Callgirl: Confessions of a Double Life

by Angell, Jeannette

  No one had told them that Norman Rockwell was dated, and may not even have been true to his time anyway.

  I hate Needham, but I liked the client well enough. He owned one of the boutiques on Great Plain Avenue, and he closed the shop in late afternoon in order to have a callgirl visit. We did it there, too, in the back room of the shop, on a sofa that was just inside the door.

  We get a lot of clients from places like Needham, clients who play the suburban success game, but see the hollowness inside it, and don’t know what they can do with that unhappy insight. Being men, they naturally think first of making their escape a sexual one. So they continue to do the Patio Daddy-o routine on the weekend and to work hard during the week to get ahead in their chosen professions. They attend their children’s myriad sports competitions and practices, and they allow themselves to be dragged by their wives to PTA meetings, suburban cocktail parties, and church rummage sales. Their tragedy is that they’re bright enough to know that something’s wrong with this picture, but too fearful to do anything about it.

  Except hire a callgirl.

  I find it pretty scary that the act of hiring a callgirl (whenever you have an extra two hundred squirreled away where the wife won’t see it) is the most daring and meaningful act in your life. But it seemed to satisfy them. Well, that, and the two martinis they drank every night as soon as they got home, the ones that enabled them to face the scripted evening activities that lay ahead, the predetermined life that stretched out in front of them.

  Carl fit the profile perfectly. Sometimes I felt sorry for him. Sometimes I thought that he was pathetic. But nothing, not even Carl and his empty life, could have brought me down that day.

  I was already bubbling over when I got to the shop and went in, pretending to be a customer. That was the procedure. I fingered expensive pins and horrifying little knick-knacks until Carl figured it was safe to lock up, and as we walked back to the back room, I talked about the class, how well it had gone.

  I should mention here that I wouldn’t have done that with very many other clients. For one thing, it probably wouldn’t have come up. Most clients don’t want you to be a person at all. They want an object. A pinup. A cuddly plush toy. A representation.

  A few clients – and Carl was one – want details about your real life. My theory is that it gives them a frisson of something forbidden, knowing personal details about a callgirl. I usually made those stories up, of course. I didn’t want these people knowing about me, prying into my life, pretending that they had the right to be part of it for anything more than the required hour.

  But today, with Carl, I couldn’t resist. “It’s going to be a great class,” I babbled happily. “Already they’re asking questions, and they’re good questions, not just excuses for talking about sex.”

  Carl smoothed a hand over his bald head. “I never needed an excuse for talking about sex,” he said, which of course wasn’t true. He couldn’t talk to his wife about it, or I wouldn’t have been there. But I let it go. “I can see one or two students who may present problems, later on,” I said. “But overall they seem to be really engaged in it, and that’s only after the first class.”

  The conversational topic was sinking in. “You teach school?” asked Carl, as we reached the back room and he kicked off his shoes and loosened his tie.

  “Yes,” I answered, caution belatedly coming back to me. “I teach at a couple of different colleges.”

  His eyes lit up. “Wow, that’s sexy. Doesn’t that really turn you on, standing there in front of a class and thinking about getting fucked the night before?”

  “I never think about my job when I’m in class,” I said, primly, although he was hitting dangerously close to home. I did, in fact, entertain similar thoughts with some frequency, although I suspect mine had a different spin on them. I did sometimes flash back on an encounter I’d had the night before, and marveled at the contrast between that memory and what I was doing by day; but those flashes of memory were never sexual in nature. I honestly was never sexually aroused by anything I did through the agency. It was just a job.

  Besides, I simply cannot imagine standing in a classroom and getting turned on at all. Maybe some women could do that. To me the concept always seemed to be bordering on the farcical. Woody Allen material, perhaps.

  If I thought about it at all, it was with the same delight I had felt in keeping secrets, back when I was a child.

  Let’s face it: secrets are fun. My Other Life kept a steady energizing flow going into my Real Life, precisely because the two were so different, because working for an escort service was so forbidden, so clandestine. So illegal. I was walking a tightrope there and I knew it, and there’s nothing like a tightrope for a little adrenaline rush.

  Carl had his mind on less lofty subjects. “Think about this tomorrow in class,” he urged me, his excitement growing apparent as he removed his underwear and pulled me down on top of him.

  “Think of me fucking you, think of me deep inside you,” he added, matching his actions to his words. “I will, baby, I will,” I promised.

  He believed me. They always did.

  After class the next day, one of the students waited shyly outside the classroom for me to emerge. “Dr. Angell,” she said, her voice low and earnest. “My mother doesn’t think I should be taking a class on prostitution. What can I tell her?”

  “Why does she think it’s not good for you?” I asked, surprised.

  An uncomfortable shrug. “I don’t know. I mean, it’s not like it’ll make me become one, or anything.”

  She may have grasped some of it, though. There was the reality of the same bizarre argument put forth by opponents of sex education in schools – that somehow knowing about something will make a person want to do it. Or those who think of gay men as constantly on the lookout for young boys to “convert,” as though their life were so incredibly irresistible that others needed to be protected from it.

