by Tracy Quan
“You’re kidding.” Just when I’ve been thinking that Jack would be on his way out of the picture, he seems to have replanted himself like an evil seed in Allie’s life. “So you’re just supposed to be seeing Jack?”
“That’s our agreement. And he’s been holding to his end of the deal. He brings cash every week. Lots of it.”
There was no point arguing, but I let her know that Howard was definitely eager. “I can get him to see me with someone else, but I could probably raise him if I saw him with you,” I hinted. This promise of extra money did not move her. Jack must be delivering the financial goods!
“I haven’t even got the time!” she protested. “I’m so busy dealing with school now! And with NYCOT and the outreach van, I really can’t, Nancy.”
But if Jack is such a great provider why does she sound so…cornered? Shouldn’t she be proud of her good fortune?
“What exactly did you agree to? Are you supposed to forsake all other guys for this—this—arrangement with Jack?”
“He says he doesn’t want to share me, and I don’t want to rock the boat right now. I know he’s more in love than I could ever be with him,” she said in a quiet voice. “But I’ve always known that. And,” she added, “this is the choice I’ve made.”
I didn’t like her tone, that cornered quality. How long can this continue before Jack tries to extract some new concession? I called Eileen—she’s always happy to see Howard—and then made my way over to Dr. Wendy’s office.
Toward the end of our session, Wendy asked, “Hasn’t there ever been a boyfriend who knew about your work?”
I shook my head and changed the subject. “Listen, I have to ask. Have you ever lost money on a real estate deal?”
“No,” said Dr. Wendy. “Because I rent. It’s so much easier to rent.”
I had no trouble looking her in the eye as I left, but it’s such a waste of money to lie to your shrink!
I wonder if she can tell. Shrinks like to call everything “material,” whether it’s true or false, perhaps to excuse their own bullshit detectors for occasionally failing. Like hookers, they have to know that some “client lies” are harmless, part of the ongoing relationship. And even smart people get fooled.
One of my clients had me fooled for an entire year. He called himself Dr. Albert and claimed he was…a shrink, actually. One day I said something to Jasmine about Al and she almost fell on the floor laughing: “Al’s not a shrink! He runs a toy business!” I guess he thought a shrink has more appeal than a guy who wholesales Betsy Wetsys? And he did persuade Eileen to chatter about her family problems—until she found out he was in toy sales. So he wasn’t all wrong.
I also knew a client who told me he had been in the Foreign Legion. Turns out that he’s a CEO at a major insurance company. Why do some guys do this? If you’re just trying to protect your real ID, you don’t make up soldier of fortune stories. And of course the most common lie is from the married client who pretends to be single. As if it mattered to me! But it may be his fantasy that he’s a footloose single guy and I’m a willing single girl.
Compared to these fantastic fibbers, I think I’m pretty normal. At least I’m not lying to my shrink about what I do for a living! Still. A girl who plays along with a john’s lifestyle fantasy is giving him his money’s worth, while a girl who lies to her shrink is just wasting her own hard-earned money.
But maybe I wasn’t lying. Didn’t she ask me if there’s ever been a boyfriend who knew about my work? Well, I didn’t really call it “work”—because my idea of work, at thirteen, was baby-sitting.
TUESDAY. 4/4/00
This morning, an appointment chez Jasmine.
The ultimate quickie: Harry waits for no girl, and you have to be on time—or risk losing him to someone who’s punctual. When I saw a black Town Car parked in front of Jasmine’s building, I thought: Yikes! Harry’s early.
But when I got upstairs, he was nowhere to be seen.
“There’s a Town Car downstairs,” I told her. “I thought it was Harry!”
“Oh, that,” she huffed. “Do not get me started. Don’t even go there!” She reached down to adjust her stockings.
“Huh?”
“Somebody—I don’t know who—is up to something,” she said in a sinister tone. “I have to brush my teeth. Help yourself. Evian? Club soda? Whatever. Go for it.”
