I picked up a sandwich and a soda from a refrigerated display case that appeared to specialize in very small, expensive, exotic juices, and headed over to a table.
It was a while before I noticed the guy at the next table looking at me. I had that part of my brain turned off, or at least turned very low – the part of the brain that notices men and flirts with them and so on. When I finally did realize what was happening, to be honest, I was shocked.
I may well have been accustomed to dealing with undergraduates in my classes; I may well have been accustomed to having men be attracted to me; what I was not accustomed to was having the two come together. But unless I was mistaken, an undergraduate was about to come on to me.
And, in fact, he did. Asked about what I was reading. Indicated that he had noticed that my coffee cup was empty. Offered to refill it for me.
Our little tête-à-tête was interrupted before it really had gotten going by the ringing of my cell phone. It was Peach. “Work,” she said economically. “Guy up in Chestnut Hill.”
I took the notes as discreetly as I could and disconnected. “I have to go,” I told the undergraduate. He had a ponytail. I really like ponytails.
“How about that coffee, later?” he suggested. “I was enjoying the conversation.”
“Sorry.” And I really was: it was a nice change to be neither call-girl nor professor. I smoothed my skirt and stood up. “It has been nice.”
And it was. Real life intruding, with a lingering promise that maybe it isn’t so bad out there, after all. That when this is all over there may be a place for me somewhere. That young men find me interesting and attractive without having been informed of my measurements – or of my ability to grant them a grade.
So I was feeling some sort of tender warmth, a longing, a lingering thought that maybe if, just maybe… It was bittersweet. I actually used that word, in my mind: bittersweet. I had never really under stood the expression before, something I almost wanted, but knew that I couldn’t have.
I knew the truth, of course: if I had gone for it, I would have found that it wasn’t what I wanted, after all. Maybe I liked the feeling of wanting. Maybe I liked the feeling of knowing that there were options out there, that the world was still turning, that it would still be there when I was ready for it again.
I was smiling when I got in my car. “I could have had a date tonight,” I informed my reflection in the rearview mirror. “I could have had a real date tonight.” I said it with triumph.
You wouldn’t have believed that a two-hundred-dollar an hour callgirl could be that insecure, would you? Surprise, surprise, surprise.
It didn’t last, of course. And in fact maybe it was a gift that had been given to me, a moment of expectation and happiness and innocence.
Because that very night was to be a lesson in the sadness of the profession.
Nothing happened there that I could use in my notes for the new class. What I learned that night could go nowhere but in my heart; but it took up residence there, and the innocence was gone, and all that it left in its wake was a feeling of irreparable and eternal sadness.
The client Peach sent me to lived alone in a gorgeous apartment in Chestnut Hill. There are Chestnut Hills in various cities all over the United States, I have learned, and they all have one thing in common: money. This apartment was filled with appropriately lit fine objets d’art, furniture that clearly had been constructed several centuries ago, and paintings whose provenance I recognized. Minor works, perhaps, but by far-from-minor artists.
The client was a slender man whose skin was so pale that it was nearly translucent in places. He had a gentle, sad smile and didn’t talk a lot. Dvorák was playing in the background, the New World Symphony. He served me sherry and we went to the bedroom.
Once there, he asked me to strip to my underwear, which on that night as on many others was a gauzy camisole over my bra and panties. “Do you have your makeup bag with you?” he asked, still with that sweet melancholic look. “All I want to do is watch you put on your makeup.”
“Just – put on makeup?” I was a little baffled.
“Yes, and talk to me.” Oh, okay, that made sense, I would talk dirty while he watched me do something. That wasn’t particularly new. Last Tuesday I had talked dirty to a client while touching myself. Tedious, but he had liked it.
I settled on to the bed and drew out the required instruments – mascara, eyeliner, eyeshadow, blush. “What would you like to talk about?” I asked, as suggestively as I could, while he settled into a Louis Quinze chair at the foot of the bed.
“Tell me that you’re getting ready to go out with Daddy,” he said, and his voice had taken on an echo, as though it were coming from very far away. “Tell me that the sitter will be here soon, tell me where Daddy’s taking you for dinner,” he said.
I froze for a moment. I truly, honestly wanted to cry. I did what he wanted me to do, of course; what else was there to do? I chatted on and watched myself in my compact mirror so I wouldn’t have to watch him masturbating while I pretended to be his mother. “We’ll call when we get there to make sure that everything is okay here.
And I’ll give you a special kiss before I leave…” I held the tears at bay. Barely.
He gave me a lot of money, later – far too much money, a seventy-dollar tip over the usual. Most girls would have loved it, considered it an easy call, laughed about it later. I drove home to Allston, feeling hollow inside and wondering what had happened in his childhood to have so warped his sexuality. And why he had chosen to work through his obvious pain in the context of a callgirl rather than in the office of a therapist… Some calls I made involved harmless role-playing, the kind of stories that they read in the skin magazines, that they see in the porno flicks:
“Pretend that I’m a doctor, and you’re the nurse who works for me…”
Or, “Pretend that I’m your teacher, and you want an Ain my class…”
This was something different altogether. And I felt it in my soul.
