Floating City (28 page)

Was this how these events were going to affect her? I wondered. I pictured a pilgrim's progress from innocence to experience that left her with the same Machiavellian approach to life she despised in her own parents. The psychology of entitlement
required
a victory. Was that the difference between her and the girls who didn't “get” it?

Maybe she felt guilty, because she softened her tone. “You should check in with J.B. sometime. He likes you. And you're both making movies now—maybe you can do some business.”

“I don't exactly make his kind of movie,” I said.

“I realize that. But all that porn stuff is a side thing. He's going legit, or at least he will be. I think he's making some kind of urban-thriller-lower-depths thing. You can talk about aspect ratios or whatever.”

She stopped at a plain red metal door in a brick wall, putting her hand on the knob and grinning at me. “And you always wanted to hang around rich people—excuse me, investigate their secret codes.”

With that, she pulled open the door and led me into the building, which turned out to be an art gallery under construction. A pair of workers were running wires and putting up wallboard.

“This is what kept me going,” Analise said. “I kept thinking about this place.”

“Is this yours?” I asked, surprised.

“Yes! I mean, not yet, but soon, I hope. Kate owns it now.”

She'd been talking about doing something in the art world for years, but it was only when the money started pouring in—a few weeks before J.B. started stealing it, in fact—that she realized the time had come. Her friend Kate happened to be looking for investors, so it all came together quickly. She even managed to convince her mother to chip in a few dollars. With time and more money, she hoped to invest enough to become a partner. Impressed, I realized she was playing the game on a level almost inconceivable to Angela or even Margot: not to make the rent or lay up a nest egg, but to build wealth. They were selling piecework; she was creating leverage. Her sense of entitlement unleashed her ambition.

She led me to the back, where an older woman was issuing instructions to someone over the phone. “If they want us to host, it will have to be after December. Tell her we're getting full, so she better act fast.”

She looked up at us and spread five fingers, the universal hand signal for
Give me five minutes
. Analise led me into another small
room, where the walls were raw and the desk was a door on sawhorses.

“My office,” she said.

My heart leapt. “Your
office
?”

For the first time that day, Analise gave me a big smile. “Boy, do we have a lot to talk about.”

Again, I thought of Angela. Her Brooklyn apartment had been the first step toward some kind of financial stability, a small-business dream to clean ill-gotten gains, sign up for a credit card, and someday maybe even move back to the Dominican Republic with a little retirement savings. I'd lost count of the number of times she'd dreamily narrated this story, as though she was the lonely office worker staring at a postcard of Tahiti in her cubicle in mid-January. Manjun and Santosh and so many others did the same shuffle between illegitimate and legitimate economies, flouting the law when they needed to but always hoping for the day when they would be freed up from sex work altogether. For Analise and her crew, the jump between legal and illegal was more like a game, and losing didn't mean death or prison; it just meant “Go back to Start. Do not pass Go.” To Analise, the chance to invest in Kate's gallery was just a chance to advance to the next round and talk about herself with a new clarity and purpose. She wasn't slumming; she was an
entrepreneur.

Just at that moment, the other woman called her name and we went back to the main room. This was Kate. She seemed to know all about me. Carrying a pack of cigarettes and a cup of coffee, she led us out to a small backyard and the requisite smokers' table and began to explain the situation as if I had come for that exact purpose. Which I suppose I had, without knowing it.

“Analise is going into the art business. It will take a year or two, but not much more than that.”

I looked at Analise. She took a deep breath and presented her case as if I were a jury—just as when Shine tried to convince me he
had philanthropic intentions when he beat the crap out of the young black men who worked for him. “I decided I'm going to be really good at this, and I don't care about the consequences.”

Was she serious? Was this some kind of psychological mechanism to allow her to keep moving forward?

“I was foolish—I admit that. I put myself in a vulnerable position. Because I was doing things halfway, playing at it like a little rich girl. So I have to decide, am I going to let some drunk asshole run my life? Some guy who beats up women? That's who gets to make my decision? Or should I find a way to
deal
with it?”

At this point, Analise's speech became halting. She still hadn't figured out all the details, but the intention was clear. She was going to escalate her work as a madam. For the foreseeable future, which she expected to be of short duration, she would throw everything she had into the trade. Earn enough revenue, launder it through Kate's gallery, where she would slowly build up an equity stake, then get out of the game. The key was to dive in deeper and focus her energies on running a productive business. She vowed not to get beat up in hotel rooms anymore, as if that was something she could completely control. She began talking about the ways she would be helping the Jo Jos and Kimberlys of the world, though she didn't push it very far, because even she knew that charity didn't suit her. But she was clear on the main point: no more lollygagging; time to get serious and make a real go of it. In the great American tradition, she was determined to offer the best possible service for a good price.

Female empowerment seemed like an odd issue to bring into this decision, but it wasn't the first time I'd heard prostitution put in those terms. Streetwalkers and high-end escorts alike talked about the autonomy and feelings of self-efficacy they earned from the skillful sale of their bodies. And they were always talking about their savvy exit strategies. Managers like Margot and
Analise were especially prone to this. In fact, nearly every escort service manager, madam, and pimp I'd ever met loved to talk about the day they would quit. Very few really enjoyed directing other women to sell their bodies, and the ones who did often turned to drugs to numb their pain and guilt. Some of this was endemic to the life of any hustler, however. I had heard Santosh and Shine speak of similar dreams. This seemed to be a natural product of the strange relationship to the future people have when they start experiencing success in the black market. They realize that the only real future is with the thieves that come after their money and the police who come after their freedom. So they pretend the future is bright.

Shakespeare said it best: if you have no virtue, assume one. But watching Analise put on her new disguise as full-time-madam-for-a-while brought the illusion and the danger home to me. I could see how it helped her push ahead through her fear, but if she actually started believing in her fictions, where would she stop? What dangers would she overlook?

