Seven Days in Rio (8 page)

A large oil truck happened to be coming right at us as we rounded the turn. For a moment, I was sure I was going to meet my maker, so I closed my eyes and thanked God that at least I would die next to a beautiful, aristocratic Tiffany who far exceeded even my wildest imaginings. I love psychoanalysis, but I’m also an aficionado of modern drama, and my life was beginning to remind me of Strindberg’s
A Dream Play
. I couldn’t tell the curves of the body undulating next to me from the curves in the treacherous mountain road that we were climbing. It was a curious medley of emotions, a mixture of joy and terrible fear.

I almost lost my breath when we pulled up in front of two huge gates guarded by naked Valkyries who had Uzis strapped over their shoulders in a way that barely obscured their breasts. The only uniforms they were wearing were stiletto high heels and the kind of officer’s hats worn by The Village People. Both of the guards had big hairy bushes that made my mouth water. I was reminded of Castro’s guerillas, who had distinguished themselves with their fulsome beards.

“Are they whores too?” I asked.

“Sure, everybody who works for us is.”

It turned out her mother, Tiffany, was one of Brazil’s most venerated whores. She was of mixed ancestry, representing the wedding of two distinguished family lines. Tiffany’s grandmother had been a famous Amazonian princess whose legendary sexual abilities were documented in the Brazilian equivalent of the
Kama Sutra
. She’d married a Portuguese general who’d achieved notoriety for his conquests both on land and in bed. Tiffany told me that when her mother was making her way as a famous prostitute, she slept with a majority of the members of both houses of Brazil’s parliament, making her the most powerful woman in the country, at least while congress was in session. Even though she was a known prostitute, her beauty was such that she constantly received marriage proposals from some of the most renowned figures in politics and the arts, but she had turned them all down in favor of living the life of whoredom that she loved. It was only when she was well past her prime that she’d finally settled down with one of her best customers.

Despite Tiffany’s torrid past, I wanted to make sure that before I paid for sex I’d succeeded in creating a meaningful relationship between us. Anyone can pay for sex, but it’s the rare john who can create a bond based on respect, dignity, and shared goals.

I had never met the parents of any of the whores I’d fucked over the years. I felt that the opportunity to meet Tiffany’s parents was a privilege that could only increase our intimacy. Tiffany had revealed herself to me, in that she had been nude from the moment I met her, but this was a chance to really get to know the person beneath the beautiful breasts and outspoken Venus mound. I was going to be humping a woman whose history was now an open book to me, just like her genitalia. In the past, I would pay for sex and only afterward, sated and proud of my monstrous capacity, would I indifferently begin to ask a few probing questions. Conversation was exactly like fucking. When I paid for a woman, I could do anything I wanted to her, and our post-coital repartee was just an extension of my desire to explore. I would ask how many men she had screwed that day, how she had gotten into the life, and even what she did about her periods.

The mansion was situated atop a huge piece of rock and surrounded by gardens. Tiffany entered a security code and an electric gate opened. We drove to the end of a long gravel driveway that led to the entrance of the stucco-walled mansion itself. There was a strong Oriental influence in the structure, which was like an enormous pagoda covered with an elaborate tile roof. Despite the guards all around, there was an air of total freedom, as the doors to the rooms (including bathrooms) were all open. I no sooner walked in than I passed a bedroom where a couple was involved in an act of vigorous missionary sex. There was a winding marble staircase, which reminded me of
Auntie Mame
, especially when Tiffany called out what I took to be the equivalent of “Hi, Mom” in Portuguese and a stunning creature wearing a long, open silk robe descended the stairs to greet us. I loved Tiffany, but when I saw the mound between her mother’s legs, which actually looked like a raccoon, I knew I was in real trouble. If there is a psychoanalytic term for the desire for the mother of a woman you want to fuck, I was suffering from it. I should have seen the writing on the wall, but I wasn’t looking at a wall when Tiffany’s mother held out her hand.

“Kenny Cantor,” I said taking her hand into mine.

“Tiffany” she replied in a matter-of-fact tone that acknowledged the provenance of her name. Her breasts touched against my seersucker jacket as she kissed me on both cheeks in the European style. Her name was actually Tiffany de Los Santos Salazar. “I’ve heard so much about you. I’m looking forward to fucking you later,” she purred.

