“Isn’t that difficult to dance in?”
“You have to put lycra in all the right places. The dresses are easy but the men needed about four fittings each. You want it to move with them, not against them. And every man’s range of motion is different so it’s extremely customized.”
“I see.”
“The shirt is sewn with an extra fold so it starts out neat and trim, but during the course of the ballet, it blouses out a touch at the back or side. Gives it realism.”
“How about the way the female soloist’s dress kept coming more and more unbuttoned?” he asked. “That was hot, and it looked totally uncontrolled.”
“It’s controlled,” Val said. “It has little snaps and undoing them is worked into the choreography.”
After the performance, without much thought, she invited him over for a little supper.
“Asking or hiring?”
She swatted him as if he were Roger. “Asking,” she said, laughing. “Good God, who hires a guy for supper?”
He smiled without answering.
“I love supper,” she said. “It’s such a great word.”
“Supper always sounds like it should be eaten on a tray.”
In her blissfully cool apartment, she poured wine into two jelly jars and showed Jav her copy of Marion Cunningham’s The Supper Book. They pored through it together and decided on Idaho Sunrise, which was a twice-baked potato with an egg broken on top before the second baking. Val threw together a salad, then they took their plates and the wine to eat cross-legged on the living room floor.
“So of course, I have a thousand questions,” Val said.
“About?”
“You.”
He smiled, a bit of egg yolk in the corner of his mouth. “Fire away.”
“You don’t mind?”
“You seem like a non-judgmental person. And you asked me to supper.”
“How long have you been an escort?”
“Four years.”
“How did you get into the business?”
“I needed the money. My family cut me off and—”
“Cut you off? Why?”
He closed his eyes and his smile wobbled a little. “Story for another day, all right?”
She held up her palm. “Fair enough.”
“I owed someone money. Also another story. I waited tables and tended bar. Noble work, but it doesn’t pay much. Original long story short, I was working at a wedding and a woman offered to pay me to come home with her. She became my mentor.”
“Your pimp?” The word was out of her mouth before she knew it and it hit the opposite wall with a thud, like a thrown tomato, oozing seeds and jelly. “God, that sounds terrible out loud.”
“I said it to her once, too,” he said. “Once. She made it clear it was mentor. She didn’t take a cut of anything I earned.”
Val took their plates into the kitchen and came back with a pint of ice cream and two spoons. “So I’m down to about eight hundred questions now.”
“Take your time.”
As they ate ice cream, Val started and stopped a half-dozen questions.
“Don’t be shy,” Jav said.
“I can barely formulate what I want to ask,” she said, laughing. “Do you enjoy what you do?”
He nodded, mouth closed around his spoon.
“What if your client is…unattractive? Do you just have a hell of an imagination?”
“I actually do,” he said. “I’m the kind of person who always has a story going on in his head. If I can’t get into a date as myself, I make up something else. And I take acting classes, which helps a lot.”
“How?”
“Ever been on a really boring date?”
She laughed. “Too many.”
“So what do you do? You convey with your body language he’s losing your interest. You change the subject. You fake an excuse and go home. I don’t have any of those options. I can’t show I’m bored out of my mind. I have to figure out a way to get interested or act interested.”
“Which is easier?”
He tapped his spoon against his teeth. He had killer teeth. “Neither, really. Like any other skill in the world, it takes practice.”
“Do you look at it as a skill?”
“I don’t get paid a hundred and fifty an hour to be bad at it.”
“Hundred fifty? You gave me quite the discount then.”
He smiled and set his spoon carefully in the lid of the carton. “I’ll ask a question now. Why do you think women hire escorts?”
“To get laid.”
“But you didn’t hire me for that.”
She nodded. “Touché.”
“Men call an escort, they want sex. Ninety-five percent of the time, they blow a load and the escort hits the road.”
“It’s a purely physical exchange.”
“They want to get off. Or sometimes get someone else off or watch someone else get off. But once the off is got, the job is done.
“Women call an escort for company. For connection. For attention. They want to be looked at, listened to and appreciated. They want the perfect date, the perfect boyfriend. A guy who makes them feel gorgeous. They pay me for my time. And if sex is part of it, great. If they want to make out a little, fine. They want to shake hands and say good evening, it makes no difference to me. I get paid either way.”
“Are most of your clients single?”
“Yeah. And the single ones almost always have an ulterior motive going on. Like they want me as a date to stick it to an ex-boyfriend. Or show the lover who dumped them that they’re just fine without him. Or to get their nosy family off their backs by showing up with me to a wedding. That kind of thing.”
“But you do have married clients?”
“Quite a few. They’re typically in a loveless marriage or neglected. Or revenging their husband’s affair. Then I have my outliers.”
“Who are they?”
“I have one regular client who’s going through chemo. Her body is a mess. She’s lost her hair, she’s skin and bones. And she’s alone. She’s got no one. She’s starving. She hired me to come sleep next to her and hold her. It’s all she wants.
“I never thought of escorting in that context,” Val said.
“Neither did I until it called me one day.”
