by Rae Meadows
After a few turns around the parking lot, we find number 206, one of the apartmentlike low brick units far from the cheery main reception. Ember turns off the radio.
“My lipstick okay?” she asks, rubbing her nose.
I nod.
“Let’s get this party started,” she says as she opens the door.
In the shadowy light, Ember is small, fluttery, and fast, like an erratic bird heading straight for a window it can’t see.Up the outside stairs, she makes her way along the corridor and stops in front of 206. Without hesitation, she thrusts her hip out and knocks with rapid-fire certainty.
When she slips inside the room, I ungrip the steering wheel. I pick at my dry cuticles and look to the hotel room door again and again. In a messy pile down by her floor mat are the papers Ember has amassed in the process of officially becoming an escort. On the top, with a footprint bisecting it, is the city ordinance list.
ORDINANCE 5.61.040 DEFINITIONS
“Escort” means any person who, for pecuniary compensation, dates, socializes, visits, consorts with or accompanies or offers to date, consort, socialize, visit, or accompany another or others to or about social affairs, entertainment, or places of amusement, or within any place or public or private resort or any business or commercial establishment or any private quarters.
ORDINANCE 5.61.085A
A licensed outcall employee may appear in a state of nudity before a customer or patron providing a written contract for such appearance was entered into between the customer or patron and the employee and signed at least twenty-four hours before the scheduled nude appearance.
Even Mohammed is willing to let us slide on the second one. His lawyer has advised us that stapling a backdated “Nudity Notice” to a client sheet will do the job.
Ember has drawn daisies and irises down the margin of Mohammed’s “Escort Training Manuel.”
6. You should dress appropriately to maximize your income. It is suggested that if you smoke, you should wash your hands and chew gum before the appointment. Remember, too, that clients may not appreciate foul language.
I click off the overhead light; I’m on edge about Ember and by extension uncertain about what I am doing. A middle-aged man in a Russian fur hat stops on the sidewalk in front of my windshield. Although it is dark and I am still, he notices my eyes reflecting the lamplight. We hold a gaze and something of a leer jags at one corner of his mouth until his plump wife scampers up beside him and they walk off toward the dining room.
“Fuck you,” I say, once he’s safely gone. My voice sounds foreign and meek in the close car.
I put the radio on continual scan and let the song snippets and half-words of ads and DJs alight on my brain and then dissipate. With a half hour to go I leave the toasty haven of the car for the pay phone at the end of the lot.
“Hello?”
“Did I tell you Ford was staying with me?”
McCallister has always been a little jealous of Ford— the way he stepped outside urban life to forge his own sort of macho path, his hairline, the fact that he knew me first. He’s afraid I think Ford is cooler than he is.
“Really. For how long?”
“For a few more weeks. His girlfriend is here too,” I can feel his relief at the mention of her. “I’m waiting for her in a hotel parking lot. She’s on her first escort date.”
“Jesus,” McCallister says. “Is it one of those fleabag places?”
“No. It’s mostly Mormon.”
“They must have beds as wide as football fields.” “Funny,” I say.
“Maria’s meeting me in a couple of minutes. Dinner with her parents.”
“Lucky you,” I say.
“What did you want, anyway?” he asks. “You never call me.”
“I don’t know. I was bored, I guess. Did you know it’s illegal for an escort to spank a client if he is in his underwear, but if he’s nude, it’s legal?”
I hear a woman’s voice.
“Well, thanks for calling,” McCallister says in a business tone.
I sigh and call him an asshole, but only after I’ve hung up.
Back inside the car, I turn the heat to high, lean my seat back and feel my skin warm down to my toes. I had told myself that my contact with McCallister wasn’t holding me back as long as I was never the one who called. In my disappointment with my weakness, I tear at a hangnail with my teeth until I taste blood.
