power, sex and money; or to tango with The Vampire

Now 46, I thought I’d left behind the opportunity to be some rich man’s paid mistress. I am, at least in my own approximation, a faded beauty, a blown rose, a woman clearly and ineluctably past her visible prime. I have wrinkles, cellulite, a spatter of grey hairs, and a perceptible slackening of flesh. I have begun to show my slow submission to the great mistress gravity, that inescapable force that will make every one of us her bitch, eventually.

I know that my evaluations of myself tend to the austere, even the draconian. I am, in a word, harsh with myself. I always have been. It is a hard habit to break, and as I age, I find it yet harder not to view my softening and my drooping with an eye more charitable than a Calvinist’s. I, therefore, had thought that I’d gone beyond the time when any wealthy man would extend the brass ring of mistresshood.

The idea of being a mistress touches me with a frisson that combines the electric thrill of pleasure and the creeping horrorsloth of morality. I have a fascination with mistresses. In last spring’s fit of bibliotaphic acquisition (a mania that, parenthetically, continues to hold me in its thrall), I bought around five books on the world of the Parisian demimondaine: those women kept by men of society, money and the arts in during the belle époque. I read about Harriette Wilson, Coral Pearl, and Catherine Walters; the men who kept them; the houses the men built for these women; and the culture these women spun around themselves like a glamorous cocoon. It seems an intoxicating, if fraught, life, at least as they lived it, a hundred-years-and-change and a continent away.

I admit that my notions of this coddled yet precarious courtesan’s life appeals to my inner rebellious romantic. I have always had a soft spot for women who get by on their wits and their tits, and I’ve always held a similar warm berth in my bosom for those who live lives that flip the big, fat bird to social constraints. Plus, the money seems awfully nice, as does the lifestyle. The part of me given to flights of whimsy appreciates the aura of insouciant freedom that surrounds the kept woman, even as the rational part realizes that this freedom is bought at a steep price. It’s a price I can’t pay, it turns out, even though I’m broke as a nag and about five bucks away from abject insolvency.

Just before Christmas, I received a series of texts from the man I have named here The Vampire; these texts escalated in size and fervency. This man is a rich, rich man, a man so stupidly wealthy that he razed his perfectly cozy vacation house to build a 10,000 sq. ft. monstrosity whose visible foundations he studded with imported fifteenth-century French stones, because twenty-first-century American ones weren’t quite picturesque enough. The Vampire is a man of ridiculous wealth, or a ridiculous man of wealth. Your choice, really.

He is also, I’m quite sure, fairly insane. Said insanity being a facet of his personality that always makes me stop and ponder at anything he avers to me, no matter how fevered, how frequent or how tempting. And yet, after several fevered texts wherein The Vampire virtually kowtowed in text-speak and offered upon digitally, and lexicographically foreshortened, bended knee to repair the wrongs he had done to me, I responded. He wanted to right wrongs, he said and said again unto inescapable notice.

These were prodigious wrongs, and though I didn’t trust him, and though I didn’t believe him, and though I was bored, and though I did it against my better judgment, I eventually wrote back. Thus began a correspondence that crescendoed in The Vampire’s offer to “take care of me” if I acquiesced to “hang out” with him, an offer he made both via email and in a surprise phone call. Apparently, “hang out” remains code for “have sex with” even when the speaker is in his late thirties, married, wildly successful, rich beyond reason, and quite possibly sociopathic.

Let me be really clear about my financial situation at the moment. I am poor. I am beyond a day late and a dollar short. I am on the other side of living hand to mouth. Every month, I look at my tiny income, and I move stuff around so that I can afford to eat as I pay my rent, cell bill, credit card, utilities, pet food tabs and the like. Any untoward expense like a haircut or new contact lenses immediately stretches my budget beyond its bursting seams. My bottom line is not pretty.

It was, then, not without a tremendous amount of twitch-laden reluctance I turned down The Vampire’s dubious offer to “take care of me.” But I did, and in the end, I told him my bottom line is that I don’t date married men (we dated four years ago; he had wedded in the past year and a half; he admitted this to me, though I’d already discovered his married state through a sly and clever device I call “Googling”). He said, “Well, if that’s your bottom line.” I said it was and we said good-bye.

My last, stony assertion to The Vampire isn’t strictly granite. I will sometimes sleep with a man who is married. I’m not a hardliner about marital fidelity. I understand there are grey areas—marriages on their individual path to dissolution, couples who have ceased to couple, people who choose flexible marriages—but I also know a grey area from one saturated with static, and I’ve grown self-protective. Apparently.

