Callgirl: Confessions of a Double Life

by Angell, Jeannette

  “I’m good. Is there any way you’d be willing to go see Mario?”

  “Now?” I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t want to go to Weston.

  “He just wants somebody around. Please go, I’ll owe you one for this. He’s lonely and depressed. He really needs us.”

  I had had another thought. “My car – I can’t take my car, the battery died last night, remember?”

  “Take a taxi. He’ll pay for it. Please, Jen.”

  I went. Of course I went. The taxi driver was curious about me until I told him that I was going to sit with someone who had AIDS. The driver was Haitian; that sobered him up, fast. My white lie was useful in that it circumvented the requisite invitation to share a quick sexual encounter, a highlight of most rides with Boston cabdrivers.

  Mario was pleased to see me, and said so, repeatedly. We repaired to the back bedroom, where everything was the same as it had been on every other call, the rambling conversations about seemingly random topics, the gentle occasional kisses or caresses, the lines, the champagne. I left at seven; Mario said that he needed to get some sleep.

  He never told me why he had needed company so badly that night. I never asked.

  So life went on. Occasionally Mario would ask for two girls, but the pattern of the calls never varied. It was pleasant, lucrative, and regular.

  *

  September brought a new school year for Boston’s scores of universities and colleges – and new faces for Peach’s business. That fall Zoe started working for the service. Peach talked about her a lot – the clients all loved her, she was tireless, she was glamorous, she was making Peach a lot of money.

  Zoe went to see Mario for the first time that October, and everything changed.

  We all talked about it, and nobody could understand what had happened between them. Whatever it was, suddenly Mario didn’t want to see anyone but Zoe. He would have had her over there every night if she had been available and willing to go. He saw other girls only when he couldn’t see her. He wasn’t negative toward any of us; he just had decided that he wanted to see Zoe.

  We didn’t take it very well, of course. Losing Mario as a regular was going to mean working a whole lot more hours, a whole lot harder, and for a whole lot less money.

  “It’s a crap shoot,” Peach used to say. “Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes you don’t.”

  I was really happy a few weeks down the line to hear that Mario wanted me out in Weston again. Usually girls were lined up for the nights Zoe couldn’t go, and there had been one time when Mario wanted to see me and I had a not-to-be-missed-if-you-care-about- your-career faculty cocktail party, and I’d had to say no. Not many people said no to Mario.

  I got to his house and found Zoe already there. It turned out that Mario had a friend over, and I was the entertainment for the friend. Mario saw it as a compliment. I was philosophical: any friend of Mario’s…

  So the friend and I went off to another bedroom. I don’t know just what I expected, but he wasn’t even remotely like Mario. I spent the next two hours truly doing hard labor. He had done a lot of cocaine prior to my arrival and some more while I was there, and was totally unwilling to admit its effect on his sexual abilities. “Work harder,” he kept urging me, and so for two straight hours, with occasional pauses for the odd sip of champagne, my hands did everything they could to revive him.

  I persuaded him to accept some other caresses (“It will relax you, you’ll see”), and even got in a ten-minute backrub with some oil I had found in the bathroom; but he insisted immediately after that I continue to encourage his limp member. He wasn’t helping things by sitting there doing lines even as I was working really really hard to get a response from him.

  He wanted me to stay later, insisting that a full erection was just around the corner; but I said I couldn’t. You get to a point where five more minutes of stimulation is not going to make a difference. He was irritated, mostly, because he had had a callgirl and hadn’t had any sex with her.

  I finally took refuge in the shower, after assuring him yet again that I had to be asleep early, and I really could not extend my visit for another two hours. I passed silently by the closed door to Mario’s bedroom, and thought with some nostalgia and jealousy about what was going on there, while I was panting and sweating and getting nowhere.

  I didn’t go again. It simply wasn’t worth it, and I did have my own regulars. For that kind of work, I didn’t need that closed door reminding me of all the perks – and my genuine affection for Mario – that I was missing.

