I won the lottery. At eight in the morning I went to the official Lotto webpage for the results and laid the ticket on my desk, smoothed its perimeter flat with the back of my hand and smudged two lines of numbers with my moist finger tips. I looked twice to make sure I wasn’t using numbers from last week’s draw and then I smeared a lime green highlighter on the ticket as I matched the numbers. By the sixth matching number, when my winnings were already over seventy-eighty thousand dollars, the rivulets of water running down my fingers were dangerously close to washing away the last and necessary digits. At the precise moment of my financial transformation, the possibility arose that there was a God who superseded the mere mathematical laws created by the hubris of humans and I suspended my agnosticism to bow a grateful prayer of thanks. I had won forty million dollars and figured I could donate a half million to the Salvation Army as a deflective action to appease the martyred saints I had prayed to.
I wasn’t a man in a grey flannel suit working at a desiccating job, or struggling to support a family and pay bills. My career in advertising was contrived coolness and I earned a nice six figures, but I felt locked in a struggle between truth and lies. I wrote the taglines for large corporations; I was the man who pulled people into the products. Friends thought my job was sexy, inventive and cortically inspired while their positions in the Ministry of Tourism or Education forever excluded them from the creative class. The company for which I worked kept a perpetually stocked bar that yielded Manhattans and Boxcars, and Mr. Overstreet, the agency czar, had bestowed a cappuccino maker that created foam and froth too light for heaven, and the stature of the firm, defined by the dollar value of the latest accounts and the size of the billboards glowing along the Gardiner Expressway, or the number of martinis imbibed at self-congratulatory swanky parties at the Gladstone Hotel, was going up. My six-digit income surpassed all my university contemporaries, but I wanted wealth that yielded uncompromising freedom and choices without constraints. I craved the kind of wealth that would push me into the upper margins of the upper quintile of income distribution, right into the monetary stratosphere.
Winning isn’t luck, but acute mathematical analysis that eludes a million players. I kept track of the lottery statistics and waited two years before I saw a pattern emerge. The numbers 7, 15, 28 and 39 were less frequent and I decided that this discrepancy would eventually correct itself. If you flip a penny thirty times and twenty eight heads appear, you can pretty much assume that the next flip will be a tail. I bought a hundred tickets and distributed my selections around the four special numbers, trying to capture as many possibilities that the cost of two bottles of 1979 Mosstowie Highland Scotch could purchase.
I made allowances for my incipient wealth. A man who plans to win forty million dollars should deport himself in a certain manner. What I earned in advertising allowed me some measure of refinement in clothing, cars, food, culture and sports; the money that was soon to come from the lottery corporation demanded that I raise the bar.
I constructed a list of “items for immediate purchase after lottery” and another list of “things to say to various people after lottery”. You’ve got to pinpoint what is important in life and I like to organize my goals.
My list of purchases included: a Gucci Duffle Bag with identification tags and double zip enclosure ($2,550) for carrying overnight needs to various women’s condos; a four-door Mercedes CLS ($110,000) to proclaim my wealth in speed and style; and a Ferrari Scuderia Rattrappante steel watch ($10,200) for knowing when it’s time to ask a woman to leave. I then constructed a list of things to say: to Mr. Washburn (Senior Account Executive), “I never liked you, Sir”; to Denise (who sat beside me at work), “Maybe you didn’t want to date me before today, but you will now, and my answer is no”; and to my girlfriend (whom I’ve dated for six months and slept with 53 times), “You can do better.”
My resignation from the agency was swift: I arrived at work on Monday morning at nine-thirty and quit by nine-forty. I left everything behind, even the bottle of scotch in the desk. “References not needed” I told Washburn. I dispatched my girlfriend in a terse text message.
Anonymity is impossible with the money I’d won. I followed all the recommended steps to beat back the desperate hordes that were going to beg, plead and try to steal my winnings, but the Internet was awash in images and stories about me and for the first two weeks after securing the money in multiple accounts and investment vehicles, I stayed home.
In the marketplace of love and lust, old rich men trade wealth for young pretty women and then acquire an even younger mistress on the side. I was rich, was asymptotically approaching fifty years of age, and desired a woman who fully understood her own mercenary ambitions. I thought speed dating might offer me an unexpurgated view of such women, all hungry for a comfortable life or an unending carnival of pleasures.
I paid a hundred bucks to attend a speed dating evening at a Yorkville restaurant. I’d read that every man has the ability to judge beauty on a subliminal level, even as quickly as a fraction of a second. Eye contact would let me detect the size of her limbal ring, a sure marker of age and vitality. The restaurant was in a census division for Toronto that contained an unusually high average income and the odds were favourable that I’d meet a woman who earned over a hundred thousand a year, just enough to treat themselves twice a year to clothes from Holt’s.
