Callgirl: Confessions of a Double Life

by Angell, Jeannette

  The head of the sociology department, for whom I was teaching On Death and Dying, was the first to comment. “So- new boyfriend?”

  I nearly spilled my coffee. “No, Hannah, why?”

  She looked amused. “You’re looking so good these days. You look happy. I heard you humming in the ladies’ room, to tell you the truth. I thought that there might be somebody.”

  No, Hannah, there are a whole lot of somebodies. There is a different somebody every night, if you really want to know. I repressed the thought and replaced the impish grin it engendered with a proper professorial attitude. “I’ve been working out more; maybe that’s it.”

  The other sociology elective that I was teaching that semester was Life in the Asylum, a course that examined the shifting ways in which the well-intentioned but fundamentally cruel institutions of medicine and psychiatry dealt, historically and currently, with the mentally ill. I spent some time focusing on the so-called “paupers’ palaces,” the immense, grandiose state mental hospitals built in the nineteenth century to try and do the right thing – whatever that was perceived to be at the time.

  The day after my shopping and mini-spa, I went into the “asylum” class (as its own inmates liked to call it) with a mixture of feelings that I was hard-pressed to sort out. We were in the middle of what I always found to be a difficult couple of weeks in the subject area: society’s use of mental hospitals as dumping-grounds for unwanted women.

  I could never treat these classes with any kind of proper academic distance or dispassion, because they never failed to anger me. The superfluous spinster, the outspoken wife, the aging mother, all could be incarcerated if the man who wished to be rid of them found a doctor willing to sign a form attesting to her insanity. Once committed in such a manner, the victim could be released, not by the signature of the committing physician (or by any evidence of mental health), but only by permission of the male relative who had instigated the process.

  I found it outrageous. Every time that I think or talk about it, I can feel my blood pressure rising.

  The students had that week been reading Geller and Harris’ Women of the Asylum . They were presumably prepared to comment on the first-hand accounts recorded in the book, the voices of real women who had lived for years and even decades in lunatic asylums, the women who were no more crazy than the men who had sent them there.

  Not more crazy, just more powerless.

  I had begun to read, in my own newly-acquired independent study (or independent obsession, take your pick) about how prostitution was sometimes used as proof of insanity, and was feeling rather more passionate anger than usual. Perhaps not a strictly academic point of view.

  Some of the women in the class were feeling even more vehement about what they had read than I was. That was usually the case, I have found, which is one of the highs, the joys, of teaching: give people information that they did not have before, and their passions come alive. Tell the truth, and watch it change lives.

  Maybe even some day it might change the world.

  There was a somewhat heated discussion involving most of the class – well, I’d anticipated that. It is, after all, really difficult to read words that express so much pain in such an eloquent way without having some emotional response to it. I let them go at it, walking around the classroom, making a comment here, asking a question there. Inevitably, we were drawn away from the topic, and I let that happen, too, to see where it might go, before reeling them back in again.

  “Well, it doesn’t really matter, does it, it’s just history, that kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore.”

  “Are you kidding? It looks different now. Maybe it’s less blatant, but nothing has really changed.”

  “What exactly hasn’t changed?” That was me, the question asked quietly, innocently.

  “What hasn’t changed? What has changed, that’s the real question! People still think that there’s something unnatural, something abnormal, about women who choose not to do exactly what they’re supposed to do.”

  “That’s bullshit! Women are presidents of companies, now!”

  “What is it that women are ‘supposed’ to do?” I asked.

  The response was vehement. “Everything! They’re supposed to do everything, be everything, and still be nurturing and non-threatening to everybody around them! They have to be sexy. They have to be a fantasy woman and at the same time be as good a cook as their husband’s mother! They’re supposed to want to have children, and if they don’t want children, if they want a career instead, they’re seen as selfish, self-centered, and not normal. I’d probably be put in an asylum if I lived a century ago!”

