Callgirl: Confessions of a Double Life

by Angell, Jeannette

  “You could tell him the truth.”

  “Oh, right. You’re so tolerant and liberal, how would you feel if Catherine went out two nights a week and had sex with somebody else?”

  He looked at me over the rim of his glass. “We have an open relationship. Catherine’s free to have sex with whomever she chooses.”

  “Uh-huh.” I nodded. “But say you’re watching her get ready – after all, it’s not anything personal, it’s just work – and you watch her put on all this fancy underwear. Fancy underwear that she’s usually too tired to put on for you…”

  My voice trailed off. I had been a graduate student, myself: I knew how Catherine must feel most of the time. Exhausted beyond exhaustion. Open relationship? I’d bet she barely had energy to fuck Seth once a week, much less anybody else. Getting laid can be high maintenance, and she was preparing for her comps, probably studying for ten hours a day along with working on and attending any classes for which she was a teaching assistant. Sex becomes pretty irrelevant at that point.

  I took a breath and continued. “So imagine that, and imagine that sometimes she comes home and tells you about her calls… you know, she talks about work, we all do it, just to unwind. And she says this guy tonight was into degrading her, calling her a slut, a whore… And then she asks you if you want to go to bed, she touches you, and all you can think of is this other guy playing those games with her, touching the same breast you’re touching… You might get turned on, and you might get disgusted, but you’ll sure as hell have a reaction.”

  Seth was getting red. “All right, maybe. But that’s me and Catherine. All right, it would be tough. But it doesn’t mean that the right person couldn’t know.”

  “The only people I know of who would tolerate that in a supposed loved one are pimps and addicts.” I know I sounded harsh, but it was the truth.

  And I never could figure that one out. In all my time in the business, I never saw a “normal” healthy relationship work in which the woman was actively working as a callgirl and the man was aware of what she did. On the other hand, lots of drug addicts functioned that way. Lots of abusive relationships, also.

  It was really odd, too, because if you think about it, it could work. It should work. I mean, in the abstract. I absolutely compartmentalized what I did for Peach as “work.” It wasn’t sex. It may have been sex for my clients – well, I should hope that it was sex for my clients! – but it wasn’t sex for me. I acted my way through a sexual situation for an hour and then it was over and I went out for a coffee and got back to my own life.

  One of Peach’s girls said to me once that she had mentioned it to her boyfriend, just as a theoretical concept, and he thought it would constitute cheating. That really cracked us both up, because nothing could be further from the truth. Like kissing your child, then kissing your mother-in-law, then kissing your lover. Same physical action. Totally different events.

  But then again, we have to remember that the industry exists precisely because men take sex so seriously.

  And of course the problems all come when it stops being abstract. I teach; I’m actually very, very good at teaching. I teach adults who do not look at me as a role model, but as a source of information. Or grades. Whatever. What I do in my own time, or what I do as a part-time job, does not change my teaching, my ability to inspire, to challenge, to excite students’ minds.

  Yet if anyone knew that I also worked as a callgirl, my career would be over. Not even the community colleges would hire me. No one would be able to define why the two are incompatible, but everyone would be sure that they are. “I may not be able to define pornography, but I know it when I see it.” Yeah, right.

  Or, just for the sake of argument, bring it even closer. One of the escorts working for Peach, Beth, taught middle school – seventh and eighth grade. Now, we all know that she is precisely the same teacher now that she was before you knew she was working weekends for Peach. Right? And nobody really seriously suspects that she is encouraging sexuality or promoting pornography among her students (as if seventh and eighth graders needed any encouragement in that direction). I mean, aside from the ethical questions involved (and my experience is that Peach’s girls fret far more about ethics than any other group of people I’ve ever encountered), what would be the point? Middle school students can’t afford Peach’s rates… So there should be no reason for Beth not to be able to do both. Theoretically.

  Theory has amazingly little to do with reality.

