Unwifeable(62)

“Wow,” he says, “you’re like an eight or a nine.”

So good. If I did write a Yelp review of the experience, I would be sure to add: If a lady is paying half a grand for your time, maybe just go for bust and say ten.

I quickly put my clothes back on, and we move to the bed, but his unrelenting pressure for me to touch him is irritating. There’s something bittersweet about the fact that even when you hire a guy to be your companion, it still feels like a shitty second date in New York.

“I love oral,” Markus says, showing me various ribbed prophylactics. “I love eating. I’m telling you, you’re not getting the full experience. You will come your pants. I’m serious.”

As romantic as that sounds, I decline. So he tries a different tactic.

“Or I can put a condom on, and you can give me oral? Or . . . I love to be stroked.”

“Yeah, it’s just . . . I don’t think I’m that good at it,” I say, thinking about how good at it I am. “But I think it’s hot when guys get themselves off. I want to see how you touch yourself, because every time I’ve done it I’ve messed it up.”

“Sweetie,” he says, beginning to jerk himself off, “you’ve paid for this. You just stroke in a slow rhythmic motion.”

I fully embrace the virginal rube character I’m doing now. “Doesn’t that hurt?” I ask.

“No, that doesn’t hurt at all,” he says, laughing. “This is a learning experience for you. It’s soft and hard at the same time.”

As he jerks off, Markus waxes on philosophically about politics and psychology and literature and Buddhism. Then he asks me to “stroke him off”—once again.

I’m starting to get a little worried he’s suspicious about my complete lack of interest in doing anything sexual. So I give him a half-hearted hand job and call it a day.

When I fly back to New York, I am immediately put on deadline for the story. Around 6 p.m. I sign off on the final proof of my pages. But while reporters are shown the mock-up of their story inside the newspaper, if the story ends up on the front page—or “the wood” as it’s called in tabloid parlance (because it used to be set with wooden slabs)—we don’t really see it.

While I never have reason to go up to the tenth floor where the A-1 page is set and designed, Mackenzie does. So, as she’s upstairs doing some important editor stuff, she just happens upon the next day’s cover all mocked up and ready to go. “Would You Pay $500 to Have Sex with This Man? Our Reporter Did!”

Mackenzie does a double take and finds the designer. “You guys, Mandy didn’t sleep with him. You guys know that, right?”

It gets changed last-minute to “Spend the Night.” Better. But it doesn’t really matter. Because the next day, the pickup on the piece translates like an international game of telephone. By the time it reaches Turkey the translation is “US Reporter Sleeps with Male Hooker for News” and leads to a lot of fan mail in broken English saying things like, “Best journalism! Very hard working assignment looking good.” In Asia, one of those creepy yet hilarious animations is done, featuring me and Markus taking a shower, making passionate love, bickering—and making passionate love again. The press requests are insane, and within a span of a couple of hours I’ve had to turn down The View while making appearances on Inside Edition, Joy Behar, and tons of radio from around the world.

At the end of this very long day, I head to Langan’s alone to get a drink. I’ve gotten only a few hours of sleep and am fried. As I sip on a Maker’s, I check my email at the bar and get a Google news alert that Gawker has written a follow-up piece to their morning link to the story.

“Should the New York Post Hire Hookers? Media Types Spend the Day Jeering.”

Meanwhile, Markus, whose real name is Patrick L. Norton, actually loves the attention. He writes on his Facebook, “If I can help and be satirized so be it. . . . I’ve never felt so important in my entire life.”

I feel happy for him and betrayed by whoever the hell is sending in tips about me. But whatever, that person at Gawker is just doing their job, too. I get it far too well.

Over at the other end of the bar, I spot a Fox reporter I’ve chatted with before, and we joke around about the prosti-dude until I realize how spent I am. Which means I have two choices: self-care . . . or ensure that the night provides a distraction enough from the self that so badly needs caring for.

“Give me one good reason to stay,” I tell the reporter.

He has an answer at the ready. “I have really good drugs.” Yeah. That sounds right.

So we head into the Langan’s bathroom and begin sharing an eight-ball, and I feel that same spinning, speeding rush of asshole invincibility I love so much. When I tell him I need to head back to the Post to pick up all my shit, the two of us have the brilliant idea that I should definitely do a bump off my desk. Because: story.

When we get back to his place in Midtown, I can’t stop rambling. Everything about the day is so preposterously heightened already, but that’s not enough. Nothing is ever enough for me. I want to go darker, weirder, sadder, kinkier, more. So I ask him if we can role-play.

“How about I pretend I’m . . . fifteen,” I suggest. “And let’s, like, make it really crazy.”

He “yes ands” my shitty sexual improv in the most hilarious way possible.