The Heartbreaker

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by Susan Howatch


  Having changed the fitted sheet and washed out my mouth I drift into sleep beneath the duvet I keep for naps, but I’ve hardly been snoozing for ten minutes when the phone starts to ring again. I reconnected it after the last client left.

  I want to ignore the noise, but the caller’s almost certain to be Elizabeth. Carta, Serena and Moira are all under orders only to call at certain times, and for them three-thirty’s taboo.

  Opening the drawer in the bedside table where the extension phone lives out of sight of clients I grab the receiver. “Yeah?”

  “Well, take your time!” snaps that bitch Susanne, Ms. Bowling-Ball Breasts of 1992. “I was thinking your last punter had left you tied down to all four bedposts!”

  “I was asleep!” I yell, but I’m aware of a soothing wave of relief. Here at last is someone who has no desire to have sex with me, and the reason for the call, though bound to be work-related, is also bound to be trivial. If it was serious Elizabeth would call me herself. “What’s the problem?” I ask, sounding almost chummy.

  “Elizabeth wants to check if you’ve ever heard of a man called Gilbert Tucker.”

  I feel as if I’m riding a lift and the cable’s just snapped. “Who?”

  “Weird name, isn’t it, sounds pervy. Gilbert Tucker. Says he’s a friend of yours.”

  A voice in my head mutters: oh my God. Swinging my legs off the bed I sit tautly on the edge and grip the phone hard enough to bust it as I muse idly: “Gilbert Tucker. Yeah. Right.”

  “Elizabeth wants to know what’s going on. She says you don’t have friends she doesn’t know about.”

  “Ah well, this bloke’s not a friend, just an acquaintance.” My imagination finally clicks into gear. “I met him at Richard Slaney’s funeral.”

  “You weren’t supposed to chat to people there!”

  “Oh, butt out, Barbie-Boobs! Here, let me talk to Elizabeth—”

  “She’s not here, and if you call me by that bloody nickname one more time I’ll kick you so hard when I next see you that you’ll wish you were a tranny on the eve of the op! Now listen, pinhead. I have to check this perv Gilbert because he’s calling back at five and we have to make a decision on him—which is why I’m interrupting your snooze. Elizabeth thinks he could be a time-waster because he asked for the cheapest possible slot, and when I told him the price for the wake-up wank—”

  “Let me stop you right there,” I interrupt, managing to sound brisk and businesslike in six authoritative syllables. “This has got to be a wind-up. Give me his number and I’ll set him straight.”

  “I told you, he’s calling back, wouldn’t leave a number. Why are you so sure it’s a wind-up?”

  “He’s a social worker. They never have any money.”

  “Oh shit! Okay, no need for you to be involved, we’ll switch him off right here at the main.”

  The call ends but I go on sitting on the edge of the bed. The last thing Elizabeth needs to hear is that I met Gilbert Tucker at the house of Carta Graham, fundraiser for St. Benet’s, and later gave him a freebie to compensate for a gay-monster act. I’ve got to get hold of Gil to make sure he keeps his mouth zipped—and what the hell does he think he’s doing anyway, contacting my office? After the freebie he himself admitted he could never afford to pay to see me.

  Abandoning all hope of another snooze I go downstairs and dig out the phone book. It only covers Central London so if he lives outside that golden perimeter I won’t find him, but I don’t think he’s the suburban type. After he confessed he was a social worker I asked him which area he covered and he said: “Shoreditch”—which was a plausible enough reply as there’s a fair amount of local authority housing north of the City—but his slight hesitation in replying made me doubt he was a social worker. My guess was that he was a doctor, a professional who had to be careful of his reputation. Or he might have been a lawyer, not the usual City fat-cat but one of the dedicated band who work for peanuts to help the disadvantaged.

  I reach the list of Tuckers in the phone book. There aren’t many Gilberts around nowadays, so provided he’s not listed just as “G. Tucker” he should stand out like a beacon—and he does. Or someone does. “Rev. Gilbert Tucker” is listed as living at St. Eadred’s Vicarage, Fleetside, EC4, but of course this can’t be Mr. Pass-for-Straight who has at least two blatantly gay pals.