  Later, long after I left the business, I heard that Mario had died. I heard it too late to do anything – the funeral was long over, the body buried. Once a few months after that, when I was up on Cape Ann, I went looking for the cemetery where Peach had told me he was buried. When I found it, there was not one grave, but two. Mario and his brother Joseph had, it appeared, died on the same day.

  There was a lot of speculation surrounding his death. One girl said that he was shot, that there was a contract out on him, that it was some rival in the Mafia who had gotten to him.

  I didn’t tell what I knew. I wondered if one day the emptiness inside couldn’t be filled anymore by alcohol or drugs or women – not even by Zoe. I wondered if that was what had driven him to confront his brother – and, perhaps, his brother’s employers. I thought that there was a good chance that that was what had happened.

  It wasn’t something that I could talk about to anybody. But I thought in the end, the emptiness had been filled: with a love that gives up everything, even life itself.

  It wasn’t a bad epitaph.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I was spending Christmas Eve arguing with a client.

  “Come on, doll,” Freddie kept saying. “Just give me your number. I won’t bother you, I’ll just call to say Merry Christmas. You owe me that much.”

  “I owe you?” I was astonished. Peach had asked me to call Freddie, to set something up for the day after Christmas, Boxing Day. The agency was closed on Christmas Eve and Christmas itself; his was the last call she had taken before shutting down the phones. “Just set up a date, Jen,” she said when she called me. “And then hang up and don’t think about work for two days.”

  But now he was playing mind games, trying to get my number from me. It wasn’t going to happen. He didn’t even know my real name, and I was going to tell him how he could reach me?

  Freddie changed tactics. “Peach won’t mind,” he assured me, even though we both knew that she would mind very much indeed. Commandment Number One: Thou Shalt Not Steal Any Clients. “It’s just I’m not sure what time I’ll be wanting to see you…”

  “So I’ll call you at noon, and you can decide then,” I said. He couldn’t trace my line, I’d had the caller-ID block installed on my telephone the second week I worked for Peach. “They’ll think nothing of calling you back,” she warned. “It gives them a sense of power.”

  Freddie was irritating me more than usual. I was tired and anxious to take a nap before getting dressed and heading out to Dedham for Christmas Eve dinner with Luis and his family.

  “Nah, come on, Tia, I don’t know where I’ll be. Tell you what, I’ll just use it this once and then I won’t call you again, I’ll even throw the number away.”

  Oh, good. You’ll even throw the number away, what a gentleman. And if I fall for that one, I’ll bet that you have some mighty fine swampland in Florida to sell me, too. “No,” I said, crossly.

  “Then fuck you!” His anger came out of the blue, taking me aback. “Fuck you, slut! See if I ever ask you for anything again!” He slammed the receiver down, and I immediately got a dial tone and called Peach. “What the hell was that about?”

  “Oh, that’s nothing, that’s just Freddie,” she said calmly. “He always tries to get girls’ numbers. He’ll probably try again. Don’t take it too seriously.”

  “What’s the point? He must know he’s not going to get it.”

  I heard her light
a cigarette, waited through the first inhale-exhale. “Well, once in a while someone will do it; that keeps his hope alive. Don’t get hung up on this, Jen. He just wants to have a hooker’s telephone number. He gets off on that.”

  It was the first time since Seth that I had heard that word in reference to what I was doing, and it was disconcerting. As if I were watching a film, I saw myself at the university, standing in front of a blackboard, lecturing. “We probably got the term hooker from the Union army’s General Joseph Hooker, who during the civil war allowed prostitutes to follow his army in order to provide them with some of the comforts of home. They were known as Hooker’s Division, and hence the modern adaptation of the name.”

  Peach’s voice interrupted my mental lecture. “Jen? Jen, are you there?”

  “Yeah, Peach, I’m fine,” I said briskly. “Never mind. Merry Christmas.”

  “Merry Christmas, Jen.”