Not even Barry, on Beacon Street, had touched my soul. This client had. I wonder about him, even now, I wonder if he still has callgirls pouting in mirrors and assuring him that Mommy really loves him.
And I say a prayer. It can’t hurt.
That night, it was hard to concentrate on writing the bibliography for my new class. I gave up after an hour and two glasses of red Côtes du Rhône and simply surfed the Net, not looking for books, just looking for something to get my mind off the sad little man in Chestnut Hill. I wasn’t altogether successful.
Recently, someone was asking me about the time I spent working for Peach. “But they want you to do really weird stuff, don’t they?” It’s a standard question. When I answer it – if I decide to answer it – I never talk about the man in Chestnut Hill. I never talk about how I still feel when I think of his needs, and his pain.
As for the other clients having weird needs… well, that depends, of course, upon one’s definition of weird. I happen to think that it’s weird to allow people to keep guns in their homes that kill hundreds of children every day. I don’t think, by that standard, that a guy wearing a bra is any too strange.
As I said, we all have our own definitions.
The fact remains that in this profession, one encounters a range of sexual tastes and fantasies that one probably wouldn’t experience first-hand if one had fewer partners. Partly, I think, it’s because when the encounter is professional rather than personal, a client may feel freer to express the fantasies that may not be considered mainstream. Here, it’s safe. A callgirl, after all, isn’t going to be shocked or disturbed by odd behavior. She isn’t going to call you names or reject you or make you feel bad. If anything, she’s going to tell you how exciting you are. Cool.
She isn’t in a position to use unusual behavior or desires to question the validity of your relationship with her. A new girlfriend, on the other hand, might look askance when first presented with an unusual request. “You want to do – w
hat?”
I think that some men call the agency precisely so that they can play out the “forbidden” fantasy, experience the side that is hidden from colleagues, wives, girlfriends, neighbors. They might enjoy vanilla sex with their regular partner and then call us when they want to explore something more risqué, something less acceptable to the mainstream.
That aspect of it reminds me a little of a conversation that takes place in the film Analyze This, between Robert de Niro, who is playing a Mafia don with anxiety attacks, and Billy Crystal as his therapist. De Niro has just said that he had experienced a moment of sexual dysfunction with his girlfriend.
“So, you’re having marital problems?” questions Crystal.
“Naw, my marriage is fine.”
“Then why do you have a girlfriend?”
“I do things with her I can’t do with my wife.”
Crystal appears genuinely baffled. “What do you do with your girlfriend that you can’t do with your wife?” he asks.
The Mafioso seems shocked by the question. “Hey,” he says, “those are the lips that kiss my children good-night, all right?”
It seemed that I was sometimes dealing with men thinking along those lines, men who wanted to play something, or try something, that they didn’t want to share with their partner – because, in their heart of hearts, they really didn’t want to be with anyone who did those things. Callgirl as slut. It’s just another level of the eternal problem: men want to have sexual experiences, they want to date promiscuous and sexy girls, but when it comes to marriage – whoa.
That’s different. The mother of my children. No question here: she has to be a Virgin. With a capital V.
Doesn’t make sense, but there it is.
All in all, though, most of the fetishes and unusual activities that I encountered were fairly benign, essentially harmless. And beyond the games and the role-playing and the toys – well, a lot of it was fun. Colored and flavored condoms. Purportedly sensual oils and body rubs. Vibrators and dildos and porn films on big-screen televisions.
Fun, mindless, entertaining, and lucrative.
Except for the guy in Chestnut Hill.
That night, for the first time since I had started working for Peach and stopped worrying about money, I took a sleeping pill.
There are some nightmares that it just isn’t worth it to invite in.
Chapter Nine
I resolutely put the Chestnut Hill client out of my mind. I had far too many other thoughts, thoughts of a practical nature, with which to deal. For one thing, eighteen people had enrolled in my class The History and Sociology of Prostitution, and, ready or not, it was going to happen.
September in Boston is nothing short of glorious. It’s usually still too hot, of course, but the leaves know what’s happening and are starting their slow demise into a fiery spectacular death. Mornings are chilly and evenings cold. There is at least the promise of something more than heat, heat, and more heat.
It’s special here for a lot of other reasons. Boston and Cambridge are educational meccas; they lie low during the summer months, but suddenly come alive with the influx of students in the fall. The sidewalk in front of the Berklee School of Music – known as the Berklee Beach, for obvious reasons – fills with young uncovered bodies. Dreadlocks and tattoos and piercings and cases containing esoteric musical instruments.
The coffeehouses, bars, and Irish pubs are suddenly so full that they have people trickling out the doors. The venerable old trains of the Green Line are inundated with freshmen away from home for the very first time, and making that fact known to the world, sitting on the steps while people try to enter the trains around them, world-weary and arrogant from their extraordinary experiences in high school in Hudson, New Hampshire, or Seekonk, Massachusetts, or Sanborn, Maine.
