Power & Beauty

by Ritz, David

  New York City has its own groove—fast, nervous, and impatient. You just go with it or you get swallowed up. Holly Windsor had that kind of groove. You couldn’t shut her up. It was almost like you had to go with her. At least that’s how I felt. If someone had said, “That woman’s full of shit,” I wouldn’t have argued. She was an actress in some play. At the same time, I couldn’t stop watching her act. I liked the play. And, in spite of myself, I even liked her. Maybe the reason I liked her is because she never stopped saying how much she liked me. I went for the flattery. And I was impressed by how honest she was about herself. People don’t usually go on and on about their own mistakes. I’d never met anyone like Holly Windsor. Nothing in my life had prepared me for her way of talking or her outlook on business.

  My initial thought—that I’d be working at a whorehouse—was in some ways right, but in most ways wrong. First of all, there was no house. The girls always worked on the outside. They met their dates in hotel rooms, apartments, homes, private jets, and even yachts. The big surprise, though, was the way they looked. They looked like they worked as bank managers, or lawyers, or ad executives. They looked like young ladies on their way up in the world of high finance. They wore dark pinstriped suits where the skirts were never too short. The suits were tailored to fit their perfect shapes, but the tailoring always left a lot to the imagination. Of course when they first came up to the office to be interviewed they didn’t always look that way. The experienced ones did—the ones who knew that the more expensive the service, the more conservative the look. But the new ones, who had learned about Holly through mutual friends, often made the mistake of wearing way-too-sexy clothes that showed off too much cleavage or booty. For the first months, I was fascinated just watching Holly interview these women.

  “Darling,” she would say—she called everyone “darling”—“tell me about your mother.”

  That first question would throw them. They wouldn’t know what to say. Some thought it was a joke, but it wasn’t. Holly was dead serious. If the girl answered, “Oh, she’s real nice,” Holly would say, “You must tell me more than that, sweetheart.” If she replied, “I can’t stand her,” Holly would keep the questions coming until she got the whole picture. It came down to this: If a woman had a lousy relationship with her mother Holly wouldn’t hire her. If it was good, the girl had a chance. When I asked Holly about this, she said, “Darling, I told you to take psychology, didn’t I? Well, you don’t really have to take it because I’m teaching it. I’m teaching you that a girl’s most important relationship is her first. That’s with Mom. If that didn’t work, chances are most of her relationships after that won’t work either.”

  “Didn’t you say that you have a terrible relationship with your mom?” I asked. “Didn’t you say she doesn’t even talk to you?”

  “That’s why I could never be an escort. Too emotionally unstable. I look for girls with emotional stability. With stability, they have a chance to become a star in this business. Without it, they’re lost.”

  Another stock question came early in the interview. Holly would take a cigarette, stick it in the black holder, light up, turn to the prospect, and say, “When did you lose your virginity?” When the question was answered, she’d ask, “Was it good?”

  Later Holly told me, “If the first time was bad, that’s not a good sign, darling, not at all. My ears are eager to hear a girl talk about how the first time was wonderful. I need girls who learned to love sex early on. I need girls who have positive attitudes about this most primal of acts. That’s why my other questions involve religion. Too much religion often leads to lousy sex. My girls need to be unencumbered by guilt or a god interested in punishment of any kind. If a client wants to be punished, that’s one thing. But it’s the girl who will be doing the punishing, not God almighty.”

  I have to say that this interviewing process was interesting as hell—so interesting that I actually did sign up for a psychology course at the community college. I saw right away that studying human nature was something I’d been doing very seriously ever since my mother died. Maybe that’s the real education Slim was trying to show me.

  Slim never had anything good to say about college, so I didn’t bother telling him that I had enrolled. My night classes didn’t get in the way of my work at the Holly Windsor Agency. In addition to psych and history I was going to take a business course, but I figured it’d be better to stay general. I was learning enough business just by virtue of my work. My history teacher was a little boring, but my psych teacher was great. She came from Rome and spoke English with an accent. Professor Anna Severina was in her seventies and sharp as a tack. She talked about personality development and ego defense mechanisms and had me thinking about my own personality and defenses and whether I was suppressing the fact that I killed a man in cold blood. How did my personality develop to the point where I was able to do that? Professor Severina talked about denial and suppression and all kinds of ideas that had me wondering whether I was denying my true character by brushing off that murder as part of the education Slim was giving me. Sure, I killed. But soldiers kill every day. I was a soldier who Slim had hired out to Sugar. I did my duty—that was all. But having done it once, could I—and would I—do it again?

  I gotta be honest: Part of me felt proud that I had been able to go through with it. Part of me was proud that I hadn’t panicked. But another part of me was ashamed of being proud. Pride and shame lived together in the same compartment inside my head. I tried to close the door to that compartment, but it was hard. Taking psych, I began to see how the mind can play with itself—how you can keep certain doors closed. After class, I talked to Professor Severina and asked her lots of questions about human behavior.