From the back window of the car, the moon hangs large and yellow. I try to believe that I am floating in the present but my mind tumbles and spins, bumping up against the fear of what I am supposed to do next. I have been in Utah for a half year. I no longer have the excuse that I’m still getting settled. The little money I came with is gone. Part of me wants to be in room 206 with Ember. Surely there wouldn’t be much else to think about than the task at hand.
*
“It wasn’t that big a deal,” Ember says. “Really. I don’t get what all the fuss is about. I just made a hundred dollars for an hour.”
A piece of Ember’s hair is caught on her lip and she swats it away as if it were a dogged fly. She punches in the lighter on the dashboard and digs around her purse.
“Here,” I say, handing her a cigarette.
“Thanks,” she says. She lights it, closes her eyes, and takes a deep drag. “Much better.”
I go first to McDonald’s to get Ember a caramel sundae, then on to Premier, where I wait in the car while she settles up. I’m jittery. I smoke without really wanting to. I tune the radio to Car Talk on NPR; I yearn for such a simple sequence of cause, effect, solution.
Ember is back a minute later with an impishness restored to her smile.
“So, Jane,” she says, counting out her money.
“Yeah?”
“What do you want to know?”
I turn the car out of the alley onto Second South.
“Tell me everything,” I say.
I drive west out of downtown, over the train tracks, and out past the airport where the lights become sparse along the south edge of the Great Salt Lake. We can smell it even in the cold with the windows up, even though we can’t see it. The snow-topped Wasatch Mountains to the east have a lunar glow. I turn in at Saltair; its washed-out, primary-colored onion domes are dream shapes against the clear night sky. This used to be a place where Mormons would come for family fun, “the Coney Island of the West.” Thousands danced in the pavilion. There was even a roller coaster. Now it houses a gift shop selling saltwater taffy and salt licks in the shape of Utah, and outdated arcade games, and occasionally it hosts the concert of a has-been performer. But in winter it’s sealed up, its windows covered with padlocked boards. I park with the headlights on the choppy lake water that laps at the saltencrusted rocky shore. The forceful wind gently rocks the car. I turn off the engine and wait for Ember to talk.
“He had a vague resemblance to Tom Hanks,” Ember says. “If Tom Hanks were short and puffy and bald on the top. He shook my hand and said, ‘Shena?’ I laughed when he said it, and then I felt bad because he blushed.”
I have the anticipatory pang in my stomach, like the moment after ingesting a drug or stepping into a pair of expensive shoes. Ember leans her seat back and puts her feet against the glove compartment.
“He had a fan of twenties already on the table next to the bed, which he knew to give me at the beginning. It’s hard to tell if he calls escorts a lot. He wasn’t relaxed but he wasn’t unfamiliar with it all, if that makes any sense. ‘So Tony,’ I said, ‘why don’t you make yourself comfortable?’ Like they say in the movies. He sat on the edge of the bed, took off his shoes, then looked at me to make the next move.” “Did you talk to him?”
“I asked him things like ‘Are you from Salt Lake?’ and he said no but I could tell he was lying. Probably married. ‘What do you do?’ Software salesman. He wasn’t exactly effusive but he was totally polite. He asked my permission for everything. I made all my actions very slow and deliberate to eat up as much time a
s possible. Scarf unwrapped. Coat off. I sat next to him on the bed and leaned over him to find an R&B station on the clock radio. I helped him unbutton his shirt. He liked that.”
“Were all the lights on?”
“At that point I made a production out of slow dancing around the room, letting my hair down, turning off some of the lights, shaking my ass for him, taking off my shoes, putting my foot up on the table to take off my stockings one leg at a time. I felt his eyes on me always but I liked it. It wasn’t that icky. He seemed harmless.”
“Was he naked yet?”
“No. Down to boxers. But not touching himself or anything. He asked me how old I was, how long I’d been an escort.”
“What’d you say?”
“Twenty-three. One week.”
“He must have been psyched.”