Even the air feels different.
They say that January first marks the new year, but that isn’t true here: for us, it’s the third of September, when there is nothing behind to mourn and nothing ahead but promise. U-Haul trucks are everywhere. Hardware stores fill with earnest young customers. Anything can happen. People smile at one another. For a few charmed weeks, it feels as though anyone could make a new beginning, anyone could start a new life, anyone could become what he or she is destined to become.
There’s an indefinable air about the whole city, a sense of expectation, of eagerness. Yes: the real new year is in September, when notebooks are still pure and white, when textbooks and course syllabi look exciting, and when foreign films suddenly start making sense for the first time.
That September, however, was hotter than any one I could remember. It was also, fatefully, the month that my car had to be inspected.
Please understand this: I loved my Civic. This isn’t a commercial, or anything, but honestly, I had 140,000 miles on it – and I ride the clutch, mind you – and I hadn’t had to replace anything major, ever. It started up every morning, no matter how cold it was.
I can’t really blame the car for not passing inspection; I never paid much attention to it between inspections. If I had been a better owner, this wouldn’t have happened.
The guy in the shop said he could have it ready by Monday noontime.
The problem was, of course, that in the escort business, Saturday and Sunday nights aren’t good nights not to work. Friday was the best night to take off; most of the girls did their personal dating on Fridays. It was a bad night for work, because guys had just gotten paid and thought they could go down to the bar and flash the cash around and get laid for nothing. They didn’t admit defeat and call the service until after midnight, by which time I personally was way too tired to go out on a call.
Saturdays were good for regulars and for guys who planned their weekend around the agency. A lot of them wanted to see an escort and then afterward go out to the clubs, or on a real date, or meet their wives somewhere for dinner. So there were always a lot of early calls, the ones I liked the best. I loved calls that had me home and curled up with Scuzzy by ten-thirty.
Sundays were always good for business: it was the last hurrah of the weekend, when Monday started staring people in the face and they didn’t like how it looked.
So I called Peach that Friday around four and told her that I was without wheels for the duration. She wasn’t happy. That was understandable. I’m reasonably sure that at least some of my regulars stayed faithful to me because I had my own transportation. It’s a lot less ostentatious than pulling up to a suburban house in a brightly-lit taxi – or having one beep the horn outside when the hour is up. It’s also a lot cheaper for the client, because he gets charged extra to help cover paying the driver. The cost of transportation to and from the client’s place was generally shared by the callgirl and the client, with Peach negotiating as much as she could from the client. None of it ever came out of her fee. Nothing ever did.
So, for the first time, I was without my own car. Peach, however, was nothing if not positive. “Not a problem,” she assured me. “I’ll get you a driver.”
Probably at least half to three-quarters of the girls who work for the service used a driver. A lot of them were college students living in dorm rooms; and the first advice that any school in Boston gives to prospective students is: Get rid of your car. The T – the public transportation system – is efficient and inexpensive; Boston traffic sucks; and the city employs (or so I am convinced) ex-Gestapo guards as meter police. I once met a woman whose son, who happened to be a police officer, ticketed her car in front of the house that they shared. True story. And it’s a fact that I have personally paid enough parking tickets to deserve having a small building – at the very least – named after me.
So the girls used drivers. I had already met one of them, Luis, who worked part-time for Peach while he went to business school. During my first week, back before she trusted me to hold cash for her, I’d meet him in Kenmore Square to give him Peach’s take from the money I’d received from the client. I’d seen him once or twice after
that at social gatherings – Peach had singled me out from among the women who worked for her as being worthy of her friendship, and occasionally invited me over to her house for late-night soirées. Luis had been there, seemed to always be there. He and I looked at each other in a way that said we were both interested, but not yet.
I don’t know where Peach got her drivers. She was usually having some sort of trouble with one or another of them at any given time, but I had never asked her about any of it.
That Saturday I showered and put on a clean pair of shorts and t-shirt (no sense in getting dressed yet when you don’t know who you’re going to be seeing, and what they’re going to want you to wear) and flipped on the television. Nothing. So I put a tape of old Frasier episodes in the VCR and was just settling in nicely, with Scuzzy purring next to me, to watch Niles have a telephonic tiff with Maris. And then my own telephone rang.
It’s funny, you want the phone to ring because you want to make money, and at the same time you are disappointed when it does because you know how annoying the next couple of hours could potentially be.
“Jen? Got work for you.”
I pulled a pad of paper across the coffee table and flipped the lid off the felt-tipped pen. “Go ahead.”
“It’s a regular.” She always told me that when it was somebody I didn’t know. Trying to reassure me, I expect. “Jake. Number is 508-555-5467. You’ll have to get directions from him, it’s in Marblehead.”
“Okay. What did you tell him about me?” This was the most crucial information, from my point of view: it determined my persona for the evening.
Callgirl: Confessions of a Double Life Page 11