I Wrote This Book Because I Love You

by Tim Kreider

  Her professional name was “Elektra Bold” but her real name, she told me, was Zoey. (Zoey wasn’t her real name, either; it was her middle name, which I learned only when I overheard her mother call her Meredith. By then I understood that having penetrated only one name out from her real one was an impressive index of intimacy.) She described herself as a performance artist, fetish model, and “pleasure activist.” She had grown up in Baltimore, where my cartoon ran in the local alternative weekly, which she said had helped her get through her depressed adolescence—clinically depressed, as in institutionalization and ECT. She told me a whole long story about her friend Ray and her deciding, during a drunken blizzard in Baltimore, to phone me up and offer to buy me a beer and give me a blow job, respectively. The plan had guttered away with the hangover thaw, and she lived on the West Coast now, but she was writing to tell me she’d be back in Baltimore for a week at Christmas and that her part of the offer, at least, was still valid.

  I was much younger then (we met through a now-extinct social network) and my inner fourteen-year-old, still incredulous that girls would consent to get into bed with him at all, was very much alive and exerting considerable influence. Most of my serious girlfriends to date had been what Zoey would call my “type A”: smart, pretty, sane, moral girls with glasses who tended to work for nonprofits or write, not bawdy dominatrices. I was tortured by the suspicion that I was missing out on a whole world of evil sexual adventure—threesomes and sex clubs and rampant, unrepentant sluttiness. This out-of-the-ether invitation seemed like my entrée into that world, like a found invitation to an orgy. And after all, this is the whole reason you become an artist in the first place, besides not wanting to get a job: in hopes that it will make girlsI want to have sex with you.

  “Dude,” my friend Harold advised me, after conducting some Internet researches of his own, “I think she might be a whore.”

  “No, no, no,” I said. “She’s just one of those free-spirited, West Coast, sex-positive types. I’m pretty sure she’s not literally a prostitute.”

  She was literally a prostitute. Actually, Zoey preferred the term whore. She confided this to me a few weeks before we were to meet, with a nervousness that seemed touchingly out of character for her no-prisoners image; she was afraid it might deter me from following through on our date. It did give me pause. I had never patronized a prostitute, less because of any moral qualms than a self-imposed stigma: I didn’t want to think of myself as the kind of guy who patronized prostitutes. I also couldn’t imagine suspending disbelief enough to convince myself that someone was attracted to me who was being paid to act like it (although I did this easily enough with barmaids, waitresses, baristas, clerks, massage therapists, and psychiatrists). But I wasn’t a customer, I reasoned; Zoey really did like me, even if the “me” she liked was as much a professional persona as her own.

  The day we met, she came to the door of her mother’s house wearing only a towel, still warm and pink from the shower. (Zoey had been running forty minutes late pretty much since birth.) The chains on her face made me a little ill at ease; I couldn’t help but imagine someone grabbing them all in a fist and yanking. But the warmth and moisture and steamy, just-out-of-the-shower smell of her when she hugged me hello made her seem very present and fleshly and accessible. Her hair was no longer pirate red but its natural dark brown. She had the thick, dramatic eyebrows of a Russian contessa. I liked that she was as tall as I was. Our talk online had been all wry, knowing innuendo, but now that here we were in real life we were both a little self-conscious about the awkward social situation in which we’d placed ourselves.

  I had had several negative experiences with the sexily insane, ranging from stabbing to nonconsensual cohabitation, and so was now guarded in my dealings with them. What made up my mind that Zoey would be safe to get involved with—that, despite her multiple piercings and profligate whiskey swigging and proffering oral sex to strangers on spec, she was not essentially damaged, dangerous, or emotionally disabled—was seeing her with her sister. Her younger sister Bea was a pretty, hippieish high school girl bound for Brown who’d had the same boyfriend throughout high school; the two of them together reminded of me of the split-screen poster for that eighties exploitation movie—“High School Honor Student by Day. Hollywood Hooker by Night.” But watching the two sisters dance hand in hand in their living room, laughing at their own silliness and for joy, felt like blundering across something beautiful in the wild—like seeing the courtship flight of hummingbirds, their flickering gemlike bodies rocketing fifty feet into the air and suddenly plummeting.