  So let’s go a step further, let’s bring it closer still. You’re liberal, I hear you shrugging this off: Sure, it’s fine for Beth to teach during the week and work for Peach on the weekends. Capitalism at its best, right? So answer this one: would you want your eleven-year old daughter to be taught English by a woman who is, in addition to a teacher, a prostitute?

  Tell the truth.

  Gotcha. I rest my case.

  Callgirls talk more with each other about morality than does any other professional group I can think of. More than priests and ministers and rabbis, even, because those people are talking about religion, which always puts a different spin on morality. I can think of so many conversations… sitting in my car, waiting for a client, having a drink at Jillian’s or coffee at the Triton Bookstore… and wrestling with issues. Being worried about the wife, what this might be doing to her. Talking about how Peach thought that somebody owed her one hundred and twenty dollars, when the girl knew that she was actually holding one hundred eighty for Peach. Talking about how much it hurts, in one’s soul, to lie to one’s boyfriend. Talking about going to confession on Saturdays and wondering if one ought to be mentioning one’s profession. Talking about the questionable ethics of learning a man’s areas of vulnerability in order to use them for one’s own purposes. We talked about ethics more than about any other single issue – including money – and I’m not sure that any of us resolved any of the struggles that we discussed. But they were real for us, pressing, urgent, important. And that’s one of the reasons I still see red when I hear someone making fun of a prostitute for having no standards. If anything, we set the bar a trifle higher than most of you do.

  Maybe we did because we didn’t get to disguise our issues the way that most people do. Affairs and marital infidelities can be rationalized away. Corporate cheating can be explained and justified. For us, it cuts a little closer to the bone. Try sitting in a guy’s living room, making out with him, while a picture of his supposedly happy family smiles at you from the end table. It never kept me from doing my job. But it always left me with a lot of disturbing questions. And no amount of rationalization or justification – or martinis – was going to just magically make them go away. I had to face them. We all did. Perhaps that’s another reason why alcohol and cocaine played such a large role in our lives.

  Sometimes you just need a little numbing from all the meanness that you see.

  But back to Seth. We’d gone through a good two-thirds of the champagne when he consulted his Rolex. “Well, this is great, but we need to get started.”

  There’s going to be competition for our reservation at Morton’s at eight-thirty on a Thursday night? Boston isn’t that cosmopolitan, and I was feeling relaxed and comfortable. “Come on, Seth, let’s finish the champagne first.”

  He got up and reached into his back pocket and took out his wallet. He took out a few bills – I couldn’t see what denomination they were – and came over to where I was sitting, putting them on the table next to my champagne flute. He was tugging a little distractedly at the unfortunate tie. “No, I just want to make sure that we have time before we leave for dinner.”

  Did the champagne temporarily remove every one of my brain cells, or am I just incredibly naïve? I looked up at him. I must have looked stupid. I know I sounded stupid. “Time for what?”

  And I still didn’t know where this was going. You, gentle reader, will have caught on by now; but for somebody who can be so cynical about world politics, astute about historical inte
rpretation, enlightened in her participation in the sex industry, I am still and will always be the most trusting and gullible woman on earth. My husband once asked me, “Hey, did you know that the word gullible isn’t in the New Oxford Dictionary?” and, indignant and astonished, I was halfway to the bookcase before I caught the amused glint in his eye.

  They ought to lock me up for my own good.

  Seth stopped next to my chair, put his champagne glass on the occasional table next to the hundred-dollar bills he had just set down there, and without further ado unbuckled his belt. “I want to be sure we have time for you to suck me off,” he said.

  You know how, when you’re in a car accident, the final seconds before you hit the other car suddenly move in slow motion? Your situation is instantly absolutely crystal-clear, and nothing exists beyond you and the vortex that is drawing you inevitably closer to disaster, and you feel almost disinterested, as though it had nothing to do with you, as though it were just a movie. And this happens even though just seconds before it you were saying, “Oh, shit. Oh, God, no. Oh, fuck.” Then at the same time another part of your brain is arguing with your senses, doing the full-blown denial thing, saying that it isn’t really happening. Now that’s real chicken soup for the soul, fuck those stupid books, give me a good hearty slice of denial any day.

