Calling Out

by Rae Meadows

  “I guess this means I quit,” I say. “And now, I don’t know.” I take a huge gulp of beer.

  “I’m glad,” he says.

  “Little by little you make compromises and allowances. You’re just answering the phones, then you’re only stripping—hey, it’s legal, it’s not such a big deal— and then it’s just your body and it makes someone else happy. Pretty soon you wake up and you are doing things that you would have never deemed okay.”

  “I assume the ‘you’ in this scenario is you,” he says.

  I laugh. “It’s that obvious?”

  The wind has picked up outside, and through the window there is nothing but dark.

  “How are you anyway?”

  “I’m just fine,” he says.

  “I saw Ember,” I say.

  Ford nods and reaches for a tortilla.

  “She’s planning on going to Spain or some grand plan like that.”

  “That sounds like her,” he says.

  “I imagine she left your heart pounded to smithereens.”

  “Yeah, but on some level I knew that there was no clear patch of sky just around the corner. I knew it was never going to be right.”

  He rises for another beer.

  “Who am I kidding?” he says, kicking the refrigerator shut behind him. “I was flying blind. It sucked when she left. It still sucks.”

  We laugh.

  “That’s why I like Moab,” he says. “I know how it all works here. I don’t need a constant readjustment.”

  “McCallister showed up,” I say.

  “In Utah?”

  “On my doorstep.”

  “It’s not all that surprising,” he says.

  “This time I broke up with him.”

  “You’re better off,” he says.

  I lean my head on his shoulder.

  There is scratching outside the door, then the sound of gnawing. I turn to Ford.

  “Porcupines,” he says. “They like the taste of shingles.”

  *

  Ford leads me on a tour of the homestead. We walk behind the trailer and stand at the edge of a moonlit gulch, listening to the snow-melt stream below. Ford puts his arm around my waist and we walk together, matching steps.

  “On Christmas I went to see this old man who’d had a stroke and couldn’t talk,” I say. “When he fell asleep, I discovered his darkroom in the backyard with boxes and boxes of the most beautiful still life photographs. There were no people in any of them, nothing living, except for a few shots of his atrophied hand. The pictures made me so sad, all hidden away.”

  Ford stops and looks up for a second.

  “I don’t think that’s sad at all,” he says.

  He turns and walks backward, facing me. In a nasally Willie Nelson imitation he begins to sing.

  “ I looked to the stars, tried all of the bars, and I’ve nearly gone up in smoke. Now my hand’s on the wheel, of something that’s real, and I feel like I’m goin’ home.”

  chapter 22

  Salt Lake County District Attorney David Lochman said his office decided not to file charges against a man who allegedly attempted to rape an escort service worker because jurors would believe the act had been consensual. “You can’t say she was hired and paid big money to go to a man’s motel room to do lewd dances for him in the nude and then come back and say she was attacked after she has been paid twice the original amount,” Lochman said.

  —Salt Lake Tribune

  I feel like I owe it to Mohammed to resign face-to-face, so when I return from Moab, I drive over to Premier.

  The office is as it always is: dim, faintly smelling of coconut oil from the tanning closet and the artificially floral after-scent of the big purple candle. Kendra is on the phone, reciting her well-rehearsed, flirtatious pitch while she reads her horoscope in Glamour. It’s only 10:30 in the morning but she sets up some new girl whose name I don’t recognize for a date at Little America. Kendra’s eyes widen at the sight of me and she waves with one of her red-taloned fingernails.

  “I thought we’d seen the last of you,” she says when she hangs up.

  “Where’s Mohammed?”

  “Next door,” she says. “So is that it for you, Roxanne?” Kendra asks.

  “Yeah, I think so,” I say.

  Although the rug store appears closed down—it doesn’t even have a sign—the door is open and the bell rings as I enter. The square room is filled with thigh-high stacks of Oriental carpets in various sizes, lushly colored and intricately patterned. I want to bite into the cardamom browns, the honey golds, the berry-stained crimsons. I feel tradition and artistry all around. I lift up a corner of a rug, only to find the next one just as impressive. I can’t believe I’ve never bothered to come in here before. I had no idea of the bounty.

  I hear the swish of Mohammed’s suit before I see him.

  “May I help you?” he asks in an obsequious tone. “Oh. It is you.”

  “Hi,” I say.

  “So,” he says.

  “I guess you figured out that I quit.”

  He picks at a thread on the edge of a rug. “Yes, well. You are not the first.”

  “Did you see the paper today? What the D.A. said?”

  “I do not want to talk about this,” he says. “I am tired, you know? I am thinking about getting out of the business altogether.”

  I raise my eyebrows.

  “I am not doing something right. It is more headaches, less money, all the time.”

  “You know what I think?” I ask.

  “I do not believe I have a choice in that matter.”

  “You have an untapped gold mine right here,” I say, patting a stack of rugs.

  “It loses me money too,” he says.

  “Because your visibility is bad, you don’t advertise, and you’re running back and forth so much, even your hours of operation are spotty. I had no idea what you had here and I’ve been only one door away.”

  “Well,” he says. “What would you propose?”

