Callgirl: Confessions of a Double Life

by Angell, Jeannette

  He paid me discreetly – an envelope slid into my hand as though it were not there at all – and he kissed me again at the door. I could have sworn I felt regret in his embrace. “We’ll see each other again,” he whispered, and I felt a thrill of unexpected sudden joy run up my spine.

  So, okay, you could see it coming. Actually, everybody but the squirrels chattering in the tree outside my studio window could see it coming, and even they were getting suspicious. The only person who didn’t see it coming was me.

  I called Peach from my cell phone in the car, sitting with the engine running, waiting for the heater to kick in. There was a thin veneer of ice on the windshield. “Is everything okay?” she asked, just as she asked every night.

  “Yes,” I said, trying to sound casual. “He was nice, Peach. I liked him. Do me a favor, next time he calls, let me take it.”

  “He already called,” she said. “He doesn’t want to see anybody but you. You got yourself a new regular, babe.”

  And that’s going to last until the first night that I’m not on and he calls. Peach’s loyalties only go so far: they’re never allowed to interfere with the bottom line. She’ll talk him into seeing somebody else.

  Peach’s voice broke into my thoughts. “You want something else for tonight? It’s only eleven-thirty. I can probably get you something if you want to hang out for a few minutes.”

  The thought of taking another call that night felt wrong – sacrilegious, almost. Normally I didn’t mind going from one man to another, but tonight my usual callgirl sangfroid was missing. Tonight was different. Tonight I had left a call smiling and humming and not counting the money.

  “Peach, I’m signing off. It’s too cold. I want to go home and curl up with Scuzzy.”

  That was on Sunday night. On Thursday, just as I was taking my dinner out of the oven, the phone rang. It was Peach. “Got work. Your regular in Cambridge called. He wants to see you tonight.”

  “The Pakistani guy?” Casual, that’s me.

  “That’s the one. Give him a call. 555-7483. And let me know when you’re heading over there.”

  I scribbled the number on my paper napkin and felt a thrill of nervousness as I picked up the telephone receiver again. This is ridiculous, I told myself. He’s just another call. One I like, but that’s okay, he makes up for my other Cambridge regular, the one who wants me to keep saying how big he is, over and over again.

  When I called, I couldn’t detect any warmth in his voice. “Yes. Tia. What time can you be here?”

  I craned my head to see the clock in the kitchenette. “Um, it’s eight-fifteen now. Is nine o’clock good for you?”

  “Yes, that is good. I will see you then.”

  “I’m looking forward to seeing you,” I said. But he had already hung up.

  I left my dinner on the coffee table, substituted a Pat Benatar CD for the television and opened the closet. Black velvet skirt. Didn’t have to go too fancy with the underwear; he preferred the light off when we undressed. Black bra, black lace shirt, gray shawl. Chanel Number Five. Re-applying my makeup in front of the bathroom mirror, I suddenly felt like I was sixteen and getting ready for a date.

  Scuzzy had jumped up onto the seat of the toilet and was watching me intently. “I’m going out,” I said to him. “Should I leave my hair down or tie it back – what do you think?” His gaze was impassive. As usual, he was unimpressed. I left my hair down.

  I put the car radio on really loud so I wouldn’t have to think. Kai buzzed me in through the vestibule, and I took the elevator to the third floor. He was standing in the doorway, waiting.

  He didn’t say anything. I walked across the hallway, looking at his eyes, and I didn’t say anything, either. Suddenly he grabbed me and pulled me against him, roughly, and I gasped as his mouth found mine. Then it wasn’t gentle at all.

  We made it as far as the entrance hall to the apartment. He managed to swing the front door shut behind me, but I was already on my knees on the Persian rug and fumbling with the snap on his jeans.

  Later, he brought it up as though it had been weighing on him. He was showing me photographs, his parents in Karachi, his brother in Paris. “I love seeing you,” he said, his eyes on the pictures. “I love having you here. I wish that I could afford more than an hour. I’d love to take you to dinner, to go to the Museum of Fine Arts.”

