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

by Jennifer Ross

Genres: Women's Fiction; Contemporary Romance; Romantic Comedy

Synopsis

“Here, in the land of conspicuous consumption, marriage isn’t considered a lifelong commitment. It’s the ultimate accessory.”
–from The Dallas Women’s Guide to Gold-Digging with Pride


Jennifer Barton’s life has veered 180 degrees. A transplanted New Yorker now in a Lone Star state of mind, she’s ditched her urban hipster look for the waxed, Botoxed, and blond glow of the Dallas women she now walks among and mingles with.

Jenny’s mission: to be in “tall cotton,” which in Texan husband-hunting terms means sporting a major rock on your finger and seeing the prenup torn up before you walk down the aisle. But learning the local lingo is only the tip of the cactus for Jenny, who is used to picking men based on attraction and long-term compatibility, not net assets. No matter that in Dallas, 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.”

To Aimee, Jenny’s pretty-as-a-beauty queen roommate (and an expert gold-digger), marrying for material worth is gospel–she’s already successfully managed her first divorce and is on the lookout for husband number two. Jenny has laughed off Aimee’s ideas on flirting and courting (“Never directly engage a man you’re interested in”), but after catching her boyfriend cheating and listening to her mother’s constant laments over her lack of grandchildren, Jenny reconsiders Aimee’s businesslike approach to marriage: plan, strategize, conquer.

Under Aimee’s guidance, Jenny finds herself grocery shopping in stilettos, attending skeet shoots and rattlesnake hunts, and traversing the ultimate husband-hunting ground–a Baptist wedding. But in between secretly decoding her targets’ e-mail passwords and breaking into potential mates’ houses to figure out what their interests are, Jenny wonders if love ever enters into the deal.

Welcome to Dallas, where the higher the hair the closer to God. Grab the steer by the horns and sharpen your nails, J. C. Conklin’s hilariously funny debut novel will have you going Texas wild!

Release date: December 24, 2008

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

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, let alone a good man here. She’s worried about my eggs rotting before I have a child but she is happy I started waxing.

There was and still is some culture shock. I’m still getting my sea legs with the whole woman thing. In New York, men never opened a door for me or insisted that I get on and off the elevator first. They never talked about marriage as if it was a good thing. They didn’t carry the heavy groceries. They thought that women should pay for dinner, movies, and their own clothes. The South does have its advantages in this sense. And its disadvantages. In New York, I’m Jennifer Barton; here I’m Jenny, because people either add a “y” to your name or a “Bob” as in “Billy Bob” or “Joe Bob.” Or, they shorten it to initials. I guess I got the better end of the naming stick. My middle initial is “R,” so I could’ve been stuck with the worst nickname in Texas: J.R.

Then there’s my boss, Carol Becker. She hates me. She spells mentor s-a-r-c-a-s-m. She hates her age (forty-seven), her lumpy body, and anyone younger than she is. She even hates that she’d have to exercise to be thin. At lunch, she devours Lean Cuisine microwave meals (the implication of multiple meals is intentional). By three o’clock, she’s popping Hershey’s Kisses like Courtney Love slams down painkillers. She wears matching oversize cotton T-shirts and long skirts with horrible little prints of cherries, carrots, happy witches, or something else totally incongruent for a woman who can’t speak a civil word until her second cup of coffee. She sharpened her careerist pencil at the Journal when editors thought that allowing women into the pressroom was nothing more than a libidinal distraction, increasing adultery and lowering professional standards. She holds a bit of a grudge against the younger females who don’t appreciate her pioneering efforts to overcome misogyny. She’s bitter, just a little bitter. She also resents that I’m taking charge of my love life.

Whenever I leave work before six o’clock, she always manages to mutter, “Not putting in a full day, huh?” Or, if I wear a knee-length skirt, she quips, “Don’t you want your sources to respect you?”

Aimee says I should get away from Carol as soon as possible because she’s the kind of woman who will wear my looks away with stress, jealousy, and hatred. “She’s a free radical brought to life,” Aimee said.

She nudges me and rolls her eyes to the left of the bar. I wait a few seconds before I glance in the direction of Baylor Jones, a trial lawyer known for his wavy dark hair (does he dye it?) and his client list, which has included Enron’s most wanted. He has the money and shoulders to wear Armani and the charm of a “truh suthun genulmun.” He’s sitting with two other men in suits and tightly knotted Brioni ties.

“See the guy next to Baylor? He’s my target,” Aimee says.

Aimee is cunning enough to be a lawyer herself. She was accepted into Stanford law school, but thought it would use up too many of her peak appearance years. Instead, she got hitched. But her then-husband didn’t stop dating other women during their marriage, including several of her former sorority sisters. After he passed along gonorrhea, he tried to explain it to her by saying there are the girls you marry—the cute, smart ones like Aimee—and the others you had fun with. Aimee laughed in his face and took the house, a lovely 1930s Frank Lloyd Wright adaptation with open rooms and beautiful wood floors. That’s where I live now.

After the divorce, Aimee got smart. She decided she was going to treat marriage like a business investment because she says, “Next time I’m gonna get something more out of it than a broken heart and a disease.” She wants to marry rich and performs the due diligence to ensure that she will. So many people in Dallas are credit rich but cash poor. They lease cars, rent houses, and expense dinners. Instead of being stuck with a huge credit card load and a guy that’s not all he said he was financially, Aimee does intensive research on every potential target. She always googles before she oogles. It helps that she is a paralegal for a high-powered divorce attorney—free access to Lexus Nexus, financial databases, and, when necessary, guys who collect information. If her target is an officer of a public company, she reads SEC documents. She phones secretaries, maid services, and car dealerships, posing as an American Express representative, to find out more information about their liquid assets and how they use them. She doesn’t move in for the kill unless her target is worth more than ten million dollars net, meaning, minus all debts and liens. She has elevated gold-digging to a science. She is a man-hunting entrepreneur.