She stalked out of the kitchen and I opened the fridge. A riot of white plastic containers assaulted the eye. In the good old days, Jasmine’s spotless fridge contained nothing more than white wine, vodka, and club soda, the occasional yogurt, and the ubiquitous box of baking soda. Now the baking soda was obscured by mascarpone cheese, blue-cheese dip, and Alfredo sauce from Agata & Valentina. Three plastic tubs of D’Artagnan truffle butter. And a large container of…rendered goose fat from Schaller & Weber. There were two boxes of omega-3 eggs and two cartons of whipping cream. An Atkins cornucopia.
I poured myself some filtered water and shook my head. But when she reappeared in thigh-high stockings and lacy underwear, I had to admit, her waistline does look more defined. To think that I’ve forsaken butter and cream for virgin olive oil, while she’s eating all this sinful gloop and getting away with it.
“There’s something going on, and I don’t like it,” she was saying. “Town Cars parked outside my building all fucking day and into the evening! Well, not all day—but enough to draw attention.”
“You’re kidding! How often?”
“Three, yesterday! And you say there’s one out there right now? It’s not even fucking noon and they’re already open for business!”
“Who? What?” I glanced up at the clock. Almost eleven-thirty, and our client was due any minute.
“Some…somebody is seeing guys in this building, and I don’t appreciate it.”
“But you’re seeing guys—”
“That has nothing to do with it. I don’t have volume. This is the kind of volume that gives a building a reputation!”
Jasmine’s building is a co-op—not a serious co-op, just a six-story elevator building that converted when the converting was good. But still. There’s a board. They might notice these things.
“Whoever is doing this has some fucking nerve,” Jasmine grumbled. “Wait till I find out who it is. Eviction’s too good for them!”
The buzzer restored her to a more social mood and I peeped out the window. Two identical Town Cars parked in front! I had to agree: It looks strange, and “our” car—Harry’s—is the one that belongs out there. Except that I couldn’t tell which was his; they look alike.
Harry was in too much of a hurry to notice (or comment on) the other car. He whistled as he undressed, and Jasmine wandered away to run water and heat up his washcloth.
Standing in his socks, suspenders, and wing tips, he grinned. “Ready for some hanky-panky, ladies?”
Jasmine wrapped the towel around his cock and I began to play with her panties.
“She’s got a hot tongue today,” Jasmine murmured. “Do you want to watch?”
After he left, Jasmine resumed her tirade. “In a small building like this, you can’t be too careful! What if people start thinking those are my customers? You know, I am a fucking lady, I do not have this kind of volume! I charge enough so I don’t have to see twenty guys a day in my own apartment! What kind of operation produces all this goddamn traffic?”
The kind of operation Jasmine started in—when she “turned herself out,” as she likes to put it. But that place was in a huge anonymous building where you could pay off a doorman. This is different.
“Are you saying there’s a house operating? Somewhere in this building?” I asked.
“Who knows. Could be that two-bedroom on the top floor. I saw a girl coming in the other day—I’ve never seen her before. She was going to six.”
“You don’t think they’re advertising! Have you seen guys in the lobby?”
“They’re probably on the Web! Or Channel 35! People have no goddam
n sense…No, I haven’t seen guys in the lobby, but I’m sure everyone else has. This is the kind of thing that hookers’ union should try to eliminate! But no, they’re trying to make it easier for people to do this. I can’t stand it!”
As I dressed, she continued.
“They have no right to behave this way in a co-op. And if the board gets curious, well, I have—” She paused. “Never mind. It’s not going to happen.” She was mumbling to herself.
“Stay calm,” I counseled. “You can’t control what other people do. Anger won’t solve this.”
“Oh, great. Now you sound like Allison.”
“I do not! That’s unworthy of you!”
“Fine, fine, unworthy, whatever,” she grumbled, “but I have something to lose!”
“I know, but maybe the traffic these other people cause—”
That set her off.
“Guys don’t like to think they’re going to a building where there’s a hooker on every floor! At least our guys don’t. Obviously, these idiots parked outside have no qualms. It looks absolutely terrible.”
