emotional ICU

When the whole city becomes an emotional ICU

My Gucci makeup bag always carries two contradictory things: Charlotte Tilbury lip liner that can draw a perfect smile, and a bottle of Bioderma makeup remover for removing stage makeup. During the 1,600 days as an escort in Manhattan, I gradually learned to use the former to outline the fantasy of my clients and the latter to wipe away the truth they accidentally revealed.

Time capsule on a bench in Central Park

The old banker who always wears a Brooks Brothers three-piece suit asked me to bring the 1948 "New Yorker" magazine and read Fitzgerald's short stories on the bench in Cherry Hill every Thursday evening. Until one day when it rained heavily, he trembled and took out the yellowed love letter from his briefcase - it turned out that each word was a code he wrote to his gay lover when he was young. When the raindrops smudged the pen handwriting into blue veins, he didn't let me finish the scheduled chapter for the first time.

The scent museum in the loft in Soho

The perfume blender with cancer always used my wrist as a fragrance test paper. "Today I want to recreate the smell of my mother in 1962," she mixed vanilla extract and cedar into an empty Hermès bottle, and suddenly paused: "No... I need the rust smell of the subway gate..." When she finally broke down and cried, I smelled the missing ingredient in the recipe - disinfectant from New York Presbyterian Hospital mixed with the yeast smell of the Jewish bakery downstairs from my childhood apartment.

Sound Bank under the Williamsburg Bridge

Wall Street's new rich paid $3,000 per hour to hire me as a "human recorder": recording the parenting manual that he couldn't read at all. Until one early morning, this quantitative trader who harvested wealth with algorithms suddenly knelt on the cobblestones of DUMBO and begged: "Can you... delete the name of my ex-wife that I mentioned last time?" His tears soaked the collar of his custom suit heavier than the Fed's interest rate hike decision.

Silent radio in the Roosevelt Island cable car

The most precious customer is actually the deaf ballet dancer. She paid cash for me to tell a fictional life in sign language in a closed car, but suddenly pressed my wrist when I signed the word "mother". Through the glass of the cable car, we watched the East River tear Manhattan's reflection into pieces, and the frequency of her eyelashes fluttering was exactly the beat of the second act of Swan Lake.