by Rae Meadows
But these are the exceptions. There is also the trucker who hasn’t bathed in three days. The aggressive, fundamentalist Mormon venting his repressed rage. The obese shut-in who wants a body massage. The frat boys on a ski trip who’ve been up for two days doing coke and expect the kind of orgy they’ve seen in a porn video. The walleyed dentist who likes his buttocks licked. I marvel at the escorts’ courage to face down another hotel room door.
My shift finally grinds to its conclusion at five a.m. and in a sleepy stupor I drive through the early-morning-empty streets toward the Avenues, where I live, with Albee mewing on the seat next to me. After the slight panic over his earlier disappearance, I eventually found him asleep in one of the lockers in the back room, on top of a crumpled blue latex bodysuit, which he had chewed and clawed to ribbons.
By the time I get home, the ascending sun haloes the Wasatch Mountains and my frosty breath hangs in the morning air. I work my key into the door only to discover that it’s unlocked.
Inside my apartment, I’m barely surprised by the towheaded figure buried in a sleeping bag at the foot of the couch. Ford. He has my other key. His appearance is a welcome surprise; he wasn’t due in for another couple weeks. I go into my room, draw all the blinds against the insistent morning, and sleep.
*
When I wake up a few hours later, I quickly splash my face with water—disheartened by the bags under my eyes—and brush my teeth before going out to greet my houseguest.
Ford and I have known each other for twelve years. We met in college, fooled around a few times, and then became friends. His baby-blond hair and small features give him an aura of innocence, though I know better. For half the year he’s a river guide in southern Utah where he keeps a shingled trailer perched on the edge of a dry gulch in Moab. The rest of the time he paints houses wherever they need painting. Even though he hasn’t lived in California for years, his beachy, laid-back aura is something that’s as integral to him as his butterscotch-leather, wornhard, resoled Frye boots. Proximity to Ford is one of the reasons I have stayed in Utah. Someday we might even decide that we found what we were looking for at eighteen, but I keep that inchoate nugget snuggly tucked away with my other unexamined rainy-day potentials such as journal writing, motherhood, and learning to play the harmonica.
“Morning,” Ford says as I walk in to the living room. He’s propped up against the couch but still bundled in his sleeping bag, watching Martha Stewart on TV. He sips tea from a mug that says “AMF Bowling,” which he bought for me during his last visit, after we rooted through the housewares at Deseret Industries, the Mormon thrift store. Albee is nosing around Ford’s used tea bag, which soaks through the front page of yesterday’s Salt Lake Tribune fanned out on the floor.
“Can I make you some?” Ford asks, holding up his mug.
“No thanks,” I say. “I need coffee.” I kiss the top of his head; his dirty-hair smell is boyish and familiar.
“You must have come in from the river early.”
“Yep. Snow broke and the season abruptly ended. What time did you get in last night?”
“Five,” I say.
He whistles. “The life of a sex worker. When did you get this guy?” he asks, lifting the puppy in one hand.
“I just kept him for the night as a favor.” It’s then that I notice the sleeping bag shift and a slender female arm hook over Ford’s waist.
“Hey, Jane. Did I tell you I have a girlfriend?” he asks.
I look at him through narrowed eyes. “Is she of age?” I ask quietly.
Ford is famous for young girlfriends who didn’t graduate from high school and who have a child or an obsessed ex.
“A very-sound-sleeping twenty-seven. Her name’s Ember. You’ll like her. She’s a cocktail waitress in Moab but she wants to go to art school and paint. She has those kind of eyes that say ‘I could have anyone in the room but I choose you.’”
“What kind of eyes are those?” I ask.
“Generous.”
“Ford. You’re so easy.” I brush away my jealousy as if it’s an errant strand of spider web, annoyed at myself for its very existence.
I motion toward the TV.
“What’s she making?”
He shrugs. “You look good, Jane.”
“Thanks,” I say, not believing him.
“I got a job at the last minute working on a house in town. It starts tomorrow. Crack of dawn,” he says. “Do you think we could stay with you for a while?”
“Sure. Of course. As long as she’s neater than you are.”
“I mean like a month.”
“A month? Both of you?”
“Well, yeah.”
My stomach retracts with instinctual opposition.
“Can we talk about this later? I’m late and I need to shower,” I say. From the window the sky is slate-colored and blotchy.
Ford waves at me with one of Albee’s paws as I retreat.
*
Mohammed’s bronze Jaguar is parked out in front when I arrive at the office. Although I wouldn’t normally have to work on a day following a night shift, I switched with Kendra—whose seasoned phone technique Mohammed pesters me to learn from—so she could take her kids camping in Little Cottonwood Canyon for the weekend. Marisa has been here since I left this morning, and from here she goes next door to belly dance at the restaurant.
“Slow?” I ask.
“Very. Mimi’s at the Motel 6 by the airport. I can stay and call her out if you want.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll leave you the tip in the safe.”
“Thanks, Roxanne. Mohammed’s at the store but I’m sure he’ll be by in a few.”
