God's Callgirl

by Carla Van Raay

  So this sensitive giant came down to earth with a violent thud after his shower, when he perched on the edge of my massage table. But Dan was a man not easily flustered. He had firmly adjusted to being different, had been through all that self-recrimination crap. He apologised, and I apologised for the let-down, and he was content to sit on the chair after that.

  With men like Dan, who could abandon themselves to the exquisiteness of total sensation in every part of their body, I could find myself weeping strange tears of excessive sensuality. To be with such men was like lying in a field of pleasure, vibrating with overwhelming music, at the point of orgasm again and again—when all I might be doing was stroking a leg.

  EVERY WHORE NEEDS a good removalist as a client. I had a strong and generous one, Brett, who amazed me with his stories about his happy home life: his nice wife, his baby girl. I never asked him why he needed me; I think he chose to come to me the way another person might choose a different menu, to keep life interesting. Brett was an intelligent but uncomplicated, practical man. The constant lugging of furniture was hard on his body and the strong therapeutic massage he asked for helped to keep him in good shape. He wouldn’t dream of leaving it at that, though. Never. His relief massage was the icing on the cake—or was it the other way around? Would he have come to me if I wasn’t in the business of offering relief? I couldn’t tell.

  WHEN ALBERT ARRIVED on the scene, a truck driver with the face of a child, I didn’t know how to handle him. He answered my advertisement, Skill plus caring, and said he needed caring, but would I please spank him? I was so innocent about this form of sexual arousal that it appalled me, but then I remembered the pleasure I once used to get from whipping myself around the legs. Whipping was what Albert wanted, hard on his buttocks with his trouser belt. He told me it was good for his circulation and looked at me so full of hope that I reluctantly obliged him.

  He lay face down on my table and I brought the leather belt down on his sizeable buttocks, which were pimply and unusually rough-skinned. His body quivered with pain and satisfaction. He thanked me and asked for more, please, and harder.

  I had strong arms and soon red welts appeared on his trembling flesh. ‘Harder!’ he called again. There was no doubt that he was getting something out of this. Then he asked me to call him a bad boy as I struck him. ‘Bad boy! You’re a very bad boy, and I need to whip you!’ I repeated as I tired myself out. Finally he began to whimper and I stopped. There had been no satisfaction in any of this for me, except to gratify my curiosity. What was this all about? And where was it leading?

  Albert climbed off the massage table with the demeanour of a child who had been beaten for being naughty. Now he walked over to Mummy, to have her forgive him and hold him on her lap and soothe him. ‘There, there,’ I said, as he sat his large bottom gingerly on my knees, ‘you’re a good boy now and Mummy loves you.’ Only then was he able to receive a massage, having his sore bottom soothed with soft creams and gentle strokes.

  I saw Albert a few times, but each visit his demands for more severe punishment grew—he wanted me to hit him harder and harder. In the end, I couldn’t do it any more. I hated playing a game in a loop that was going nowhere. Albert was devastated. I felt for the child in him who had grown used to this so that he now could not imagine anything better, but I was clear that this was not my way of treating people.

  IT WAS DURING this honeymoon period of my career that I finally learned to masturbate. After all the resistance I’d carried, I found it surprisingly easy. ‘How come a sexually free woman can’t masturbate?’ Hal used to say, chiding and challenging me. I had always thought of masturbation as something you did only if you were desperate and lonely. It’s not natural, I thought, and so I made myself dependent on a lover if I wanted to orgasm.

  One Saturday evening, when I was home alone but tuned into the excitement of all those people out on the town, instead of feeling that I wanted to be there with them, I dressed up in lacy panties, scanty bra and silk dressing-gown, lit a few candles, grabbed a long mirror and put it on the floor. I took my very special rose-perfumed oil and knelt in front of the mirror with my knees apart, my gown open. As when performing for my men, I liked gradual excitement, gradually exposing my breasts and my delicate parts, my nipples and the soft lips of my vagina. My hand removed only part of my gown, part of my bra, as if an invisible lover were slowly undressing me. I found myself taking the part of a man, exciting the woman in me. I became wild with the beauty and the passion of my own body.

  I made up a character called Father Kennedy and fantasised that he had a darkroom where he loved to fuck Sister Mary Carla on his developing table.

