The weekend before the trip, I made appointments with my hair stylist, nail technician, and Travis the Waxing Diva who ripped out my pubic hair with warm wax and cotton strips so I could come to Tony looking like his ideal manic-pixie-dream-girl/porn star. Thank God I couldn’t see how insane I was, running around town blowing all my money, as if a forty-five-year-old man needs additional inclination to get hard over a thirty-two-year-old girl in a thong who offers blow jobs like glasses of water. Like an idiot, I didn’t think Alan noticed. I was so self-involved chasing my fantasy I couldn’t tell the difference between his ignorance and intentional blindness. He and Mom had a lot in common that way, though they never met.

“Special plans this weekend?” said the saleslady at Zovo Lingerie who winked as she wrapped a lacy peignoir with matching thong in pink tissue paper.

“A business trip. But you never know,” I said and winked back, laying down my silver MasterCard. I felt that familiar Zing! when the card reader said, APPROVED.

The sales lady, dressed in that season’s green Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress (I owned one myself), handed me the shopping bag, tied with a pink silk ribbon. I shifted it with the handles of three others, which collectively held seven hundred dollars’ worth of apparel. I drove away with every purchase my heart desired that day, objects that once would have been out of my parents’ and my financial reach.

I was living the American dream. I had finally arrived.