Marisa takes her dance costume from the hanger and unhooks her bra under her shirt. The outfit she wears to dance in looks like an armored bikini top and a brocade skirt from a community production of Ben Hur. She whips off her shirt and ties the top behind her back; the flesh bulges around the string. I haven’t seen her belly dance, but Mohammed claims she has impressive hip isolation.
“Oh, look out for that guy from Weber who kept calling last week. The one who wants a large black girl. He starts saying nasty things after a minute or two. His number’s on the clipboard,” she says.
Marisa sprays perfume across her puckered abdomen. Her hair, gray rooted and reaching her waist, brushes my face as she turns to leave.
“Hello, how may I help you?” I ask, answering the phone.
“I gained at least six pounds last night. My dad had to pull me off the trough of candied yams.”
McCallister.
“Where are you?” I ask.
“I just got back into the city,” he says.
I imagine his wind-ripened cheeks. Even though our continued contact may be unwise, I’m glad it’s him. There’s a certain pleasure for me in familiar sadness, like picking a scab just to make sure it still hurts.
“How’s business?” McCallister asks.
“Not a lot of callers today.”
“Too many wives to visit?”
“Can you believe I worked here on Thanksgiving?” I ask, trying to make him feel responsible in some oblique way.
“It’s not exactly shocking, Jane. Knowing you, I bet you offered. Were you okay there all alone?” he asks.
“Sure. It wasn’t as depressing as you might think. Did what’s-her-face go upstate with you?” I ask, knowing full well that she didn’t.
“She went to see her parents in San Francisco.”
“How are things?” I ask, not wanting to know. We bat about the safe banter like two cats with a ball of yarn.
“Good. Really good, actually.”
There is something about the way he says “really.” I feel a swirling in my stomach and I want to hang up.
“Maria’s moving in,” he says.
The news hits me like a medicine ball in the gut. I inhale with difficulty. My eyes sting in their efforts to stay dry.
“What?” he asks. “I lost you for a second.”
“Nothing,” I say, “I have to go.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I just have to get the other line.”
“Hey,” he says, “Happy Thanks—”
All those years and he never asked me to move in. Of course I never asked him either, but he’s only been dating Maria for six months.
*
Mohammed returns from the rug store in a lather about a sale that didn’t materialize.
“She said she wanted to buy it. She came to look at it twice. Then today she says it’s not quite right. These Mormons. I don’t understand them,” he says, lifting his hands and letting them fall back to his sides with exaggerated theatricality.
“Maybe it had nothing to do with her being Mormon,” I say. “Maybe she wasn’t even Mormon.”
He stops and puts his hands in the pockets of his blazer.
“Why are you so, how do you say, against the grain?” he asks.
“Because I was here all night.”
There is a faint, unfamiliar knock on the front door. Mohammed looks up from rubber-banding bills together as I buzz the door open.
The woman who makes her timid entrance is in her late twenties, a shade heavy around the middle, dressed like she is interviewing for an administrative assistant position at a real estate office. She wears a boxy, shoulderpadded jacket and matching skirt, ill-fitting but neatly pressed, and a floral scarf knotted around her neck. But it’s the chipped fuchsia nail polish and heavy lipstick that hint at the motivation for her appearance on this postThanksgiving afternoon. That, and the folded classified section of the newspaper tucked under her arm. She stops just inside the door.
“I’m here about the ad?” she says as if it’s a question. She laughs, not quick enough with her hand to cover her crooked front teeth. “I saw it earlier this week but with the holiday and all. I mean it said women between eighteen and forty? It didn’t say any other requirements, so, I don’t know. I thought that, well, I thought maybe people look for all different types.”
Mohammed signals her to step in from the door. “Come in, please. Come in. What’s your age?”
“Twenty-six,” she says. She appears to suck in her stomach when she says this.
Mohammed openly looks her up and down as if appraising a used car.
“Complete an application and then we’ll talk,” he says. “I’ll be next door.”
I hand her a clipboard holding a badly mimeographed application, and a pen with a mismatched top. The toilet runs loudly.
“Fill out both sides and feel free to ask me any questions,” I say with a smile.
I know she is probably feeling sick about what she’s doing. On closer inspection I notice a smudge on her jacket and threads hanging at the hem of her skirt. She sits on the edge of the couch and chews the inside of her cheek as she scans the sheet. The exposed need of new applicants is hard for me to witness. I want to tell her that she shouldn’t do this, that she won’t make it long, that her unquiet eyes give her away. But who am I to say anything.
“So on this number three,” she asks, “is it really true? I don’t have to go naked?”
This one gets them every time. Mohammed says to say yes because he knows they’ll warm up to it when it becomes a question of money.
“It’s true, technically. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. But I have to tell you, most clients are looking for more for their money. And the tips are higher.” I feel like I’m apologizing.
When she finishes, she hands me the clipboard and cracks her knuckles. She stands near the desk, clutching her purse for security. Her face is determined and less young-looking than I’d thought at first. I see that her name is Megan but I don’t read anything else to spare her the embarrassment from obvious lies about weight and body measurements.
“Do you like working here?” Megan asks.
“Yeah,” I answer, “it’s not so bad.” And despite my conflicted feelings about this place, I mean it.
“That’s nice,” she says.
“I need to take your picture,” I say.