  I took a deep breath. “Your mother doesn’t need to worry, and neither do you,” I said firmly. “This class is going to be about as sexy as learning trigonometry, or studying wind velocity. We’re academics engaged in an academic look at a sociological phenomenon.” She still looked uncomfortable, so I went on. “Is she afraid that you might end up disagreeing with her views, once you’ve been through the class?”

  A nod. “I think that’s it,” she said miserably.

  “Is this your first year in college?” I asked, as tactfully as I could. I knew the answer already.

  “Yes.”

  I put a hand under her arm and guided her to a bench. We sat. “This is one of the hardest times in your mother’s life,” I told her. “It’s not new; in fact, it started when you turned two and discovered that you were a separate person from her. And it continued when you were in high school and stayed out late, when you dated boys she didn’t approve of, when you said things to shock or provoke her.” I was out on a limb, here, but I was taking a chance that her adolescence wasn’t entirely unlike my own.

  She seemed to be following me, anyway. “This is sort of like dating someone she doesn’t like?”

  I shrugged. “In a way. All parents want their children to be independent thinkers. Or at least they say that they do. What most parents don’t realize is that in becoming independent thinkers, their children may make choices that are different from the choices that they made. They may make choices with which the parents fundamentally disagree. And no one likes that.” I hesitated. “I don’t plan to have children, you know, but sometimes I think about it anyway, and you know what my greatest fear is?”

  “What?”

  “That I’d do my best to raise them with correct values – that is to say, my values – and they’d end up becoming Republicans in spite of everything I’d taught them!”

  That got a laugh, as it was meant to do, and she nodded. “So it’s not about a class on prostitution,” she summarized.

  “No, I don’t think that it is.” I stood up. �
�The best thing that you can do is share your thoughts with her, even if you’re not sure what it is that you feel or believe. That way, she gets used to the changes you’re going to be going through gradually, and she’ll see that it’s not the effect of brainwashing that got you there, but careful consideration. She should be proud of you for that.”

  I watched her walk away, but instead of following, I sat back down on the stone bench. It was really odd, I thought, that this hadn’t occurred to me before, in all of the times I’d examined the juxtaposition of my two current occupations, but it sure as hell was occurring to me now.

  If this girl’s mother was concerned about her taking a university-authorized class on prostitution, how exactly would she feel if she knew that the instructor was, in point of fact, a prostitute?

  Theory is fine. Knowledge is good. Understanding is commendable. And as long as we continue to look at the subjects of our study from a distance, as though they belonged to some primitive distant tribe that has nothing in common with us, then we’re all safe. Academia can continue to form, judge, pronounce, dictate.

  I was beginning to feel a lot of sympathy for the members of that tribe. I knew just how they felt.

  Chapter Twelve

  I think that somewhere earlier I may have mentioned something positive about the influx of freshmen into the Boston area every fall, how it was somehow energizing, part of the whole new beginnings theme that we celebrate here every autumn.

  That may be both the first and the last nice thing that I have to say about them as a group.

  I know that sounds awfully curmudgeonly, and I’m not the right age to be able to claim that title; but, honestly, it’s the truth. It’s not just a matter of being stuck in a stuffy subway compartment sitting in front of pimply adolescents who are absolutely certain that their knowledge, their perceptions, and their reactions are true, right, and real. It’s the fact that they feel compelled to carry that attitude with them into class as well that bothers me.

  I gave an assignment to the prostitution class. I also defined the format in which it should be delivered, mostly to save myself from the complicated rambling diatribes often produced without such guidelines. The papers duly came in, and two had ignored the format issue altogether. One of the two, in place of the expected annotated academic paper, had produced a one-page poem on the subject. I sighed, not looking forward to the confrontation that was going to have to happen here. If anyone wants my opinion on the dumbing-down of American public schools, I would be more than happy to give it.

  I gave the unacceptable papers, uncorrected, back to the students in question – both of them freshmen – and asked that the assignment be rewritten following the format I’d indicated. “I’ll even be nice,” I said. “I won’t penalize you this time, because perhaps you didn’t understand the directions. Write it over and I’ll grade it as though it came in on time.”

  Far from being suitably grateful for this extremely generous interpretation of their works’ shortcomings, both of them were indignant. Loudly indignant.

  “I can’t believe that someone this narrow-minded is teaching in a so-called center of learning!” snarled Jesse, wasting no time in going straight for the jugular. He was the poet. Probably practicing for his next foray into angry verse. Unfortunately for him, it had been done before, and by persons with a great deal more talent than he was currently evidencing.

  I began, “I’m merely asking you to –”

  “So your way is the only way to do it?” countered Bob, managing to interrupt and be boorish at the same time. “Like we don’t have brains. Like there’s nothing that we have to contribute. The point of being in school isn’t to teach us how you want things done.”