But I wonder how self-protective I really am, for if I was truly protecting myself, wouldn’t I have chosen, as some other women do, to make some money while being happily bedded while swaddled in a luxury hotel room and high-count sheets? An article from Time magazine on a book by nearly the same name, “The Truth About Woman, Money and Relationships,” made me reconsider my knee-jerk denial to The Vampire. In this article, the book’s editor, Hilary Black, discusses how much money influences the relationships decisions made by women in a precarious profession like, say, freelance writing. Black says, “I think that women [who] grew up as the children of baby boomers — certainly, from that generation on — felt they had a lot of options, and one of the options was not to work. I think that's why so many women who wanted to make their own way in the world and did so very successfully are kind of caught up in this conflict and this ambivalence about who earns the money,” and then she notes that while lots of women do marry for money, they don’t talk about it.

No doubt they’re also reluctant to talk about when they fuck for it.

I once was an accidental whore. But I’ve also found myself in greyer and much more culturally acceptable areas—times when boyfriends (or ex-boyfriends) have given me money for rent, food, and other necessities. And if I’m honest with myself—and I do try to be—as much as I hate the ethos of movies like Pretty Woman or, more recently, Sex and the City, I buy into it. There is a part of me that finds the thought of a cardboard cut-out of a man, a cold and emotionally unavailable man, a man with more hard cash than molten emotion, a man who can “take care of me” appealing. It’s with terrible truculence that I admit this thought, but there you go. I guess it’s true that you hate most in others what you hate in yourself. I hate Pretty Woman, and yet Pretty Woman lives a life of quiet desperation deep in my breast.

But when the offer was extended to me, when the great not brass but gold ring was dangling, I smacked it down. I walked away. Sure, I walked away with regret, I walked away cursing my ethics and my self-knowledge and my stupid unwillingness to extend trust to this man who so clearly did not deserve it. I walked away while waving a tearful good-bye to cash and luxury goods and happy romping with a man who, despite his insanity, I actually liked, but I walked away.

If the triad is power, sex and money, in saying no the two latter, I kept the former for myself. It’s a nice thought. I just wish that I could count on my ethics and my good sence to pay my overdue rent.

Comments

[Svasti]

Sounds like a very sane decision to me - even if the money would be nice, you don't need that kind of insanity in your life or your bedroom. No matter how much you like him. Self-preservation is definitely a good thing, methinks...

[Jack B]

I agree that it was a good decision. If I recall your previous posts correctly, this man seems to enjoy getting women to trust him and then hurts them in ways that are completely legal. He sounds twisted.

[Raj]

Ethics are like those red velvet ropes; most people don't cross them but very few ask as to why are those barricades there to begin with!

At the airport, Aloha airline needs those velvet ropes so everybody can check-in without stepping on each other's toes; but at 8.39 pm, with nobody else around, do those ropes really make sense?

Unethical thing to do here would have been to promise to hang out with Mr. Vampire but then start scheming so that he divorces his wife and may be dangle a big rock in front of you. Unethical thing would have been to secretly tape the rituals of "hanging out" and then blackmail him. I don't think you had any such kniving plots in mind!

Financial issues corrode the soul. To avoid having that brown stain, you are willing to hang out 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week, with a roommate that you will undoubtedly hate, but not be intimate with somebody who admires you?

Of course things are more complicated than that; they always are; we enjoy reading your musings precisely because you have charming internal constraints and a beautiful way to expose and nudge them.

We missed you CG; hope you will continue to write here sporadically.

[Pete]

CG,

As usual, a well written scholarly piece that conveys your position and dilemmas in mind pictures and goes through to show that your ethos are upheld.

Your writing is a pleasure to read and one that evokes familiarity even if we do not know you in the corporeal sense.

Keep writing, please!

Pete

[Karl Elvis]

God, I want you.

I just needed to say that.

[Septguy]

I've dreamed of having a "mistress" CG. Not that I can afford one, not that I can see how men who are married or involved with someone else can juggle both of them, visions of small curved bottoms being juggled around and around, the juggler's eyes focused on each as they pass overhead.

My sense is once the financial issues were calmed, your focus would then have been on ...a cutter guy, someone who wasn't pulling strings, etc. What would it have done to your creative writing I wonder? Would it have been fuel for the future or an dark cloud over you?

Good to hear from you.

[sufferkate]

I have been reading your blog (linked from Tara's [hobostripper]) for some time now, and I am completely awestruck. I love the word 'horrorsloth,' too, by the way.

[1st Republic 14th Star]

1 -- You did the right thing.