I wasn’t sure how she could have heard about me, but in the age of high-speed Internet and the Blackberry, anything was possible. I had noticed that Brazilians texted almost as much as they fucked. I also realized that from a psychoanalytic point of view the situation in Tiffany’s house conformed to neither the classical Oedipal nor interpersonal models, and that I might need a more cutting edge approach in order to understand the relationships within the family.

“Tiffany, your father wants to see you before dinner.”

“He probably just wants a blowjob,” she giggled.

The nudity and intergenerational fucking were surprising — all the more so since, glancing at my watch, I realized it was three in the morning. Like all college kids, I went out for hamburgers or pizza after late-night parties, but in Tiffany’s family everyone dressed up for dinner in the wee hours of the morning. In fact it was the only time they dressed. Like Jews who recline at Passover, by the end of the meal the women had their slinky dresses pulled up to their navels so they were ready for the obligatory tango that followed all major meals. That was in fact how Tiffany and I almost consummated our relationship. We were dancing closely in a style that used to be called The Grind when I was in high school, and Tiffany simply reached into my little bikini underwear and stuck my penis into her. It didn’t take much since my erection had been growing ever since the meal ended, and she lazily began to pull her elegant gown up to reveal her fury cunt, which I had nicknamed Che (after Che Guevara), but just as I was about to come, my eyes locked with her father’s and I lost my erection.

The short-circuiting was so overwhelming to my senses that it must have eradicated some of the mnemonic pathways between the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex. I’m a bit of a heretic when it comes to orgasm, which I believe has transcendent and even religious facets that divorce it from the vicissitudes of the conflicts that preoccupy psychoanalysts, so I was surprised by the failure I was experiencing.

Despite the disorientation created by the blockage of my own energies, I noticed that Tiffany’s mother was dancing with one of the waiters who had served dinner. I couldn’t help associating her hairy pussy with the hairstyles of geniuses like Mozart, Beethoven, and Einstein. Tiffany’s father was already getting blown and rimmed by two of the pool attendants. I had felt a little self-conscious when Tiffany pulled her dress up and started to dance with me right in front of him, but after we were done dancing and had returned to the table for coffee, dessert, and aperitifs, he seemed totally unruffled by the fact that I had just tried to fuck his daughter.

I noted almost immediately that possessiveness and jealousy were absent in this household. Here was a family unit seemingly devoid of any rivalry or generational antipathy. It reminded me of the Sullivanians back in Manhattan, who had attempted to break down some of the patterns of Oedipal conflict by abolishing exclusivity in sexual relationships.

Tiffany’s parents’ home was like an old-fashioned hippie commune, except that it managed to maintain all the trappings — fancy cars, gardeners, pool attendants, servants, and security guards — of aristocratic society. I realized that servant girls getting fucked by the master was no real advance in civilization, since it practically defined the master-servant relationship throughout history, but, outside of the Marquis de Sade, I hadn’t heard of any aristocratic manses where everyone was on such an equal footing.

I didn’t know if I was falling in love with Tiffany or her family’s way of life. My own family had had a Russian cleaning woman who came to our Kew Gardens apartment once a week, but she was hardly the kind of woman you wanted to see without her headscarf, much less in the nude. I came from a totally middle-class background, which exuded none of the glamour of Tiffany’s aristocratic forbears. My parents mostly sat in front of the television watching Milton Berle and Lawrence Welk, drinking tea and rooting among the chocolates in the thick Barricini boxes for the ones that had the caramel or nougat centers.

I knew that Brazilians, like many Latin peoples, liked to eat late, but dessert didn’t end until dawn and had many courses of its own, including a segment in which naked Amazonian women with unusually large secondary sex characteristics passed out
digestifs
and played the bongos. I noticed that whenever I started to make romantic gestures toward Tiffany, she quickly suggested an activity that was more appropriate to a hooker. When I tried to kiss her, she immediately asked me if I wanted her to go down on me. When I took her hand, she wanted to know if I wanted to finger-fuck her, at one point offering, “You can do me in the ass, if you like.”

