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huge, perfect breasts and a virtual forest between her legs. I was eager to explore my newfound friend with both my fingers and my tongue, but something was holding me back. Tiffany seemed like relationship material, one of those complex hookers who brought a lot of emotional baggage along with her sexual allure, and I didn’t want to get emotionally involved with someone at The Catwalk before I’d even made it to The Gringo. I had gotten into a serious relationship with a hooker during my first year at Columbia and ended up regretting the loss of my youthful opportunity to play the field.
    As I felt her furry vagina rubbing up against my hardened penis, I let my hands wander over her velvety folds, finally letting my fingers crawl inside of her like little snakes ferreting out their prey. She was impassive in the face of my prying, which was now taking on the quality of an exuberant gynecological exam. I love touching vaginas so much that I had once toyed around with the notion of becoming a gynecologist. However, my mother’s own excitement about the prospects of my being a doctor blunted my ambitions. Every time I thought about a woman in stirrups, I saw my mother’s face. She was understandably disappointed when I dropped the idea. In her inimitable way she would ask, “You’re going to make your own mother pay to have some stranger examine her?” I dropped organic biology and majored in economics precisely to avoid such potentially embarrassing Oedipal scenes.
    Tiffany kept staring at me like a long-lost lover, and I began to wonder if indeed I’d met her somewhere else, even in another life. I’m a firm believer in the transmigration of souls, and it seemed reasonable that I could purchase her services even if her body was occupied by another spirit. When she looked at me with those doe eyes and asked if I wanted a blowjob, I told her we’d better talk first. I knew that acknowledging the depths of Tiffany’s feelings was a potential rabbit hole. The question of emotional intimacy was in fact a point that I wanted to bring up with my psychoanalyst friends at the hotel, because I was beginning to get the sneaking suspicion that free will might be playing a greater role in human affairs than Freud had accounted for. For instance, I had the choice to behave like an animal and accept the blowjob, or, like Hamlet, to deliberate before doing anything rash. I readily accepted the fact that it might turn out that behaving like an animal with Tiffany was the humane thing to do. On the other hand, getting involved with her complex problems and psychohistory as an excuse for getting into her pants set up expectations I could never fulfill.
    Still, the side of me that leans toward relationship-building with whores was winning out again. I led Tiffany over to the quietest little nook I could find, where another couple was already engaged in an unclassifiable sex act, and asked her if she wanted to talk about anything. I ordered a couple of margaritas.
    The old expression “you can’t see the forest for the trees” certainly proved true in our case, since my ability to listen to what Tiffany was actually saying was impeded by the fact that I couldn’t take my eyes off the extraordinary flora and fauna between her legs. Tiffany spoke excellent English and, from what I could tell, American intellectuals like Susan Sontag must have been quite a craze among the prostitutes of Brazil, because Tiffany, like her older predecessor, turned out to be extremely knowledgeable about Sontag’s work. In fact, she owned an autographed copy of the Portuguese version of Against Interpretation.
    As it happened, her slide into a life of prostitution had nothing to do with poverty or lack of education, but rather an over-immersion in the work of the French deconstructionists, particularly Derrida, whose writing she had interpreted in an overly literal way. She had initially gone into therapy to palliate her inability to think