  After Bea and her boyfriend left, Zoey and I were alone in the house. I soon learned that 65 percent of my time with Zoey would be spent waiting for her to get ready—sitting and flipping through a book while she ransacked her suitcase, strewing the room with corsets and boas, strap-ons and camisoles, handcuffs and frilly little underthings. It was less like getting dressed to go out than mounting a production of Die Walküre. She chose an ensemble of fence-net stockings, a hat with little cat ears, and an enormous furry purple coat whose name was ViolettaII to go to lunch at a pub. Just as I thought we were finally ready to leave, she said coquettishly, “But first, I was thinking we should honor the conditions of our deal.”

  “Okay, so just tell me,” my friend Lauren once asked: “Was the sex with her, like, the best you’d ever had?”

  Prurient-minded friends who’ve plied me for information about the life of a prostitute are always disappointed by how little I can tell them. It was only in the last year that it even occurred to me to ask Zoey how much she charges. The truth is, I hardly ever asked her about her job, not because it made me jealous or squeamish but for the same reason I hardly ever ask my friend Gabe about his career at NASA, except insofar as it concerns the existence of aliens: talking about work is boring. And however salacious it may seem to civilians, that’s what prostitution is: another goddamn job. As in any job, Zoey has good days and crappy ones, clients she looks forward to and some she has to put up with. Although she tries to be careful, she’s occasionally found herself in a creepy or dangerous situation. (Driving out the long dirt road to my cabin, she told me: “You realize that if you were a client there is no way in hell I would ever agree to come out here.”) She’s more conscientious about her sexual health than most amateurs. She’s not a runaway or junkie, a sex slave or indentured immigrant; she wasn’t abused as a child, doesn’t get slapped around by some pimp, and isn’t in the business against her will. She went to a posh private school and graduated college. She enjoys her work and considers it a vocation; she describes some of her relationships with clients as truly intimate. Her experience as a prostitute is atypical—it’s the equivalent of cultivating craft, small-batch, sustainable marijuana in Telluride as opposed to running dime bags in Baltimore—but Zoey argues that it shouldn’t be. Instead of harassing sex workers, she says, governments should be ensuring that more of them are like her: voluntary, safe, and satisfied in their work. Anyway, I’m in no position to disapprove of her profession, even if I were disposed to, since, although I’ve never been a client, I’ve certainly been a beneficiary of her skill set.

  To keep this essay just barely confined to the realm of literary respectability instead of blooming into unrepentant smut, I’m afraid I’m going to discreetly elide the dirty parts of this story. But because there is simply no understanding certain relationships outside of bed, in respectable daylight, I will say that our week together was not unlike like one of those having-fun-and-getting-to-know-each-other music video montages in a romcom, if they had those sequences in porn films. We parked on a side street in Baltimore with only steamed-up windows for privacy while caterers carried giant bowls of salad right past us. I learned that using Violetta as a blanket was not unlike having a ménage à trois. We practiced very poor road safety. At my isolated cabin I seriously feared that my neighbors, overhearing us, might call the police, mistakenly assuming I was murdering someone.

&n
bsp; To answer Lauren’s question: it was pretty good. It wasn’t that Zoey was privy to any professional sex tricks or ancient tantric secrets so much as her frank, matter-of-fact attitude: So what do you like to do? Anything you’ve never tried but always wanted to? It was a relief to have sex be, for once, unabashedly about the sex itself, instead of feeling like some unspoken promise or a tacit contract with a lot of fine print. Nothing was going to shock or offend her; nothing was weird or taboo. We did some things I had never done before that I’d always wanted to try, which things, it turned out, I liked just as much as I’d suspected I would. (I’m sure my own proclivities seemed boringly ordinary to her; the one time she snuck up behind me and bit me, not lightly, on the ear, I said, “PLEASE DO NOT DO THAT”—and not in the sex voice but in the your-chair-is-on-my-foot voice.) Zoey, who is privy to so many secret predilections, thinks it’s a pity that so many people only act out their filthy kinks with professionals or in one-night stands, and are perversely inhibited with the people they love, the same way they’ll tell total strangers secrets they hide from their wives.