“I know. But Harry was in too much of a hurry to notice! Maybe the other tenant will get blamed for your traffic, too. It doesn’t have to work against you.”
“Yeah, well. The other tenant won’t get blamed for what I—” She hesitated, then went on. “I have never attracted a scintilla of suspicion, and that’s why they’ve never been able to—” She stopped again.
“I know all this. Get a grip.”
“No, you don’t know! It’s not what you think, dammit.” Marching over to the walk-in closet, she beckoned to me. “I want to show you something.”
A new fur coat? A cage for locking up kinky clients?
“Promise not to tell anyone,” she said.
“Of course.”
“Not even Allison. Or your boyfriend.”
“Not even!” The boyfriend part was a joke. She knows I don’t share secrets with Matt.
She flung open the door and I saw a good-sized walk-in closet transformed—into something that now looked rather small. There was a gleaming white hand basin with a small cupboard below. An oval mirror with a burled wood frame. Four neatly folded green towels hanging from a rod, beneath a small makeup shelf. Oh, and a small but elegant toilet.
“I have an illegal bathroom,” she said in a hushed voice. She was standing in the doorway, arms crossed, a look of prideful paranoia on her face. This room is like her secret child! “If they find out, I’ll be sunk! I could get reported to the city! And I’ll have to pay a fine!”
“But—but—how long have you had this here?” Last time I opened this door, it was her coat closet!
“Two years.”
“But I’ve never seen it!”
“Of course not. I’m the only one who uses it. Usually when the other one’s occupied.”
“When did you have this installed? How come I never knew! You had this done without a permit?”
“You were on vacation in France. Everyone was in the Hamptons and this guy I know from…before”—meaning her cocaine-dealing days—“Vince. He’s a contractor now. He did it on the sly for cash. If those busybodies on the board find out, they’ll be pissed. I have to keep a low profile! That’s why those scumbags with their constant traffic are such bad news. I can’t afford the attention!”
She closed the door quietly. Illegal luxury on a small scale but still—very illegal.
“I see what you mean,” I agreed.
FRIDAY. 4/7/00
Today, a piece in the Times about a Washington archaeologist who recently uncovered a brothel in D.C. While searching for something entirely different, her team discovered buried garbage going back to the 1800s. It was the strange mixture of trash that gave the building’s former game away. Hundreds of champagne-bottle wrappers, mingling with humble dishes that weren’t good enough to rub shoulders with the champagne paraphernalia. Digging deeper, they found two kinds of china: fancy stuff for the business and sturdy everyday stuff used by the girls when they weren’t working. (Sort of like the apartment at 444, where Bianca, the madam, kept two sets of towels! In one closet, the “elegant towels” for clients. We girls got our own from a separate closet filled with clean but faded washcloths that had seen more elegant days.)
Back at the D.C. dig: Almost a century later, after the business had been literally buried, this building could not escape its past. Because two kinds of trash—high-class and middle-class—were revealed in the dig. Whereas the other buildings in the vicinity produced only one kind: common, or garden-variety, workingmen’s trash. So something funny had to be going on.
There’s a moral here. If archaeologists, a hundred years later, can figure out what you were up to, well, think of the present! You can’t be too careful about separating your trash.
Ever since recycling hit, I’ve been religious about separating the respectable trash and the bedroom trash. Never mix the sex trash with old bills or junk mail! Don’t even let female trash—telltale signs of makeup removal, tampon wrappers, and the like—enter the same bag as the condoms. (This way, if anyone should find three discarded Trojan boxes and ten little K-Y tubes, they might assume a popular gay guy instead of an industrious call girl.)
Your landlord might be snooping around the incinerator room. Like the D.C. archaeologist, he’s looking for something else. An illegal subletter. A recycling transgression. But he stumbles across a suspicious cache of sex trash on the floor where you live. Thanks to an old Con Ed bill, he starts wondering…nightmare on East Seventy-ninth Street!
