Losing It
Love and reading
Cupid is armed and dangerous
Passionate and penniless in Paris
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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Appelt wants to meet each man personally, and for good reason. On one occasion, a pair of male friends who came off perfectly on the phone showed up for their face-to-face interview decked out in rubber from head to toe. "Not that there's anything wrong with that," she smiles -- but few women venturing out into the risky world of infidelity for the first time are going to find solace in a leap quite that far. Appelt is proud of the men she's collected. Status obviously matters to her and her female clients, and sifting through her files, she points over and over to the doctors and lawyers and men of means who have registered with her service. Jacqueline, too, is impressed. Sure, there has been the occasional mishap, such as the time one man phoned her up from a hotel demanding that she get herself down to the room pronto, because, after all, he'd "paid for this." But all Jacqueline has to do is call Appelt and that file is yanked. "It's not about sex," says Appelt. "It's about diversion, maybe even adventure. If the couples I bring together end up in bed, well, wonderful. But sex isn't the main reason people register with me in the first place, and it isn't always the way their evenings together end." Nevertheless, Jacqueline is aware that "sex is always in the background," always hovering over any of her dates. A man may go out of the way to set up a rendezvous "on neutral ground," he may act the perfect gentleman from start to finish, but the air is perpetually charged with possibility. And that's precisely what she likes about meeting the men Appelt refers to her. "I can go to a movie with one of my girlfriends, but it's not the same. You go to a movie with a man, a married man ..." Jacqueline works her eyes. "Well, the flirting and the tension, it just adds something. It's different." Jacqueline has already turned one of her best friends on to the service, a dutiful wife who works full time, but who for the last six weeks has been having the time of her life breaking the contract she agreed to on her wedding day. Neither Jacqueline nor her friend would have dared to venture into such territory without the assistance of Appelt's agency. The service is a remarkably late-'90s sort of project. In an age when, outside the Oval Office at least, the slightest hint of flirtation is likely to be met by the slap of a sexual harassment suit, an age in which downsizing and economic upheaval have led to rampant job insecurity and turned so many of us into the scrambling sort of "free agents" celebrated by the likes of Fast Company, an age in which new services arise and compete with each other to capitalize on our lack of leisure time, Christa Appelt's agency seems all but inevitable: the outsourcing of infidelity. If the enthusiasm of clients like Jacqueline is a reliable indicator of the agency's potential, Germany is likely to see subsidiaries pop up in every major city. And sales of cell phones will undoubtedly soar.
David Hudson edits Rewired and is a regular contributor to Spiegel Online. |