“He pulled back the bedspread and leaned against the pillows. I made a lot of eye contact. After I pulled my shirt over my head I tossed it at him. I tried to make two minutes go by before the skirt came off but time is so damn slow when you want it to go fast.”
“What did you do when commercials came on the radio?”
“I asked him what he wanted me to do.”
“And?”
“‘Just keep doing what you’re doing, baby’ he said, ‘Show me your ass.’ He said that a lot. So I was down to bra and undies and I danced like the girls did at American Bush. Lots of leaning over in various directions, grinding, moving my hands all over. Then he asked if I was cold, which I was, so he said I should join him on the bed.”
“Weren’t you scared?”
“I mean, yeah, kind of. I gave him sort of a lap dance—he had the covers pulled up—and let him touch me some. He was gentle. His hands were warm and smooth.”
“Bra on or off?”
“On. But I let him take it off.”
Ember is making lines of white powder on a Johnny Cash CD case.
“I think the key is going to be pity,” she says. “I felt sorry for this guy.”
“Did you kiss him?”
“Yeah, but no tongue. He smelled like Old Spice. Like my dad. We rolled around the bed, both with underwear on.”
“Did he try stuff?”
“Not really. He rubbed his boner against my leg but that was okay. He licked my boobs. He kept saying, ‘Shena, you’re so pretty.’ But he didn’t ask for a blow job or sex or anything.”
“How much time was left?”
“There were about five minutes before the call so I pulled away and got fully naked. I lay on my back and showed him my cootch. He jacked off, then he whimpered like a little boy.”
There is so much distance in Ember’s retelling, I feel like I’m watching from the back row of the balcony section. I can’t get at it, whatever it is.
She snorts cocaine with one of her newly acquired bills.
“Wow, I’m a cliché,” she says. She laughs as she wipes the powder from her nostril.
“So then what?” I ask.
“Kendra called. He didn’t want to extend. I got dressed, he thanked me, kissed me on the cheek, and gave me fifty bucks extra.”
Headlights, one of them dim, approach in the rearview. A beat-up van drives into the parking lot, but when it sees our car, it drives back out onto the frontage road.
“Maybe we should go see what Ford is up to,” Ember says.
“What are you going to tell him?”
“Just about nothing,” she says.
On the way to town, I stop at AM/PM for more cigarettes and then the drive-through at Arctic Circle.
“Do you have any siblings?” Ember asks, between fries.
“A sister. She’s older. We’re not that close. She’s a real estate agent and lives outside of Chicago with her lawyer husband. She thinks I’m having some sort of third-life crisis. Which I may well be.”
By the time I was ten and my sister was fifteen, she had moved on from me, and my clamoring for her attention only made her retreat more. She has always yearned for structure—even as a child she made a diagram of her wedding—and she planned her life accordingly. I, on the other hand, wanted something or someone to lead me in the other direction. I would say we are amicably estranged, confused by each other but not willing to make the effort to get past it. I called her when McCallister and I broke up, but she said she never could understand why I had liked him in the first place.
“One of my brothers is in jail for drugs,” Ember says. “One’s in the army in Texas. One is a steamfitter in Milwaukee. He’s the most normal. And one’s dead. He died last year when this chick hit him with a brick.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Don’t be. He was an asshole. He tried to rape me when I was twelve.”
Ember has her feet up on the glove compartment again; her skirt pushed up like a tomboy’s, her hair in a high ponytail, and her hamburger resting on her knees. She looks ten years younger than she did before her date.
“I miss the idea of my brothers,” she says. “But I don’t really miss them as people.”
I take the long way home, up along the ridge of the Avenues with a perfect view of the graph of lights in the valley and the fantastically lit temple glowing at its heart. Whatever one thinks of Mormon ideology, the way they took control of this place, bent it to their will, and forced unforgiving land to make sense is admirable.
“Hey look,” Ember says, pointing up to a streetlight.