Pleased with my foresight—I’ve been two steps ahead of all this for at least five years—I clipped the Times article for Jasmine. I bundled my used coffee filter into a partly filled D’Ag bag. Then I trotted down the hall to the disposal area, a four-day “growth” of New York Times Metro sections tucked under my arm. After popping the bag down the chute, I gazed at the neat spotless floor. The tall blue bag was empty, and the porter had left behind his signature aroma—pine-scented Lysol, which inspired a wave of regret. It seems a shame to desecrate a tidy recycling area with more of the same old same old!
A minute or two later I was back in my apartment, standing in the kitchen and rinsing out an empty Astroglide bottle, trying to decide whether to recycle it here or toss it into a garbage can on York Avenue when nobody’s looking.
At which point, the phone rang. I picked it up with my free hand and scrunched my neck over to talk.
“Suzy! At last!”
A male voice from the past, calling me by my work name…Who—? Then my internal voice-ID “software” kicked in.
“Wally! I thought you were—” I gulped hard. “Just one second, okay? My hands are full.”
I stuffed the Astroglide bottle into my gym bag and dried my hands on my jeans.
“How are you?” I asked. “It’s been ages! Is everything okay?”
“It’s been exactly a year and nine months,” he said. “I’ve been counting the days. And I’m very pleased to have my health back.”
Actually, I’d thought Wally was never going to call. After twelve months of silence, I had gotten concerned. I’d figured he had gone off me or started seeing someone new. After a year and a half, I’d believed he was dead. Client attrition is something you start seeing more of when a high percentage of your clientele is over sixty.
“You should have called,” I told him. “I was worried about you!” But I did my best to sound light and chatty.
What does it mean when you think someone has died—and he resurfaces? Could it be that I’m too vain to believe a regular client would choose not to see me? After I hung up with Wally, I stared into the mirror. Vanity, thy name is…well, for today at least, it’s “Suzy.”
10 Only Collect
MONDAY. 4/10/00
Wally is a soothing probate lawyer whose passions have been gently organized into well-tended collections—nineteenth-century micromosaics, twentieth-century paintings, and books. Despite the fact that
his books are eighteenth-century editions, he’s democratic enough to appreciate my embryonic collection of significant editions.
Most of these were gifts from the parents after I demonstrated that a runaway does not automorph into a child of Satan. When it became obvious that I wasn’t going the way of all the other middle-class runaways—pregnant with an STD, living in a squat, calling collect from jail or rehab, asking for money to buy drugs, showing up on the doorstep with self-inflicted wounds—when it became clear that I wasn’t doing any of this juvenile stuff, that I intended to live quite comfortably and knew how to, Mother started normalizing our relationship. By sending me things that needed taking care of. A small necklace with my name on it, too delicate for a child, that my father’s mother had given me at birth. Some Doulton china with a pattern of falling leaves. A silver bracelet that once belonged to my mother’s Chinese grandmother. Last year, I received a framed picture of my father’s half-Indian mother, taken in a Port of Spain photo studio when she was a sultry flapper. (Any sexy genes in my lineage must come from Dad’s non-Chinese side. So it’s kind of funny to me that clients don’t notice my darker bloodlines.)
I’m not sure my parents would have entrusted me with these personal treasures had they known I was turning tricks. They would fear for my safety, for the security of my possessions and my body. They think a hooker is someone whose household can be turned upside down at any moment. It’s completely outside their placid middle-class lifestyle to envision a girl like me. If I tried to tell them how it really works, that I can afford to turn down risky business, that I see only private referrals—and if I mentioned the kind of money I make—they would suspect wretched drug-induced denial.
Not that they’d ever believe I’m a hooker anyway, even if I were momentarily nuts enough to tell them. Despite the fact that I’ve been on my own since the age of fourteen. Parents believe what they have to believe, overlooking major details to determine other stuff: Are you alive? (Basic.) Scarred or unscarred? (In any obvious sense of the word.) Do your eyes gleam with ambition or are they glassy with punk ennui? Do you iron your clothes, look better or worse than they expected?