Seven Days in Rio by Francis Levy

girls who just wanted to have fun. I realized my possessive attitude toward Tiffany would get me into a lot of trouble with my Sullivanian psychoanalyst friends back in New York, and that my delusions and desires would make it increasingly difficult to take a realistic attitude about the rest of my vacation.
    I began to think that I should call the hotel and try to speak to China, or even the great Schmucker himself. On the other hand, Schmucker, though known for his insights, was not known for his empathy. Legend had it that he had once told a patient that if he needed support, he should get a jockstrap. I’d caught a glimpse of him giving a presentation in another room as I left Sunshine’s lecture, and he talked about the human psyche the way a drill sergeant speaks to his men before an engagement. In fact, his account of one of his cases reminded me of a Pentagon briefing by the Joint Chiefs of Staff after a bombing in Iraq, and when he’d finished it sounded much like George Bush’s fateful “mission accomplished.” Even though Schmucker kept repeating the Freudian mantra that there were no easy answers and that everything was over-determined, he was plainly trying to persuade his audience that he really did have the answers. I was afraid that even if I managed to find the courage to wake him in the early morning hours and negotiate a fee, he would just tell me I had to leave Tiffany if I wanted to achieve a happy life with a hooker. The other thing I realized was that Tiffany, for all her aristocratic upbringing, was neither a happy camper nor a carefree hooker. I had known that from the first moment I looked down into her crotch, and then up into her eyes to see that she was crying. I started to wonder if my cock had not become to her what a pacifier is to a baby. Perhaps constantly putting cocks in her mouth every time she felt sad was a way of running away from her fears.
    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