  Another female voice chimed in. “And it’s sexual, too. Men used to be imprisoned for doing something wrong, women were incarcerated for being too sexual. If you wear skirts that are too short, or blouses that are too low-cut, or too much make-up or jewelry, you’re not fitting the expectations, so you get punished, you get called names.”

  I looked at her. “What kinds of names?”

  A shrug. “You know. Whore. Slut. Bitch. Either you fit into their image of you, or you’re insulted for it.”

  “But you can’t win, because men want that, too! They want you to be a bitch at the same time that they call you names for being one!”

  Another student said, “That’s the real difference. We only get insulted for being different. Back then, they got incarcerated for it.”

  The voices continued as I looked off into the distance. I knew the truth of what they were saying, but I was hearing it as though for the first time. The first time that it applied to me, anyway. To call someone a prostitute, even now, was an insult. Even my students said it, so it must be true.

  I gave them a writing assignment, told them to capture their thoughts and anger and passion on paper, because I knew that I would get primal, angry, real words from the women and primal, defensive, real words from the men. I sat down behind the desk and frowned down at the blotter. I was still dressed in my teaching clothes – skirt, knit silk shirt, jacket, flat shoes. I didn’t plan to change anything but the underwear before signing on tonight. So I was safe from society; if I didn’t look like a hooker, then maybe at some level I was still a nice girl.

  Later, when I got to know some of the other women who worked for Peach, I would be surprised that no one would ever look at them and guess that they worked for an escort service. They didn’t look the part.

  What was “looking the part?” I wasn’t even sure, myself, anymore.

  *

  Peach called me at seven-thirty. “How late are you going to be around tonight?”

  I hadn’t thought a great deal about that. “I don’t know, why?” It wasn’t like I had a lot of other things to do. My evenings, since the departure of the rat bastard, were fairly predictable.

  “I may have someone for you to see. You’ll like him, but he doesn’t want to see you until ten, is that okay with you?”

  “Sure.” I certainly could stay occupied until then; I was going to spend some time on the Internet. Because of the turn the afternoon’s discussion had taken, I needed to look into a few things that hadn’t originally been on the syllabus.

  Those were still early days, when I thought that I could get up from correcting exams and leave on a call. I didn’t understand, yet, that there needed to be a little transition time between the two.

  “Great. You don’t have to call him.” I raised my eyebrows. That was a pleasant surprise. No sales job required. “He’s at Bella Donna on Hanover Street, in the North End.”

  “Peach,” I said slowly, “that’s a restaurant.”

  “Oh, I know. He’s the owner. Just go to the bar and say you’re there to see Stefano. Be there at ten, and give me a call after you get there.”

  “Okay.” I had actually eaten there before, with the boyfriend who had preceded Peter the Rat Bastard. The restaurant was hard to forget. Northern Italian cooking, sauces that made you swear off Ragu forever. The chef could
do things with mushrooms that would make God himself jealous; he had a five-mushroom soup that I would be willing to live on for the rest of my life. This was going to be interesting.

  The challenge, as I saw it, was parking. I could take the T, of course, but it would take over an hour to get there from Allston. On the other hand, the North End is notorious for having no parking spaces available, anytime, anywhere. So I went early and cruised around halfheartedly before settling for an exorbitantly expensive parking lot and walking up the hill to Hanover Street.

  Part of Bella Donna was a small bar, a place frequented mostly by locals, men of a certain age, the pals and cronies of the owner. I went in and hesitated, a nice girl a little out of her league, until the bartender approached me with a wide smile. “I’m here to see Stefano,” I told him, cursing myself for not having gotten the man’s last name from Peach. It would have sounded a little less awkward, I thought.

  If I wanted to be discreet, however, Stefano obviously didn’t particularly care. As soon as I asked for him, there was a ripple of winks, nudges, and nods all around the bar. They all knew what I was there for.

  The client himself, emerging from a back room, was not unattractive. He was dark-haired with the beginnings of a belly overlapping his belt, white teeth, and very hairy fingers. Well, you can’t have everything.

