Chapter 2 American Crow #3
Ross had once seemed very grown-up to Felicity and me; when we were twelve, he was an “older guy.” And he was a few years older, but time had filled up the spaces between us so he was now not “an older guy” but a contemporary.
His parents and mine were close, and there were even photos of me and Ross and his younger brother Warren grinning on the beach in Florida during one of the winter vacations our families took together.
Not long before, my folks and his put on a neighborhood “progressive” Thanksgiving dinner.
My mom described this about five times as a “Friendsgiving,” until Nell deadpanned, “Did you just make that up?”
That November evening was cold, sidewalks sheer with black ice, as we all trooped along, two dozen people having cocktails
at one house, then salad at the next house. It was an odd thing to do, probably more impressive in the days when people traveled
by horse and buggy. This being Wisconsin, people were getting tipsy by two houses in, people staggering inebriatedly over
black-ice-slicked sidewalks carrying covered trays of shrimp toasts and squash rolls, house to house like overgrown trick-or-treaters.
Nell had fantasies of ten houses filled with dirty dishes that drunk people would return to later that night. “This is one
of the many, many reasons I don’t cook,” she said.
“Mom is the best reason,” I said. Our mother’s culinary efforts were legendary and not in a good way.
After we ordered our drinks and mains, Ross said, “Reenie, I’m not a real man.”
Putting on my best faux-psychologist manner and the nice open posture I’d learned from all those counseling visits I’d had
the summer after senior year of high school, I said, “How do you feel about that, Ross?”
He grinned and took a sip of his rum punch.
“That kind of drink isn’t going to do much to show that you have hair on your chest, Ross,” I told him. “All it needs is a
little paper umbrella. I’m teasing, I’m teasing!” And then I wondered why I couldn’t resist the temptation to needle an old
friend who I was trying to convince to spill the beans on his colleagues. “So how did you figure out that you were coming
up short in the masculinity sweepstakes?”
Ross said, “I don’t know. I thought I was okay with the nerdy academic who wore good clothes and played right field . . .”
“But . . . ?”
“But all these guys my age I knew were hiking to base camp on Mount Everest and biking the Black Mountain Trail in Canada. And my girlfriend can beat me at tennis.” He added, “I want to be the kind of guy who can fly fish but also be the kind of guy who doesn’t have to bring a bag of taco chips to the Friendsgiving . . .”
“Remember when we had that Friendsgiving that time when there was a blizzard on Thanksgiving and people brought all the things
they were going to bring to their family?” I said. “And that one woman brought a chocolate chip cheese ball . . . and we all
just stared at it like it was going to catch fire or something?”
“That was Gail Valenti,” Ross said. “The woman who worked at the public TV station and would only go out with guys she thought
looked like old-time mobsters?”
“Right. What ever happened to her? What kind of person would even think of a chocolate chip cheese ball? It’s like mushroom
ice cream.”
He said again, “Gail Valenti.”
For some reason then, my mind wandered back to Felicity and how we’d once organized a Christmas brunch with a couple people
our age and their mothers. I pictured us all drinking mimosas and stuffing our faces with quiche, and I wondered if Felicity
had already left college behind by that point, which cast a sort of eerie blue glow, like streetlights on an urban corner,
across that innocent scene. I tried to recall anything that I’d observed different about her that day, and no, there was nothing
I could recall. She was just as she always was: friendly, cordial if a little remote, well-dressed, her manners excellent,
her most genuine smile only for me. To my confusion, I felt tears gathering.
Ross was saying something and I quickly switched back to him.
“What would you compare that to for a woman?” he asked me.
“A life crisis?”
“Maybe like an epic passage in a woman’s life. I guess having a baby, huh?” This was one of the moments, not particularly
unusual, when I had to wonder if Ross, while a very nice guy, was about as thick as the ice in February on Lake Monona.
“I don’t know. It could be any number of things. Success. Love. Doing something that matters.”
“Do you think what you do for work matters?”
“I don’t know. I do think that everybody has the right to know everything they can. We see all the time what terrible things
happen when people rely on bad information. So yeah, even though I’m usually writing about purses, I’m writing the truth about
purses.”