Speed dating ten women when you only want one of them is like eating vegetables before dessert. I had to get through nine women, nine varieties of potatoes, carrots, beets, all of them root vegetables, before I could taste the crème brûlée. Amanda (an underpaid magazine editorial assistant), Molly (a decorator whose unfortunate portfolio was in Toronto’s classless neighbourhoods), and Missy (the name bespoke an asexual and spoiled girl) were amongst the first five women. I repeated the topics, same lines, went through the motions. Girl number five was pretty, but her sweater from Sears announced a lack of hedonism or carnal awareness; I wanted the woman at the end of the queue who had dirty blonde hair, thin arms, and a waist around which I could link knuckles. She wore a tight red shirt, buttoned corset-like, that accentuated positive breasts, pin stripe pants, and three-inch conservative heels on patent-leather squared toe shoes. The crow’s feet around her eyes suggested intensity and playfulness. No one else at the table showed this degree of sexual dimorphism. No other woman looked quite as womanly as she did.
Her name was Rachel and she was a chef at a downtown restaurant. Her latest and only cookbook had been published six weeks earlier and was at the front of Indigo but heavily discounted. A cookbook is not literature so she wasn’t really an author. We had three minutes to talk and I saved my best line for her: “Did you know that mathematicians have proven that your seventh relationship is the optimal one and that the seventh person is your soul mate? I believe I might be sitting across from mine”.
“I’m not very good at math,” she replied. “I’m also not very good at love.”
“You don’t have to be good at love, or lust; just precise and deliberate.”
After six dates, four dinners, twelve cumulative hours of vigorous sex, and three weeks in total, Rachel “moved in” with me. I gave her a hundred thousand dollars to decorate the loft in any style she desired. She was nonplussed by the amount although I suspect her giddiness was contained. The lottery had never come up and I calculated that it was entirely reasonable that within Rachel’s milieu there would be no banal conversations about lotteries. More test than testament, my only stipulation was that the bed be king sized and that the sheets be made from 1000-thread-count Egyptian cotton threaded with 22 carat gold; the colour did not matter. I wanted to envelop our bodies in tangible pecuniary pleasure, but I wore a condom to protect the sheets. Rachel consulted her friend who had designed a showcase cottage for some mastermind retailer who wouldn’t live in anything less than six thousand square feet or two million dollars. The designer was improbably good looking and I had no idea if she was talented as a decorator but she did perform oral sex on me with exquisite choreography and finesse. Fidelity was never implied in the bargain with Rachel and I expected she must have known that my sexual appetite could not be satiated by one woman.
“This is your best recipe ever,” I complimented her on conjuring the finest rugs, furniture and paintings that could be bought in Toronto. I had insisted that everything be purchased within city boundaries and that my name be prominently displayed on all invoices. This, of course, was a little like limiting her to a hundred-mile diet.
My days were redolent of the Roaring Twenties, inasmuch as I could glean this from rereading The Great Gatsby. We drank and partied and dined. Rachel surprised me by never saying “I love you” or confusing coitus with companionship and I was grateful that she was becoming the perfect girlfriend for a rich man. She continued to work and I helped her promote the book (our social connections grew immensely over the following six months and I’m sure this helped her authorial status). I scoffed at any activity that was not hedonistic as I had taken a vow to do nothing useful (to anyone else) for a year. While Rachel worked at her restaurant I worked out, read biographies, kept a journal of random thoughts. In the interstices between noon cocktails at the Four Seasons and dinner out with Rachel, I’d order escorts who served me in a room I permanently reserved at the Royal York.
We continued this perfect life for nine months until Rachel started upsetting the cart (and as soon as she did this I began to imagine her as a brazen ox tugging against the weighty boxes in the cart, filled with my money). The disequilibrium she initiated also inspired me to begin examining her physical beauty, looking for measurable imperfections that, if they placed her too far away from what was reasonable, then I would have to begin the dissolution of our agreement.
“I’d like us to host a party this weekend. We need to start thinking about our plans.” This was tantamount to Brutus discussing the murder of Caesar; I’d always considered her to perfectly understand the slippery grip she had on me and that plans were reserved for dinner or shopping.
“Who would we invite? And what plans are you talking about?” Mixing the questions, I considered, might void a consequential answer.
Rachel had an off-putting habit of busying herself with some task when she needed to be directive in her speech. Now she rummaged through the cabinets for ingredients for dinner.
“I’d like to invite maybe ten people, all couples of course, since it’s easier to keep things lively.”
“The plan?” I asked again.
“Why don’t we have a drink and talk about this. You can make us something new. I bought a cocktail recipe book for you.”
