We had planned to leave at three, and it was now past four. Our bags were packed. Jerry was still hunched over his cards. “All right, Tia, all right,” he said crossly to me. “Just one more hand.”
I dropped my voice. “Jerry, it’s four-fifteen, we’re supposed to have left already.” I knew that he was an important client for Peach, or I’d have left on Saturday. She didn’t want to lose him; I didn’t want to lose her. But what a temptation.
“Jesus Christ!” His roar interrupted my thought and startled people at the tables next to us, and a pit boss looked interested and began drifting in our direction. Jerry saw everybody looking at him, and in a tone that implied they would all agree with him, he said, “What do you want? I pay her more than she’s worth, and now she’s nickel and diming me about the time!”
I walked out. I waited for him in the front hall. There was a statue there, with a periodic sound-and-light show about the Native American heritage of the Pequots. I thought about Irene’s words and looked at the feather headdress on the statue that was more a tribute to John Wayne than to John Smith, and waited for Jerry.
I wondered what the gorgeous women in the slinky black dresses in the casinos frequented by James Bond et al. would have done in my place. I thought about what they would have done for a good ten minutes.
And then I did it. I got in the car and headed home alone.
Chapter Six
And so spring drifted imperceptibly into summer. It was another of those springs that we get so frequently in New England, where if you’re not paying attention for a week, you’ve missed it altogether. One day it’s damp and chilly and you’re wearing a wool jacket, and then within a week you’re waking up sweating with your bed-sheets twisted all around you, the sun is blindingly bright, and the temperature is hitting ninety degrees with some regularity.
I had turned in my last grades at the end of May, and in June I started summer school.
Three classes, I thought with relief. It didn’t mean that I could do without Peach, but it meant – hopefully – that I could keep my focus where it belonged, in the classroom rather than in the bedroom.
Summers are important – not to mention fun – for not-yet-established professors, because the curriculum everywhere tends to get a little lighter. Students don’t want to take calculus over the summer; they want to take their electives then, learn something interesting and a little offbeat. And so in the summer months, most colleges are more open to suggestions for subjects that aren’t necessarily part of the general semester’s curriculum.
I was teaching the same classes I had in the spring, Life in the Asylum and On Death and Dying. I was also teaching a Thursday evening class at the Boston Center for Adult Education, giving women tips and destination suggestions for world travel alone.
When I was doing my undergraduate work, a friend and I – both of us travel-mad – had written a book on women traveling alone, and while I had traveled mostly on a shoestring since then, I knew that I could be helpful. And, besides, teaching the class was fun.
Peach, unfortunately, was less than pleased about my class on world travel. “What if I need you?” she asked. “Thursdays can be busy.”
I shrugged. “It’s just one night a week, Peach. I never work every night, anyway.”
She wasn’t deterred. “If one of your regulars calls,” she warned darkly, “I’ll have to send him to someone else.”
I had my own regulars by then. And I am here to tell you that regulars are a very good thing. The thought of losing one was enough to give me pause… Well, actually, it would have given me pause, were it not for the fact that regulars can also be fickle. A sure thing isn’t a sure thing until the money is in your pocket and you’re on your way out the door. If the rest of life hadn’t already taught me that, working for Peach certainly did.
It wasn’t even particularly that I adored my regulars, even, or certainly not all of them. But they have the advantage of being a known factor in a swirling sea of unknowns.
One of the – oh, what is the word that I want? troubling? disconcerting? – things about being an escort is that you often feel like you’re going on a series of blind dates. You never know who or what exactly is waiting on the other side of that door when it opens. That uncertainty can get a little wearing.
All right: it can get very wearing.
Besides that, you have to be “on” all the time. Taking an acting course or two might be, in retrospect, the best way to prepare for this job, because the moment the door opens you’re committed to getting out of there with two hundred dollars in your pocket and, hopefully, a client who will request you again and again. And you need to work for that. Whatever it takes. Selling yourself all over again. Being exactly who he wants you to be. Chameleons, that’s us.
Regulars are a relief from that uncertainty, that edge that is something like fear but not quite fear, that sense of always being onstage, always selling something, always trying to convince, to please… and, at the same time, trying to stay tuned to your inner voice for safety’s sake. Regulars mean that you can relax a little. You know what to expect with them, what they like and don’t like, how the visit is likely to go.
That which is known is comfortable.
So in essence, you could say that we have a goal every time we walk into a new situation, see a new client. The goal is always to make the guy a regular. Unless he’s horrible, of course; and you can pretty much figure that one out in the first five minutes. The rest of them are fair game.
Some of these regulars, for me, evolved into something akin to an ongoing relationship, one that differed from other relationships only in that it ended with a financial transaction at the end of the evening. Not all of them I met through Peach – she tended to collect men who didn’t want the same girl every week, because she didn’t make as much money off that kind of regulars. I met some on my own, was introduced to others. And I loved them. I even developed a friendship of sorts with them, a real affection. Within the parameters of our defined roles, these were, in fact, real relationships.
There was Phil, who liked to show me off to his friends. We sipped cocktails together in trendy restaurants on Columbus Avenue, chatting with all the people he knew who “accidentally” happened by that night, before going back to his place for sex.