I also had an intuition that the relationship with Kate was not going to work out. It was just a feeling, but the thing about laundering money seemed like a bad sign. Analise was taking on too many risks. She was wealthy and she didn't need to worry about hiding and laundering her cash. That was the kind of thing Shine and other ghetto entrepreneurs had to worry about. So why go into business with Kate? What did Kate give her that she felt she was lacking? Something didn't feel right.

Maybe Kate sensed my skepticism. She tapped her cigarette against the edge of the metal table as a reflective expression came over her face. “I've known Analise since she was a baby,” she said. “Our families spend summers together.”

The phone rang and she said she'd be back in a minute, crushing her cigarette under the toe of her stiletto. Analise began filling
in the rest. A musician, Kate quit school to travel and her father cut her off. Her mother still sent her money through their lawyers, but she didn't touch it, said she'd give it to her kids when the time came.

“Why an art gallery?” I asked.

“A lot of men come here,” Analise said. “She gets to know them real well.”

I sighed.

At least she'd finally decided to let go of Brittany, she said. “She's acting totally crazy. She's calling up people at their offices and setting up dates herself.”

Point by point, she filled me in on the rest of her business plan. There were planned investments in new artists, especially beautiful young females who would attract wealthy men to the gallery, exhibitions and liaisons with galleries in Paris, Rome, Mumbai. I couldn't tell whether the illicit activity would be going global as well, but this was still the upper-class version of Shine I'd been searching for. Analise was also moving “downtown,” and using new connections to create new moneymaking schemes and capitalize on the worlds she could bring together. “Reach out and touch someone” was being given an uglier meaning. I did my best not to be judgmental, but I felt I was seeing a life unravel in front of me, with little of the empathy I felt when watching Carla or Angela succumb to similar pressures and desires. I realized then that the distancing effect of being a professional observer actually allows you to feel things you can't feel as easily with your own friends. You expect more from people closer to you. You allow yourself to get angry with them. Maybe this was another reason I tended to study the poor. Maybe I really did find safety in their difference, even though I kept telling the world that treating them differently was patronizing. It was something to think about later, when things were more calm.

•   •   •

T
oward the end of that summer, I decided to take Analise's advice and check in on Junebug—in my mind, that's what I still called him. I had seen him a few times since the night at the hospital, once at a screening and once in his production offices, when he was a completely different person—much more at ease and in control. He even got me to suggest some “urban” story lines for his next movie. Now that he was in production on a legitimate film, I was curious to see how he was managing the transition.

I dropped by his new office a few days later. The scale of his operation surprised me. At least ten production people were drinking coffee amid legal pads and laptops, a pair of whiteboards were covered with scheduling details, props and costumes awaited final touches. “Sorry, Sudhir,” he said. “We're running a little late.” Then he turned to his crew, all business. “The new pages won't be here until Monday, but everything is the same in terms of the schedule. So let's try to get the casting done—which means you, Jimmy. Try to focus on the job instead of chatting up the hotties.”

When they were finished, J.B. asked me to step outside on the roof to smoke a cigarette. “Never go into business with friends. My dad keeps telling me that.”

“Those guys are your friends?”

“I went to boarding school with them.”

“Lost any yet?” I joked.

J.B. smirked. “I'm not sure I ever had any to lose.”

They were all part of an investors circle, he explained. They had money but no experience, and they all wanted to get into movies, so they'd each put up a half million bucks for a shot at the glory of cinema. “Which means that everybody gets to give their input,” he said with another cynical laugh.

They had been doing this for a few films now, starting with
student films and then porn and now this. I asked how much money they'd spent so far.

“A lot.”

“Lost much?”

J.B. laughed. “I put fifteen grand into dot-com stocks just before the crash of 2000. I'm never playing the market again.”

I understood the lure of films, I said. You could reach such a wide audience. But I couldn't conceive of gambling away thousands of dollars.

“That's the difference between you and us,” he said, shaking his head as if in pity. “We know you have to get in the game and stay in the game. Because once you're in the game, you're
in the game.
”

Back inside, I handed J.B. an outline I had written for him—Carla's story, basically, starting with the beating and then her push into the escort business. I expected him to put it aside and read it later, or not read it at all. Instead he asked me to sit down and leaned back in his desk chair like a mogul, holding the pages in front of his face. A few minutes later he tilted forward and slapped the pages on his desk. “These are
great
,” he said. “Let me pay you for this.”

“I'd rather get to know your rich investor friends,” I said.

He laughed. “Never going to happen.”

“I don't want to
poach
them.”

He knew what I was after. He cocked his head and gave me an appraising look. “What do you make of this tribe, Mr. Anthropologist? Figured it out yet?”

With that, I knew I could eventually get him to cooperate. Despite his cloak of cynicism and the standoffishness that seemed to be part of having money, he was as susceptible as most of us are to Carl Jung's great maxim:
The desire to reveal is greater than the desire to conceal.

“I have a few theories,” I said.

One theory, in fact, was that my initial assumption about the
remoteness of the rich was wrong. I had a hunch that Analise's newfound commitment to life as a madam and J.B.'s playful resistance to my interest both shared the same eager motive. Analise wanted to prove that her skills and savvy outweighed her wealth, and J.B. wanted me to see him as something more than a category (preferably, as the next Samuel Goldwyn). Both wanted me to see them as making it on their own. They wanted me to recognize them as authentic themselves rather than mere products of their gilded environment—which struck me as bitterly ironic, since poor people, authentic almost by definition, rarely seemed to give a damn about whether they made it by pulling up their own bootstraps. Those who had so little were only too happy to take help from anyone willing to give it.