Fifty-Eight: Demimondaine

 A lovely friend wrote me a night or two ago to say that she's joining the demi-monde in her city. It seems that she's found an actual sugar daddy. The negotiated arrangement calls for $500 per week with occasional shopping trips, and she's to be available two nights a week, with no sleepovers. The schedule, she tells me, meshes perfectly with her other jobs. She says she can go from barista or receptionist to demimondaine in just a few blocks' drive. Her SD is, I'm gathering, married and rather older (of course). He's a landscape architect, with a small firm in a city that's coming to be thought of as hip.

 I told her that I'd be very jealous if he's older than I am, since I rather do like being her official Older Admirer. I'm jealous, too, of his profession.  The career I envisioned in high school was probably architect or urban planner, and landscape architect is a career I might have considered as well. My friend told me not to worry about her SD being older than me---- she assured me that he isn't.  There are very few times when I'd insist on being older, but this is one. She assured me, too, that I'd been her first Older Admirer, which should count for something in both our lives. It does, of course. It certainly counts for something in mine.  

Anyway... I am intrigued and pleased. She negotiated the whole thing herself, which does impress me. The actual dollar figure per week isn't high, but she plans on using the shopping trips to expand and re-do her wardrobe. She is a fashionista, and her tastes are precise and impeccable. I like her sense of style, and at her height (just at five-eleven)  and her weight (very much in model range) she can carry off some wonderful looks.  Her SD is likely to be very surprised when she takes him shopping--- $500 per week may be the least of his expenses.

Am I actually jealous? Oh, maybe...maybe a bit. I've known her for a while, and I do think of her as a wonderful discovery in my life. She's funny, clever, witty, literary, long-legged and sharp-hipboned. Excellent music tastes, a fine painter, and properly averse to underwear. I told her yesterday that I always do want to travel with her, and that I wish I could be the one taking her into keeping. She texted back to say that she did wish it could be me, too. That's a text I'll keep. She knows the right things to say. But after all, she always has.  I do want to end up at a Chelsea cafe with her one autumn night. I may be a bit jealous, yes, though I have no proprietary rights here. I am glad that I'm on her text/call list. 

 Now I will have to ask her things, of course. Did she put up an on line ad? How did she decide to do this? What was the initial interview like? Was there a kind of trial session in bed? (I think there was, based on her texts to me) Where will they rendezvous? She lives with three other people in a rented house, and I doubt she can bring him there. So...motel? His office? I'd like to know how the logistics work.  My hope would be that she insists on hotels. My friend is a painter, and she has a certain fascination with sex in offices and studios, but I hope she'll insist on a small boutique hotel. 


I did write her to say that, yes, I wish it could be me, too. Not as a sugar daddy, but as someone who could take her into keeping. She liked that--- she wrote back to say that she'd rather be a mistress than a sugar baby, if only because it seems to have more style to it, and because she thinks that a gentleman's mistress would share more interests and emotional sympathy than a sugar baby. An escort, she wrote, has independence, but right now she'd like to have some regularity in income over and above her day jobs, and she wants the ability to avoid sleepovers. She may, she said, interview other possible SDs as well. But her requirements are simple enough: regular income, no encroachments on her life as a hipster girl with bookshelves and a tiny painting studio. 

I do wish her luck, of course. And I will be following up on all her stories. She did write to say that I was someone she saw as a mentor, or at least as a tempter, and that she intended to report to me about everything. She does that--- she makes me feel valued, and she knows exactly how to hold my interests.   She's a girl who's been a dear friend for something like five years now, and I want always to be there for her. She's self-aware and introspective, and I suppose I will be reading her e-mails and texts with a historian's eye, or at least an analytic eye. I'd like to see how she moves into the demi-monde, and see how she creates herself as a new girl in a new kind of world.