Robert took me to wine-tasting parties at Cornucopia-on-the-Wharf, whole dinners constructed around sampling wines from a given country or area. We’d sit at big circular tables and listen to the distributors discuss the wines while we ate and sipped, and Robert watched the other men watching my breasts. He always liked it when I wore low-cut dresses and flashy necklaces. It was a minor indulgence that I usually granted.
For Raoul – far and away my favorite client ever – I dressed in little black nothing cocktail dresses and went to the symphony and Handel and Hayden Society concerts and even the occasional opera.
We ate dinner first, wonderful dinners near Symphony Hall, at Tables of Content or Tiger Lily. My time with Raoul felt oddly like an ongoing friendship: the sex always seemed to be a bit of an afterthought, fifteen minutes tacked on at the end of the evening because we both felt it to be our duty. More frequently than not he would ask, apologetically, if I’d mind terribly if we skipped that final portion of the evening; he was in his sixties, and quite naturally got tired. I always managed to express regret.
But even Peach’s regulars – clients who would prefer to see me, but would see anybody else if I wasn’t around – were important to my mental health. And her threat to send someone else to one of my regulars was real. But in the end a scheduled absence wasn’t really all that different from what happened any other night I didn’t work for her. Peach tried to be fair, but business was business, and she’d send another callgirl to anybody’s regular in a heartbeat.
So, despite her reservations, I taught my evening class.
I liked the two day classes, don’t get me wrong. But that night class was – well, honestly, it was sheer fun. O
pinionated. Lively. It was exclusively female, all of the students being women with something of an adventurous mind and spirit, wanting to go to Thailand or Argentina or the Ukraine by themselves. Hikers, photographers, writers, adventurers. There was always lots of laughter, lots of wisecracks; it seemed that we had formed some kind of immediate solidarity around the shared facts of our being single, female, and wanting to see the world.
We talked about Muslim countries, and we talked about compromises. One of the younger women in the class who had sat stolidly in the front row until I could convince her that I really did want the chairs arranged in a circle, had assigned herself the role of Angry Young Woman. She wore t-shirts with messages like “A Woman Without AMan is Like a Fish Without a Bicycle,” and Doc Martens, had her hair in a buzz cut, and she seemed ready to take on the world as though it had somehow personally affronted her. As, perhaps, it had.
“It’s wrong,” she said, her voice rising. “They can’t make women cover themselves up, like it’s somehow our fault that they can’t keep their hands off us! What kind of patriarchal bullshit is that, anyway?”
I said, mildly, “It’s their country.”
She was almost out of her seat at that. “Oh, so if you travel somewhere they execute people without a fair trial, you’d just shrug and say they have the right to do it, it’s their country?”
Someone from the other side of the room said, sotto voce, “Yeah, some country like Texas, for example.”
The first student was undeterred. “Well? Where do you draw the line? Huh?”
I said, again as calmly as possible, “You can choose not to travel to places where you find the customs offensive or degrading. I have always felt that by choosing to visit a country, you have also chosen to accept their customs, or at least to acknowledge them and abide by them. You don’t have to like them. And you don’t have to go there.”
I flashed back for a moment, then, remembering my junior year abroad in France, remembering wincing when American tourists with their inevitable loud voices and broad vowels came into the café I frequented, demanding hamburgers. With ketchup. I remember wondering why they bothered, even, leaving Cincinnati or Denver or wherever it was that they lived.
I cleared my throat. “I lived in Tunisia for two years,” I said to the class. “I covered my head when I went out in public, and I wore a wedding band on my left ring finger, and I traveled all over the country, and I never had a single problem, a single unpleasant incident.” I held up a hand to silence the Doc Martens woman, already seething, ready to launch a retort. “And no, I don’t think that it’s comfortable being in a country where you have to pretend that you belong to a man in order to be safe. That’s why I don’t live there. But if I went there with my set of ideas and my way of life, then I would not have enjoyed my stay as I did. And if you travel expecting people to second-guess your beliefs and your needs and your comfort level, then frankly, there’s no point in traveling at all.” I glanced at the girl in the Doc Martens. “Otherwise, you might as well stay in Cambridge, where you can dress however you like and take men to court for sexual harassment.”
All right, so it was a little cold. But if we’re all so evolved that we’ll explore and respect and adopt foreign concepts like Feng Shui, and eat sushi and hummus, and dress in ethnic clothing, then we’re really being hypocrites if we draw the line at belief systems. It’s exactly like the middle-aged American tourists and their hamburgers. What’s the point?
And I need to remember the same thing. I realized that the next night as I stood in a hotel corridor, waiting for the gentleman behind door number 148 to open it and invite me in. I’d like all of our clients to conform to my idea of how a man should behave; but that is, after all, only my own needs and values and preconceptions at work. I’m a traveler here, visiting your world for an hour. What are your customs? What are your taboos? How can I learn about you and have you feel good about my visit?