I made Algonquins and placed them on the diamond coasters. Rachel wore a short dress and buck leather ankle boots. Listening to her talk was a deliberate diversion from my attuned libido. I always wanted her, even when she was unavailable and this sometimes complicated my ability to interpret her message. Lately when we had sex I used her predilection for combining drinks with intimacy to calibrate certain physical features. We would be thirty minutes into coitus when she would become inert and pliable (a certain result if she drank three martinis in a half hour). I measured the length of her leg (to calculate her leg-to-body ratio) while she slept and then laid a soft seamstress’s tape from her navel to Mons pubis to anus to figure if the two distances yielded the Golden Measure, an aesthetic recognized in art and architecture.
“We’ve been together for almost a year, keeping separate residences. Let me move in since this is the larger condo and we can have a consistent relationship with fewer interruptions.”
Consistent sounded like “committed”. I still had thirty-six million dollars in liquid assets and although she did not know the exact girth of my holdings, I had no doubt that my flamboyant purchases let her guess I was worth more than a few million.
“Yes. Let’s reconfigure the place for when this happens. You have a lot to bring.” I poured the Algonquin down my throat and felt it burn my heart.
Everything in the next two months revolved around the impending conjugation. People use language to describe this event that equates a relationship as a series of rungs on a ladder. “Taking it to the next level” they will say, as if there is a linear and upward path one follows in the evolution of love. The problem is that ladders are often wobbly and inexperienced ascensionists will topple the path near the final rung (is this last rung called death, or marriage?). I saw relationships as a circle where there is no end or beginning, a merry-go-round from which you jump at any time.
Rachel owned enough things to require every item in the loft to be assigned a new place. The kitchen suffered the most turbulence from her arrival and half of what I had was sent away to Goodwill to make room for her superior equipment. I hired the a carpenter to partition the bedroom so a second closet could contain Rachel’s clothes, shoes and lingerie. She altered the perception of space and time: the loft felt a thousand square feet smaller and the day seemed six hours longer after her move was complete.
This was nice for ten days, maybe eleven if you count the day she worked late and I consumed three hookers and a bottle of Jim Beam, although a fifth of the bottle was spilled on the stomach of one escort who lay on her back so I could see how much liquid could be held in the reservoir of her flat tight stomach. For a few hundred dollars the escorts let me photograph their faces and then load the images onto a computer where a program let me superimpose each face onto a grid. An algorithm constructed a statistical profile of the hooker, identifying the degree to which her chin, nose, cheekbones, forehead and eyes adhered to universal standards for physical beauty. My favourite and most expensive escort’s neonate features yielded numbers against which Rachel would be judged. If Rachel wasn’t at least as attractive as the hooker, whose cost was a fraction of the total amount for Rachel (including the psychic costs attached to Rachel’s speech mannerisms—too many “likes”—and body tics such as a nail biting), then a binary choice was needed: stay or go?
Our social life was flourishing. Rachel had us attending Toronto International Film Festival parties in September and private functions with editors and publishers fêting visiting authors in October. My subscription to Esquire provided appropriate suggestions for attire and lately my wardrobe was attuned to grey tones with lots of blue accents. I was thinking of dyeing my hair grey rather than wait for my melanocyte stem cells to stop pumping out the vigorous topsoil-black colour I currently had. Grey is sophisticated and urbane, I learned, and I liked its wavering between black and white; a nice compromise of extremes, the median.
At one of these parties, a cocktail and nibble affair for some do-good author, where one had to stand the entire evening and hold a perspiring drink (admittedly, whisked away when empty and replenished without any qualms or queries), Rachel introduced me to a lawyer who worked with some big firm on Bay Street crucifying patent infringers for five hundred dollars per billable hour.
The guy was tether-ball pole tall and skinny. His clothes hung nicely on him; so many tall thin men look ill or like parking meters with “out-of-order” bags draped over them. He was model material. Every mathematical measure of male attractiveness I could bring to bear on my assessment clearly decided he was extremely good looking. I was sure, though, that he had a fraction of my wealth.
“Have you read this guy’s book? I can’t be bothered. I don’t give a shit about schools in Africa. The schools here need help. Charity begins at home, right?”
I liked the lawyer’s thrust with the argument and felt a kindred spirit was near. We might possibly become friends, with me playing the role of a wry rich benefactor to his favourite charities. For an hour we talked about our shared disdain for socialists, G20 protestors, parsimonious bartenders, open toe sandals and the war on poverty.
“What a great guy your lawyer buddy is,” I told Rachel in the cab home. “We need to get him over for dinner. He’s a big fan of anything Italian.”
“I already did invite him. I saw how well you two were talking and thought he’d be a nice complement to our first anniversary dinner party.”
