Callgirl: Confessions of a Double Life

by Angell, Jeannette

  Or safe.

  The trust was simply not there. The reality is that clients, taken as a whole, were difficult, self-centered, sometimes petulant, always demanding – not the ideal partners in a scenario that required trust.

  Clients played tricks, tried to make you feel bad, made up reasons to detain you, and tried to get between you and Peach.

  There was a optician in Hull I saw sometimes who couldn’t come, not even after a fifty-minute blowjob (I know, because I timed it by his bedside clock), and would yell at Peach on the phone when the time came for me to be called out. “She’s no good, I should get another half-hour for free, I shouldn’t have to pay for this one.” From what I heard, no one could make him come, and he had this same yelling match with Peach after every call, no matter who the girl was.

  There were regular clients, guys who should know better – who tried to give you less money than they were supposed to. “I’ll make up for it next time; Peach knows I’m good for it.” Uh-huh. One thing you learn in the business is that sex is like drugs: once it’s over, ain’t nobody gonna pay for it – they’re too busy looking ahead, getting the cash together for the next fix. There were other clients who played games with the actual money itself, making you ask for it, ten-dollar bill by ten-dollar bill. For some men, I realize, these rituals were part of the transaction, just like spanking me or having me say I’m a whore or fucking me on their desks. That was a humiliation I really didn’t like, and I avoided them whenever I could.

  Peach helped, though. We always asked for the money up front if the client was new; but most of her clients were regulars, and they paid at the end of the hour. It seemed classier, somehow, to do it that way, to pretend that the call is a date and the money is just an after-thought tacked on at the end.

  Her regulars expected it, but it was a courtesy that had to be earned. When Peach heard of someone playing games with the money, she withdrew the courtesy. Fast. “Walter,” she would say, when she set up a subsequent call for someone like that, “I do have to tell you that you’ll have to pay at the beginning of the hour. I’ll tell the girl to leave. I don’t let people take advantage of my girls like that, Walter.” And Walter – or Fred, or Gary, or whomever it was – would accept his punishment, grovel for a while, and maybe a month or two later she’d relent and let him pay at the end again.

  That was how I got into that awful situation, that time that I spent the night with Abe. Because he was used to paying at the end, and took advantage of it, and that time there was no Peach to call, to make everything okay again. So one could say that I learned my lesson about going behind her back.

  What was interesting about Abe, in the end, was that he really was all bluff. He never called any schools to track my employment down; he never called Anne’s parents. Even Abe must have known that there was a line there: if he crossed it, he could never go back. He was childish and self-centered, but he wasn’t evil.

  So the control freaks were the worst, but they weren’t our only source of income, thank God. One client, a guy named Martin who lived over in Malden, made up for a lot of the others. First of all, there weren’t a lot of ethical dilemmas to deal with here: he had no wife, no girlfriend, and no real potential for either. He was mentally retarded, lived on Supplemental Security Income, got together enough money from his part-time work at a deli to see a girl once a month. He always called Peach; Peach was really good with men like him. There was another client, too, one I saw with some regularity, a quadriplegic in Dorchester, whose home health aide waited patiently in the kitchen while I was in the bedroom with him; Peach could not have been more accommodating than she was with that guy.

  If she yelled and screeched at the clients who tried to cheat her or who were mean to her girls, there was also a maternal side to Peach that was very loving, patient, and kind to guys like the one in Dorchester… and Martin.

  Martin had his own rituals, too. He usually had the television on in his small room – not to anything like a soft-porn station or an X-rated movie, but to whatever he had been watching when you arrived. You’d do a slow strip tease in front of him, then some minimal kissing and caressing, before proceeding to taking him into your mouth, then finally move up his body to straddle him. He’d come fairly quickly after that. Then he’d pay you, and add a tip, which would have been ludicrously insulting from anybody else, but was touching in view of his circumstances, usually amounting to something like three dollars and eighty-seven cents. Finally, he’d give you a magnet from the deli where he worked as an additional tip, with a whispered, “If you say you’re a friend of mine, they’ll take a dollar off a sandwich for you!” I still have a small collection of those magnets, somewhere. Even now, I don’t want to throw them away. They meant too much to him.

  So Martin was an exception. But for many, many of our clients, I knew that I couldn’t trust them as far as I could throw them. And without that, there was no way in hell I was going to put myself in a position where I could get really physically hurt.

  I know that some women do it. Hell, I know that some women specialize in it; I’ve seen their ads. I can appreciate the need: it must be difficult to tell one’s wife, “Oh, honey, by the way, I’d like to spank you tonight.” Much easier to go to a professional.

  I just didn’t want to be that particular professional. I’ll keep that part of my sexuality in my Real Life, thank you very much.

  *

  Scuzzy was waiting by the door when I got home, and the room’s general ambience reminded me that it was time to clean his litter box. I made tea and sat down at my desk. The headache wasn’t getting any better, and I had to prepare final exams for all four classes.

  Two of the classes could potentially share one exam, of course; I was doing two sections of the prostitution class. But I wasn’t so far removed from my own undergraduate days that I could delude myself that they could all take the same test, and that students in the first section wouldn’t pass along the questions to the students in the second section. For a fee, of course.