  Of course, that part of the brain usually shuts up on impact. Even at its most persuasive, denial can’t do much of anything creative with twisted metal, with the slow finality of impact, with the color and taste of blood.

  They say that when those things happen your life passes in front of you, but I don’t think so. I think time just slows down enough for you to fully understand how little control over your life you really have.

  I’ll bet it’s especially slow for people who spend all their time trying to control things.

  Anyway, that’s what happened that Thursday night at the Ritz-Carlton. Part of my brain was talking calmly and rationally, telling me that this wasn’t really happening, this wasn’t real. I was misunderstanding what was happening. No. No. If I could just sit still and not breathe, I’d find out it wasn’t real.

  At the same time another part of me knew with dreadful certainty what was ending and how terrible was my loss. I was watching everything spin out of control – Seth, our years of friendship, the warmth I had been feeling, my history of leaning on him emotionally, my perception of who he was, to hell with that, my perception of who I was… and it wasn’t the past spinning around there with me, it was the future. I was Alice Through the Looking-Glass, bewildered at the sudden perception that nothing made sense anymore, that nothing that I had always accepted as real was, in fact, reality. If this could happen, anything could happen. I could be the White Rabbit.

  He could be the Jabberwocky. Our shared past meant nothing. Our future was nonexistent. And I had never imagined a future that didn’t have Seth in it.

  I finally managed to pull myself together – there hadn’t been any impact of metal on metal, after all, but I had to deal with the reality of the disaster anyway. The reality was that the belt was unbuckled and the zipper was going down, and if I didn’t do something right away I was going to see Seth’s penis, and I couldn’t bear that.

  Something inside me would break if I did.

  My mouth was dry. I looked at him and all the words inside me couldn’t get out. All I said was, “Why?”

  He paused with his hand still on the zipper. His tone was mildly curious. “Well, you’re a hooker now, aren’t you?”

  *

  I don’t know what the worst part of that story is. That Seth could make that kind of assumption about me, based on my employment? That he had retained, despite my attempts to explain my life, all of his prejudices about prostitution? That he had been everything to me, and I was nothing to him?

  Or was it simply that I had lost a friend?

  A Barbra Streisand character once said something about, “I may be a prostitute, but that doesn’t mean I’m easy.” Just as callgirls see sex within a structured work setting and sex with a chosen partner as completely different things, so too is our morality unaffected by our work. I may exchange a sexual encounter for money, but that will never mean that I treat sex lightly, or give it away casually. I’m not easy.

  If anything, it’s the other way around. I was actually far more promiscuous in the years and months before I started working for Peach. I remember – and can I tell you how ashamed I am at this memory? – having sex once with a guy just because it was easier to go ahead and have sex with him than it would have been to argue with him about leaving my apartment. Just because I was tired and it was the quickest way out of a tedious situation.

  That’s what is humiliating, you see. It’s humiliating to hurt myself like that, to treat my mind and my body and my soul like shit, fucking someone whose name I couldn’t even remember even as he was entering me, giving in to his obnoxious, degrading words and behavior, simply because I didn’t have the energy to do what I wanted to do. That’s a horrible realization: that I was willing to hurt myself, to hurt my soul, just because I was tired.

  I wasn’t acting within any particular moral framework back then, needless to say. But nobody then assumed that they could simply thrust their penis in my face and expect me to respond. I was still a nice girl, then.

  I took it more seriously, once I started working for Peach. I didn’t fuck strangers anymore simply because it would have been easier than standing up to them. I started thinking more of myself. I came to an understanding, a policy, if you will, that I would exchange sex for two things, and two things only: for love, or for money. It sure as hell helped me to sleep better at night.

