“I don’t know. I do think that everybody has the right to know everything they can. We see all the time what terrible things happen when people rely on bad information. So yeah, even though I’m usually writing about purses, I’m writing the truth about purses.”
“That’s a comfort to me.”
“So, Ross, let’s talk about Felicity and all this.”
He pressed his lips together and nodded. “Sure.”
“Are you okay with that?”
“Sure, but...”
“You afraid to get people mad?”
“Reenie,” he said, his eyes wide. “I’m reluctant because I care about Felicity too. I thought she was a great girl. If this is all true, it’s sad, and if it’s all a lie, it’s even more sad.”
I told him I was sorry, and I genuinely was. I’d gotten defensive because of my emotional entanglement and I didn’t want Ross to see me as unfair.
He went on. Rumor had it that several other teachers, including one on Ross’s softball team, had also known Felicity. Ross stayed only a few minutes but long enough to say that he could never have imagined any of this in his wildest. Felicity always seemed almost prim, self-possessed to an unusual degree for people our age. Had it been anyone else, Ross said, he would have suspected that she’d been the victim of some kind of violence or abuse, but with that family? Her father, Roman Wild, was a minister, and Ruth was our high school chemistry teacher. I was no fan of Rev. Wild’s brand of fiery fundamentalist Christianity, and I had not been raised in any religion. But I knew Ruth well and really cared about her. I knew Felicity’s two brothers, who were still kids living at home. None of it seemed to add up.
I wanted to talk to him again, at length.
My first task would be to get it in writing that my editor was on board. So I would head to my office for a meeting with my boss, Ivy.
I’d done my research—finding out at least as much as I could about the modern world of upscale vice. It wasn’t something I’d ever had a reason to think about before, though of course, trading in sex for money wasn’t called the world’s oldest profession for nothing. (When my sister and I were kids, my parents offered us each two thousand dollars if we would promise not to have sex before graduating high school. My mother called it the world’s second-oldest profession—not having sex for money.)
The language was one big change. Most scholarly writing considered the wordprostitutionto be derogatory now, with its connotation of selling yourself or even selling out. But what else was it? The more accepted term,sex work, sounded like digging for sex in a hard hat. Whatever you called it, the sex trade had evolved, especially since the age of the internet. Most of the women were young, of course, but they weren’t all by any means desperate teenagers escaping a life of abuse. On a street corner in a red-light district, that might still be the profile, but in the upmarket world of vice, there were college students or new graduates, dentists and nurses and exercise psychologists paying off their student loans, not putting their profits up their noses. They were alluring but also wholesome-looking. They were savvy. Sites like OnlyFans and smaller soft-porn chat destinations purveyed their services in cheerful ways. Many required payment in advance, by card. Virtually all insisted on well-established hotels, or, if theyvisited a client’s home, some took “body buddies,” male friends to stand guard in the car or the taxi or the lobby, keeping an eye on the time, staying in constant phone contact.
There were two sides to this: One vocal camp praised sex workers for asserting themselves. Some women involved wanted to see it as a kind of payback, bamboozling men out of big bucks. The other side, equally vocal, said this way of life put people on a collision course with darker forces. Slice and dice it how you would, sex work was still fucking for money. Linnea Noonan, a feminist scholar and writer who’d once supported herself and her infant son that way, said portraying it as some jaunty third-wave feminist twist wasn’t entirely honest. She’d created a forum called Council of Whores (COW) to debate these issues online and in person.
“You can say, okay, there’s no job where you don’t have to hold your nose sometimes. But for every whore who chose this, there are twenty who were pushed into it because they didn’t have a better choice.” Some of the biggest proponents of destigmatizing the language, naturally, were men, the customers, because it didn’t make them seem quite so sleazy. Linnea said that the biggest problem was that, at the end of the day, the body you’d sold was still the body you lived in.
Most women stayed in the life for a few years and then moved on. And when they moved on, this interval would be a secret lacuna in their lives.
But Felicity had gone in the opposite direction, and, presumably, not out of need. Had she continued to be the stellar student she was up until sophomore year, she could have walked out of college debt free.
The question was why? Why everything? What pushed her to change course in the first place? Did that veer have its roots in something that happened long ago? It seemed unlikely that such a white-bread place as Sheboygan, Wisconsin, would give rise to dark deeds, but didn’t every true crime show start withthe cliché that said “things like this just don’t happen here... ?” I would go to that place where Felicity’s family and mine still lived and talk to the hometown crowd.