  These are the kinds of intimacies that bond together couples who must seem, to onlookers, inexplicably ill-matched. People seeing Zoey and me together on the street must’ve assumed either that I’d hired her or that our lives involved a lot of role-play—that the next day, perhaps, she would be dressed in a power suit and I would be wearing a dog collar. For Zoey, every day was like a combination of senior prom and Halloween. I had to get used to being with someone who was a spectacle everywhere we went. It was like being friends with a celebrity, or walking a pet leopard. I once got to watch an entire Sicilian brass band check her out in the frank but courtly Mediterranean manner—each man giving her a leisurely, judicious once-over in turn as we passed, eyebrows raised, lips pursed in appreciation—both more shameless and more civilized than the furtive, sleazy American leer.

  My own snobby theory had always been that anyone who needed to go to elaborate lengths to make themselves look interesting must not be. I liked go forth into the world disguised as a grown-up, the better to wrongdo unmolested by the police. But this was of course just as much a costume as Zoey’s more theatrical wardrobe; the difference was that whereas my coloration was for camouflage, hers was for display. What I tried to conceal, Zoey advertised. Once when we were drifting in a rowboat in Central Park, Zoey dressed in high Edwardian foppery in honor of Oscar Wilde’s birthday, a Conservative Jewish girl of about fourteen called boldly out to her from another boat: “Where are you from?” Zoey answered: “San Francisco,” either confirming a lifetime of stereotypes or—who knows?—maybe launching another young soul on the rapids to depravity.

  Although all my girlfriends to date had been what Zoey called type A, there was another type I’d always been attracted to, ever since my Byronic crush on tenth-grade poetess Deena Stroehmann, with her feathered bleach-blond hair, suicidal eyeliner, and tight black parachute pants, a type I had never once gotten to go out with: the cool girls, the bad girls, the tough, slutty, rowdy girls, with shocks of fuchsia or cerulean hair, pierced lips and nipples and elaborately tattooed asses; girls who wore ripped-up fishnets with little plaid schoolgirl skirts and silly neon sneakers or combat boots, who had day jobs as barmaids or strippers and sculpted with scrap metal or made guerrilla documentaries, girls who drove muscle cars barefoot while blasting Led Zeppelin. My cartoonish description should make clear how little experience I had actually had with such women. This was the elusive, hitherto hypothetical type B. Now, for the first time, I got to be with one. For me it was a glimpse behind the scenes of something that had always been mysterious, off-limits.

  Of course she was a quivering insecure mess inside like everyone else. Her flamboyant coloration was less for sexual display than a kind of protective mimicry—that adaptation whereby a harmless animal imitates a deadly one, pretending to be venomous when all it wants is not to get eaten alive. We both presented deceptively fierce fronts to the world, behind which we were mushily vulnerable. Readers who knew me only through my cartoons expected someone unshaven, apoplectic, and semicoherent with drink; Zoey, a performer, understood that what she “knew” of me was a persona, and enjoyed getting backstage to meet the actual me. And although I was grateful for the entrée that my cartoon alter ego had granted me into her favors, I found I liked the sensation of getting to be known. Lingerie (or leather, or latex) may be more enticing than nudity, but the thrill is still in finding out what’s underneath.

  I enjoyed camping it up around her in the role of Privileged Straight White Male, or Cynical East Coaster. Zoey and her friends’ conversation sounded to me like a pidgin of Queer Theory academese and New Age horseshit: I’d squinch up my face in distaste when she said things like heteronormative and exoticization, the linguistic equivalent of ’70s architecture. Like a lot of West Coasters, she was loath to own up to any unattractive emotions, and would say that someone was “teaching her compassion” rather than that he was “an asshole.” It was fun getting to play the straight man, the normal one, since I had so few friends around whom I could plausibly assume this role.