  Or can it?

  The Church of England at present is all screaming misogynists and squealing earth mothers as the ordination of women issue comes up for the final debating round in November’s General Synod, the dog-collar parliament. I know this because I read The Times. I also know, since I’m in touch through my clients with gay views on topical subjects, that there are a few clergymen who are brave enough not just to come out as gays but to oppose the anti-women lobby because they’re opposed to all forms of discrimination. This seems like an attractively ballsy stance on the one hand, but pretty damned naive on the other. First there’s the outing question: out yourself by all means but don’t expect to win any Brownie points later when you’re pushing your pet cause. I mean, any gay who opts to be a clergyman (and no one’s twisting his arm) is seriously off his trolley if he thinks the huge non-gay majority is ever going to prefer him to a plonker with a wife and two kids.

  And second, there’s the women priests question itself: if the gay clergy now support women in the hope that more toleration will come their way, they’ve got their wires crossed, because although the gays’ cause and the women’s cause may look similar, the similarity’s an illusion. Women constitute half the human race, and a woman is a woman is a woman—unless it’s some sort of hermaphrodite or an athlete pumped full of the wrong hormones, but there are medical tests available to determine whether these popsies can still be called female. On the other hand, how on earth do you define what’s gay? There’s no medical test, and although there are lots of theories about what causes homosexuality, no one knows for sure, just as no one knows for sure how many gays there are. How can they be sure when people have such wildly differing ideas about what constitutes a gay? And don’t ask the activists. They’re the last people who’ll give you a straight (excuse the pun) answer.

  In some cases there has to be a genetic component to homosexuality, that’s obvious. But what exactly switches it on? And does it sometimes stay switched off because it’s muzzled by cultural conditions? And anyway, what about the cases where the genetics factor isn’t an issue? I’ve had clients like Richard, who insisted he was born homosexual, but I’ve also had heterosexual clients who took it up in the services and got a taste for it, and clients who are happy to be straight but fancy a man a couple of times a year for a treat. Oh, and while we’re on the subject of the hard to classify, don’t let’s forget the pervs who are bored with women and get into same-sex shenanigans for a buzz—they don’t really care what they fuck, they’re just into holes of any kind. The activists, both gay and straight, would say all these thrusters are gay, exhibiting their inborn immutable orientation. But are they?

  The trouble with the activists’ claim that homosexual behaviour always springs from an inborn sexual orientation is that it doesn’t match the evidence. Mark you, I’m not saying there’s no such thing as orientation. Obviously there is. But the point I’m making is that orientation is a lot more shadowy, flexible and mysterious than people think. I mean, we’re talking about the human brain which controls the human body, and the human brain’s a plastic sort of arrangement, capable of amazing adaptation as well as enormous variety. How else can you explain the non-eunuch celibates who have deliberately chosen to live with no sex at all? If any group can testify to the power of the brain over the sex organs, these weirdos can! And if the brain has the last word here, why shouldn’t some straights opt to be gay occasionally if the fancy takes them? And vice versa? The truth is that sexually nothing’s impossible and that’s why categorising people as either STRAIGHT or GAY is too often just totally unreal.

  This rigid concept of orientation, which both
gay and straight activists rely upon to keep them in business, is one of the reasons why the activists can’t stand people like me. I’m the living proof that they’ve got their jockstraps in a twist, although it’s more than their political lives are worth to admit it. Not only can I testify to the extreme diversity of my clients, but my own working life proves that sexual behaviour can have nothing to do with sexual orientation.

  I’ve never had any doubt that I prefer being straight. I know that if I was offered the choice of a man or a woman I’d always choose the woman—and don’t think I’d turn her down if she looked like the back-end of a bus. The back-enders are often absolute furnaces (starved of the opportunity to blaze) and touchingly grateful (never spoilt for choice). Bring on the girls in any shape or form is what I say! Yet the fanatics insist my lifestyle means that deep down I’ve got to be gay no matter how much I protest that I’m not. But I never protest. Can’t be bothered. If people want to think I’m gay, let ’em. I know which way I like my bed to bounce, and that’s why I’m relaxed enough in my head to feel mellow towards the gays I like. (Naturally I’m not going to feel mellow towards any bloke, gay or straight, that I don’t like.)