  “That book you gave us about family,” I said, “is always talking about the huge influence of the mother and father. But it doesn’t talk about what happens when the father dies young, when there is no father.”

  “The dynamic changes,” she said. “It changes radically. Many times the young boy will seek out a substitute father.”

  “And will the substitute dad have as much influence as the dad?”

  “Most definitely,” said Professor Severina. “Often even more influence. The fatherless boy is so eager for a strong male figure that, in embracing a role model, his vulnerability is extreme. He’s looking for strength, pure and simple. That strength can have a positive character, or in the case of young boys attracted to gangs, the strength is brutally negative.”

  The phrase “brutally negative” stuck with me. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. During these talks with Professor Severina I was beginning to see my own mind from the outside. That made me understand myself more. Maybe the act of killing wasn’t the real me. Maybe it was something I did in response to this role model. Or because of “peer pressure.” “Peer pressure” was another term Mrs. Severina used in describing why certain kids become violent. Their nature isn’t violent, but the cool kids are violent, and they want to be cool. I knew enough gangbangers back in the ATL to realize that this was true. It was a way to conform.

  In contrast, I was seeing how the pros working for Holly were anything but conformists. They were conforming in their dress—they looked like lady bankers. They were conforming in their talk—they spoke like lady lawyers. They were dignified, they were polite, they looked like they obeyed all the rules of society, but when I got to know them, I saw that they were really rebels. They hated normal society. Take Lisa.

  Lisa wasn’t her real name. Most of the girls changed their names. They changed their whole histories. They reinvented themselves. If they had really grown up in Iowa, they’d say they grew up in Connecticut. Lisa said she grew up in England, but she really grew up in Brooklyn. A vocal coach taught her an English accent. I was there the first day Lisa came in the office applying for an escort job.

  Holly had me in on all the interviews. She was training me to see who was real and who wasn’t. The training was fascinating because us
ually the girl who was not real—the one who could act and look the part of a classy career woman, not a hooker—got the job.

  Lisa wanted the job real bad. She was honest. She began by saying that as a girl in Brooklyn she dreamed of being an actress. She thought that was possible because she was beautiful. Her dad was Puerto Rican and her mom Irish. She had reddish hair and blue eyes and skin the color of dark gold. Right after high school, when she was eighteen, both her parents died—her dad got killed in a freak accident in his construction job and her mom got cancer. She was all alone and needed money. She worked as a waitress. She moved to Manhattan, where she found roommates in an ad. She secured an acting teacher, looked for agents, and tried out for parts. Nothing happened.

  She talked about dating. The goal of every guy was to fuck her. She had seen that ever since she was fifteen or sixteen. That was nothing new. But when she got older, she expected more. Instead of getting more, though, she got less. She saw that if a guy took her out for a nice meal, he expected return payment in the form of pussy. That made her mad. The whole system set up by society made her mad. If she didn’t give up the pussy, the guy flew into a rage. It was crazy, it was frustrating, and she wanted nothing to do with it.

  She thought about modeling. She met a photographer who took a bunch of pictures of her. He praised her to the sky, but then he made a move. He’d get her work only if she gave him pussy. It was the same thing. For a while she thought her beauty would get her somewhere in the theater. No such luck. The apartment she shared was turning into a condo and she needed another place to live. The restaurant where she worked had lost its lease. With no job, she was down to her last dollar and had nowhere to live. By chance, a director who had auditioned her kept her cell number and called. He didn’t want her in a play, but he did want her in bed. She went out with him to a cool restaurant in Tribeca. Afterward he asked her over to his brownstone. The guy owned the whole building. She slept with him that night and in the morning told him the truth—that she needed a place to stay. Could she stay for a day or two until she found a job? He said no. That’s when she decided that if she was going to get fucked, she was going to get paid.

  I liked Lisa and so did Holly. We liked her because she didn’t hold back anything. “She understands herself,” Holly said after Lisa had left. “She sees into her own mind.”

  When Holly wasn’t sure about the credibility of a client, she had me talk to him on the phone or meet him in person. This was interesting as hell. I’d dress up in a suit, a vest, and a $150 silk tie. I felt like I was running a corporation. I’d meet a guy in the bar, say, of the Four Seasons Hotel, on Fifty-Seventh Street just off Park Avenue, where the cheapest room goes for $1,100 a night. One time there was a guy in his fifties, an overweight, balding, happy-go-lucky guy. His name was Harper. He said that he wanted a complete evening—dinner and a show followed by jazz at the Blue Note downtown. He wanted to make sure his date liked the theater and appreciated jazz. He wanted to talk about jazz. I told him that I didn’t know the musical tastes of all of our escorts, but I assured him that they were charming and cultured. He liked hearing that. There was a gleam in his eye. He was willing to pay the going rate—fifteen thousand—for an all-nighter. I was ready to close the deal when I saw the waitress walk by with a tray of drinks. He tried to do it subtly, but I saw him stick out his foot so she tripped over it. The drinks went flying. I saw that same gleam in his eye; he tried to hide a smile, but he couldn’t. In spite of his apologies, he enjoyed the whole thing. I figured the guy got off on humiliating women. I told Holly to forget about him. When I explained why, she agreed and said I was catching on.