  I took a deep breath. “I’d like that.” I hesitated, knowing that if Peach found out about this I’d be looking for a new madam and a new agency. “I could give you my phone number, at home.”

  He waited. Now I was the one who couldn’t meet his eyes. “I’d like to see you outside of work,” I said.

  A smile lit up his face. “I would like that very much,” he said gravely.

  I felt daring. “Okay, then. And – I should tell you – my name isn’t really Tia, it’s Jen.”

  “I like Jen better. Is tomorrow night too soon? I can pick you up, we can have dinner at Biba.”

  “Yes – I mean no, it’s not too soon, that sounds wonderful.” Part of me was sifting through the conversation already, the illogic of his being able to afford Harvard, this apartment, Friday nights at Biba, but not being able to afford seeing me. Yet even as I thought it, I was glowing with delight; he liked me and wanted a real relationship with me. That was what I wanted to believe. That was what I believed.

  We’re known for that, of course. Women will always find a way of believing the unbelievable. Callgirls apparently aren’t any different than the rest of the species.

  And so we started seeing each other.

  We left a lot out of our conversations, of course. Like the fact that I was still working for Peach. Like the fact that he only saw me at night, and never introduced me to any of the friends to whom he constantly referred. We ignored those spaces, talked around them, and sometimes they cast a shadow over my thoughts, but I got good at dodging the shadows.

  It was fun… it was good. We went to ethnic restaurants and sampled the cuisines of the world, and over sole mornay or shish kebabs or sushi we talked about literature, politics, technology, ethics. We saw foreign films at Kendall Square and Coolidge Corner. We listened to new bands at the Middle East in Central Square and jazz at Scullers and blues at Wally’s. We never went to my studio; Kai said he had an allergy to cats. So it seemed appropriate that we always went back after an evening out to his apartment on Broadway, where I often spent the night.

  His manners were impeccable. His thoughts were obscure.

  Peach knew that something was up. I finally told her the truth when I realized that what she was thinking was far worse – that I was seeing Kai professionally, without going through her.

  She shrugged, not showing any surprise, just faint irritation at the apparent loss of a client. Faint, of course, because she knew her loss was temporary. She didn’t share that thought with me. “I told you when you started that you’d fall in love with one of your clients,” she said, dismissively. “It happens to everyone. There’s always one, and you do what you need to do, and then you don’t do it anymore.”

  Well, if you have any sense you don’t. I knew one or two women who tried, and it doesn’t work, not ever, no matter how much you want it to. The fact that the relationship began on such drastically uneven footing can never quite be erased. For one thing, the man assumes that the sex will always be the same as it was when it was professional. A prostitute’s job is to make him feel good; her needs and desires and preferences are irrelevant. So she spends an hour intensely focused on him. Once they’re in a relationship together, that intensity fades. She cannot fail to disappoint because she is now human, subject to headaches, mood swings, and her own wants and needs.

  Peach knew all this, and she knew that it was healthier when it ended before it got to that point; but that knowledge meant that she wasn’t exactly the best person in the world to go to for advice or sympathy. “It just happened,” I said helplessly. “I really like him, Peach.”

  So I went on c
alls and told Kai there were nights I couldn’t go out because I was working. I still carried the illusion that that was somehow normal, somehow all right. I convinced myself that this guy was the only man on earth who really did completely understand the differentiation that we draw between “working” sex and “personal” sex, and could see that my going on calls had nothing to do with my making love with him.

  I didn’t think about it having been me who had crossed the boundary, thereby taking away its safety, its protection.

  One night after watching Catherine Deneuve, drinking brandy, and making love, I slept over at his apartment, and slept late. I was still in bed when he went to take his shower. Usually by then I had gone; we hadn’t yet reached the stage where it was okay for me to leave any of my possessions at his place, and since I was usually still dressed appropriately for an evening out, a discreet early departure seemed the better part of valor.

  I didn’t want anybody seeing me and assuming that it was a pickup, a one-night stand. I wanted to protect his reputation. File that one under “ironic.”

