I never really enjoyed that end of the business, even though, as Corinne had predicted, I did discover a scam that worked for me. I would pick on the most happily married man I could find, the one who wouldn’t dream of cheating on his wife, let alone paying for it. I would tell him that I could teach him how to give his wife more pleasure, that it was a sin for a married man to be so inexperienced. “The blind leading the blind,” I would tell him. I tried to make him feel guilty. I was amazed this approach ever worked. Not often, of course, but even when the mark had no intention of buying, he never failed to find me amusing, as if I were another colorful New York side trip, like a visit to Chinatown on Saturday morning or a performance of Oh! Calcutta!
“Man is not monogamous,” that was my line. I was just repeating what Corinne had told me. I remember with certain regret one shy man from outside Des Moines who had always been true to his wife until he met me. By this time, I believed so completely that practicing monogamy was living a lie, I saw nothing wrong in seducing him. In fact, I couldn’t wait to enlighten the shy man from Des Moines.
Shortly after I moved into the Coventry, my old friend Whitney, a dance major from our alma mater, looked me up. I had not heard from any of my classmates since I had been kicked out of Pendleton, a college for budding libertines and aspiring dilettantes.
Traditionally, students had a hard time getting ousted from Pendleton. My friends thought I was a rebel to be admired; actually, I was usually too sick in the morning to get out of bed. Indeed, I was mortified that I suffered from acute anxiety attacks whenever I tried to enter the library, or that my crippling hangovers forced me to shun the classes of the very teachers who had offered the most encouragement. This is what drove the dean, finally, to ask me to leave. Immediately, I took off in the middle of the night with the reckless debutante Cynthia Austen White Andover Poole in her souped-up Thunderbird, the driver handicapped by a scared kitten crying and crawling all over her while she gunned the accelerator on the southbound thruway. As far as I know, neither one of us ever went back. Whenever I thought of that sanguine campus designed to replicate an old New England town, its open commons set high on a real New England plateau, I was filled with remorse and eager to put the whole experience behind me. I thought I had long since severed all ties with my Pendleton college chums.
As luck would have it, my college friend was in a hurry to sell her mother’s tasteful furniture, enough to fill my little apartment. I gladly paid out three hundred dollars, the sum she had decided she needed to get across the country and establish herself at the ashram she was about to join in Colorado.
I had gone from knocking around like a stray on the backstreets to living in a fabulous big studio with a view of the East River, full of nothing but silky, varnished mahogany, fancy upholstery, and a walk-in closet very nearly jammed with clothes. Marvelous. And the best part was that I was sane, unassailably sane. Just as I suspected, money made the difference. Nothing like the grounding influence of things to keep me on track. I was shining with health and cosseted by all my possessions; for the first time in my adult life, I felt that I was a success.