  I reminded myself that killing him would not help my career. “Actually, it is,” I said, mildly. “How can you know that you disagree with a way of doing things if you haven’t tried that way out?” I hesitated, wondering if I was reasoning with the unreasonable, then hurried on before they could jump in. “Tell you what, I’ll give you an extra-credit assignment: examine the format that I want you to use, and take it apart. Intellectually, not while you’re mad at me. Tell me what’s wrong with it, and why you don’t want to use it.”

  ”Oh, yeah, so your answer is to get us to do your work for you?”

  Something like this happens every year in the fall. They come in, some of them having been at or near the top of their classes in high school, and they’re used to one way of doing things – the way that worked back in Pawtucket or Fort Lauderdale or St. Louis. They’re cocky and convinced that they have the right to have an opinion on every subject under the sun.

  The problem is, of course, that in order to have an opinion you have to have something to judge it against. You can’t pick Freud apart until you’ve really studied Freud. You can’t argue against a concept that you haven’t bothered to examine. But no one wants to make the effort of actually studying, and too many public schools are letting students get away with that. So instead of insisting on excellence, we’ve made opinions – anyone’s opinions – count as much as actual knowledge and understanding. And we wonder why we produce some of the most uneducated people on the planet.

  What I wonder is why we don’t seem to care that we do this.

  “You can rewrite the papers,” I said steadily, “or you’ll get a zero on them.”

  They went for the zeros. They might learn, in time, but not during this round. The next thing you know, they’ll be complaining that my grades were adversely affecting their self-esteem.

  I was actually starting to see my night job as a pleasant escape.

  Peach farmed out the telephone to one of her assistants that weekend, and gave a party at her apartment in Bay Village. I say “party,” though the term is employed somewhat loosely; what it really was was Peach’s salon. I was tired, but I went; of course I went. I was still fairly new in the business, still enchanted by Peach and her persona and ideas and energy. I was thrilled, to tell you the truth, that Peach seemed to be singling me out for attention.

  I loved going to her house. I would have loved it even if I hadn’t started my flirtation with Luis there. I loved the fact that everyone was so cool, so sophisticated, and so smart. I think that at some level I may have been guilty of stereotyping, too. Maybe it’s okay to be chic and intelligent too.

  You have to understand that everybody who met Peach absolutely, fanatically adored her. It wasn’t just that she was known in certain circles as a madam, although that didn’t hurt. It was something inside of her, some bit of vulnerability, something vaguely childlike, that attracted people to her.

  She chose carefully those whom she allowed to surround her. I was among the only women who worked for her who were ever invited. These were people who tended to be bright, well-read, able to carry on witty conversations on nearly every topic. I think that’s what I’m referring to when I call it a salon – that intellectual ability, those lively conversations, which were often the only things that any of us had in common.

  So let’s talk about Peach.

  What can I say about her? She simultaneously projected caring and vulnerability, so that you both wanted to cry on her shoulder and then take care of her for dealing with the trauma of your tears. You did things for Peach that you wouldn’t have ever dreamed of doing for anybody else. It took me a long time to figure out that this wasn’t natural, that she had created this persona because it worked. She had decided who she wanted to be, and then she became that person, summoning this new being from deep inside her. She was the madam who ran an illicit and successful sexy business, she could discuss Faulkner, she knew the right people, she was the darling of the club circuit. But I knew – she had allowed me to know – that she was most at ease in her sweatsuit, that she read the National Inquirer, that she wrote poetry deep in the night. I didn’t tell anybody. I was just as dazzled by the persona as everyone else was, and gratified by my participation in it.

  Her callgirls would have done an
ything for her. She counted on that.

  That was essential to her business, and it can only happen with a madam. You have to understand that having a madam and having a pimp are, like callgirls and streetwalkers, two very different things. Peach herself had an undergraduate degree (in Communications, which if you think about it makes perfect sense) from a well-known and respected college. She knew more about the classics of literature than I (and, I’ll venture to guess, you) ever will. She read voraciously, novels and nonfiction and philosophy and poetry. She shared her books, which lined the walls of her apartment, with generous and reckless abandon. She was exceptionally beautiful, hair flowing around her face, eyes that seemed to understand everything. She made the best coffee in the world, played killer Scrabble, and was famous for losing things.

  She worked out of her apartment, sitting surrounded by books and Diet Coke and cats. She had a phenomenal memory for numbers, and no client of hers ever needed to worry about the embarrassment of having his name and information ever show up in any little black book, for there was none. All the information was in her head. The occasional client – a traveler staying in a hotel, a first-time caller – would have his telephone number scrawled in the margin of whatever she was reading that night. Even now I will sometimes pick up a book that Peach once gave me, and find in its pages cryptic notes and numbers competing with the chapter headings.

  Likewise, she stored mental information about who was on, who was off, who might be persuaded to work if a regular called, who needed transportation. She could rattle off measurements, bra sizes, accents, occupations, and preferences without ever missing a beat. It never failed to astonish me. She’d be brilliant in sales.

  Come to think of it, she was.

  Back when I was working for her, Peach’s fee was a flat sixty dollars per hour. She was clear about it: when she quoted a price to a client, she’d always say, “and that includes your tip and your fee.”