And I would talk to my mother.
Miranda was as stunned as I by the news of Felicity’s arrest. She and Ruth Wild were still friendly, if not exactly friends, and my mom might help ease my way into what would certainly be an agonizing encounter.
This story was worthy of my mom’s attention. Mom was now a well-paid PR executive for a national organization that helped women, but twenty years ago, she’d been a newspaper reporter.
At the oldMilwaukee Journal Sentinel, my mom, young Miranda McClatchey (now Miranda McClatchey Bigelow), not much older than I was now, was part of a Pulitzer Prize–winning team investigating conditions at pricey elder-care facilities. Undercover, she worked as an overnight nurse’s aide, watching the abuse, powerless to stop it, until, with her meticulous and irrefutable stories, she stopped it in its tracks. Back when Miranda was a reporter, I was little more than a tot. But I dimly remembered her coming home every morning from her night shift at one of the awful places, sobbing as she made our breakfast.
So okay, Mom won a Pulitzer Prize. I wrote about the enduring chic of a vintage Versace clutch compared with a Judith Leiber. My mom considered me a dabbler. She never said so, but you didn’t have to be a mental gladiator to figure it out. I didn’t care, or so I said. Brokering my journalistic soul seemed a fair price for not having to spend my life hideously depressed about things I couldn’t change. This walk on the wild side would be temporary but I wanted it to matter. Whatever it took.
Downtown the next morning, I nearly charged directly from the train through the (pink-tinted) glass revolving doors into theFuchsiaoffices. At the last moment, I stopped, making a detourinto Latta Java coffee shop next door. Composure, and even a soupçon of detachment, were qualities that my editor respected. I didn’t want to confront Ivy with a full head of steam.
I’d decided that, for the moment, I would act as though Felicity had agreed to talk to me—while I implored the universe to send me a justification she would buy into. (If she never came around, I could always later say that she changed her mind.) Convincing Ivy that this piece was worthy of all the real estate it would take up inFuchsia, and all the time I would need away from the wonderful world of scarves, was still an uphill battle. One afternoon last week, I got Ivy’s attention by positioning this as aVanity Fair–worthy drama with a third-wave feminist flourish: “This isn’t just an ordinary murder story, it’s mythic. It’s the story of a modern woman’s vengeance on the kingdom of men... It could even be seen as a sort of dark reverse of the Me Too dynamic, women taking advantage of men’s appetites and bamboozling them into paying big bucks.”
She agreed, suddenly excited and on board. But the next morning, she started to waffle.
I brought Ivy a skim latte, extra hot. She would know that I was currying favor with her, but Ivy appreciated subtle coercion. It was Saturday, and though we always worked at least half days on Saturday, the voltage was a little lower, a good atmosphere for a chat.
Ivy was always in early. She didn’t have to fight traffic, although, given her nature, she’d have been on deck at dawn even if she’d had to mush a team of six sled dogs from Winnetka. As it was, she just took the stairs. Her parents owned the building (and the magazine). Ivy and her family lived in an apartment that occupied the whole seventh floor. Her parents lived in the penthouse above, her two brothers on the two floors below Ivy—the vertical equivalent of a family compound. The rest of the building housed theFuchsiaoffices and the family business. (Somethingcalled Exquisite Enterprise. We had no idea what it did, although we knew it was either fabulously lucrative or a front for a drug cartel, since Ivy’s parents and their parents were billionaires.)
No one knewFuchsia’s financial status or even why it existed at all or how long it would last. Her parents had bankrolled it for two years. In an era when once-regal print publications were thin to nearly nonexistent, it was a gambit born of a whim. The whim was not Ivy’s, but her mother’s. Like many chic and clever writers of previous generations—true stars like Joan Didion and Meg Wolitzer and Mona Simpson—Sabrina Torres had been a guest editor atMademoisellein 1980, just before that plucky magazine gave up the program. These “college girls” of another era competed by writing essays for the privilege of working at the magazine for a summer in New York, living at the women-only Barbizon Hotel. An idea so antique it was alluring, it evoked a shiny, healthy blonde dressed in an oatmeal turtleneck and green wool “slacks,” the kind of thing my grandmother wore at Oberlin College fifty years ago.