“What?” She blanches.
“Oh, don’t worry. Just right here. In what you’re wearing. So we remember what you look like.”
She straightens her shoulders and smiles with closed lips. The Polaroid is unforgiving. In the photo she looks like she’s going to the prom alone in a secondhand dress. I staple her picture to her application and ring Mohammed at the rug store so he can give her the speech about how escorting is not prostitution.
“No blow jobs or hand jobs, no matter how much money,” I hear him tell her, as I have heard him say to so many interviewees, including me.
When I applied, the strangeness and mystery of being inside a dim and bedraggled escort agency had me nervous and sweating. I answered the ad because I wanted the challenge of unfamiliar territory, but as I waited, I almost lost my resolve, imagining how easy it would be for me to get a regular office job. It was only when I went back to Mohammed’s office and he launched into a monologue about legal escorting that I started to relax. His accent softened the crassness of the content by giving it a clinical distance, and his animated up-and-down gesture that accompanied “hand job” I found oddly stripped of vulgarity. The only time he had nothing to say was when I told him he wouldn’t have to loan me the money to pay for the license that even phone girls need one to work here. I could still afford what amounted to little more than I had paid last year for a pair of silver sandals I never wore.
Megan doesn’t know it, but she is lucky Mohammed’s talking to her. The girls not attractive enough get a “We’ll call you” or “Get licensed and come back and see us,” when Mohammed knows full well they don’t have the money to get licensed or they never would have answered the ad. The truly hopeless ones, addicts or runaways or streetwalkers, haggard and rabbit-eyed, are the saddest to watch walk away.
Mohammed appears from his office.
“Go measure her. And see what she looks like with no clothes on,” he says. “I can’t tell what her figure is like in that matronly outfit.”
“I’ll measure her, but I won’t have her strip,” I say.
This is an ongoing battle. He keeps asking and I keep refusing. Even he, out of some sense of civility, won’t go so far as to request to see an applicant in the nude, so he asks the phone girls to do it for him. The other two find a perverse sense of power in sizing up new escorts, even though neither Kendra, the ex-phone-sex worker who is fifty pounds overweight, nor Marisa, the belly dancer who is forty-five, could be an escort at Premier even if she wanted to. I tell Mohammed it isn’t part of the job and it makes me uncomfortable.
“She’ll have to get naked in front of the men. At least you won’t be touching yourself under the covers.”
“Sorry, Mohammed,” I say, “No dice.”
“Then just her boobs and her tummy. She says she exercises but she looks bumpy.”
The phone rings.
“You’re on your own,” I say before answering.
He must be in good spirits because he decides to loan Megan the $250 to get licensed with the Salt Lake City Police Department. Although he only makes this offer when he thinks a girl has potential, he’s always looking for the next moneymaker and he’s not the best judge of a good bet. I’m amazed by Mohammed’s unfettered optimism. Behind his desk is a pile of dusty VCRs and CD players, useless collateral he’s accepted over the years for loans never repaid. Last week he got saddled with a snowboard.
For her collateral, Megan puts up a gold bracelet that she says came from her grandmother. She ceremoniously unclasps it from her wrist and lets go of it in Mohammed’s palm with stoic deliberateness. He scribbles an illegible loan transaction record on a yellowed receipt pad and hands her the carbon copy before leaving for the restaurant. I write out a check to the city for her mandatory health check. Even though legal escorting means no sex, the city requires a full gynecological exam to check for sexually transmitted
diseases. Anything, I gather, to add to the unpleasantness of the process. One more way station where the girl might still turn around and realize that the escort industry, although legal, is still sinful. But I don’t think the health check will be enough deterrence for Megan.
Ford arrives just as she is leaving the office. Assuming that he is a client, she darts out the door with her head down, disappearing into the shocking glare of mid-afternoon desert sun. He looks disappointed. Despite his manly avocations, Ford is unabashedly romantic. He sees escorts as wayward nymphs waiting to be saved.
“A new applicant,” I say.
“I imagined them differently,” he says. “More vulnerable or something.”
“She’s plenty vulnerable,” I say.
“You know what I mean.”
“Younger and prettier,” I say.
“Maybe that,” Ford says. “Are you the only one here?”
“Yeah. Mohammed’s next door.”
“The puppy’s in the car,” he says.
“Oh, God. I totally forgot. You can leave him with me. Jezebel should be here soon.”
Ford picks up the binder and reads the list of girls’ descriptions.
“Sorry I didn’t ask you before about staying. I mean, for so long. And with Ember. It all happened pretty fast,” he says.
There is knock on the outside door and I buzz it open. It’s Nikyla. In jeans and no makeup, her long hair down, she looks like the coed she should be.
“Hey, did you find my cell phone charger?” she asks, flipping her sunglasses up onto her head.
“Nope,” I say.
“Hi,” she says to Ford, “I like your boots.”
In full thrift-store attire he looks a little like Jon Voight from Midnight Cowboy. Ford smiles. Or more accurately, he beams.
“Thanks,” he says.
“Keep it together, Ford,” I say.
“See you tonight, Rox,” she says.
“Rox?” Ford says, eyebrows raised.