  I caught on so quickly that Holly turned the New York office over to me while she opened up escort services in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and, yes, Miami. The woman was a whiz. She didn’t believe in advertising of any kind. Not even on the Internet. She called the Internet too public. “Darling,” she said, “any two-bit hooker can set up an escort service on the web. But that’s so crass, so terribly available. The truly exclusive services must be just that—exclusive. That means word-of-mouth only.”

  Holly’s primary job was generating word-of-mouth. She developed a national network by cultivating the powerful. A captain of industry, a U.S. senator, a world-famous athlete—she knew how to connect to these people. Part of her pitch was the fact that her agency had no presence on the Internet. Absolute discretion was the key. She’d show up at exclusive parties. She met these men at a time when, more than ever, they were worried about being caught. She didn’t use e-mail or texts. She talked to you face-to-face. In New York, she had me talk to the customers the same way. We went old-school—in-person meetings, no electronic traces, and of course cash only.

  One client was a brotha in his forties who’d gone to the Wharton School of Business. He owned his own ad agency and had heard about us through a client of his. We met for drinks at the Carlyle Hotel on Madison Avenue. That same night George Clooney was at the bar with friends. The brotha started telling me about his wife. After their second child, the sex stopped. He tried convincing her it was her marital duty. She wasn’t buying. He got into porn but porn didn’t satisfy him. He snuck out to titty bars but they made him feel cheap. He started secret dating but that got complicated. He got caught lying about being single. Talking chicks into pussy was hard work. He wanted to relax. He was willing to pay big bucks for a nooner—that meant a blow job and quick fuck. He turned out to be one of our steadiest customers. And no trouble. The guy had great manners.

  I was getting good at psych and liking it. I was feeling strong. I was feeling confident. I was feeling really good about myself. Holly Windsor never held back the compliments. “Sweetheart,” she said, “you understand subtlety. You yourself have a subtle mind for this, the most subtle of businesses. A successful month is one during which no complaints are registered and no news is made. We aim for a drama-free business. In fact, during these past six months or so that your subtle presence has been part of the agency, we have experienced no drama. I salute your subtlety, darling, and look forward to seeing it grow as the days fly by.”

  On a day that should have been a red-letter celebration—my twenty-first birthday—I took a subtle approach. I didn’t tell anyone. Slim called from Atlanta, but that was it. I knew, of course, that Beauty knew, because her birthday was only a week away, but I didn’t expect to hear from her—and didn’t. The pressure of school and work had taken up most of the space in my head. There was always a special place for Beauty, though. I couldn’t deny that because she still appeared in my dreams two or three times a week. We met in my dreams. When Professor Severina said that dreams represented suppressed desires, I thought of Beauty.

  The more I got into the job at the Holly Windsor Agency, the more I got into my psych course. The two went together. I was doing psychology day and night. In fact, I decided to major in psychology. I loved looking at people’s minds from different angles. Now I could see why, without a dad, I had clung so closely to my mom. I could see why, without a father figure, Slim made such a deep impression on me. When Professor Severina talked about posttraumatic periods in people’s lives, I thought about that period after Moms had died. I wondered how long that period had gone on—if it was still going on. When I interviewed the ladies wanting to be escorts—and man, you can’t believe how many women out there wanted the job—I heard plenty about their traumas. A couple of them had been raped. One had been beaten by a boyfriend. Another had run away from home at eighteen because her stepfather had tried to mess with her. This one woman from California who was prettier than Halle Berry and couldn’t have been older than twenty-five said she had been married three times. Her first marriage, to a preacher, happened when she was sixteen—and with her mother’s approval. The preacher was rich.

  I got good at understanding who could handle the job and who couldn’t. Not that I didn’t make mistakes. I thought Betty Langston would be perfect at the job. Great shape, sunny personali
ty, no interest in romantic entanglements. She just needed money to complete law school and this was the easiest way. But after spending two nights with the head of a big Wall Street brokerage firm, she called to say she’d fallen in love with the guy.

  “How does he feel?” I asked.

  “The same, Power. He’s ready to leave his wife.”

  “Stand by,” I said. “I need to discuss this with Holly.”

  Holly was in Seattle, setting up her newest office.

  “Disaster,” she said. “Disaster with a capital D. And I don’t have to tell you why, do I, darling?”

  “Confusion of love and lust.”

  “Exactly. This poor dame is cruising for a bruising. And if she gets hurt, she’ll pass the pain on to us.”

  “So what do I do?”

  “Fire her. Tell her she’s through. Do it now.”

  “And what about him? He’s one of our better clients.”

  “Call him and tell him that the little lady has become emotionally involved and, as responsible and discreet agents, we must ask her to withdraw from our organization. We do this to protect our clients. He’ll appreciate it. And he’ll also have the option to pursue her on his own or drop her.”