For the first time this season, it’s begun to snow.
chapter 8
Although I wake up to a glorious white-covered morning, by the afternoon all the snow has melted in the unrelenting valley sun. As I drive to work, the last shaded patches are seeping into the ground.
Inside the office, Jezebel and Nikyla are decorating a fake Christmas tree Mohammed brought in to make the workplace more festive. Albee drags a wad of tinsel through their feet.
“I need another box,” Jezebel says, after tossing a handful of tinsel on the tree without discretion. “This side is totally naked.”
Nikyla carefully hangs frosted-glass ornaments in even spaces between the artificial limbs of the tree.
“Maybe if you hung the strands individually, it wouldn’t end up so lopsided,” Nikyla says.
Jezebel moves from the tree and hangs tinsel on Nikyla’s shoulders, head, and breasts, until Nikyla gives her a playful shove.
“Come on, Rox, help us out here,” Nikyla says.
But the phone is ringing so I skitter over to answer it, setting up a date for S&M Samantha with a once-aweeker in Federal Heights, before even sitting down.
“I can’t believe you pushed that whore instead of me,” Jezebel says, draping her arm around Nikyla. “I’m totally broke. Albee is so fucking expensive.”
“You couldn’t have gone anyway,” Nikyla says.
“Hey, Roxanne,” Jezebel says. “You should come with us!”
“Come with you where?” I ask.
“Bachelor party. These guys coming in from L.A. out at Alta. Come on. It’s the best setup.”
“We’ll show you what to do,” Nikyla says.
“I don’t think so,” I say. “I’m not ready for that.”
“But you’re considering it?” Nikyla asks.
“I guess,” I say shyly, though the thought of dancing around next to these two nubile beauties in a roomful of chanting drunken men seems scarier and more exposing than rolling around on a bed with a stranger.
“Oh come on,” Jezebel says, fingering her bottom lip like a toddler, “don’t be a party pooper.”
Nikyla winks at me. “Another time, Rox. When you’re ready.”
“Thanks,” I say.
But as they bustle around, painting their faces, laughing, spraying perfume, I want to be one of them. I’m jealous even though I’m not quite sure of what.
“They booked us for two hours,” Nikyla says, “but since it’s early I’m sure they’ll want us longer.”
Jezebel says, “As if they would tell two hot na
ked girls, ‘Okay, you can go now.’”
They set off, done up like party-going teenagers, and leave me alone with the half-tinseled tree. I turn on a lamp in the lounge to save the tree from the obfuscating darkness but it’s tilted and more blaringly metal and plastic in the light. The void from the girls’ departure is heavy and quiet. I start hoping they forgot something and will come back for me.
When the door flies open, I jolt out of my chair but it’s just Mohammed with a wreath in one hand and a bag of lights in the other.
“It’s looking better in here,” he says.
“Since when do Muslims celebrate Christmas?” I ask.
“Hah. I am an American,” he says, shaking his fist in the air. He takes a roll of stringed lights from the bag and hands it to me. “Start at the top of the tree and work your way down. Next year maybe we’ll get one of those fluffy trees that’s all white.”
“Flocked?”
“Flocked. Yes,” he says. “That would be nice.”
He sticks a cluster of plastic thumbtacks into the door and hangs the pine wreath, already dried out and starting to brown in patches.
“That new girl quit. Megan who called herself Pamela. After one lousy date. Can you believe this? I went out on a limb for her, gave her a chance, and look at the thanks I get.”
“I think she was pretty traumatized. It took me twenty minutes to get her to stop crying after the date.”
“What did she think she’d be doing? Dinner and a movie? That crummy bracelet of hers isn’t worth anything. We have to be more careful about who we take on. I mean this.”
Mohammed straightens the wreath.
“I’ll be at the Saharan,” he says.
He shuts the door behind him and a sprinkle of needles falls to the carpet.
*
Ford, Ember, and Ralf are drinking whiskey in the kitchen when I get home. Ember is making popcorn while the other two play chess at the table.
“One big happy family,” I say.