2 -- This is a very good piece of work. Please keep writing.

3 -- I urge everyone who sees this to do what I'm about to do -- put a little something in the tip jar.

[1st Republic 14th Star]

Hey, what's the deal? Does this tip jar button not work any more? How do we make donations, then?

[chelsea g]

Oh, gosh. Thanks, Mr. Vermonter. No, the tip jar doesn't work. Amazon stopped their service, and I've not yet replaced it with another one. If you're gunning to give me money and have a PayPal account, you can PayPal (the verb) money to me with my email address, chelseagsummers@gmail.com.

Thank you so much for all of your support. It really means an awful lot.

kissykiss,
chelsea g.

[1st Republic 14th Star]

Well, then. Everyone follow my lead and PayPal a little something our favorite writer's way.

I wonder what the conjugation on our new verb would look like -- PayPal, PayPaled, PayPalling?

[chelsea g]

Thank you so very much. I really appreciate your kindness.

in serious gratitude,
chelsea g.

[1st Republic 14th Star]

Oh wait -- if Sarah Palin gets ahold of it, the expression will be "PayPalling around with terrorists."

[Reverse Mail Order Bride]

I dropped by on the off chance there were some news of you and am *very* happy to find you writing again. I'm one of your (mostly) silent readers but in the past your writing has both lightened my mood, inspired me, aroused me and made me want to come over there and beat some sense into Donny's thick skull. I hope that this year will see the solution of your financial problems and bring you inspiration and happiness. :)*

[cme]

Thank you for writing this. I've seen those grey areas from a few perspectives and they haunt me.

[Alana]

Love you.

A

[Trinity]

Hi Chelsea,

I found your blog through a fellow blogger and friend, Alana. I am happy I came to visit. You are a truly gifted writer.

Thanks! Trinity

[Arlen]

wouldn't it be sweet and sensible if everyone here would pay Chelsea regularly? isn't this simply a way to encourage and support (and pay for what we are receiving- the best art/writing around)?

off to drop 100 in the 'tip jar'

[Portlandgirl]

Yes, welcome back CG - even if it is just intermittently. I'm going to paypal a little bit over, too, and I'd gladly paypal a little bit each month just to read your writing on a regular basis! I can't believe how much I've missed you!

Hmmm. I think you did the right thing. But there's also a part of me that likes dangerous games, and another Robin-Hoodish part of me that believes it is entirely just for the less wealthy and more deserving to, um, "extract" financial support from the ridiculously wealthy (and usually less deserving).

I think your brush off is going to make him pursue you even more ardently, should you change your mind. But be careful!

And didn't you support C. for quite awhile? I know that it was a completely different situation--he was your live-in boyfriend--but still, I sense the triad is lurking there somewhere, deeply embedded in heterosexuality itself: money, power, sex. Do you think it's a fair comparison?

Okay, I confess: I am a secret Dr. Laura listener (not supporter, just listener!). Yesterday she was going on about how doctors who were supported by their wives through med school and then dumped them upon graduation were doing so because they had unwittingly sacrificed their sense of masculinity by being supported by their wives.

Which I think is a whole load of bullshit, basically, it's just another stupid ancient gender-based emotional remnant that most men should be able to get over if they just thought about it logically for a couple minutes.

But I'm just a commie feminist, so what do I know?? :-)

xo

[GP]

I wonder if the real issue is that the Vampire is insane rather than the morality of sex for money, either as a mistress or as a whore. Had Vampire been somewhat sane, or whatever passes for that these days, I wonder what could have been the alternate outcome of the story.

[c]

GP,

I've certainly considered that concept too--the reckoning that it was The Vampire's insanity and not my morals that led me to say no. But I've also considered the whole of the situation. Were he just as rich, but still married, and I still poor, but still the same person, I would still decline. I don't want to be supported by someone who isn't doing it to better able us to make a life together. To put it succinctly, I'd be supported, but I won't be kept.

kissykiss,
chelsea g.

[Sabina]

I love your writing. And it seems to me that turning down something tempting is incredibly mature-- in a mental sense, that is. I've seen you at an In the Flesh reading, and you're most certainly still hot.

[Innocent Loveboy]

46 isn't bad really. I hear a lady's sexual peak happens between the ages of 30 and 50.

[minstrel hussain boy]

ahh, you understand perfectly the trap of "kept." were it to be more transactional, say pay to play or fee for service, it would give you far more power.

by holding the financial strings the vampire would gain power and control. if he's a true sociopath, that would be a bigger turn on than any sex. sometimes i think that this plays a part in some of the weirder kinks.

good on ya. good call.