  “Why not concentrate your efforts. Spruce up your image, get a Web site. Really make a go of it,” I say.

  “Hm,” he says. “I will think about this.”

  His cell phone rings and he has a quick conversation in Arabic. He gets up and heads toward the back. But then he stops.

  “You know what my motto is?” he asks.

  “I can’t begin to imagine.”

  “You cannot always be happy, but you can always fill your eye with beauty.”

  I think of the photographs of the tree stump, the egg, the work boot.

  “I stole it from George Hamilton,” he says.

  “The tan guy?”

  “The same. Love at First Bite was the first movie I saw in America. I have been a big fan ever since.”

  *

  A postcard arrives today from Ember from Telluride, Colorado. “We got a little sidetracked,” it says, “but heading up to Portland soon. Then Spain and olé, baby!”

  When I was in Moab, Ford told me that when Ember was eight and living in a shabby apartment in Milwaukee, she and her brothers had a plan to take a raft down the river and sail away. So they saved all the change they could, stole some, filched from their father’s pants—until they had amassed the twelve dollars for a mail-order inflatable raft with oars. Her mother had been gone for days on a bender and her father was out scrounging for work, so Ember waited for the mailman every day until the package arrived. The kids took turns blowing it up, and then on an overcast summer day, the five of them— the oldest only ten—set out for the river. They slid down a trash-strewn bank, holding the little red and yellow boat above their heads, before getting in the water.

  They flowed with glee along with the current. Even though none of them could swim, Ember said she wasn’t scared. At first no one noticed the bobbing raft with five children in the middle of an industrial river. But soon people were lined up along the bank, pointing in horror as the kids careened ever closer to the drop-off they had no idea exis
ted. It was only when a helicopter arrived above them and ordered them to hold on to the line did they suspect they might be in some trouble.

  The phone rings and it’s Kendra.

  “I know you said you aren’t going out anymore but I have this guy who’s insistent on not seeing anyone but you and I thought I’d at least ask. It’s Scott, that one you all say is hot.”

  It gives me pause to imagine meeting Scott over coffee, coming together like old friends. Flirting. A first date and a last date. A bit of cinematic symmetry.

  “I don’t think so,” I say. “Tell him I moved away or got married or something. Or whatever. Tell him what you want.”

  *

  In September 1857, in a meadow in southwestern Utah, a militia of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints attacked a wagon train of Arkansas families bound for California. After a five-day siege, the militia persuaded the families to surrender under a flag of truce and pledge of safe passage. Then the Mormons slaughtered 140 men, women, and children. Only 17 children under the age of eight—the age of innocence in the Mormon faith—were spared. The church first blamed the massacre on the Paiute Indians, then, as evidence mounted, on a Mormon zealot and militia member who was also the adopted son of the prophet Brigham Young.

  “But of course it was church leaders who ordered the massacre,” Ralf says. “The poor bastards thought they were doing God’s work by ridding the world of infidels.”

  I ran into Ralf this morning in the Coffee Garden for the first time since our winter picnic, and now, over biscuits and gravy at Ruth’s, he and his purple-haired girlfriend Luna are fervently explaining to me their campaign to get the church to own up to its past.

  “Mormons are fanatical documenters of history. They like to say there’s a record of everything. So of course they know,” he says.

  “The church refuses to admit LDS leaders had anything to do with the massacre,” Luna says.“And without any attempt to atone for it, it’s a history built on dishonesty.”

  “We’re trying to set things right, even if it’s 150 years late,” Ralf says.

  “My band does a song about it,” Luna says. “You should come to our next show and hear it.”

  “I’d like that,” I say.

  Their affinity for each other is bright and heartening.

  “We’re going down to Moab in a couple weeks to visit Ford,” Ralf says. “I’m trying to convince him to come up to do this job with me in Murray that starts pretty soon. It’ll be cake. Just painting. And it’s inside.”

  I laugh.“It’ll be just like old times.”

  “Something like that,” he says.

  Luna rests her ring-laden hand on Ralf ’s forearm.

  “Ralf and I were in the same ward as kids. Same church and everything. Then I saw him a couple of months ago for the first time in like fifteen years. He looks the same as he did when he was twelve,” she says.

  “You know how people say things happen for a reason?” Ralf asks. “That used to really bug me because what they’re really saying is there is a “good” and God-sanctioned reason for bad things to happen, and that reason is necessarily okay because it’s part of God’s grand plan. Anyway. After finding Luna, I’m not annoyed anymore.”

  “How come?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “Because I’m happy.”

  *

  Jezebel disappeared. It took a while before anyone believed it. The first few shifts she missed at work and the unanswered phone messages were nothing new for her, so no one thought much of it. Finally Nikyla went by her apartment and there was some old man living there who said he’d just moved in. When Nikyla found the landlord he said Miss Smith had owed three months in rent and she had had an illegal dog so he finally had the locks changed. But it didn’t really matter, he said, because he never saw her again anyway.

  It happens all the time in this business, girls just vanish without a word. There was never a good-bye or an explanation from Jezebel. Now there is just a void. Nikyla thinks she ran off to L.A. with some guy she was sent on a date with.

