Francis Levy - Seven Days in Rio

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.

As the night ended, and I went so far as to imagine us trying to get our kids into Manhattan private schools, I began to suspect that she was picking up on my distinctly domestic fantasies and wishes, while at the same time finding them hard to process.

Even Brazilians have to stop dancing and eating and having sex so they can get some sleep, and when the sun started to assert itself as more than a decorative presence, rising over the Atlantic, beating down on us as we swayed to a morning mambo, the true nature of my predicament stared me right in the face. Though paying Tiffany would be no problem (I had plenty of reals on me), I had no way of getting back to my hotel, even if I wanted to, and I didn’t have any pants. As trivial as it may sound in a liberated society where nudity is rampant, I was still a Manhattanite at heart, and felt uncomfortable walking through a hotel lobby in my underpants. Indeed, I hadn’t noticed any Brazilians parading around the hotel in my state of undress. It was one thing to be naked on a beach or in somebody’s hacienda or even, like Tiffany, cruising around in a sports car. It was another to waltz up in one’s underwear to the concierge at a hotel, where a certain degree of formality and decorum were required. In addition, what if I were to walk into the lobby of the hotel and run into Herbert Schmucker or China Dentata?

I noticed that Tiffany had fallen asleep on a chaise longue, and for a moment I worried that she might get a sunburn on her pussy and not be able to perform her professional duties. But I assumed that her dark complexion enabled her to absorb sunlight better than a North American like myself. I hate to wake up a sleeping hooker. It is so rare that prostitutes get to sleep while on the job, and I felt the level of trust that had been building up between Tiffany and me was something that had to be cherished and cultivated, especially if we were to create a life together and become the top horses in each other’s stables.

There were so many unresolved questions. I had to get back to the hotel and into psychoanalysis, if only for a few days, while Schmucker and China were still in town. With all my experience, I knew that psychoanalysis was not like the trauma therapy they give to the survivors of plane accidents, earthquakes, and hurricanes. I was aware that it was a slow, laborious process that went on for years. But Lacan had revolutionized analytic treatment with his short sessions that sometimes lasted no more than a minute, and for which the patient still paid for his full hour. I saw no reason why I couldn’t pay some outrageous fee to be psychoanalyzed in the three remaining days of my vacation. Psychoanalysis wasn’t part of my original package, which included airfare, deluxe hotel accommodation, and continental breakfast, but with the psychoanalytic conventioneers occupying so many rooms at the hotel, I knew there must be plans that offered therapy, as well as sex, as part of a package.

I hadn’t paid Tiffany a cent, but I figured she was running a tab and that when we were done she would present me with a bill for the numerous blowjobs she had tried to give me, as well as for the failed fuck while we had been dancing. It wasn’t as if these were tax-deductible items that needed to be itemized, but I’m an accountant, so I like to know what I’m paying for.

I whispered softly into Tiffany’s ear, asking her if there were any buses that could take me back to the hotel. “Don’t you want to try to stick it in again?” she murmured, pulling my prick out of my bikini briefs and holding it in her mouth like one of those cigars that Fidel Castro used to puff on.

“I think we need to talk.”

“Okay, let’s talk,” she moaned as she filled her mouth with me.

“I want to end the relationship.” The words came out of my mouth involuntarily and I wanted to take them back immediately. Tiffany took my penis out of her mouth for a moment, holding it in her hand as if she were the master of ceremonies at the mic, about to toast the bar mitzvah boy. Without making any pronouncements, she started sliding it in and out of her mouth vigorously. I guess she felt she could suck my feelings away. Perhaps she thought she could blow my brains out. This had occurred at several moments in my adult sex life, when an orgasm was so overpowering that it essentially became an outof-body experience. I think she had the idea that she was so good with her mouth that she could use it to eliminate any of the doubts I might have had in my head.

I don’t think I’d ever tried to come so many times in one twenty-four-hour period, all unsuccessfully, and I couldn’t remember ever getting so close to a hooker as I had to Tiffany. But I didn’t lose my resolve.

“You’re a beautiful, young woman with a lot going for you. But I’m not ready to settle down and spend the rest of my vacation with the same woman, no matter how expensive her services are. I still haven’t even set foot in The Gringo. I feel like I would be doing myself a disservice.”

“The Gringo is just filled with whores,” she said.

We just looked at each other with the resignation that a couple has when something painful yet very true comes out in a counseling session or a conversation. I couldn’t believe what was happening, and I was filled with doubt, but I also shored myself up and adopted a steely determination. I would have put my pants on if I had any.

A few minutes later I was standing at the bus stop below the cliff that faced the mountainous estate, which looked dramatically out over a pristine ocean vista. The whole scene was Jane Eyre in reverse. Tiffany was the tormented Rochester in his aerie. I was the innocent Jane, forced to rely on reason and old-fashioned common sense to survive in a sea of overwhelming emotions. As much as I longed to return to the estate’s hallowed halls and lay my eyes on Tiffany’s operatic Venus mound, making love beneath the portraits of the great whores and sluts of her aristocratic ancestry, I knew I had to break away from a relationship that was doomed from the start.