  Of course some dyed-in-the-wool sexual classifiers would insist I was bisexual, but bisexual means getting equally turned on by both sexes, and that’s not where I am at all—as far as I’m concerned, male chests, waists and legs don’t even get to first base in the erotica stakes. Still, I appreciate the fact that my clients need to believe I’m turned on. That’s why when I’m with a client, whether I like him or not, I act my socks off and try to serve up an erection even if it’s not strictly necessary. Well, of course I do, I’m a professional, I take pride in my work.

  Which leads me to admit this: despite my orientation, servicing gays isn’t a sexual non-event for me. How could it be? Whatever our orientation we all have erogenous zones which could be manipulated successfully by a well-programmed robot. It doesn’t really matter who’s doing the manipulating. You prefer, of course, that you’re not having it off with Godzilla, but if you are you can always close your eyes and dissociate—or at least I can. Mental control like this also helps to prevent orgasm (a serious waste of energy) and enables the body to be unfettered by physical revulsion. Why do I like opera? Because it’s noisy enough, when I play it in my head, to drown out all the grunts and groans and squeals and squawks of pushbutton sex, that contact sport which, like rugby football and sumo wrestling, is an acquired skill and nothing to do with sexual orientation at all.

  At this point my thoughts turn back to the Reverend Gilbert Tucker, who no doubt thinks sexual orientation is always inborn, immutable and inextricably wedded to sexual behaviour. If he is a clerical gay activist— and I hardly think he’d be bumming around with those two in-yer-face types if he wasn’t—I salute him for his guts in coming out yet I groan at the thought of him committing professional suicide in the name of some starry-eyed concept of gayness which doesn’t match the reality I know. In fact as I visualise Gil playing Mr. Valiant-for-Truth, awash with idealism, I’m groaning so hard that I can only hope the Christians don’t crucify him. He’s too nice a bloke for such a grisly fate, that’s for sure—but now it’s time to face the fact that even the nicest bloke should be kept right out of my life if he has St. Benet’s connections.

  I punch out the number of his vicarage.

  The bell rings four times. I’m just trying to work out a message for the answerphone when the receiver’s picked up and Mr. Valiant-for-Truth says: “Gilbert Tucker.”

  “Gil, it’s Gavin Blake. Listen, mate, what the hell are you playing at, calling my office?”

  He takes a deep breath. “I decided I did want to see you again after all, and I knew that this time I’d have to go through the proper channels.”

  “Yes, yes, yes, but—” Running my fingers through my hair I try to keep cool. “Okay, let’s get a couple of things straight. One: don’t tell anyone at the office that I gave you a freebie. And two: for God’s sake don’t say we met at Carta’s house. The story has to be that we met at Richard Slaney’s funeral.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Oh God . . . Right, let’s get our heads together on this. Richard Slaney, that’s S-L-A-N-E-Y, was a lawyer who worked for Carta’s old firm Curtis, Towers. He died of a coronary and his funeral was at Compton Beeches near Andover a few weeks ago.”

  “Got it . . . Gavin, it’s so good to hear you! I suppose you got my phone number from the book, but what made you so sure I was the Gilbert Tucker living at St. Eadred’s vicarage?”

  “There weren’t any other Gilbert Tuckers queueing for my attention, but don’t worry, I’m not grassing you up to the Bishop of London. Look, I thought you said you couldn’t afford me?”

  “I’ve just inherited a legacy from an aunt.”

  “Don’t make me laugh! Gil, I don’t understand why you want to go down this route, I really don’t—you’re a nice-looking bloke, you’re out, you could get it for free anywhere, so why buy a sliver of my time at a rate you can’t afford?”

  “You’re worth it.”

  “I know I am, but—”

  “I want to get to know you better.”