  He kissed my hand, which was really nice of him under the circumstances, and offered me a cocktail. We sipped wine and made polite conversation about the weather, the cronies hanging on every word as though waiting for the punch line from a joke. I said that I had once visited Italy. He said something in Italian that had the cronies gasping for breath through their laughter.

  We sipped some more, and then Stefano said something long and graceful to the men sitting around the bar, and slid me off my stool. He led me downstairs, where, next to the wine cellar, it turned out that he had a room that was – how can I best say this? – outfitted for his needs.

  He explained the situation to me: no embarrassment there. Sometimes these needs involved women; sometimes they involved a special card game or two. People stayed there from time to time. The room also served as his own home away from home on the occasions his wife Giannetta got fed up with him and kicked him out of the house, occasions that appeared to occur with some frequency.

  In any case, it held a table and chairs, a sofa and two or three armchairs, and a small single bed in a corner.

  He locked the door carefully behind us, and we sat on the narrow bed and made out for a few minutes. It was fun. The stale air and his eager hands reminded me of summer camps in years gone by. I had a vague memory of a boat house filled with old detritus from beach days, half-inflated swimming tubes, abandoned badminton racquets, and two passionate teenagers finding temporary refuge there in the stillness of a hot summer evening. His lips were rough, and I was again an adolescent kissing a teen-aged boy, a boy unsure of his own needs, unsure of his own power, unsure of what was expected of him.

  Stefano pulled away at length, and gestured for me to stand up. “Take off your clothes,” he urged. As I started, slipping my jacket off my shoulders, taking off the silk shirt, he unbuckled his belt, unzipped his fly, and pulled out his cock.

  By the time I got through the layers to the new camisole, he was already – so to speak – there. Orgasm attained. Tissues employed.

  Later, I learned that this was in fact the sum of Stefano’s sexuality, though at the time I was a little disconcerted. This was supposed to be work, after all, wasn’t it? I hadn’t really done a whole lot. I wasn’t even naked.

  I saw Stefano quite a lot after that, and the scenario never changed. It was always a toss-up as to which of us would finish first, whether I would get my clothes off or whether Stefano would have an orgasm. We never made it as far as actual physical contact. It was not expected.

  He did, however, have a reputation to maintain, and his friends in the bar knew that he was downstairs with a lady. So I got dressed while he washed up at the small sink in the opposite corner of the room, and then, magically exactly on time, there was a discreet tap on the door and one of the dishwashers (never a waiter) from the restaurant arrived with a tray of food and wine.

  We sat at the table and drank Chianti or chilled Valpolicello and ate veal scaloppini. Or some sort of marvelous seafood stew. Or (after I requested it) that incredible five-mushroom soup. We spoke, sometimes; often we did not.

  After the requisite time had passed – it wasn’t the full hour – he stood up, kissed one of my hands as he slipped the money into the other, and back upstairs we went.

  Waiting for me at the bar was a shopping bag filled with takeout cartons of delicacies. He gave me this gift with a flourish, the bar broke into applause, and that was that.

  I heard, later, that if the girl seeing Stefano had a driver, he’d find out where the unfortunate person was waiting and either invite him or her in for a dinner on the house, or send still more of his incredible take-out to the car. He was generous, and open, and kind.

  That night, after seeing Stefano, I called Peach once I got home.

  “Does he ever actually have sex with anybody?”

  “Don’t think he can,” she said, cheerfully. “What did you have for dinner?”

  I giggled in spite of myself. “Veal. It was incredible.”

  “Thought you’d like him. Do you want anything else tonight?”

  It was eleven-thirty, and I had On Death and Dying at eleven in the morning. “I don’t think so, Peach, but I’ll work tomorrow night.”

  “Okay, you got it, honey. Sleep tight.”