  But I was tired and it was warm under the comforter, and cold outside. I wasn’t really listening when the phone rang, when the answering machine picked up the call, when a man’s voice began leaving the requisite message.

  “…and listen, dude, you never cease to amaze me. Dan just told me, it’s all around campus. Getting a hooker for free, that’s gotta be the best stunt anyone has pulled around here for a long time. Hall of Fame shit, man, that’s pure Hall of Fame shit. When you gonna bring her over so we can all see what you’re getting? That’s too cool.

  You’re a stud for sure. Talk to you later, man.”

  Click.

  I don’t remember getting up, or getting dressed, or leaving. I didn’t wait for him to get out of the shower. I didn’t leave him a note.

  I may have been too stunned. Or I may have realized that words, at that point, would have been redundant.

  Remember those bad feelings I was supposed to have felt, back when I started doing this?

  So do I.

  Scuzzy was delighted with my depression. I called my department, pleaded a family emergency, and arranged for a teaching assistant to cover my classes, while the cat sat on my yet ungraded papers and seemed to nod approval. I stayed home with him, feeding movie after movie into the VCR and cat treat after cat treat into his mouth. I sent out for home delivery every night and over-ate and didn’t bother cleaning up, so that within a few days there were empty takeout boxes scattered all over the studio, which Scuzzy assumed were exciting new toys obtained uniquely for his pleasure. I fell asleep on the couch without bothering to fold it out into a bed, and he slept contentedly on my chest. I didn’t bathe, which he probably attributed to a new sensitivity on my part to his dislike of water and anything wet.

  I knew that Peach was calling, even though I had turned off my ringer and my answering machine. I didn’t care. Oh, I’ve been dumped before; haven’t we all? But what had happened here… it was different. It was obscene, perverse, worse than any of the so-called degrading fantasies I had played out on calls. Those were experiments, sublimations: this was raw cruelty. He “got a hooker for free.” I could be defined; I could be replaced; I was generic. I wasn’t Jen; I wasn’t even Tia. I was a hooker.

  There may even have been a wager involved, and I could imagine his friends, laughing and swigging from their beer bottles. “No way. No hooker’ll ever put out for free.”

  “Bet you I can have one begging to do me for free.” It had to be some kind of ultimate ego-builder for him, the foreigner in an Anglo-Saxon country, the Muslim handling currency that said, “In God We Trust.” Americans had to pay to have sex with me, but he could get back at them for their suspicious looks and their xenophobia. They had to pay, but he could have me for nothing, anytime and as often as he pleased. “Dude! That’s Hall of Fame shit, man.”

  I’d watch television and after a while I wasn’t hearing anything but those words in my head. It hurt more than anything I had ever felt before.

  Eventually I started smelling myself, and almost mechanically I took a shower. After that it was a fairly small step to go to the grocery store, and the next day I did laundry and plugged my phone back in.

  Peach was livid. “Where the hell have you been? What’s wrong with your phone? I’ve been calling you every day! It was like you had disappeared off the face of the earth!” Her voice was a snarl.

  Yes. Well. Something like that.

  “You might have thought of someone besides yourself,” she went on. “You might have thought about me. I’ve had problems, too, you know. I didn’t know what to say to people.”

  Yes, that was my main concern, your social malaise. “I’m sorry, Peach,” I said tiredly. “It’s over now.”

  “So can you work tonight?”

  I took a quick involuntary breath. I didn’t know if I could trust the clients. I didn’t know if I could trust myself. Given the right provocation, I could see myself taking all this out on some hapless inoffensive guy who had the misfortune to say the wrong thing, to refer to any of the places I had been with Kai, to listen to seductive music. On the other hand, if I didn’t get out of the apartment I was going to go crazy. “Okay, Peach, sign me on when you turn on the phones.”

  “Good. Great. Then I’ll be talking to you shortly.”