  Being a callgirl is being a professional. I interacted with my clients the same way that any service professional interacts with their clients. Some I liked, some I didn’t. I treated them all the same; I treated them all fairly. I charged a fair price for my services and didn’t cheat or cut corners. Some of Peach’s girls would try to get the guy to come as soon as possible, and then would leave afterward. I always stayed the full hour, if the client wanted me to. Always. If I left with my dignity intact, it was important to me that the client had his dignity intact, too.

  So where did this crazy idea come from that just because I do it professionally, I’m available twenty-four hours a day – for free, mind you – to anyone with the requisite equipment and needs? Just because I do it professionally, I love to do it and want it all the time?

  Do you really believe that we’re all nymphomaniacs who can’t get enough? You’ve been watching too many skin flicks, my friend.

  Let’s rephrase: do you see a whole lot of psychologists begging to analyze people on their time off? Or chemistry teachers who just can’t stop trying to cram the Periodic Table of Elements down people’s throats at dinner parties? Or a Web designer who goes around offering to put together killer Internet sites on Saturday afternoons for free, just because they like coding?

  Oh, please Get a clue.

  It’s a job. It’s a job. Most if us can’t wait until it’s over, and don’t think about the next time until we absolutely have to.

  It’s a job. We know you wish we’d play the fantasy for you all the time, and we’ll do it well, but please just accept and be grateful for our willingness to do it as a profession. We’ll whisper in your ear, even as we probe it with our tongue, that we’ll fantasize about you tomorrow. We’ll scream in the throes of apparent orgasm and we’ll gasp to you that all we want to do is please you and we’ll swear that this is the best, the best it’s ever been… and all that that means is that we’re good at our jobs.

  I worked at one time for a software company. The engineers there had me absolutely convinced that all that they cared about in life was the database application they were designing. They came in early, they worked late. They sat in the cafeteria and talked about system architecture. They made jokes about life in cubicle-land.

  But do you know what? All that meant was that
they were good at their jobs. Because in the grand scheme of things, they knew that it was just a database, a database that stored and kept track of insurance policies. And when they went home they thought about their families, their goals, their pleasures, the book that they were reading, the movie they wanted to see. They didn’t think about coding, or databases, or configuration specs. They didn’t confuse their jobs with their lives.

  So give me a little credit; look at me as you might have looked at one of those software prima donnas. Like them, I may have liked what I did, but I never mistook it for reality.

  Never

  Chapter Eight

  I had thought that the class on prostitution would work as a summer elective, but as soon as I’d turned it in to the Curriculum Committee, they raced around like crazy to get it into an addendum to the fall catalogue. I’m still not sure why. Maybe someone thought that there weren’t enough feminist-oriented classes in the fall lineup; maybe they just needed something a little different to spice up the hour between World History 101 and Elements of Logic. Or maybe they were financially astute, watching the bottom line, knowing that a possibly-prurient class would attract students, donors, and attention. Whatever the reason, it was going to appear, and I was going to have to be prepared to teach it.

  So I suddenly found myself immersed in prostitution. One could say that my research was both academic and practical in nature. Theory and reality. By day, I sat in the stacks at the library at Boston University reading, taking notes, waiting for the magical moment that inevitably happens when all the information suddenly takes on a form in my mind, and I see clearly how to present it, like a sparkling path opening up before me. By night, it would be off to the races. I usually arrived at the library already dressed for work; it was easier to leave directly from Commonwealth Avenue than to go all the way back to Allston to change.

  One evening I headed over to the BU student commons to get something to eat, having come to the realization that I was tired and hungry and was not assimilating any of what I had been reading for the past half-hour. When I had been a student here, this area had been just a cafeteria. Now it seemed to have become the equivalent of a mall Food Court – perhaps so that when the mall rats arrived at college they would feel right at home, wouldn’t have too much nostalgia for their lost teenaged years. God forbid that we should ask anything too difficult of them.