  Annoyingly, she never let me get away with it. With the acuity of a con artist spotting a colleague, she quickly sized me up as one of her own kind. She called me a “stealth weirdo.” An understanding grew between us that, despite our superficially polar looks, we were essentially the same underneath: self-doubting artists, depressive fuckups, deviants, and freaks. She really was a performance artist—it was not, in her case, a euphemism for pole dancer—a sexual provocatrix in the tradition of Annie Sprinkle, letting strangers look at her cervix through a speculum or attempting to get impregnated onstage. We both suffered from bouts of abysmal self-doubt, and each sometimes lay awake at night wondering Oh, what is to become of me? Once when I was trying to talk to her in an earnest, concerned-friend way about the relatively short span of a prostitute’s earning years, she said, “Thank you for your financial counsel, Mr. Twenty-Dollars-a-Week.” I hung my head in shame. When she’d tell me about her byzantine, impossible-to-follow relationship troubles—typically not just love triangles but love rhombi, dodecahedra, or hypercubes—I’d ask her, “So, how’s that whole polyamory thing going?” She’d counter: “How’s monogamy working out for you?” And we would both hang our heads in shame.

  These were just the kinds of differences it’s fun to play up between friends, like one of you arbitrarily taking the role of the one who says I don’t know, maybe we shouldn’t and the other the one who says Aw, c’monnn—what’s gonna happen? That I write and Zoey has sex for a living seems incidental; what’s essential is that we’re both passionate devotees of our respective vocations. When I was thirteen I wrote up an outline of my future life in which I would be a writer living in a circular house in Montana with a puma whose name would be Ralph; at the same age Zoey drew a picture of the brothel she and her friends would run, called Chez Cécile, all of them lounging invitingly about in negligees.

  It was obvious, even to recidivist disaster-seekers like ourselves, that Zoey and I would’ve self-destructed as a couple almost instantaneously, so we both held back a certain emergency reserve of affection in the interest of self-preservation. I’d hoped that all the obvious obstacles to a “real” relationship with Zoey, among which the fact that she was a prostitute was not even #1, might safeguard me against getting too erotically addicted—or, worse, romantically attached—and spare me the usual NASCAR-like emotional crash.

  It mostly worked. There were a couple of uncomfortable moments in just the one week we spent together. She made out with another girl in front of me, a sight that allegedly inflames most hetero dudes to hooting frenzies of lust but mostly made me feel like I ought to excuse myself. She made the mistake of introducing me to one of her other lovers, a person named Pale Eddie. I was not pleased to meet him. I stopped by her house to return a purse she’d left in my car and got to find her in bed with someone else. All these glancing hurts acted as mild, inoculatory do
ses of jealousy that protected me against what would’ve been a more virulent case later on. The most jealousy I ever felt over Zoey was when I learned she was seeing another cartoonist—my one meager claim to uniqueness negated. I didn’t want to be part of anyone’s harem, just another sensual treat to be sampled. “I know,” Zoey said when I tried to explain all this for the zillionth time. “You are a special special snowflake.”

  There was a moment that week when I found myself standing at an I-95 Park & Ride at dusk, waiting to meet a stranger who would sell me some special thermal blankets for Zoey’s snakes (she had three, named after the Gorgons) to wear during their cross-country flight to San Francisco. Harold told me over the phone: “Dude, your life has officially become strange.”

  At the end of our week together, Zoey sat on the edge of her bed and made a touchingly shy speech: “I know I’ve only known you a week,” she said, “and I know we don’t really know each other, and I don’t want this to sound crazy or anything, but . . . I just want you to know that I’ve really enjoyed spending this week with you and getting to know you and—whatever it means—I . . . kind of . . . love you.”

  “I know you do, Zoey,” I said. “I kind of love you, too.”

  Maybe this sounds naïve, as if we were confusing an erotic daze with something more real. Sex is supposedly superficial, merely physical—as though love weren’t physical, too, a neural squall of endorphins and hormones. And yet I’ve noticed that most people can only sleep together casually for so long before they have to admit either that they don’t really like each other and have to stop, or else that they really do, and it isn’t casual anymore. A woman once told me she loved me on our second date, which made me reflexively wary: she seemed overinvested way too soon. It was years too late before I realized that I’d loved her, too. Who’s to say that sex is not as legitimate a way into intimacy as having dinner and drinks and talking about your pets and siblings and favorite films—that it isn’t, also, a kind of love? (The King James Bible famously translates the Hebrew word , “to know,” to refer to sex.) People who disapprove of prostitution call it “selling your body,” but what Zoey was selling was really only a token compared to what she threw in for free. Sex was just the occasion for the real transaction, the way a bar ostensibly sells alcohol but really affords a forum for companionship, conversation, flirting, laughter, and the chance of meeting someone new.