The Perils Of Desire - How A Woman Of Indomitable Will And Irresistible Allure Snookered Washington

Amanda Northumberland had never expected to be one of the highest paid women in Washington.  A young women of means and modest education - Miss Porter's finishing school in Farmington, Briarcliff College, conduit for marriage to eligible men with more money than intellectual valor; and then off to Washington to trade on her good looks, sanguine personality, and matter-of-fact way of looking at things.  Sex was the world's oldest tradable commodity, and from what she heard, Washington was a seller's market. 

The sexual peccadilloes of Washington were well known.  Everyone from the President on down had their little piece on the side, and politicians on both sides of the aisle were no strangers to afternoon trysts, unexplained fugues, and the most beautiful call girls that money could buy.  Sexual pleasure was a perk of office, what young men in Bridey's Bend, Bear Fork, and Poplar Ridge dreamed of.  Serving one's country was one thing, but the rewards for doing so were another - the real, only reason why anyone ever bothered. 

Many young women resorted to arranged sex out of need, circumstance, or bad fortune; but not Amanda.  She was a Belle de Nuit, an upper class woman of aristocratic breeding who simply found the run-of-the-mill life of wealthy New England matron pedestrian and insignificant.  

Breathing the rarified air of the Übermensch was for most people unthinkable if not unconscionable. What would the world be if everyone looked out only for themselves and led a life of amoral ambition? Doomed, a sinkhole of greed and selfishness. 

Amanda thought nothing of the sort. If the only validation of the individual in a meaningless world is the expression of pure will, said Nietzsche, then why would anyone settle for only a nice home? Life was meant to be led on the margins.

 

Her sense of risk as the defining quality of this moral stretching had nothing to do with physical danger.  Those in fact who risked their lives climbing mountains got little in return except an adrenaline rush at the top and again during the fall from an icy precipice.  Those like her who threw their lot into anti-sociability, and who gave a defiant guffaw at convention and propriety were the real risk takers, for community wanted nothing to do with the outlier, the sexual miscreant.  

For Amanda the pay - the thousand in cash left on the dresser - was nothing compared to the millions in 'emoluments of tact', Washington's name for hush money.  Financial rewards obtained this way - i.e. the savvy concoction of sexual appeal, personalized satisfaction, irresistible desire, and fear of exposure - was the best of Nietzschean will anyone could conjure. 

As the Faunia character tells Coleman Silk in Roth's The Human Stain, prostitutes are paid not for sex but to leave - sex without attachment,  without commitment, and without consequence; but within the codicils of that contract is the source of a woman's power. Silence is a commodity no less than her sex and far, far more valuable. 

 

Nothing in Amanda's parentage, family legacy, or upbringing suggested such a woman. There was no Iago, Goneril, or Regan gene - no DNA bits that determined moral outlook or lack thereof.  There was nothing in the predictable, safe, and sure childhood of the young girl that might have led her to such an extreme adulthood - no sexual repression, no parental resentment, no sibling rivalry.  All was as it should be for the making of an ideal, respectable citizen. 

Nietzsche himself never dwelled on what might produce an Übermensch - those predisposing variables which lead to uninhibited independence and defiance of social norms.  Freud had not yet come on the scene, and Nietzsche was simply interested in the Platonic ideal. 

So, whatever the variables, antecedents, or reasons for Amanda's dramatic turn away from the settled life of the Northumberlands, she was indeed an unusual article.  She combined the very best sexual seductiveness, understanding of male desire, and human weakness to both satisfy her clients and bind them to her in unbreakable, financial contracts. 

Just as CIA agents operate under deep cover, so did Amanda.  It was just as difficult for outsiders to know her real profession as it was to out those Langley operatives who by day were bank clerks, school teachers, and social workers. 

 

As such, Amanda was both a belle de nuit and belle of the ball.  Her family name and history were among America's and England's finest, and she was a prized invitee to the best soirees, teas, and social events of Georgetown, Great Falls, and Potomac.  No one in her milieu combined such beauty, taste, elegance, and aristocratic sophistication. 

Not that she was overly proud of family recognition, but that she could be received into the most preserved places of Washington society and at the same time be the call girl of preference for the Capital's high and mighty. 

Not quite pulling the wool over the eyes of Georgetown matrons - they were far too easy a mark - but fooling the whole lot of social incidentals who sniffed at the hems of power was her victory.

It was a good life, a double life little different than that of the deep-cover spy, and being the best in both worlds without either one aware of the other, was truly a remarkable, merit-worthy fact.  She dallied with the presumed best of American society while exemplifying the worst - a hooker, a whore, a slut.  It was this dramatic difference which ironically made her whole.  It was one, unifying, indomitable will which defined her, and there were few like her. 

A lot has been made of the Jeffrey Epstein list - who among the power brokers had consorted with this pedophile and his pimp wife?  Who was on his island? His yacht? Who sampled from the stable of young virgins he had enticed into prostitution by wiles and wild promises? 

Amanda's list, if it were ever made public, would be nowhere near so troubling or incriminatory. Neither the men who followed her scent nor the Washington matrons who thought her the heir to the Northumberland fortune would ever be outed.  Her magnificent charade by day, and her marvelously opportune hook-hold on the men who ran the nation's business by night were both capital secrets, kept so by Amanda who knew that every day of silence increased her value in both worlds. 

'What a woman', said one of her clients long after she had left Washington for parts unknown. She had been seen on St. Tropez, on the slopes of Gstaad, and in Chillicothe, Ohio of all places; but no sightings had been confirmed. True to form, she had both appeared and disappeared as a wonderous chimera, a sylph, a dominatrix, and a hostess.  A wonderful woman indeed.