Seven Days in Rio (9 page)

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.

The buses coming down into Rio from the mountains are supposed to follow a schedule, but despite very different topography they behaved similarly to the buses on Fifth Avenue, which come in herds and then disappear completely for long stretches of time. I wasn’t sure what bus to take, and I didn’t have the Brazilian equivalent of a MetroCard, but I had the kind of
reality
that could get me anywhere. Hanging around at Tiffany’s parents’ estate, I was at the top of the economic ladder. Brazil is still a third-world country with a huge population living in shacks and shantytowns, and if 150
reals
will buy a 69 from nobility like Tiffany, it wasn’t hard to imagine what the Tiffanys of the peasant class would do for even less. Hitching a ride back to Rio for the same amount seemed like a more than reasonable expectation.

A crowd of leathery peasant women in muslin dresses, their hair wrapped in scarves, suddenly surrounded me. Perhaps it was the bikini underwear. I immediately asked which way to the Copacabana. One of them must have understood me since she pulled out a piece of paper and pencil and started to draw a little map of the Rio shoreline. Unable to decipher her crude map, I immediately asked if any of them had a global positioning device, calling out the letters “GPS” to make my point. They couldn’t figure out what I was talking about and they turned their attentions back to the heavy burlap bags filled with produce they were readying themselves to heft. Soon a bus rounded a sharp curve, bearing down on us at such a high rate of speed that it looked like the centrifugal force was going to cause it to careen off the side of the cliff. But the old hags had their eyes on something else, pointing excitedly toward the gardens at the back of the huge estate, their toothless mouths gaping with screams of delight. Looking up, I glimpsed Tiffany’s father’s infamous gang of naked gardeners, their personal topiaries glistening in the morning dew. Before following my fellow travelers onto the rickety bus, I noticed that its luggage rack was piled high with suitcases and boxes, which looked perilously in danger of either falling off or causing the bus to topple on its side.

As we moved toward the center of the city and then out toward the Copacabana, I noticed that even though it was early morning, the streets were filled with hookers, who I assumed were just coming to the end of the late shift. There was only one time of day when it was really hard to get a hooker in Rio, and that was from mid-morning to early afternoon, when the night shift had already gone home and the girls who worked from 4 p.m. to midnight had yet to punch the clock. It was like in New York, where it’s impossible to get a cab between three and five in the afternoon, when the night men have yet to come on. The only difference was that hookers in Rio didn’t have off-duty signs to turn on like taxis.

To my relief, I wasn’t the only person in the lobby walking around in his underwear. In fact, men clad in boxers, briefs, or old-style Jockey underpants, of the kind my mother used to buy three-for-$5 at Woolworths, outnumbered those dressed in normal street clothes. It was apparent to me that most of the men, tourists like myself, were still in somewhat of a daze, undoubtedly having experienced one of the best nights of their lives. I walked over to the auditorium where the analytic conference was set to convene to check into that day’s presentation.

The lecture of the day was on “Erotomania,” a condition also referred to as De Clerambault’s Syndrome, in which a person has the delusion that they are desired by a well-known figure who doesn’t even know they exist. Before I’d left for Rio, the case of Uma Thurman’s stalker had been in the headlines, and when I’d read the accounts I considered the possibility that the stalker was actually in the right, that Uma was really in love with him but just didn’t know it. Being reminded of this made me question my whole night with Tiffany. Maybe I was just another john to her. Maybe I was investing a tremendous amount of emotional energy in someone who didn’t even fully grasp my existence. Maybe the guilt I felt about breaking away from her was a figment of my imagination.

I also had forebodings about Schmucker and China Dentata. They met so many people — would they even remember me? In addition, I was feeling the stress typical of anyone at a psychoanalytic conference who wants to make time for sightseeing, although in my case the sights were the accoutrements of local streetwalkers. How could I attend the lecture on erotomania, get some sleep, get laid, and also have time to terminate an analysis I had yet to begin? Analyses go on for years, but there is no time limit and no strict rules, especially since the Lacanians had shown that sessions didn’t have to conform to the 50-minute model, and could be as short as one minute in duration. There are 60 minutes in an hour. If I devoted 60 of my remaining 96 hours in Rio to analysis, I could have the equivalent of 3,600 Lacanian sessions, based on the one-minute model. The typical patient, who sees an analyst four days per week for approximately 48 weeks of the year (since most analysts take August off), only does 192 sessions in a year. So by my calculations I would be able to undergo the equivalent of almost 19 years of analysis in roughly four days, simply by shortening my sessions to the absolute minimum allowed by the academy that regulates Lacanian analysis.

With regards to China, there was something more global that I didn’t even want to think about. It related to the compromise of her analytic neutrality. I was starting to veer into a series of thoughts typical of most patients — thoughts that led to the inevitable desire to sleep with one’s analyst. In my case, the fantasy was complicated by the fact that I wanted to sleep with an analyst with whom I hadn’t even begun treatment. I wasn’t sure if the transference with China could be called positive or not.

When I crossed the lobby, I could see China sitting in the breakfast nook of one of the hotel’s restaurants, auspiciously named The New Yorker. I could see the back of the head of the older man she was talking to, and even though I had never studied phrenology, I was sure it was Schmucker. I was seized by a murderous jealousy that almost made it impossible for me to sit down and have a little breakfast of my own. I was afraid to look, afraid that the emotions of seeing Schmucker and China, who I now began to suspect were lovers, would provoke in me an impulse-control problem with grave repercussions. Still, I put one foot in front of the other and headed for a long table covered with bowls of stewed fruits, plates of pastries and croissants, and platters of cheese and cold cuts. Sitting down at a table, my legs shaking with agitation, I was surprised that I had the wherewithal to ask the beautiful, young waitress, who was wearing a nameplate on the breast pocket of her uniform that read “Tiffany,” if I might obtain an omelet to anchor my breakfast. Tiffany was playing with her skirt, and she picked it up enough to reveal the little pink fold that gave away the fact that she wasn’t wearing any underwear. I noticed a banana nestled in her apron pocket in a suggestive way that only Brazilian waitresses knew how to pull off. Even fruits had lost their innocence in this Garden of Eden. She pulled the banana out, rubbing it against her elegant neck and then rolling it across her lips.

“We have some very nice bananas,” she said. “They’re still green, but when you take them back to your room they get ripe.”

I was about to go into analysis, where it’s recommended that patients avoid any major life changes for at least the first year, which according to my calculations meant I shouldn’t start seeing any new Brazilian whores for at least another 3 hours and 12 minutes. Of course, who knew when that would be, seeing that I hadn’t talked to China or Schmucker about starting treatment. But how was I going to explain this to my beautiful bananawielding Tiffany? Clearly, a woman so charmingly unperturbed by the social conventions of underwear could hardly be expected to understand the exigencies of Lacanian analysis. If I told her I was going to have 3,600 one-minute sessions, translating into the equivalent of 19 years of therapy in the remaining 96 hours I was in Rio, she would undoubtedly think I was nuts. Long-term therapy has always been hard to explain in modern times, with our need for quick fixes and painless remedies, and Brazilian society is no exception. I wouldn’t have known where to begin when it came to explaining something like Lacanian analysis, in which a therapeutic interaction that only lasts a minute costs as much as a one-hour session.