The night after that I decided not to work. I had On Death and Dying the following day and was giving back papers – the first one I had assigned to the class, breaking the ice around the difficult subject of children and death. The class had been asked to write a short story in which the writer attempts to explain death to a child. It was, as always, an assignment that left me a little teary. I’d spent the day reading and evaluating the papers, and was emotionally exhausted. Time for pajamas and television, time to order Indian food from the take-away down the street and invest in a little Quality Cat Time with Scuzzy.
Needless to say, Peach interrupted this program with one of her own.
She was brisk. “Jen, there’s practically no one on tonight. I’ll throw you a little extra. I don’t want this guy calling another service.”
I sighed. “How much extra?” I was at that point almost – almost – caught up with bills, but money was still tight and Peach knew it.
Lightning calculations on the other end of the phone, and then she sighed. “All right, an extra fifty.” That meant, of course, that she was going to ask him to spring for the extra. I never, then or at any time that I worked for her, saw Peach reduce her own fee for any reason at all. She really didn’t need to sigh as though I was robbing her.
In any case, the extra fifty had me hooked. I reached for pen and scrap paper. “Okay, Peach, I’ll do it. What’s his name?”
“Dave Harcourt. He’s a regular. He lives in Needham. You’ll need lingerie; do you have anything?”
“Sure.” But it put an end to my hopes for a casual call, jeans and simple accessories.
“Great. He’ll tell you what he wants. Call me back.”
Dave surprised me: he was the only client I ever called who didn’t immediately want to know what I looked like. He was more interested in my clothes closet. Or, more specifically, in my underwear drawer. “What will you be bringing?”
The word bringing seemed odd, but I was used to clients being nervous. “What do you like?” I asked. “I have –”
He interrupted. “Black stockings and a garter belt,” he said. “And a couple of different bras. And a teddy. Oh, and what size shoes do you wear?”
“Nine,” I said lamely. It sounded like he wanted a fashion show, not an escort. I winced. It sounded like it was going to be a busy hour.
“That’ll do. Bring a couple of pairs, high heels, black.”
“That sounds wonderful,” I said. “I have a cocktail dress that –”
My efforts were unnecessary. “I don’t really care what you wear,” Dave said. “How long before you get here?”
Peach confirmed what I was thinking. “Put the stuff in a bag,” she advised. “He doesn’t want you to wear it, he wants to wear it himself. And be discreet, he lives in a residential area.”
He had fairly mediocre taste in wine, even less taste in furnishings, and incredible eagerness to see what I’d brought with me. The problem, it transpired, was that we were not even close to the same size.
A fair amount of struggling, breathlessness, and epithets ensued. He gave up altogether on the teddy, but just managed to strap the bra on across his flabby chest. I stood behind him, trying to make the garter belt stretch far enough to hook together in the back, feeling oddly like a Victorian matron attempting to impose an hourglass figure on a debutante who had consumed one snack too many.
My debutante and I finally made it, and soon he had also struggled into the stockings and shoes and was striking poses in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirror that unfortunately constituted one of the living-room walls. He was visibly getting more and more excited by the view, and the only contribution that he needed from me was apparently to sip my wine and tell him how exceptionally beautiful he looked. We did finally have sex in the end, which I found slightly disconcerting, as he was still wearing my underwear, but it was successful from his point of view and he finally, reluctantly, got into his own clothes and gave mine back to me.
I never wore them again. It wasn’t the association that bothered me; it was the fa
ct that they were stretched beyond the point of no return.
Just as well, really, since after that Dave started asking for me. I even eventually bought a little Dave-kit, with plus size undergarments, and it worked out well for a year or so.
I kept thinking about the image of the traveler as a conceptual frame for prostitution, and was more and more intrigued by it. It worked both ways: the client gets a taste of exotica, of something out of the ordinary, expensive and beautiful and not at all what the guy who sits in the next cubicle is doing that night. Like Anne Tyler’s Armchair Traveler, he visits a new country every time a new girl comes to his door. And the girl travels, too, but she’s doing it on a shoestring, she doesn’t know what to expect and has to be prepared for anything. It was a neat bit of categorization, I thought.
That weekend, and the following weekend, when I had free time, I went back to the books I had been reading before I started working for Peach, the mass of literature that exists out there about prostitution, madams, brothels. This time I went with the more academic texts, books with titles like The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era, and Hell’s Half-Acre: The Life and Legend of a Red-Light District.
What was occurring to me was that there was too wide a gulf between my two jobs, to the point where I was feeling that I was living two lives. I found myself thinking about the one while performing the other, and while it gave me a secret smile, a moment of inner amusement, it did feel jarring. Running out to the post office on a Saturday morning, my hair uncombed, no makeup or jewelry, my sweatpants stained and tattered, I had the impulse to say to the man standing in front of me in line, “Do you know that tonight I’ll earn two hundred dollars, that somebody will be glad to pay that for an hour of my company?” It really was a laugh: I looked like no one’s idea of a callgirl.
Or on a call, with my head tipped back and my eyes closed while a client pawed at my bra, I’d think about what assignment I’d give to my Asylum class the following day. Might as well use your time, I told myself. Certainly it was less tedious if one could simply pretend to not be there.
Callgirl: Confessions of a Double Life Page 8