The Dallas Women's Guide to Gold-Digging with Pride

Book by Ross Jennifer

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 America beauty contestant, one of those tall women who appears to have never grown inner thighs. Aimee lipoed hers out. She has long blond hair (bleached with extensions, of course—we’re in Dallas after all) and a perpetual fake tan. A sign of her skill is her natural look, even with all the work she’s had done.

A picture of me: I’m five feet four inches tall; occasionally I say five-five. When I lived in New York, I thought this was average height. In Texas, they grow people big. Most women are five feet seven at a bare minimum. I wear heels to compensate. I don’t weigh that much, 110 pounds. I do possess my original thighs and spider veins, though I’m thinking more and more that my genetics are a bad fashion statement that I should make over. I must admit I was geek chic in the Northeast. I wore as a badge of honor the fact that I had never used an eyelash curler or lip liner and had no idea if I possessed blue or yellow undertones in my skin. I never got hit on at a bar and was never a recipient of a double-take from a man on the subway. I thought that my practiced careless appearance telegraphed that I was smart—she must have a brain if she’s that plain. But now I think it just said: wannabe librarian.

After I met Aimee, I decided I’d indulge in some of the feminine things that I ran away from in New York—makeup, regular waxings, and form-fitting clothes—because I secretly wanted to be hit on and appreciated for my appearance. It felt like a sin or a sign of weakness to admit that to my friends in New York. Now I highlight my hair to a dark blond and submit myself to weekly manicures. I am still proud to own pale, freckle-free skin, though. I run from the sun.

I was sent to Dallas by the Journal because I am young and have no clout. I cover retail—J. C. Penney, Wal-Mart, etc. It isn’t bad if you have an enduring affection for two-dollar flip-flops, polyester-blend clothing, and cubic zirconia. Did I mention that I get all the irregular T-shirts I want? This is the first time I have ever lived below the Mason-Dixon Line. My mother, ever the Jewish liberal, thinks I won’t be able to find a good bagel...