  What I’ve learned in life: Everything can be bought.

  Maybe I’d just skirt the issue altogether by giving everybody a take-home exam instead.

  I think that my conscious remembrance of my mother, earlier, had rattled me. For the first time, since I’d begun working for Peach, I allowed myself to wonder what my mother would think of what I was doing. She’d probably approve of neither of my jobs. My family was not academic: I was the first to earn a master’s degree, much less a doctorate. I hadn’t exactly dazzled any of them with either. I think that my mother would have been pleased to see me married, with children, maybe writing in my spare time… Not teaching college. And certainly not working as an escort.

  Well, that’s a little obvious, I told myself sourly. Like there are a whole lot of women out there whose mothers would be delighted to see them working as prostitutes. It’s not that she’d be so very unusual in that regard. But… it was more than that. In the year and a half since she had died, I had come to terms with who my mother had been, what she thought and felt, and why she had done the things that she had, more than I had ever been able to do while she was alive.

  My mother was all about appearances. She spent most of her life pretending that she was living in one world, even though she was actually living in another. What was real was bad, somehow, tainted. Only what we pretended was true was real.

  I had embraced life in the real world, had turned my back on my mother’s fictions, and in so doing had betrayed her.

  I shook off the thoughts. I couldn’t afford to go down this particular branch of memory lane, to indulge myself in a bout of guilt or feelings of inadequacy. I had work to do. And the damned headache wasn’t going away.

  In the Middle Ages, they believed that when you got an intense headache, it meant that a ghost was going to walk that night.

  I reached for the Excedrin again. My mother was doing her utmost to haunt me at the best of times; I wasn’t about to give her any en
couragement.

  Chapter Nineteen

  That summer, I went on my first vacation in years.

  Peach fretted, but I wasn’t going for long, only two weeks. Two weeks between my two summer sessions, and I couldn’t get out of town fast enough – freedom was calling me. Amazing how escape becomes possible when one has the financial means to access it.

  Scuzzy went to stay with Vicky, my administrative assistant, yowling piteously all the way over to her apartment in the Fenway. Irene agreed to come in and water my plants.

  There was nothing else keeping me in Boston.

  I flew British Airways to London, as I had two years before, the summer when I went to lecture and started thinking about working for an escort service. I stayed in a modest hotel that was a big improvement over the student housing of my previous visit, I ate wonderful cholesterol-laden meals in pubs, and I played tourist. Big Ben. The changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. Two whole luxurious days at the British Museum. Meat pies. Tea and clotted cream. Warm beer and cold toast.

  This time, when I was on the Underground, the voice that told me to mind the gap didn’t seem quite so bossy. Maybe it was because this time I knew that I was earning more then she was.

  In London, callgirls (most of whom, it seems, are independent) advertise on the inside of telephone booths, with little colored cards that urge you to ring her for a good time. It’s brilliant; I don’t know why we haven’t thought of that in the States. Then again, we have a lot more seriously disturbed people than they do in England; who knows who might call? England is marginally more civilized. At least little white boys haven’t yet taken to decimating their entire school population with automatic weapons.

  I went to see Cats, and it was when I was walking back to the hotel that I finally found a name for the malaise that had been following me around since spring. It was like the shadows of ghosts you encounter, sometimes, elusively staying just beyond your range of vision, and yet you know that they are there. They whisper in the empty hallway behind you, the presence that wasn’t quite a presence when the wind twitched the curtains, the sure knowledge that there is something out there and the frustrating inability to name it.

  That night I found its name.

  I was lonely.

  Oh, I had friends. I had people who would come over and sip wine and play board games and talk with me. I had friends who would invite me out on the town, keep me dancing until dawn. I spent time alone because I chose to be alone; there was never a time when I couldn’t secure company if I wanted it.

  But since Luis had left, there was no one for whom I was the most important other person in the world.

  I hadn’t thought that I wanted that, particularly. Apparently my subconscious disagreed. The city was filled with couples, touching each other, kissing each other, laughing together. Once I stared noticing them, they were all that I could see.

  London is the ideal place for romantic fantasies about strangers, because British men’s accents are so damned gorgeous – cultured and intelligent and sexy all at once. I loved their voices. You’d be walking along the street and hear this man behind you, and a shiver would run up your spine, and you’d turn around and – it would be a short chubby balding guy puffing away at a cigarette. The voice, I have found, has nothing to do with the persona. Still, I went home to the hotel that night after Cats, imagining all the voices I had been hearing over the past week, lying in bed antouch-ing myself and wishing with all of my heart that I was not alone.

  *

  I arrived back in Boston on a blazing hot summer afternoon. The taxi in from Logan wasn’t air-conditioned. What a surprise. In England, things worked. People fixed them when they were broken and made sure that they stayed functional.

  Welcome home.

  The feeling of loneliness had, if anything, intensified.

  I stood on my bathroom scale, aghast at the three pounds that hadn’t been there before vacation. I wondered about what it would be like to have a life where a temporary extra three pounds simply wouldn’t matter, because the person that you were with would love you no matter what. Because your livelihood and your self-worth and your lifestyle wouldn’t be hanging on what immature strangers thought of your looks. Because there was someplace where you belonged, and somebody with whom you belonged.