  I did. I had enough dinners to last me for the next two nights, a sixty-dollar tip, and I hadn’t even taken off all my clothes. This, I thought as I slipped between my sheets with Scuzzy kneading the pillow beside me, is easy. Nothing to it. Amazing that more women don’t do it. I’m carrying it off without a problem.

  Well, anybody can be wrong.

  Chapter Five

  In the end, I took a few nights off after that. Stefano had been fun, most of my calls had been okay, but the experience with the guy in Back Bay had shaken me up more than I liked to admit.

  So instead of working I sat in my apartment, sipped red wine, and wondered if I hadn’t made a mistake, after all. Maybe the world of prostitution was, in fact, as terrible as it had been portrayed in movies, in books. Maybe it would end up making me feel bad about myself. Maybe I needed to decide if the Stefanos made up for the Barrys.

  What I really needed, I decided, was to get away from it, to get some perspective. I needed a dose of “real life” – whatever that is – to feel like I was really myself again.

  So I spent a lot of time working on enhancing my classes. I arranged a field trip to a funeral home, and I followed up some leads I had heard concerning possible full-time faculty openings.

  I also spent some time tracking down people I’d promised to get together with socially, but had neglected. I thought that I didn’t need a social life. I was wrong.

  Friends had fallen out of touch, and I had done nothing about it. That happens a lot when a relationship ends: people who knew you as a couple feel awkward around you once you’re single, and I hadn’t exactly been active in pursuing anybody. So I tried to make up for it.

  I had lunch with my friend Irene, who had been my carrel-partner at school. We ate at Jae’s on Tremont Street and talked over pad thai and sushi about our inability to secure tenure-track positions, and we both admitted that we had nothing even approaching a love life. We promised that we’d try to see each other more often.

  I went to the Silhouette Lounge in Allston with my gay friend Roger, who certainly, according to his conversation, made up for Irene’s and my lack of a love life with his busy nocturnal agenda. We drank blue drinks and he provided a running commentary on every man who entered the room. We promised on parting that we’d try to see each other more often.

  I even invited my next-door neighbor over for Indian food (delivered) and a r
erun of Rear Window on AMC, which was fun; but we didn’t promise to see each other more often. She got up early most mornings to take the T to the financial district, where she did something with stocks; my invitation appeared to be an opportunity for her to mention (which she did, several times) that sometimes she could hear my music playing after ten.

  Peach obviously felt the lull and wanted to make things up to me. “I’ve got something special for you,” she said brightly on the following Wednesday.

  “What is it?” Okay, so I was ready for a break from trying to convince myself that I really did have a social life.

  “Not what, honey: who.”

  Who was a client called Jerry Fulcher, and he wanted to go gamble at Foxwoods. He wanted me to go with him. Three days, two nights, an Earth, Wind and Fire show, and a massage and spa treatment if I wanted them. Just be my date, he said.

  Peach had already negotiated a flat fee – you really can’t charge by the hour for a whole weekend – and it was looking good to go.

  Three days away from the city at the world’s largest resort casino and a thousand-dollar paycheck. I didn’t think it over for too long. I could use a vacation.

  So, that weekend, off we went to Foxwoods.

  We drove down together, Jerry’s plan, which I accepted without thinking much about it. Another mistake; but who knew? This was uncharted territory for me.

  To get to Foxwoods, you drive on uninspired highways and then on back roads that look like you’re going nowhere in particular, and then suddenly there it is. Parking lot after parking lot ringing it like a concrete moat, and shuttle buses in pastel colors bustling in and out of them. And there, on top of the hill, is The Place itself.

  It looks, and not unintentionally I suspect, very much like Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, the Disney version – only on steroids. The place just doesn’t know when to stop: towers and balconies and turrets and acres of glass reflecting back the green of the surrounding trees (we’re still working the Sleeping Beauty analogy here, in case you weren’t paying attention). Everything is clean and everyone is happy. The staff is all so perky, they have to be rejects from the Mouse Machine itself.