The Sisters Brothers

After a terse encounter with Sally, Eli reflects on his sexual experiences: He “had never been with a woman longer than a night, and they had always been whores” (56). Eli finds these encounters shallow and lacking in human connection, since paid sex workers merely mimic intimacy. More interested in finding love than physical release, he has “given up on whores entirely, thinking it best to go without rather than pantomime human closeness” (56).

Nevertheless, his attitude toward women remains confused. He has no understanding of how to build an emotional connection with another person because all his relationships (even the one with Charlie, to some degree) are so transactional. With Sally, he falls back on money—the medium of exchange that can procure sex work: He hides $5 beneath the sheets of his bed, in the hopes that the woman will find it and “associate her thoughts of [him] with the notion of a marriage bed” (73). But this stratagem is doomed to failure. Sally is potentially available for paid sex—as Charlie confirms, Sally offers him a variety of paid sexual services, including “the whole thing” (96)—but she cannot be paid into loving Eli or even thinking fondly of him.

Almost all the novel’s women refuse to perform the kind of emotional labor Eli thirsts for.