“Yum. Yum. Yum.” He tossed me another twenty.
Help me become somebody else.
—
It scared and surprised me how much I loved being watched. The music, the bright lights, the rapt crowd, the filthy dollar bills tossed at me. I made so much money that I stepped right over the one-dollar bills. I was nineteen. I’d bleached my butt and given lap dances to a varsity basketball team, but scooping up singles was somehow beneath me. When the lights came on, the club smelled of semen and industrial air freshener. Benzos didn’t work. The only way I could come down was to clean, so I got on my knees with a Brillo pad and ajug of industrial Clorox. I’d scrub until the sun came up or I came down, whichever happened first.
Then I’d go back to my dorm room and I’d take a long shower and I’d sleep, the Laura Ashley comforter pulled over my head, the Tiffany light Queenie gave me and a Mary McCarthy book on the bedside table. All I wanted to do was sleep all day and wake up in the late afternoon and eat a breakfast burrito. But I knew that no matter what time I woke up, Emily would be there. Emily was always fucking there. Judging me. Trying to save me. A ghost of the girl I used to be. The girl who had dreams of studying art at Cooper Union. The girl who painted and wrote bad poetry and pretended to be “literary.” The girl who’d never even had a boyfriend. Who’d never done more than make out in the back row of the suburban metroplex. Who’d definitely never shaved her labia with a men’s BIC Flex 5 trim and shave. Who’d never curl into a ball in the shower. Who’d never let the scalding water pound on her back as she sobbed and thought about the essay she had due in her Power of Prose class. Who thought about a Jean Rhys novel and dinner parties and trips to Paris. Who’d let the hot water run over her and thought about anything to not think about what happened that night.
Emily, always annoying me, always droning on about art and books and this fantasy of a future that she’d laid out for us in New York, like she watched too many episodes ofSex and the City. I may have been a stripper with a burgeoning drug addiction, but she was the delusional one. Truly. How could she look in the mirror and not see the truth? That she was, at best, average. Nothing she wrote was original or special or worthy. She got this hirsute boyfriend who published a poem in theOxford Americanand read Proust in a hammock outside his garage apartment. I instantly wanted to do him, just to piss her off. I couldn’t help it. She was so grating, always talking about moving “up east,” as if the big city needed her. Yes, Emily, the NewYork literati are just waiting for you. Graydon Carter is saving you a spot at the Waverly Inn. Nobody wanted Emily. Not her mother. Not her revolving door of father figures. Not the incoming freshmen who filled out their dorm-room compatibility quizzes. Emily—even the name feels plucked out of a 1990s baby name book by someone who didn’t care enough to flip the page. I had to get away from that bitch.
The Gold Star Fashion Modeling Agency had nothing to do with fashion or modeling, but the agency got me far away from Emily and Texas. They got me real work, a makeup artist, catering, a set, rules, sex acts I could refuse to do. The men—the producers and actors (if you can call them that)—all had to agree to my guidelines because I had a face like a fucking angel, which you could only see if you clicked past several pages of “Asian babes” and “Sapphic Sorority Sisters” and inserted your credit card details. You don’t find that face every day in the adult industry. This was before every slut with a webcam could make a living. This was the movies (sort of).
I did maybe two videos—one of which prominently featured a mason jar (don’t ask)—before I graduated to become a type of luxury good, sold at a very high price to a select group of subscribers on the dark web. Later I would learn that the videos were a sales tool. Test-drive the new Maserati. John (that was actually his name) kept a database, Excel spreadsheets with intricate details about all the girls, our ages, backgrounds, STDs (bonus if you were like me and had none), languages spoken (English, conversational Spanish), education (some college), and paired us with men. Sergio saw me in the mason jar movie and requested me. I guess it started from there, these superrich guys, the travel, the jets, the on-demand services. I was good at being a professional girlfriend because the more I had to think about someone else’s needs, the less I had to think about my own. I loved seeing the world. Although I hated the parties, putting on a fake smile, and pretending that we’re not all about to have an orgy as soonas the last oligarch’s wife leaves. I saw the sights, met some interesting people, had arguably one of the world’s most valuable collections of La Perla negligees. Emily probably thinks I was hustling outside a Pancake House in Kentucky when in reality I was hitting the foie gras station and sixteen types of caviar at the buffet at the Peninsula in Shanghai. I’d walked along the Bund, strolled into galleries, shopped at Shanghai Tang, pushing the limits on what I could spend, but it never even made a dent. Money didn’t mean anything to these men.
I learned that the best thing about having money was the ability to think about things other than money. I dyed my hair, got a nose job, had my implants removed, anything to make sure no one recognized me from my earlier work. I started to read theFinancial Times. I gave myself the kind of education I never would’ve gotten at a football school in Texas: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus. I learned French, picked up some Mandarin. I took easily to the tennis courts and ski slopes and even played pickleball. You would’ve thought I was from Connecticut. Word started to spread. I didn’t need John or a database. If you wanted someone discreet, classy enough to bring to charity events and cocktail parties, smart enough to hold her own, to talk literature, current events, the markets, but dirty enough to do whatever she’s told, I was your gal.
But the best part about the work was that it made me forget Emily. To finally quiet that incessant, annoying voice saying “You’re better than this” and asking “What about your dreams?” And “Are you still writing?” I know that even if I told her all of this, really opened up about how successful I am, how I’d gotten clean and built an interesting and lucrative life for myself, she’d still look down on me. Maybe not to my face, but deep down, she’d think I was some hot mess who needed to be saved. Okay, so my “career” came with some caveats (nobody loves getting cum on fresh makeup), but it was basically thelife we’d always dreamed about, and I’d built that shit out of nothing. Forged a fascinating existence out of Vaseline and baby wipes. I’d started out stripping by a regional airport, the walls shaking every time a flight landed. Graduated to a strap-on at a studio in the San Fernando Valley, and two years later, I was wearing a Versace bustier on a mega-yacht in the South of France. If that isn’t success, I don’t know what is.