“So… You’re always playing a part.”
Jav nodded.
“What about it turns you on enough to have sex?”
“I like sex,” he said and something about the simplicity of the answer and its earnest delivery made Val crack up. Jav joined in, rolling his eyes and raising his shoulders to his ears.
“What do you want from my life,” he said, laughing. “I mean, come on, who doesn’t like sex?”
“My sister, actually,” Val said. “She rarely has sex. It’s not a driving force with her.”
“Really?”
Val nodded. “She’s been to bed with both men and women and neither turns her on. And you’d think it would make her seem cold or unfeeling, but she’s one of the most loving, affectionate and tactile people I know. She loves to be touched and held, but nothing more. I have a lot of trouble getting my mind wrapped around it. Then again, I’m kind of a sexed-up individual.”
“Which brings up a good point. When you think of a male escort, you think of some over-sexed guy who loves fucking, right?”
“Right.”
“Those types make lousy escorts. Because it’s all about them. And the slightest little thing gives them performance issues because they have no psychological backup.”
“Huh.”
“Don’t get me wrong, I like fucking women but…” He ran a hand through his hair. “It gets kind of murky here. I mean it’s really hard to put into words.”
Val ventured a guess. “You like paying attention to women?”
“There’s something genuinely exciting about seeing them bloom. Sink into their own skin a little more and feel sexy. And even if she’s not physically
attractive to my eyes, part of my job is seeing around that. Gloria, my mentor, says everyone has something fascinating in them. It’s my job to find it.”
They were quiet a moment. Through a lull in the air conditioner’s hum, Val heard New York singing its theme song: revving engines, honking horns, clattering manhole covers. She stretched out on her side. Jav sat with his back against the couch, arms crossed and one hand fiddling with his earlobe.
“What you said before,” he said. “What if a client is unattractive? I have less of a problem if she’s visually unappealing than I do if she’s an unpleasant person. If she’s boring, or racist, or bigoted. Or mean-spirited. Those are really hard dates.”
“Have you ever walked away from a client?”
“You mean bail? Yeah. I’ve left money on the table. I know my limits. Gloria says you should be able to look your income in the face.”
“You should write a book someday,” Val said. “It’ll be called Gloria Says.”
He laughed. “Honestly, I don’t get paid because I’m good at fucking. I get paid because I’m good at finding. And when I find a woman’s fascination and have it in my hands, it’s really not all that difficult to get aroused for it. Let me rephrase that. Getting aroused for it is rarely the problem. Getting off on it is not a guarantee.”
“You don’t always come?”
“No. But it’s not about me anyway.”
Val nodded slowly, wondering what he looked like when he came.
“I won’t lie,” Jav said. “I have times when I can’t get hard for a client. But tell me if I’m wrong: you can satisfy a woman without your dick being involved. If you’re any good, that is.”
Val laughed. “True. But what about love?”
He didn’t move a muscle yet his skin seemed to harden like a shell. “What about it?”
“Who loves you?”
“You mean, romantically?” He shook his head. “Nobody.”
“No girlfriend?”
“What for?”
“To love,” she said, laughing.
“I love what I do. I get loved at an hourly rate and I don’t have to deal with any hassles.”
“Sounds so cynical.” She stretched out on her back, hands laced behind her head. “Who was your first love? Like in high school, I mean.”
He shrugged. “Nobody.”
“You’ve never made love.”
“Have you?”
She opened her mouth, then closed it, filled with a troubling confusion. “Of course,” she said to the ceiling, which raised its eyebrows at her.
Really? With whom?
“Love and I aren’t friends,” Jav said. “I get my fill of sex and companionship and when I’m not working, I like being by myself.”
“You’ve never met anyone you wanted to open your heart to?”
“No. Well… Yes. Once.”
“Who was she?”
Jav smiled, his eyes fixed on the opposite wall. “He.”
Val lifted her head. “You’re bisexual?”
“I don’t know.” He glanced at her. “I’ve never told this to anyone.”
She gestured around. “Doesn’t leave these walls. Believe me, I worked as a dresser on Broadway. I know how to keep secrets.”
Jav ran a hand through his hair. “He was just someone I saw. Saw at the same place all the time. I started going out of my way to be in that place. I couldn’t explain why I kept wanting to see him. It’s not like we interacted or talked that much, but I kept going back. One night I gave him my card but he never called.”
“Called to do what? I mean, what did you want from it?”
“I don’t know,” he said softly. In that moment, he was intensely vulnerable and painfully sexy. “I think about him. And I do think about guys sometimes.”
The way the words fell out made Val think it was the first time he’d ever spoken them. She made her voice as soft and neutral as possible when she asked, “Have you ever been hired by a man?”
“Once I was working with a couple and the guy started touching me. I got turned on, and then I freaked out.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m bisexual but only in my thoughts. Those thoughts feel fine in my head but they’re clumsy in practice. Maybe I’m just curious.”
“Bi-curious,” Val said.
“And bi-cautious.”
