"Look, we're taking dinner at Nobu tomorrow night — I don't know if you've heard of it — and I wanted to see if you would like to join. It will just be me and some of my mates and some of my clients, but I must be honest with you, some of my clients are very well-known, very celebrated, and I can't mention their names."
"Okay," I said, trying to sound unimpressed. I put down my glass, already empty. I wondered what a raucous dinner with a character like Frederick, British Real Estate Mogul, would be like. I hoped his famous friends were Elton, Ringo and Mick.
The next day, I wandered along the Thames thinking about how I could move to England and be people's American friend. Have you met her? My dark-haired American friend who is rude yet charming? You know, the marvelous actress-writer-artist-director girl? I would live in a flat and go to the pub to drink half-pints with dandy boys in ascots before meeting my well-accented boyfriend(s) for bangers and mash, and I'd weigh roughly a hundred pounds ("seventy stone"?) because I'd be unable to hold down any of the deep-fried nastiness that the Brits seemed to live for.
It was a Saturday, and I walked over to the Tate Britain to see the Frances Bacon exhibit, where I cried silently over the triptych of Bacon's lover who'd committed suicide. The sallow Brits around me seemed disarmed by my open expression of emotion. And then I thought, "Fuck it," cried openly, and decided to go to Top Shop to deepen my credit-card debt.
I nearly fainted as I got off of the Underground at Covent Gardens, and I realized I had to try to eat. The cafes were all crowded with tourists munching fried wads of starch and drinking their pints. I marched into an Italian-looking cafe and asked to be seated toward the back, then pulled out my Time Out London and did my tourist thing until my UK cellular-piece began to fart, indicating an incoming text. The text was from Frederick:
I WOULD LOVE FOR U TO COME TO DINNER BUT I MUST WARN YOU THESE ARE HI-PROFILE CLIENTS OF MINE.
I rolled my eyes, sipped my espresso, and thumbed back:
"I must be honest with you about something. I'm not in real estate."
WILL REFRAIN FROM FAINTING AND OR ASKING FOR AUTOGRAPHS — FROM NY AND UNIMPRESSED
My phone then began dancing the Private Call jig. We made a bit of decent small-talk about the shitty Italian food I was forcing myself to eat, before Frederick sighed deeply and cut to the chase.
"I must be honest with you about something. I'm not in real estate. Rather, I'm in another kind of real estate. The real estate of the flesh, if you will."
"Pardon?" I asked.
"I run one of the biggest and most successful companion agencies in London."
"What?" I asked, fairly certain that I knew what that meant but not fully believing that I was on the phone with a pimp.
"Escorts. Women." Frederick said.
A moment or two went by.
"Whores?"
"No! Maia! Not sex, companionship. They're very well-paid."
The specifics of Frederick 's long-winded monologue are hazy in my memory, as at first I was only half-listening, not realizing I was in negotiations. He mentioned a young woman whom he had met last week on holiday from Sweden. She was broke, dragging her unwieldy suitcase, all alone. He set her up with his "companion" agency, and now she had a flat in Kensington and was pulling in £5,000/week. And they weren't all whores, he said. There was discretion involved. A certain celebrity, whom he couldn't name, had paid £1000 to have a girl walk on him in stilettos and piss on him.
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