  Three hours later I was sitting around the family table with Luis and his parents, trying desperately to make reasonably scintillating small talk. I was exhausted, I had a headache, and Luis was annoying me with his attempts to present me to his parents as though he were a maître d’ and I a succulent dish they had ordered.

  “Entonces, Luis tells us that you are a university professor.” His mother was beaming at me. She was one, too, or was in her native Ecuador. She left academia behind when she married Luis’ father, a Venezuelan diplomat.

  “Yes, just a lecturer at present, though. I hope to get tenured eventually.”

  “What is your field of study?” asked Luis’ father, looking up for the first time from his plate of underdone beef.

  I took a sip of wine before answering. “My doctorate is in anthropology. I teach –” Luis kicked me under the table. I coughed, none too convincingly.

  His mother did not notice the exchange, or chose to ignore it.

  “So what classes are you teaching now?” she asked.

  I glanced at Luis, helplessly, but he didn’t say anything or otherwise come to my rescue, so I told the truth. “Three sociology electives, two of which I created.” Leave it at that, I prayed silently, and then, because I didn’t trust my prayers to work, I took the initiative and dove as smoothly as I could into another subject. “Luis tells me that you spend a great deal of your time traveling. Do you have any plans for the near future?”

  Luis finally woke up, and answered for his parents. “They’re going to Australia in February,” he said. “Mama, this beef is excellent.”

  “What are the classes?” asks his father, a man with an unfortunate unswerving knack for staying on topic. I could have lived without it.

  I blotted my mouth on the linen napkin and said, “There’s a course called On Death and Dying, another titled Life in the Asylum, and a third called History and Sociology of Prostitution,” I said.

  “Luis is right, this is marvelous.”

  His mother was looking distressed. “Those seem – odd subjects,” she said, uncertainly.

  “They sound like a waste of time,” said his father, not looking up from his plate.

  And I was suddenly angry.

  I was angry because of his easy dismissal, the same dismissal given these people for centuries on end. The people locked in mental institutions no better than prisons – but incarcerated without benefit of trial or hope of reprieve. The women forced into prostitution and then murdered for it, their sanctioned killers the very men who had used them for sex, obliterating traces of their first crime with their second. The children, abandoned, hurt, and frightened, who existed in the odd shadowy world left behind by these lost souls, nameless because their parents’ existence was no longer acknowledged. The forgotten, whose voices echoed eerily through my syllabi, whose torture, death, and degradation had been created, sustained, and applauded before being dismissed by arrogant self-absorbed complacent men just like the one sitting across the table from me, examining his beef and avoiding any thought that might disrupt his comfortable narrow reality.

  Well, I had decided to try to be their voice. I had designed the curricula for the classes; I passed on the truth of their existence to those I hoped would honor it. Those classes weren’t about impressing the dean or getting tenure or being invited around as a guest lecturer. I had thought that they were, but that Christmas Eve I understood that they were not.

  I was giving a history back to those from whom it had been taken. I was giving dignity to the memory of those who had been deprived of it in life. I was seeding outrage and pity for them in the hearts of young people who might actually use the information to help others – the homeless, the mentally ill, the forgotten, the abandoned.

  The prostitutes.

  I took a deep breath, and said, as evenly as I could, “You will excuse me, please. I need to leave now.”

  I wondered, as I let myself out the front door, how long it would be before Luis spoke to me again.

  *

  Freddie and I didn’t connect the day after Christmas, and the following days were slow for the service, too. Luis had gone with his parents to spend time with an elderly cousin who lived somewhere near New York City; there were no classes to prepare, no syllabi to write, and I got bored. I even had my nails done, I was that desperate.

  Finally I called Peach, just to talk to somebody. “Isn’t anything happening?” The truth was that I could use a call; I’d spent rather more on Luis’ Patet Philippe Christmas watch than I had intended. Who knew, now, whether or not I’d have the opportunity to give it to him?

  “Nothing, Jen. You know it’s slow between Christmas and New Year’s.”