“That’s a comfort to me.”
“So, Ross, let’s talk about Felicity and all this.”
He pressed his lips together and nodded. “Sure.”
“Are you okay with that?”
“Sure, but . . .”
“You afraid to get people mad?”
“Reenie,” he said, his eyes wide. “I’m reluctant because I care about Felicity too. I thought she was a great girl. If this
is all true, it’s sad, and if it’s all a lie, it’s even more sad.”
I told him I was sorry, and I genuinely was. I’d gotten defensive because of my emotional entanglement and I didn’t want Ross
to see me as unfair.
He went on. Rumor had it that several other teachers, including one on Ross’s softball team, had also known Felicity.
Ross stayed only a few minutes but long enough to say that he could never have imagined any of this in his wildest. Felicity always seemed almost prim, self-possessed to an unusual degree for people our age.
Had it been anyone else, Ross said, he would have suspected that she’d been the victim of some kind of violence or abuse, but with that family?
Her father, Roman Wild, was a minister, and Ruth was our high school chemistry teacher.
I was no fan of Rev. Wild’s brand of fiery fundamentalist Christianity, and I had not been raised in any religion.
But I knew Ruth well and really cared about her.
I knew Felicity’s two brothers, who were still kids living at home. None of it seemed to add up.
I wanted to talk to him again, at length.
My first task would be to get it in writing that my editor was on board. So I would head to my office for a meeting with my
boss, Ivy.
I’d done my research—finding out at least as much as I could about the modern world of upscale vice. It wasn’t something I’d
ever had a reason to think about before, though of course, trading in sex for money wasn’t called the world’s oldest profession
for nothing. (When my sister and I were kids, my parents offered us each two thousand dollars if we would promise not to have
sex before graduating high school. My mother called it the world’s second-oldest profession—not having sex for money.)
The language was one big change. Most scholarly writing considered the word prostitution to be derogatory now, with its connotation of selling yourself or even selling out. But what else was it? The more accepted
term, sex work, sounded like digging for sex in a hard hat.
Whatever you called it, the sex trade had evolved, especially since the age of the internet.
Most of the women were young, of course, but they weren’t all by any means desperate teenagers escaping a life of abuse.
On a street corner in a red-light district, that might still be the profile, but in the upmarket world of vice, there were college students or new graduates, dentists and nurses and exercise psychologists paying off their student loans, not putting their profits up their noses.
They were alluring but also wholesome-looking.
They were savvy. Sites like OnlyFans and smaller soft-porn chat destinations purveyed their services in cheerful ways.
Many required payment in advance, by card.
Virtually all insisted on well-established hotels, or, if they visited a client’s home, some took “body buddies,” male friends to stand guard in the car or the taxi or the lobby, keeping an eye on the time, staying in constant phone contact.
There were two sides to this: One vocal camp praised sex workers for asserting themselves. Some women involved wanted to see
it as a kind of payback, bamboozling men out of big bucks. The other side, equally vocal, said this way of life put people
on a collision course with darker forces. Slice and dice it how you would, sex work was still fucking for money. Linnea Noonan,
a feminist scholar and writer who’d once supported herself and her infant son that way, said portraying it as some jaunty
third-wave feminist twist wasn’t entirely honest. She’d created a forum called Council of Whores (COW) to debate these issues
online and in person.
“You can say, okay, there’s no job where you don’t have to hold your nose sometimes. But for every whore who chose this, there
are twenty who were pushed into it because they didn’t have a better choice.” Some of the biggest proponents of destigmatizing
the language, naturally, were men, the customers, because it didn’t make them seem quite so sleazy. Linnea said that the biggest
problem was that, at the end of the day, the body you’d sold was still the body you lived in.
Most women stayed in the life for a few years and then moved on. And when they moved on, this interval would be a secret lacuna
in their lives.
But Felicity had gone in the opposite direction, and, presumably, not out of need. Had she continued to be the stellar student
she was up until sophomore year, she could have walked out of college debt free.