Amonth later, Taylor and I walked into the lobby of the Ritz the way we always did—confident, conservative, purposeful. We were both exactly five feet nine in three-inch heels. Taylor wore a tan, tailored skirt suit hemmed extra short with a white camisole underneath and, as always, a pearl choker she got on her twelfth birthday as a gift from her grandmother. Her signature look was very little makeup and a bouncy, strawberry blond, blow-dried bob. I was her photonegative, with my black suit jacket nipped at the waist, shoulder-length, chestnut hair, and red lipstick. Red lipstick because above all there is no kissing. Yes, the Pretty Woman thing is true. The no-kissing part, at least; the rest is an insulting crock.

I had perfected the art of not looking anyone in the eye as we walked toward the elevators. It could trip me up sometimes, how people looked at me, the barb of disapproval followed by the self-satisfied smirk—always so impressed with their own street smarts because they had spotted the hooker in the fancy hotel.

Taylor had convinced me to trade dancing for escort work with promises of easier money and a swankier life in general. In the span of a month I had seen nearly every five-star hotel in New York without ever staying the night. When we walked into the Ritz that day, I was queasy and exhausted. I had spent the previous evening at the St. Regis with an aging Italian art dealer who had freebased cocaine until yellow film edged the corners of his mouth and stretched in long strings when he talked. He had smoked until he was impotent and then opted to watch hotel porn and poke his dry, twitchy fingers inside me for what felt like about nine hours but was really only two. I was definitely making more money than I had before, but it wasn’t always as easy as Taylor had led me to believe.

It turned out that Taylor sometimes worked outside of the Crown Club. Occasionally she even engaged in the extremely risky practice of snaking the Crown Club’s clients. Diane didn’t scare me, exactly, but she wasn’t the highest rung on the ladder. We never saw or heard from the unseen hand that ran high-class prostitutes in our neighborhood, but it was safe to assume that these were people you didn’t want to steal from. But Taylor was a lionhearted free spirit, possibly a sociopath of sorts. She was someone I wanted to be near, whose love and approval I craved. I imagined I resembled Taylor. I, too, was that brave, in my dreams.

In spite of my outwardly bold existence, when I was alone I literally looked under the bed for monsters each night, consumed by irrational panic. I checked the locks on my doors and windows three times a night and insisted that my roommate, Penny, do the same. I often woke from night terrors, a constant in my life since childhood, in the early-morning hours and lay there frozen with fear, reminding myself to breathe, unable even to get up and go to the bathroom. But with Taylor I was fearless. I could breathe freely. I never once looked over my shoulder. So when she called me to go along with her on sketchy jobs—bachelor parties out in Westchester, a masochistic Columbia professor, a Japanese businessman who liked to talk about enemas while Taylor and I made out—I always said yes. It wasn’t exactly the money that motivated me. I could have made similar money coloring inside the escort-agency lines, but my transgressions with Taylor gave me a feeling of free fall, a sense that anything could happen, and that was worth the risk.

Taylor didn’t know much about the job we were interviewing for that day. All she knew was that a talent agent in L.A. had tipped her off to a meeting with a woman who was in New York looking for entertainers to amuse a rich businessman in Singapore. The money was meant to run into the tens of thousands.

“What if they peddle us to some third-world brothel?” I asked in the elevator.

“You’re always so negative.”

Taylor was taking a class in Dianetics. She was all about being positive and freeing herself of the limiting imprints left by her past (this lifetime and others) on the fabric of her existence. She believed that success was her birthright and was only a week or two away. It was an infectious faith.

When we reached the room a man in a suit opened the door. I couldn’t place where he was from. He looked kind of Persian but also kind of Asian. Taylor stuck her hand out and he ignored it. He went back across the room to join his friend, and the two of them acted as silent observers for the rest of the afternoon.

We were the last girls to arrive. A woman stood and came to greet us, introducing herself as Arabelle Lyon. When working as an escort, I usually tried not to have expectations, not to make assumptions, but Ari was a genuine surprise. She shook our hands and shot me a whole-milk-white smile. She wore almost no makeup and her hair was the natural sunny color that most mousy brunettes had when they were five years old. The two lurkers in the corner were mysterious, but it was this Gidget look-alike with the French name that made me suspect. How could she be anything but shady, with a disguise like that?

I looked around the room. Among the seven or so girls lined up on the couches there were one or two obvious duds, one or two who could be tough competition, and an anomaly named Destiny.

“Jesse?” Ari asked, when Destiny introduced herself.

“No. Destiny. It’s on my license.”

Destiny’s fried brassy extensions put Jon Bon Jovi to shame and her green contacts made her look like something out of Cat People. Her three-inch acrylic claws were painted with neon zebra stripes that matched those on her fingerless gloves. No classy suit for her. I couldn’t stop staring. I was enthralled.

Ari sat across from us in a straight-backed chair. She could have been a kindergarten teacher getting ready to read us a story. She began by explaining that she worked for a rich businessman in Singapore who threw nightly parties for himself and a few friends. They were looking for a handful of American women to join the party as his guests for two weeks, and we could expect to receive a cash gift upon leaving. This cash gift would be somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty thousand dollars. She assured us of our safety and told us that we’d be treated with respect, even pampered.

I watched the reaction of one of the girls I had pegged as tough competition. She was a long blonde with crazy cheekbones. I could tell she thought she had it in the bag. My competitive spirit kicked in. I didn’t know if I believed Ari or even if I wanted to go on this mysterious and potentially dangerous job, but I knew I wanted to be picked. Ari asked us questions.

“Have you traveled at all outside the country?”

“I’ve been to London and to Ibiza,” bullshitted Taylor, “and I plan on touring Bali in the spring.”

“No,” replied Dud Number One.

“I went to Hawaii once,” answered the blonde.

I thought it best to leave out my family trip to Israel. I told her that I had been to the Cayman Islands and that I was saving to go to Paris. It was the truth.

“Does the Bronx count?” asked Destiny. “Nah, I’m just messin’ with ya.”

Ari paused and tilted her head, contemplating Destiny as if she were an exotic animal. Then she snapped back into business mode and told us that the job would require maturity and respect for other cultures and that she was looking for girls with whom it would be easy for her employer to get along. I caught some of the Gidget spirit from Ari. Gidget Goes Geisha.

“I love traveling,” I said. “I love experiencing other cultures and I’m a fun party guest and I’d be perfect for this job.”

I felt like I was vying for a job in the Peace Corps, until we reached the second half of the audition and went into the next room for a photo shoot. The bed had been pushed aside in order to make room for the lighting setup. We lined up along the wall and waited for our turn in front of the camera. A too enthusiastic photographer took pictures of each of us in our underwear and handed us his card, in case at a later date we needed head shots at a good rate.

Ari went on to explain that she didn’t work for a Singaporean businessman at all, but rather for the royal family of Brunei. The money was better than she had intimated at first, though she couldn’t be specific. The parties I was to be attending would be thrown by Prince Jefri, the youngest brother of the Sultan, and I would be his personal guest.

To which I responded, “The Prince of where?”