  “I’m flattered, but as I said after we did the freebie, I can’t have a relationshipwith you. If you’re booking a slot in the hope that it’ll—”

  “At least if I book a slot I get to see you again!”

  My forehead’s damp. I’m pushing a hand against it as I suppress my impatience. “Okay,” I say flatly, “let me help you get real here. The truth is that my manager’s unlikely to take you on as a client because you don’t earn enough.”

  “Thanks to my late aunt I’ll have a private income.”

  “Gil, just listen, would you, and stop feeding me these pathetic lies! You can’t be a client and I can’t be a chum you chat to at weekends!”

  “But surely at weekends you can see who you like?”

  “Right. That’s when I shag women.” I never usually rub a gay’s nose in this fact but I can think of no other way to get him to back off.

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” says Gil laughing. “Who’s telling pathetic lies now?”

  This was worse than teaching a mermaid to walk. “Gil,” I say, making one last effort to reach him, “you’ve got to wise up or you’ll get hurt, and believe me, that’s the last thing I want—I want to think of you tucked up snugly in your vicarage with a nice-natured, church-going soulmate who thinks paying for sex is something that happens on another planet. So why don’t you just forget about me and—”

  “I’m going to bust a gut to book that slot!” declares the Christian martyr, begging to be thrown to the lions, and hangs up, leaving me feeling not just exasperated but queasy at the thought of him talking to Elizabeth.

  I sit brooding on the conversation for a moment before deciding that there’s no need for me to go on feeling queasy. Gil will serve up the right story, Elizabeth will turn him off and that’ll be that. Gil will mope for a while, but I can’t get involved. One of the reasons why I’m so successful at what I do is that I stay detached from my clients’ emotional demands. Most of them just want a physical release, but there are always some who almost beg to have their hearts broken. I try to be kind, but I can’t afford to get churned up in my line of work, and detachment is the big advantage of screwing across your orientation. Emotions are kept safe in a fireproof compartment and the clients become just objects which require skilled handling.

  Elizabeth explained all that when she converted me to the idea of servicing gays. That was after Norah kicked me out of the escort agency. I didn’t do gays when I worked for Norah. My job was to go out with women who were twenty or thirty or even forty years older than I was, and I couldn’t stand it. I felt so sorry for them, so humiliated on their behalf, so angry that they should be so desperate. In other words I got emotionally involved, and once I was upset I couldn’t shag properly— well, I was a low-grade shagger anyway before Elizabeth trained
me.

  When I wound up a failure as a hetero-escort, Norah stopped employing males because (she said) she was fed up with temperamental masculine equipment. (Typical lesbian cattiness! Strictly speaking our equipment was none of her business anyway—what makes an escort agency legal is that in theory it’s just peddling companionship, and whatever sex takes place is supposedly a private matter between the client and the escort, but that’s the kind of legal set-up which can be bent as easily as a stick of chewing gum, particularly when the stick’s being chewed by someone like Norah.)

  However, she was probably right to get rid of the younger of my two male stablemates. He was straight but a psychopath, all charm and no heart—Norah was lucky he didn’t start cutting up the clients. The other bloke was much nicer—a good-hearted bi with not much upstairs—so his sacking made less sense. He was only doing escort work to finance his mother’s hip operation, poor sod . . . I must say, one thing the leisure industry’s taught me is how diverse human beings are and what a huge, sprawling, exotic, fantastical canvas we’re given as a background to our pathetic little efforts to get through life as best we can. If there is a God— which of course there isn’t—what a vast painting the old man’s working on as he lolls in front of the canvas with a brush in one hand and a can of Australian lager in the other! Forget the pearly gates and the Elysian fields. Heaven’s a jumbo art studio with gallons of paint stacked all over everywhere and maybe a music system which plays non-stop opera by Mozart to keep God sane.

  I sigh, marvelling that a random thought about my failure as a hetero-escort should have led to this nutso vision of an artist-God sloshing away at a mega-canvas while getting himself trolleyed. Then I stop daydreaming and focus on the job.

 

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