Treasure in Georgia
He told me never to write a story about us. I told him not to worry, my voice like a soft, reassuring hand on top of his. But he lied to me and I lied to him, too.
~~~
Treasure and I met on an app built for older men to find younger women willing to spend time with them, often intimately, in exchange for expensive dinners, gifts, or cash. A sugar daddy/sugar baby site. I’m on it because I need money, he’s on it because he got an itch to cheat on his wife again. He admits this, frankly, in the third message he sends on the app.
He’s brusque, a Jewish ginger with a serious New Yawk accent. Armed with a scumbag vocabulary which seems to be his first language, he objectifies women, but he can also discuss the poetry of Adrienne Rich, and has seemingly endless cultural knowledge. He’s a member of etiquette-driven New York City social clubs, but says he’d kill someone who ever wronged his daughter. Treasure is the perfect mix of predatory salesman and cultured charm; he’s curious, brilliant, anxious. Macho and soft, classically ugly, he is surprisingly sexy. My Anthony Bourdain dream man. I think I’m in love with him.
But love is never simple, and each of our unique brands of paranoia create exquisite barriers to intimacy.
~~~
On our first date he’s visibly nervous. I am too, and rightfully so. I’ve agreed to meet a stranger off an app, and I don’t even know what he looks like. Treasure’s profile picture on the site is a shot of a turquoise oceaned beach, with a man walking on it, his back turned to the camera. It could be him, or it could be anyone. I never asked to see a picture. I guess I didn’t want to know. This isn’t about looks.
My first glimpse of Treasure is on the corner of Bleecker and Crosby in SoHo. He’s not at all what I expected, but then again, it could be much worse. He’s just like...somebody’s dad. I breathe and remind myself how freeing it would be to not have to worry about rent. To not dive deeper and deeper into credit card debt. I’m here to get paid to play and I don’t feel I have much to lose.
We circle SoHo for an hour in the rain, while Treasure insists on holding my umbrella over me. I “haha” at his jokes and my feet start to rub and blister. Every time we come upon a bar, he comes up with a reason why it’s not the right fit. He talks fast and his eyes dart around, always looking to avoid someone he knows. Finally, we end up at a tourist pub. His anxiety is palpable, like the sweat building under my too-tight jeans. We order gin and tonics. I specify “Hendricks” because I know he’s paying.
“You’re hot, but not too hot,” Treasure says to me. My eyebrows raise as I sip my drink. “That’s good, because it looks less weird for me to be out with you,” he explains. I realize he means I look natural, classy, not too obviously like a girl you’d pay for sex. This makes me feel like I should’ve worn more makeup. Like my whole life would’ve been different if I just knew how to style my hair into a look.
I inquire about his experiences on the site, and he adamantly tells me he’s never done this before. He has cheated on his wife before, yes, but never like this. “When you start hiring prostitutes, your game is over,” Treasure proclaims. A sugar baby/sugar daddy dynamic must seem different to him. To me it’s just a prostitution rebrand, something to make paying for sex more palatable for ego-driven men.
I’ve never done this before either, but I’m broke in a way I’ve never been broke and weighing what I can withstand in order to survive. Treasure seems suspicious, like I’m a scammer, a professional slut. I think that’s who he meant to order on the Sugar Baby site. But instead he got me. Up until our meeting, his messages have been crude, centered on fucking and sucking. He’s thrown off, perhaps ashamed he has been talking to me that way and unable to make a swift recovery.
After two rounds of gin and tonics and stilted conversation, Treasure walks me to the train. I feel pretty sure I won’t see him again, but before I descend into the subway, he asks me if I’ll step aside, off the busy sidewalk. He makes it a big deal, a dramatic gesture. “On the count of three, let’s whisper our real names in each others’ ears,” he says. Neither of us use our real names on the site.
He counts to three. I smile at his earnestness. We take turns revealing our names to each other, through subtle whispers. When his hot breath hits my ear, I shiver. His real name humanizes him somehow.
After the chill inducing name trade, I put my cards on the table, and send Treasure a half nude photo. We joke about our fake online identities, and how bold a move it was to swap real names. I’ve only ever been truly interested in girls who I wanted to fuck and learn everything about. To know you inside and out… Treasure writes to me.
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