While at first I was afraid that I was getting so exclusively involved with Tiffany that I wouldn’t be able to play the field and meet other eligible whores at The Gringo, I now started to imagine all kinds of scenes of domestic bliss with her. Now that I am thinking about it, I realize that my desire was predicated on impossibility. The only reason I let myself want Tiffany was because I realized I couldn’t have her.

Still, I couldn’t stop marveling at her crotch, and I imagined that hairy bush lying next to me every night, offering me solace like my old dog, whose furry snout was always within reach. I imagined living on this Edenic estate, where I now felt like little more than an interloper. Of course we would acquire an estate of our own, overlooking the beach at Ipanema, saving money by wisely managing and investing Tiffany’s earnings. I would add to the pot by doing a little tax work of my own on the side. I’d pay homage to Tiffany’s great grandmother by playing old Stan Getz albums. I allowed myself the luxury of imagining a whole family. I would ensure Tiffany’s legacy by fathering a whole line of daughters, talented whores in their own right, who would proudly parade their pudenda in the family name.

I knew in my heart that Tiffany, however introspective she was for a whore, however deep her perceptions and however articulate she could be, even with my penis in her mouth, was basically one of those girls who just wanted to have fun. I realized my possessive attitude toward Tiffany would get me into a lot of trouble with my Sullivanian psychoanalyst friends back in New York, and that my delusions and desires would make it increasingly difficult to take a realistic attitude about the rest of my vacation.

I began to think that I should call the hotel and try to speak to China, or even the great Schmucker himself. On the other hand, Schmucker, though known for his insights, was not known for his empathy. Legend had it that he had once told a patient that if he needed support, he should get a jockstrap. I’d caught a glimpse of him giving a presentation in another room as I left Sunshine’s lecture, and he talked about the human psyche the way a drill sergeant speaks to his men before an engagement. In fact, his account of one of his cases reminded me of a Pentagon briefing by the Joint Chiefs of Staff after a bombing in Iraq, and when he’d finished it sounded much like George Bush’s fateful “mission accomplished.” Even though Schmucker kept repeating the Freudian mantra that there were no easy answers and that everything was over-determined, he was plainly trying to persuade his audience that he really did have the answers. I was afraid that even if I managed to find the courage to wake him in the early morning hours and negotiate a fee, he would just tell me I had to leave Tiffany if I wanted to achieve a happy life with a hooker. The other thing I realized was that Tiffany, for all her aristocratic upbringing, was neither a happy camper nor a carefree hooker. I had known that from the first moment I looked down into her crotch, and then up into her eyes to see that she was crying. I started to wonder if my cock had not become to her what a pacifier is to a baby. Perhaps constantly putting cocks in her mouth every time she felt sad was a way of running away from her fears.

All these thoughts were running through my head as I watched the sun rise over the distant
favelas
of Rio. I was becoming more and more involved with perhaps one of the most mysteriously alluring Tiffanys I’d ever encountered. We had now been together longer than I had ever been with a prostitute, and all she did when she wasn’t dancing naked or trying to fulfill my sexual urges was cry. I tried to take the analytic attitude of a listener, keeping a poker face while at the same time making terse editorial comments aimed at getting her to talk about some of the feelings that were coming up. Inevitably, I ended up popping out with some of the typical shibboleths of analysis: “Do I remind you of your father?” and “Is my interest in you perhaps causing some discomfort?” Considering my own dysfunction, I might have asked myself if her father reminded me of my own, but comparisons between the Brazilian industrialist and the middle-class Jew from Queens simply fell flat.

I asked her if she realized that there were women who were not prostitutes and, based on her response, I could tell it was something she really hadn’t thought about. Her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother had all been well-known Brazilian whores. All the rest of the women in her family were whores, as were all her friends, and naturally all the female employees in her father’s factories and on his estate. Prostitution was the only life she had known. I was beginning to think that the problem, in some regard, was me, and that it went back to the first time she’d seen me strutting around The Catwalk in my bikini underwear. Perhaps she’d realized I was relationship material, while at the same time not having the awareness to deal with the emotions that her attraction to me was eliciting.