  I look for Jezebel while I’m walking around the city even though I know it’s futile. I hope she didn’t latch onto something or someone worse. It’s amazing to me that vibrant and girlish Jezebel could be lying in a morgue drawer and I would never know. Then again, she could be on a beach somewhere, still working on her tan, still contemplating her rise to stardom, as her boyfriend waves to her from atop a surfboard and Albee frolics in the sand.

  I thought escorting would get me closer to the bottom of real life. But as Nikyla said, “It is what it is. People with people. It’s nothing to feel bad about. Even if it’s something we’ll never do again.”

  I’m having dinner at Saharan Sands, Mohammed’s restaurant, for the first time. Nikyla is meeting me here for a celebratory dinner. She is probably the only escort in history to give two weeks’ notice. I feel like I’m back on the other side of the line, looking in instead of looking out. I’m no longer privy to what goes on a few doors down at Premier. No one calls me Roxanne.

  Up close, Mohammed’s wife looks tired around the eyes but she is prettier than I’d thought from just seeing her through the window, her features delicate and composed. She is, surprisingly, very pregnant. Even if I might look familiar to her, I imagine she blocks out her husband’s other business. She doesn’t consider that I might be one of those girls.

  On my last day in Moab, Ford took me on a hike in Arches National Park, up the smooth rock hills, through the chasms, and along the narrow pathways to the monolithic spires and ridges, and the gravity-defying red sandstone arches. The unlikely formations are bold, graceful, daring, without real purpose. Under the dwarfing span of Delicate Arch, against an endless blue expanse of sky, I felt lighter than I have in years. Ford said he thinks people like to find places that remind them of their fragility. He took my picture under the famous arch but he had to stand so far back to get the whole thing in that I’m not sure I’ll be recognizable.

  Nikyla, her skin perfect and radiant, sits down across from me smelling of vanilla and soap. She grabs my hands across the table.

  “I’m so glad you called. I have such a craving for falafel,” she says.

  I raise my water glass.

  “To the end of your escorting career,” I say.

  “Our escorting career,” she says and clinks my glass. “You’re not going to move back to New York now, are you?”

  “I promised my friend Ford I wouldn’t give up yet on Utah.”

  “Good,” she says. “I want you around to babysit.”

  The thing about Utah is that despite its wholesome veneer, I’ve come to see it as it is, to know it in my way, and it’s a lot messier and more alluring than it appears on the surface. And the truth is, I don’t need a promise to Ford to keep me here. I can now say, yes, given the options, I choose to live here, to pitch my tent in this place that’s seemingly far away from everything. For now, anyway.

  I’d forgotten that when Marisa isn’t answering phones at Premier, she comes here to belly dance. Over the stereo speakers, a pulsing drum-and-cymbal beat precedes her, and she sways out from the kitchen with no introduction, just the tinkling beads of her costume as her hips snake in tiny figure eights. This is the first time I have seen her dance, and Mohammed is right, her hips have a life of their own. Nikyla lets loose a catcall and the men at the table next to ours put down their forks to focus on the dancer. They are hooked. I smile encouragement at Marisa but she doesn’t seem to notice.

  epilogue

  I got a letter a few weeks ago from Ember. She never made it to Spain. She eventually ended up back in Milwaukee, where she’s been trying to stay clean. She lives with her mother, who’s also on the wagon, and waits tables at a diner. If she has a boyfriend, she didn’t mention him. Milwaukee, she said, is still the pits.

  Mohammed closed Premier Escort because of an unsavory audit and, I like to think, my influence. Some of the escorts went over to Baby Dolls. None of us ev
er heard from Jezebel again.

  Nikyla married her boyfriend just before giving birth to a baby girl she named Spencer. They now live in a sunny little apartment not far from the mall where she and her husband are both managers. I take Spencer every couple of weeks so her parents can go out on Saturday night—they’re finally old enough to get into Club DV8. Spencer has silver studs in her ears, perfect chubby legs, and Nikyla’s green eyes. I like to take her on walks through the shady evening streets of the Avenues.

  Mohammed hired me to manage his rug store, since renamed Pasha after his new daughter. We’ve secured a lease on a new space with a much-needed front display window and good foot traffic up near the university, next door to the King’s English bookstore. Our Web site has been up and running for four months and we’ve already shipped orders from as far away as Hawaii. I’ve been pestering Mohammed for a raise, and although he hasn’t granted it yet, he did give me a gorgeous burgundy Persian carpet that now covers the floor of my living room.

  Ford is finally moving up to Salt Lake for good. He has accepted a job as an avalanche forecaster and he’s coming this weekend to look for an apartment. He’s keeping the trailer in Moab—his country house he calls it—for frequent visits.

  This is my second fall in Utah. Outside my kitchen window, the cottonwoods are orange, the walnut trees yellow-green, and the scrub oaks red on the mountains. Despite the drizzle, the colors are electric. On Saturday, Ford has promised me a hike out in Little Cottonwood Canyon, where the autumn chill will be settling in around the mountains and the yellowing aspen leaves will be aflutter in the wind like thousands of tiny clapping hands.