  “You haven’t put out any calls?” I sounded petulant. Well, fine, I was feeling petulant, too. It was a matched pair.

  A sigh. “I put out a call for a client who wanted a twenty-year old Asian. Did you want me to send you on that one?”

  “No, no, I know, Peach, I’m just being a pest. Let me know if there’s anything.”

  I was halfway through re-reading Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil when she called back. “Got somebody, but it’s a new client, didn’t know if you’d want him.”

  “Hmm,” I said. “I – um…” There I was, always ready with the witty remark; I cracks myself up. But it was a good question. I had told Peach practically from the start: no new clients, just guys she knows, guys who aren’t cops. I can only do this as long as nobody knows that I do it. It would only take one person to see one arrest report, and everything that was meaningful in my life would be gone. “What did you think of him?” I asked at length.

  “He sounds okay. You can always leave if it feels funny.”

  So I went. The guy was taciturn on the phone, but I was used to all sorts of non-conversationalists, so I didn’t think much of it, and went out on the call.

  The setup was odd, to start with. I called him from my cell phone instead of ringing the doorbell, as he had requested; but I had assumed that it was because the doorbell was broken. Not so. I was met at the door by a very young, very thin man, who spoke in whispers and instructed me not to talk until we got upstairs.

  Upstairs, it transpired, was simply his bedroom, nondescript and with a minimum of decoration, lit only by the dim bulb on the very high ceiling. We sat together on his single bed, and I took care of business. “Just to get it out of the way, since we don’t know you yet, Peach wants me to be paid at the beginning.”

  He pulled a wallet out of his back pocket, but didn’t open it.

  “Okay. It’s one hundred sixty, right?”

  I could feel myself tensing. “No, it’s two hundred.”

  “Oh, the lady I talked to on the phone said one-sixty.” Lady? How old was this guy, anyway?

  “Okay,” I said, “Let’s just call her; she can straighten it out for us.”

  He opened the wallet but still didn’t take any money out. “No, that’s okay, I’ll pay the two hundred. I just want to make sure – I want to get my money’s worth. We’ll be having sex, won’t we?”

>   I froze. That was an oft-repeated passage in the World According to Peach: cops want you to say that it’s sex for money. Or arms for hostages, I had thought fancifully at the time. It didn’t seem so amusing, now. You have to spell it out before they can arrest you, Peach said. “We can do whatever we like,” I responded slowly, wondering what the hell to do. “Let’s just get this business part out of the way, and I’ll call Peach and let her know that I got here safely, and then we can talk about it.”

  He wasn’t looking at me; he was frowning at the floor. “I just want to be sure that’s what’s happening,” he said. “I just want to know that actual sex will be included, for that price.”

  Oh, God. Please say that this isn’t happening to me. I made one last effort. “You know, I hate to make plans. Why don’t we just get comfortable with each other, and see what happens?”

  His head jerked up, and he looked at me intently. “But we’ll have sex, right?”

  I stood up, and as calmly as I could, I asked, “Excuse me, sir, but are you a police officer?”

  It was pretty dramatic, and incredibly anticlimactic. “No,” he said, shaking his head and looking puzzled. “Are you?”

  I had misread him, which, in my own defense, had been fairly easy to do under the circumstances. He was, as it turned out, an extremely awkward young man of marginal intelligence and limited social skills, who after that last conversational exchange paid me without another word, listened to me check in with Peach, and for all intents and purposes had sex with me without another word.

  So I was wrong. But I could have been right, and I was more than happy to leave that call early.

  I assume that had I ever in fact been arrested, Peach would have bailed me out, all that sort of thing. But the very thought was irrelevant. As I said, Peach always expected people to follow her plans for them.

  In this case, I was happy to oblige.

  I made New Year’s resolutions that year. I’m not enthusiastic about them, usually. It seems such a contrived little list, and invariably, depressingly, the same as the one from the year before. Lose five pounds, read more edifying literature, join a fitness club, study a new language, stay more in touch with people, be more tidy.