I’d forgotten Emily in order to survive. So if you ask me, she got what she deserved, summoning me back like that.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
• • • • •
We are almost toRiver Oaks. Holden is asleep in the Cybex Aton G lightweight portable travel car seat that we had to have and, until now, had never used. We ride in silence, except for when the driver offers me an Altoid. We turn off the inner loop and drive past the country club where my grandpa played golf and into the leafy, oak-lined streets with the understated elegance of Georgian and Tudor and English-style mansions built in the 1940s and ’50s. He turns on Lady Bird Lane and down Kirby Trail and we reach my family’s home, a redbrick traditional with a wraparound porch and a huge oak tree that shits pollen all over the driveway and makes my mother’s allergies flare up but that she can never tear down because it would decrease the value of the house.
I find the spare key in the potted petunias that died a long time ago. I try not to wake my mom. She’d been so surprised when I said I was coming to visit that she’d asked where I’d be staying. “Um, with you?” All she could say was “All right then.”
I hadn’t been home in two years. Roman, who had always been the diplomat, thought I should make an effort with my mom, so we flew to Houston for Thanksgiving. My mom was still living with a retiredradiologist named Javier in a sprawling starter castle in a new development in Sugar Land. Javier and his three brothers deep-fried a turkey, proving their virility by tossing a bird carcass pumped up with hormones into a vat of flaming grease. It was delicious. My mom had recently had back surgery and was too medicated that visit to make much of a scene. She drank a bottle of pinot and passed out on a leather sofa, the Cowboys game on, drooling in Javier’s lap.
Now, two years later, I find her, single again, in a Valium-and-wine nap on the orthopedic La-Z-Boy that we bought my grandpa after he had a hip replaced. It doesn’t go with the rest of the house. The TV is on, a rerun of one of theLaw & Orders—some girl pulled out of a ditch near Wollman Rink. It’s impossible to travel quietly when you’ve got a baby, a stroller over your arm, and a Cybex that is not nearly as portable as they claim it is. Holden cracks his eyes, disoriented. “Shhhh. Hey. I got you. I got you.”
Before I know it, the TV is off. My mom is snapping back the La-Z-Boy and walking toward us, rubbing her eyes, trying to put us into focus. I stop, step off the stairs to say hello. My eyes scan the living room that at Christmas used to have a Douglas fir to the ceiling decorated with soft white lights and silver ornaments. Madame Alexander dolls underneath. The indents on the frayed Oriental rug, the only hints of the baby grand I used to play. My mom must have sold it. Empty bottles of Yellow Tail, press-on acrylic nails in a Lalique ashtray, a stray tea bag on the wooden coffee table. My mom moved back in a year ago when things went south with Javier. I couldn’t imagine being a middle-aged woman sleeping in the bedroom you grew up in. Her parents’ once-stately home, now a halfway house between husbands. But it didn’t seem to faze my mom. She’d find another man.
“What happened to your face?”
“Nice to see you, too, Mom.”
“I didn’t know when you’d get in. I would’ve run to H-E-B.”
She looks appalled by all of my gear, my wild hair, my oversize men’s clothes. She’s about to start in on me and then softens at the sight of her grandson. I look at Holden looking at my mother. He’s changed so much. His face thinner, his sandy ringlets have turned a dusky chestnut, straightening out at the top. He is at an age when, depending on the outfit (and if it has real buttons), he looks like either a baby or a tiny salesman. I was not much older than Holden, sick with a stomach bug, when my mom left me outside on the lanai rather than clean me up. My grandma got home from bridge and found me in my Fisher-Price bounce chair, crying and cold and covered in shit and sick. She petitioned for partial custody the next day.
My mom reaches for Holden, as if she never told me she didn’t want grandbabies, as if she’d always wanted a dozen of them nipping at her slippers on Sunday mornings. “My goodness. Would you look at that baby? What a beautiful, beautiful boy. Looks just like his daddy!” She can’t help herself.
“Say hi to your grandma,” I say to Holden, making “grandma” sound as elderly and postmenopausal as possible. My mom’s face contorts.
“What about Glammy?” she says to Holden. Has she actually been thinking about this? “You like that? Glammy?” Then she says to me, “It’s Granny and glam—”
“I get it.”
Holden is chewing on her necklace, a long, gaudy heirloom thing with a leopard charm. She doesn’t stop him. I touch Holden’s nose. “He’s a good one,” I say, prying the chain out of his mouth. Who knows where that thing has been?
I’d had twenty pounds of baby on me for ten hours, through TSA screening, a feeding at a Cinnabon, and a three-hour flight with a poop diaper right when they came around with Delta Biscoff cookies.I fed Holden a steady stream of organic banana and sweet potato Happy Baby puffs like he was a sea lion in captivity, but even that didn’t keep him still. I would’ve handed him to anyone: the guy at the airport with theUnvaxxed, Overtaxedtrucker hat; the man who recently chased us down the Bowery groping his invisible breasts, shouting, “Mama. Mama. Give me some of that!” Anyone except my mom. She doesn’t know how to hold him. She is clumsy, a hand between his legs and on his back. I cushion his tush in case he slips. She grabs one of his bare feet.
“Mommy doesn’t put socks on you? Our whole body’s energy comes through the feet. Yes, it does…You’ll get sick…Yes, you will.”
I take him back. “He hates his socks. He pulls them off, and you catch a cold from bacteria, not bare feet.”