New York Escorts: Nine’s a winning ‘Number’ in Crosley’s short-story collection
But it won’t be easy to pry Crosley loose from her habitat: it provides her topics – Manhattan, apartments and the oddness of life outside of New York, in, say, Alaska, where bears share the neighborhood.
Crosley’s lifestyle is ruled by real estate. This will cheer the untried housing seeker. In “Take a Stab at It,” her strongest essay, Crosley goes condo-hunting with a friend whose parents will bankroll the down payment. The piece offers both snappy one-liners and a credible moral inquiry into caste: In a spat after her wealthy friend pays for dinner, she wonders, “If I felt this indebted over pizza, how was I going to cope with floor-to-ceiling French doors?” Later, when the condo deal dissolves, Crosley finds herself reading local newspapers, hovering over local papers’ escort agency ads and thinking, “How bad would it really be?” if the result were a place of her own.