Saturday, November 20, 2010

KEPT WOMEN by LESLIE MCRAY with TED SCHWARZ : EXCERPT

page 71 (This is the lowest point Leslie experienced as a mistress...)

"I was forty in a world where players in their twenties were overage. I had come to recognize that I was addicted to a highly destructive life-style. Increasingly I had been involved with men who were violent toward me, yet with whom I continued to associate. I retained photographs of myself from when I was a top international model. I framed a letter from the office of a major presidential adviser. I talked of what was happening in Monte Carlo, Cannes, Rome, London, Paris, and other sections of the world, but I was speaking of past trips, past associations. The telephone no longer rang with offers for the modeling jobs I once dominated. The men who contacted me were fewer in number, less sophisticated that in the past, no longer, the world's elite. My time was past and I knew it."

Page 73

"Then there was another man because there had always been another man. "Use my house, consider my staff your staff, drive my car." It was a familiar litany I heard and I fantasized that all was well again. I was still in the game, still competing with the twenty year olds ...still a prize to be won by men who competed for the attention my presence on their arm would bring... But the man who loaned me his house could not keep me there, did not want me there. He had his own life, his own kept woman. I was no longer his but merely a friend, or perhaps a faded memory for whom he retained enough love or enough guilt to provide what was a little more than a few day's vacation... I was on the streets, living from my car, desperately calling men I knew, yet trying to disguise the panic in my voice...

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