  I decided to make an effort to return to the land of the living. I shaped my nails and put on some dark red polish. I did my eyebrows. I rubbed moisturizer everywhere and brushed my hair the hundred strokes mandated by my grandmother. I watched Jeopardy! and blew through the European Literature category, but was moronic when they did the Table of Elements. I bet everything on Final Jeopardy and lost it all when I had absolutely no idea which president signed an act of which I had never heard, and then ate three cookies to compensate.

  At my current rate of food consumption, if I didn’t get to the gym soon I wouldn’t be able to work for Peach at all anymore.

  I tried to get interested in the latest Patricia Cornwell, and as usual got really irritated with her grammatical faux pas and resolved to compose a letter to her editor I knew I’d never actually write.

  By the time it was nine o’clock I decided to see what was going on. Almost all of my regulars were early-evening kinds of guys, but I also hadn’t been available for a while, and had no illusions about Peach’s loyalty in those circumstances. If she could talk the client into seeing somebody else, she would. “Hey, it’s Jen, haven’t heard from you. What’s up?”

  “Slow night.”

  I was beyond tired of my four familiar walls. “I’ll take whatever you’ve got, Peach, I just need to get out.”

  Silence. That either meant she was thinking or had become riveted to whatever was on her television screen. If it was Ally McBeal, I might never get her attention back. She’d been known to put her mother on hold when Ally McBeal was on. “It’s slow, Jen. Give me another hour, okay? I’ll try to get you something.”

  In another hour I would have gone back to thinking about what had happened and felt like an utter fool another – oh, let’s say, thirty times. “No one called? Come on, Peach, it doesn’t have to be Prince Charming.”

  She snapped, “Look, the only call I have right now is the Pakistani in Cambridge, okay?” She was exasperated, and maybe she really had been trying to shield me from something. I had to give her credit for that possibility.

  I also didn’t know when to let go. “What did he say? Did you tell him I’m on, tonight?”

  “Oh, God, honey.” Another small chunk of silence. “All right, yeah, I told him you’re around tonight. And I told him who else is around. He said fine, you, whatever. I gave it to that new girl from Sudbury. I didn’t think you’d want to go.”

  I didn’t say anything. I was busy trying to assimilate the fact that, after whatever it was that had happened between us, he could agree to see me again professionally. That it really didn’t matter. Whatever, that was what he had
said. Good American colloquialism. Tia, the new girl from Sudbury, whoever. I was, in point of fact, only a hooker, one he had managed to get for free for a while but was willing to pay for when he couldn’t.

  I had thought that I couldn’t possibly feel worse.

  I had been wrong.

  *

  I went to school the next day and sat in my new office meeting with an assortment of students whining about grades that shouldn’t have come as such a surprise to them.

  By seven o’clock I had worked out, showered, and eaten a Weight Watcher’s pizza. I called Peach. “Checking in,” I said, briefly. She called back within half an hour. “Work,” she announced. “He’s new, if you can handle that. But he checks out, he’s staying at the Sheraton, the concierge says he’s been there before. I had a good feeling about him. Let me know what you think.”

  I imagined that if the concierge had vetted him the client couldn’t be too scary. And I really needed to get out of my apartment.

  I didn’t get any feeling at all about him on the telephone, but that probably wasn’t his fault. I should have been excited. I always liked hotel calls, walking down a corridor in a classy place, feeling good, knowing I had just made one hundred fifty or two hundred dollars, knowing that I was attractive, desirable, feeling part of the expensive hush of the lobby, smiling at the doorman on my way out… I put on a loose skirt and sweater that covered up my bloating from my recent bingeing and drove to the Sheraton with the radio silent and my head, for once, the same.

  Found the room. Found the guy. I felt a little rush of nervous energy when I went in the room, checking him out. New clients made me edgy. He was pleasant, poured me a drink from an opened bottle of white wine. “Can we talk for a few minutes first?”

  “I’d like that,” I said, the words rote and automatic, and watched him checking out my legs as I sat down on the edge of the bed. He didn’t offer any help with my coat; I took it off, put it on the bed next to me, and sipped the wine.