The Dallas Women's Guide to Gold-Digging with Pride: A Novel - Hardcover

Conklin, J. C.

 
9780345492944: The Dallas Women's Guide to Gold-Digging with Pride: A Novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0345492943 ISBN 13: 9780345492944
Verlag: Ballantine Books, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

Arriving in Dallas to take a new job, Jenny Barton, a half-Jewish, single girl from New York, is plunged into the foreign world of Texas, where her roommate Aimee and her friends introduce her to the fine art of gold digging, Texas-style. A first novel. 35,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

J. C. Conklin is a former Wall Street Journal and Dallas Morning News reporter. Conklin is the co-author of Comeback Moms: How to Leave Work, Raise Children, and Jump-Start Your Career Even If You Haven’t Had a Job in Years, and the co-founder of the movie production company Texas Avenue Films. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband, Kim, her son, Columbus, and her two Papillions, Navette and Ruby. It was as a lowly writer in Dallas that she discovered the cutthroat world of husband-hunting. Never get in the way of a single woman turning thirty in Texas–you’ll have permanent scars.

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Chapter One
Never Directly Engage a Man You’re Interested In

My face isn’t tingly. In fact, everything feels quite normal, which isn’t normal, considering I just paid six hundred dollars for several shots of Botox, a deadly toxin, to be injected into my crow’s-feet—my infant crow’s-feet that I didn’t even notice until my friend Aimee pointed them out to me at lunch a month ago. I immediately became obsessed with them. Every time I looked into the mirror they seemed to be furrowing deeper and longer into my face. Soon I’d be looking like Barbara Bush on a bad day.

Aimee is my age, twenty-nine, but she shows no signs of age because she’s done all the procedures—Botox, microderm, the blue face peel. Her skin looks airbrushed. She is unnaturally smooth. It’s like she has never smiled, frowned, or had contact with the sun.

“I’m not supposed to try to squint or lie down for six hours, right?” I ask Aimee as I brush my fingers over my temples, feeling where the needles went in. I wonder what will happen if I squeeze the holes like a zit. Will deadly toxic puss shoot out and hit my mirror?

“That’s right, honey. You don’t want toxic mold spreading around.”

Aimee pushes down my hands, then sips her chocolate martini and scans the room. We’re at Beaux Nash. In Dallas, this place is a gold mine. It’s brimming with trial lawyers, lobbyists, oil execs, techie sellouts (when the selling was good), and other men of leisure, meaning men with a net worth of ten million dollars or more.

It’s not as sexy as it sounds. For one thing, the place smells like old men, cigars, and shoe polish. A massive mahogany bar and green leather booths crowd the room. A huge glass vat of soaking pineapples with a spout overwhelms the bar. How much demand is there for pineapple juice at a place like Beaux Nash anyway? Yes, I’ll have a twenty-year-old Scotch and a side of pineapple juice? The best part of the place, aside from the rich men, is the fresh potato chips, right out of the fryer. It’s impossible to resist wolfing down a whole basket of them, especially if you’ve been caught in the open on one of those Nazi-like no-carb diets.

We are husband-hunting. If you’re a Northerner by birth, like me, this is something you don’t quite understand about the South—people get married early and often, and for women it’s still quite acceptable to husband-hunt as a profession. Most of the Southern women I know spent twenty thousand dollars on their debutante dresses (Vera Wangs and Escadas), vowing to wear them again when they walk down the aisle. But they never do, of course. By the time the wedding comes around, they say the dresses are old-fashioned and out-of-date, come to think of it, like most of their marriages after a couple of years.

The point is, in high school they were already unabashedly planning the perfect wedding, calculating it would happen in three to five years. In high school, I was convinced I’d never get hitched. I held on to that belief through college and for several years afterward. But the longer you’re in the South, the ideas of marriage and regular churchgoing don’t seem so abhorrent, more like benign details that give the South its quaint character the same way floral wallpaper, Laura Ashley pink duvet covers, and rusty water faucets give atmosphere to local bed-and-breakfasts. Here, in the land of conspicuous consumption, marriage isn’t considered a lifelong commitment. It’s the ultimate accessory. Your husband is someone whose name you can slip into conversations. He’s a reliable date, gift-giver, and someday car-pool-sharer. He’s not really your companion, because most married people I know have dinner with a collection of their same-sex friends. Men eat together at steak houses. Women lunch at sushi spots. A husband is like a Hermès bag or a Chanel coat, a good investment that will mature over time. If he no longer fits, you can trade up to a more luxurious model.

There is no shame—and some would say there is honor—in divorcing once, twice, three, or more times. There are starter marriages. Children unions. Second-house-in-Aspen matrimonies.  Private-plane collaborations. Many women view multiple marriages as promotions to better stations in life. One particularly ambitious woman divorced her politician husband because he was a Democrat in the Texas state legislature and couldn’t afford to send her abroad. A week after the papers were signed, she walked down the aisle with a beer king in front of four hundred “friends.” She was born-again, financially. Two years of well-placed political contributions later—Republican, of course—and voilà she’s an ambassador to some island republic under our protection.

I’m not shy about wanting money. I have my needs like every other woman. But I’d like my marriage to have a little love in it. God willing, I’ll be walking down the aisle with a man who has a sizable bank account and also my heart. That’s what Aimee has promised me, at least.

By day I’m a professional girl—a reporter for the Wall Street Journal—and by night I’m a husband-hunter or, at least, I intend to become one. I’m fed up with the ramen-eating artist who can’t work a real job because he must think about creating. I’m sick of the relationship-phobic professional who is great for the first month, then turns aloof and weird. He gets angry at you because you assume he’s your steady Friday-night date and rebels against cuddling. I’m disgusted with the emotional vampire, the guy who leaches on to your own reserves and demands that you validate his whole existence. Yes, you are a great writer/lawyer/politician, and great in bed and very, very funny. This kind of man is never generous in return, neither emotionally nor materially. I should add that invariably in all these involvements there is some incident of cheating; one of them drunkenly kissed my friend at a party; another accidentally slept with an old girlfriend; still another became more of a partner with a male friend—in the Vermont sense of the word than a beer buddy. I’m exhausted from the relationships I’ve endured, so I’ve decided to try it Aimee’s way.

I met Aimee four years ago as a fledging reporter. My first story for the Wall Street Journal was about a lunatic fringe Fort Worth judge who threw an obese man in jail because he couldn’t lose weight, the same judge who made an adulterer plant a sign in his front yard listing his indiscretions. Who knew that ear kissing was a punishable crime? Aimee provided a lot of backstory on the judge, like his habit of wearing women’s garter belts under his robes.

We met on the steps of the courthouse as I was chasing after one of the judge’s law clerks. The scrawny guy was more frightened of the press than moving cars. He ran from me right into traffic. Luckily he was nimble and avoided a head-on collision. As I watched the law clerk scurry away, Aimee walked up to me and invited me to lunch. Over an Asian chicken salad she loaded me up with tantalizing details about the judge with a fondness for the garter belts. In full disclosure, the judge had dumped a friend of Aimee’s a year ago so she had motivation to spill the beans. During lunch, something clicked. We recognized some sort of similarity—a hard thing to imagine given how different we looked and talked. We started having regular weekly meals, which evolved into daily phone conversations and ran into happy hour drinks.

Aimee is a paralegal extraordinaire, and she looks like a Miss...

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Verlag
Ballantine Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2007
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0345492943
ISBN 13 
9780345492944
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
293
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Verantwortliche Person
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