The inevitable question... What do you do for a living?

I was great with parents.  From the time I was a very little girl, all of my friends parents would go out of their busy, white-collared social schedule just to tell my parents repeatedly what a well-mannered daughter they have.  I never thought I knew something someone else didn't.  I took it for granted that everyone knew the proper placement of the napkin when politely excusing oneself for the powder-room.  

The dress I had purchased from the Manhattan Tory Burch boutique on my morning routine walk-of-shame from Tom's five thousand square foot loft in Soho, to my little bedroom on First and First.  It was caftan style in white cotton with a silver floral print, just in time for their end of the summer sale at five-hundred dollars.  Thirteen years in Los Angeles had caused me to forget many of the rules from my East coast routes, but by all practical standards I figured I had at least the upcoming Labor Day weekend to get one good day out of that white dress.  And five-hundred dollars to be well suited for my boyfriend's parents during the first meeting, was well worth the expense.

The dress was still laid out on my white lacquered French antique full-size bed, while I was packing my weekend sized Prada suitcase, when Tom called, "My mom's not feeling so well, so I think it's best I just go down myself this weekend."  

I sat on the bed, wrinkling my new dress, "What's wrong with her?"

"It's just a cold or something."

"I'm not afraid of a runny nose."

"I don't think she's feeling up to company."

I was wondering how far I could push the no white after Labor Day rule.  "I'm still in town the following weekend."  

"They're going away that weekend."  No further weekends were suggested.  

I looked at myself in my dresser mirror, above photos of my waspy friends and their children, and a photo of me, perfectly coifed in prep-school uniform, with my tiny arm around my father looking dapper as usual in a gray wool pin-striped suit.  "You were the one who asked me."

"I probably should have talked with my parents first."

I noticed the lines starting to form on either side of my mouth, even when I wasn't smiling.  "So, you won't be in town for the long weekend?"  

He started to ramble on about his responsibilities to his parents.  I started to rummage through my wallet for the Thory Burch receipt.  "Tom, you don't want to introduce me to your parents, do you?"

A heavy pause said everything.

"Did they ask what I do for a living?"  

He stumbled his way through something, which definitely let me know they had.  

"What did you tell them?"

"I changed the subject."  He said with slightly nervous laughter.  

The dress was an exchange only, no refund.

I had my answer as to why this handsome man five years my junior liked the cougar in me with every night he kept me in his loft, but would never take me home to meet his parents.  The only thing I didn't yet understand was how, with all my proper table manners, I had become the girl you couldn't bring home to mom.

That night, we sat on his brown leather sofa, eating New York pizza and watching Japanese animation... the kind that always ends with the monster moving his exceedingly large, numerous phallic tentacles in and out and all around the young schoolgirl's body.  During a sojourn to Tokyo, I was fascinated by the discovery their equivalent to "People" magazine, and all the like, contained graphic photos of young girls and cartoon style hardcore porn.  I was stunned at the perfectly acceptable touch on the tush amongst strangers, the regular dinners where the wives were left home, and the goes without saying every man to his Geisha.  Yes, every culture certainly has their rules to sex... and just about everyone in every culture has sex.  The most difficult part however, is that the rules are generally unwritten, and the sex is mostly misunderstood.  

Tom was stroking my leg, aroused by the gigantic tentacles penetrating the Miss Goody Two Shoes.  He liked my legs, preferably in thigh-high stockings and stilettos.  Regularly obliging, this evening I was wearing my new Thory Burch dress... no stockings, no stilettos.  I wanted him to remember the image of the girl he couldn't take home tomorrow, looking every bit the perfect girl a mother would love.  "Are you ashamed of what I do?"  I finally blurted it out.

Tom look up at me, his eyebrows burrowing.  He sat back with a sigh, focused now solely on the happenings of the little girl.  "You know what you do turns me on."  

"Good, because what you do turns me on, too."  We shared a smile.

He continued, "But, my parents aren't going to understand."  

"Yet, they understand the gambling you do on Wall Street every day."  

His one brow raised, "I rarely lose."

My brow to match his, "I rarely lose, too."  

Tom got up to brush his teeth.  Still feeling unfinished, in typical girl fashion, I continued, "What did your parents say when you dated your last girlfriend for six years before finally telling her you had no intentions of marrying her?"  

From the bathroom, he hollered back, "What does that have to do with anything?"  

It always amazes me how men can't follow a woman's train of thought.  I joined him in the bathroom, taking the pink toothbrush from the silver cup holder.  He spread the toothpaste across the bristles for me in a clean line, but just shy of a generous amount.  "You let her believe what you were doing with her was going to be something else.  A woman's youth is important, and you took those years with false promises.  At least what I do is honest."

As we both put brush to teeth, our stares were penetrating through the mirror.  Allowing the combination of toothpaste and saliva to inch its way along the corner of his mouth, "I was twenty when I met her.  She knew I wasn't ready to get married from the start."  

Trying to hold back the puddle of well-churned saliva, "Six years is one year short of common law marriage in many states."  

"We all make mistakes, alright?  I like you.  We have a good time together... even when you get a little nutty, and regardless of what you're doing for a living."  

"Then why don't you tell your parents that?"  The thick white drool was now running down my chin.  

He rinsed away his minty-fresh.  "Look, you're not going to be doing it forever."  

I spat the white foam from my mouth into his sink.  "What if I am?"  

Tom moved into the bedroom closed off by heavy sliding doors, once used to only belong to the artists who inhabited Soho, before they turned the property into something worth having and were forced out to Brooklyn.  I finished in the bathroom and found him naked in his large four-poster King size bed.  I picked up my over-night bag.  He pulled back the sheets, "Just come to bed."

I turned to face him... looking deeply into his large brown eyes.  I wanted to "just come to bed."  I wanted to envelope myself in those freshly ironed Frette sheets and furrow into the pocket between his hairless chest and his arms which wrapped all the way around me and came out the other side to hold me through the night.  I wanted to never leave.  But, I knew that night that those Frette sheets I had purchased for him would one day belong to another woman, regardless of any past she could easily hide.  

"Just hire a hooker.  It would be more honest."  It was twelve steps in my Hermes sandals to the door, passing a massive old trunk with its open lid.  I turned back, walked to the trunk in which he kept hundreds of pornos.  I took one out and looked up at him.  "This one's mine."

If anyone had seen me walking home that night, no one would have guessed that past my Hamptons Girl exterior, inside my understated Gucci purse was a DVD called "Young Sluts, Inc.", that it was one of many I had shot for Hustler, and most of all that I still had a whole lot more to make.