A long interlude of silence. Val glanced at her watch. It was nearly one in the morning. Her heart thumped steadily behind her breasts. Her eyes roamed over Jav’s far-away expression and superb body. Her thoughts folded over and over, like a ribbon of cake batter poured into a bowl. She wanted to take him into her bedroom. Correction, she wanted to pay him to come in her bedroom.
A single, wicked chuckle in her chest.
“What?” Jav said, smiling. His mouth was delicious. Those full lips and straight teeth.
She rolled on an elbow. “I have three hundred cash in my dresser drawer. Will you stay a couple hours? Or however long the amount gets me?”
He stared at her. “You shouldn’t keep that much bread around.”
“I don’t usually. I would’ve gone to the bank today but I bumped into you.”
He blinked a few times. “Why did you say hello to me?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
More staring. “You’re not lonely. Or neglected.”
“I’m curious and horny.”
His eyes narrowed slightly. “You don’t want to go to bed with me for me? Because we had a spontaneous date and a good time and you’re interested in me?”
“I’m extremely interested in you. I also know you’re not interested in being loved. So paying you keeps me from getting too emotional about this.”
“This wasn’t where I was expecting the evening to go.”
“Me neither.”
“And I don’t have any condoms with me.”
“I have some.”
He looked away from her. A single index finger lifted off his wrist. “You have to give me a few minutes,” he said. “I have to be in a certain frame of mind to work. It doesn’t switch on and off.”
“Take your time.” She got up and gathered the ice cream carton and the spoons, dumped them in the sink. She went into her bedroom, counted out three hundred and put it in an envelope. Back in the living room, she set the envelope on top of the fake fireplace mantel.
“I’m going to take a shower,” she said. “Which I usually do before bed anyway. You can see yourself out and I will have absolutely no hard feelings. I had a fantastic time tonight and it can end perfectly right here. If I come out of the shower and you’re gone, then goodnight and sleep well. If I turn around in the shower and see you there…”
He tilted his chin. “How do you know I won’t take the money and split?”
“Because I have one of your secrets.”
Soaping up in a soufflé of bubbles, she was immensely pleased with herself. And turned on. She leaned a shoulder against the cool tiles and slid fingers between her legs, her bottom lip tucked under a tooth. God, she was practically inside-out. What a wild night.
Then she heard the jingle of a belt buckle on the other side of the curtain. The dull tinkle of loose change spilling from a pocket onto a bathmat and the soft drop of clothing.
Her mouth formed a clichéd crack. Is that you, dear? But she swallowed it back. Talk would only ruin this. She waited patiently.
The scrape of the curtain rings on the rod. A cool breeze through the steam.
His dry body slid up against her sleek, wet skin. His hands found her breasts and his mouth slid along the curve of her neck, drinking her.
She was beautiful and soft.
And he was so fucking hard.
“I’ll see myself out,” Jav whispered.
“All right,” Val said, her voice indolent and slushy.
He leaned down to brush his nose along her cheekbone. “I can’t think when I had a better time.”
She smiled behind cl
osed eyes. “Bet you say that to all your clients.”
“How come none of them believe me?”
Her smile grew wider and she pulled the sheet tighter around her breasts, burrowing down into the warm nest their bodies had made.
He kissed her softly. “Goodnight, funny Valentine.”
“‘Night, Jav. Be careful going home.”
“I will.” He’d stayed an extra hour for free—weird things happened at four in the morning in New York and cabs were easier to hail when the sun was up. Of course, that was the professional reason. The real excuse was he’d fallen asleep. Something he rarely did with a client.
He walked softly into the living room and took the envelope off the mantel. Usually he slipped it into an inside pocket of a suit jacket or sport coat. Now he had to fold and cram it into his shorts pocket where it stuck, awkward and obvious.
All his movements were clumsy and reluctant. His fingers balked at tying his sneakers. Turned locks the wrong way while opening the door. He stumbled going down the hall and the elevator door banged him on the elbow as it was closing.
He didn’t want to go.
After the date to the Cinderella premiere, Jav figured he’d seen the last of Valentine. She’d obviously hired him as a last resort. A personal dare, just so she could tell the story later. A gorgeous, confident chick like that didn’t need to buy what Jav was selling.
When he saw her in line at the deli yesterday, he’d pulled his shades down, turned his back and went invisible. It was the code of escorting. He’d learned early on not to say hello to clients he saw outside of dates. One embarrassing gaffe drove the point home like a spike. He was hired for certain services during certain hours. When the hours were up, the relationship ceased to exist. At least in public.
He got used to it. After a while he stopped questioning it. So he kept his back to Valentine and if she recognized him, he expected she’d look straight through him. Instead, she said hello.
It was the first time a client acknowledged him outside a date.
She wanted to spend time with him for him, and he couldn’t say why it touched him so much.
Then the ask turned into a hire, and he couldn’t say why it disappointed him so much. She put the envelope out and it took him quite a while to switch into work mode. He couldn’t find a story. He wasn’t sure one could be written. Or needed to be.
An Exaltation of Larks Page 10