Rachel was becoming assertive, less pliant. Another list was needed. Some sort of ordinal ranking scheme that would snuff out any doubts about Rachel’s beauty, intelligence, fun quotient, or broader entertainment value.
Using a six-by-four matrix to organize the salient metrics about Rachel was easy enough and designing a rough copy of the rubric required about an hour’s effort and then another hour to fill the chart. Beside “humour” I entered a 3, rather than the highest score of 4, because she never told jokes and her witticisms, like the wines she drank, were too dry for my taste. I did, however, give a 4+ for “sexuality”; partly because anything lower would reflect poorly on me and our sex life owed much of its vigor and inventiveness to my efforts.
In an impromptu insight, Rachel decided that we should keep our lawyer friend Daniel to ourselves before bringing him into a larger group of guests. She prepared a sumptuous meal for Daniel (or Danny, depending on your relationship to him, so if you were a long-time friend you used the less formal moniker, otherwise he expected the lawyerly “Daniel”). Celery stuffed with gorgonzola was stacked across a square plate, placed beside a round plate with flowers fashioned from prosciutto petals and fig stamen. I was surprised that pasta bows with prawns and peas appeared as a main dish (she did offer an alternate of short pasta with spring vegetables) since Rachel knew I was severely allergic to shellfish and would be forced to dine with my Epi-pen on the table.
If I remember this dinner with any clarity at all, or extinguish whatever resentments I have built up over time, I see three people engaged in a rather cliché gathering where there is laughing, drinking, eating, many compliments to the chef and many toasts. The conversation pinged and ponged equally amongst us; no monkey-in-the-middle for this convivial threesome.
“Well, I have very much enjoyed the dinner, Rachel, but it’s time for business.” Daniel pulled a file from his satchel and placed it on the table.
“What the hell, Daniel! Let’s drink! What kind of work belongs in our house? I don’t even have a job!” I hit the exclamations a little hard, three glasses of wine having been followed by brandy.
Rachel moved beside Daniel and spoke.
“Daniel is going to give you some legal papers. I’m leaving tonight and these will explain your options and the associated costs.”
A litre of inhaled air escaped me in sixty seconds of hiccups. The effect was funny at the time; it gave credence to later versions of this story where I became a happy drunk, listening intently to what I was being told but really quite incapable of seriously considering it.
“Rachel has constructed a claim against you for an amount between two hundred and two-hundred and fifty thousand dollars, “Daniel proclaimed. “This represents the improvement she has made to your condo, which we estimate has increased in value by at least one half million dollars since she began improving it. Additionally, the entire contents of this condo-furniture, rugs, artwork, and linens- will be removed at the end of this week by the company from which it was leased.”
Danny drank two fingers deep from his wine glass and Rachel sipped-slurped her diminished reservoir.
Apparently, Rachel had banked every dollar I’d given her to decorate and furnish the loft, then hired a staging company to complete the loft and used my line of credit to secure the deferred payment, which was now due. The fellating decorator was part of the ruse.
I’m good with math. I have a degree in it and I can write copy that will sell anything. I use both sides of my brain equally, an ambidextrous cerebral cortex. I was not, however, going to spin this into anything but what it was: a win-win outcome.
“I have something I’d like to show you Rachel. You might be interested in this Danny, if you intend to have her when we are done.”
I passed across the table the Excel spreadsheet containing Rachel’s assessment, although neither of them could quite grasp what they were supposed to understand.
“Rachel. Overall you are a ‘two’, meaning that you are below expectations in every way, except for the sex part. I can’t date a woman who is subpar since it demeans me and I can’t internalize an ad campaign to convince myself you are anything but a remaindered product.”
I walked to the kitchen and took a cheque and a calculator out of the dedicated stationery drawer.
“Have you heard of the Drake Equation, Rachel? Daniel?” Without wine in their glasses they looked like they were waiting for the bill at the bar, desperate to leave.
“Yep, I didn’t think so. It’s an equation that can be used to determine the likelihood of extraterrestrial life, but you can modify it to figure how many perfect partners exist for you in a given city. I did the math and it turns out that in Toronto there are exactly sixteen women who are right. You’re not one of them.”
I’d only discovered this equation a few days ago and vowed to use it to narrow the future field of eligible women and to be bridle my enthusiasm for possible matches.
The amount I paid Rachel consumed less than one percent of my wealth, a trifling tuition fee for such a valuable lesson. I heard that she’d used the money to expand her kitchen and menu and put a new drink on the bar roster called “The Drake Equation”. For the past three months I have revised calculations and lists and redecorated the loft in a style that befits my linear sensibilities (geometric patterns dominate the style). Although there are only fifteen women left in the city whose paths can fruitfully intersect mine, I have decided to step outside the equation and enjoy relations with transitory women. Lust is all I need.