  I was surprised to find tears, hot and unexpected, pressing against the back of my eyes. I was not going to cry about this. I was not going to be so pathetic that I burst into tears every time I felt a little lonely.

  Besides, it was sensible, I thought, as I finally started the long unpacking process, sensible that I should stay single, at least for as long as I was working for Peach. After all, getting involved with someone while working this profession means that you’re faced with making a choice between two unpleasant alternatives. You can either choose to not tell him about the escort work, and keep lying, keep covering up, keep living in fear that he’ll discover your secret by himself. Or you can tell him, see how liberal he sounds, see how titillated he gets – at first. Then see how long the relationship takes to crash and burn after that.

  I can’t really say that I would blame him, to be completely honest. I know exactly where I stand with clients; having sex with them clearly constitutes a work-related undertaking. When I was sleeping with Luis and also seeing clients, I had no problems keeping the two activities separate. In a sense, Luis was having sex with Jen, the clients were having sex with Tia. I know, that’s a little simplistic, but it’s not an unreasonable way to look at it.

  Anyway, it would be a tough thing to deal with at the beginning of a relationship. Far better to hold off until there aren’t any skeletons halfway out of the closet.

  The question was, of course, if I would ever reach a point where I didn’t have skeletons in the closet. Probably not; but that shouldn’t be such an obstacle, should it? Everyone has something in their life about which they are profoundly ashamed. Everyone had dirty little secrets, lies nurtured and guarded jealously. Everyone has skeletons.

  Still, mine might be a little harder to swallow than others. It was really difficult to construct a happy ending coming out of that particular scenario. “Um, Honey, you asked about my part-time work…” How does one tell a lover that one has been a callgirl? Will he be turned on? Yeah, probably, at first. But not for long. In the age-old dichotomy of men’s relationships with women, he’ll want like hell to sleep with me. But I’m not the kind of girl he’d take home to meet Mom. Definitely not the kind of girl he’d marry.

  He would end up eventually as all my clients do, fantasizing about me while he tiredly making love to his bored and indifferent wife.

  Oh, yes, I was setting myself up to believe the worst. But even believing that, I wanted to find out, for real. I wanted somebody. I didn’t want to be alone anymore.

  In the end, I learned that the best planning in the world doesn’t matter. When I met my husband, Tony, he knew that I had a friend who ran an escort service, he knew that I knew some women who were callgirls, and he didn’t have much of a problem with it, or even much interest.

  I had decided by then to live the lie, to keep the skeleton in the closet, to be sure the door was tightly sealed. I wanted a life with this man. And, anyway, why not? We were only talking about three years out of my past, after all – not such a big deal. I could do it.

  There were a few verbal slips, of course. I said once something about, “back when I worked for Peach,” but I covered that up reasonably adequately by saying that on occasion she had asked me to drive someone to a call when her own driver was busy or unavailable. Tony nodded; I had in fact once or twice performed that service for Peach in fairly recent memory, and he believed me.

  It might have worked out. I might have kept the secret, maintained the story, denied the past. But in the end I wasn’t given the option of keeping the closet door locked, the skeleton safely hidden. Because one night when I was not around, Tony opened the door himself.

  By that time we w
ere living together, though not yet married. I hadn’t worked for Peach in over two years. I didn’t think about it a lot, except for the fact that I was still teaching the prostitution class and was still amazed that people continued to cling stubbornly to those worn-out clichés about the business, amazed that the word “degrading” kept surfacing. I wondered if it might help things if I wrote a book on the real world of escort services.

  I told Tony right away about the idea. “I’ve been friends with Peach for years, I’ve watched her work, she can give me anecdotes, and I’ll write about it,” I said. Tony was supportive – Tony has always been supportive. But I needed more than my husband’s opinion, particularly when he was not in possession of all the facts.

  I told a lie of omission earlier when I said that Seth was the only person who knew both sides of who I was back then, of what I did. Months after that awful night at the Ritz-Carlton, I went out drinking with my friend Roger, and decided to tell him. My decision probably was strongly influenced by the fact that Roger was gay, and unlikely to slap money down on the bar and unzip his pants for me. It wasn’t a big deal. He had thought about doing it himself, he said, unimpressed, and we went on with our evening.

  Roger had moved since then, and we had stayed vaguely in touch through e-mail. As I thought about the book I might write, I needed an opinion. Who should I ask? Not Peach; she would be appalled at the thought and would do everything in her power to dissuade me. Not Seth; he’d be too afraid that he might show up in its pages – as, in point of fact, he did.

  So I wrote an e-mail to Roger in Key West, and asked him what he thought. He thought it was a great idea, he’d buy it when it came out, and he had met this fabulous guy just the night before that he was just dying to tell me about… I went to bed, but Tony couldn’t sleep later that night, and my email was sitting open on the computer screen when he switched it on to play a hand or two of solitaire. Funny, isn’t it: there was no psychic voice that awakened me as I lay sleeping a few rooms away, no omen that told me something momentous was happening in my life.