  Father Kennedy watched me walk towards him. It was recess time at the primary school where I taught seven year olds. The wind caught my veil, waved it above my head as if in welcome.

  I had pinned my black shawl behind my back, in work mode. I was aware that my clothing, plastered to my body by the wind, would reveal my shapely legs and hips, and my nipples, standing out at the tips of my small, firm breasts.

  As I advanced, he remembered that the pockets of my habit were literally bottomless—I had cut out the fabric—and that his hands could reach through them, down and down…

  He waited for me near the door to the room where he developed his photos—where he would take me. Wishing to seem casual, he moved towards me only as I drew near, then wheeled to saunter beside me.

  He was in his cassock, buttons all the way from chin to hem. His dress was designed to obliterate the shape of his body, but the wind made a mockery of all pretences. And so he put the wind into his back, hiding himself from any curious gaze.

  Unobtrusively, his right hand found its way into one of my large pockets and he saw my eyes grow large and luminous as his fingers found what they wanted.

  Now he must take me inside, or reveal to all the world that his penis was pushing at his cassock.

  In the ruddy light of his studio, he gently laid me on the table in the middle of the room and lifted up my skirt to lick my eagerly opening vagina.

  It was easy for him to lift up his cassock and insert his gleaming penis. He undid the buttons of my bodice to expose my heaving breasts. My nipples yearned for the touch of his fingers, the lick of his tongue, the gentle suck of his mouth. My breasts cupped in his hands, he bent over me and kissed me full on the mouth, stopping my scream as I came, lifting my body towards him.

  A bell rang to announce the end of recess. I buttoned up, unpinned my shawl and modestly draped it around myself. A kiss goodbye and I left the dark room to rejoin my charges.

  Father Kennedy bent languidly over his developing tray. His pictures of the parish church were coming along well…

  My orgasm was prolonged, sweet and satisfying.

  The glow of achievement stayed with me in my dreams that night. I dreamt of being a novice nun once more, who went to the forest every week with some of her sisters to meet the young men studying for the priesthood in the monastery next door. Everyone was involved in one massive explosion of sexual energy.

  I woke from this orgasmic dream in the middle of the night feeling exhilarated, and laughed aloud at my choice of symbols for sexual excitement. I knew real priests usually to be the most unimaginative and uninteresting males you could possibly meet. The sublimation of their sexuality seemed to leave them dried-out, or else holy in a way that made me want to puke.

  Nuns were not much better off. Too often, their Godgiven female juiciness dried up into pale wrinkles. The sculptor Bernini saw it differently, judging by his statue of the saintly Sister Teresa in the Vatican, but how many nuns looked like that these days? Nuns like Teresa of Avila and Hildegard of Bingen have been dead a long time.

  TO MY UTTER surprise, my anus became spontaneously orgasmic. It happened when I was having a normal evacuation. Sitting there, I became aware of the pleasure of feeling a large stool roll easily down from my bowel into that last section before it left my body. Tears came involuntarily int
o my eyes and streamed down my face as this most ordinary of functions became the apex of pleasurable sensations. I sighed with ineffable pleasure as the last stool plopped into the water. My body was letting me know that all was well with the bowel that had once been so constricted and dried-up.

  I understood, then, why my men liked being stroked around their anus so much, even the most conservative, and some even liked a tiny poke in there (clean holes only), and how homosexual men would find anal intercourse entirely satisfactory. Not that anyone had ever enjoyed anal pleasures with me. When I was with one of my pimps, one guy tried, but it hurt so much and I cried so miserably that he gave up, lucky for me. Only once did one of my own clients make a pass at my anus, when we were doing it doggy fashion. ‘Wrong hole, mate,’ was all I needed to say.

  GOD’S CALLGIRL WAS happy. With my clients I had what few achieve in a marriage: a life where my innermost essence found expression. I was the giving goddess who took nectar from her God in the shape of many men.

  I felt pleasure in being with most of my clients and a true heart connection with some. I appreciated my customers—at least, what I got to know of them during the short periods we spent together in such out-of-the-ordinary circumstances. They certainly seemed appreciative of me, which was even more important. Not many words were spoken, but there was respect, appreciation, friendliness and humour. ‘I like your special touch, Carla,’, ‘I feel at home with you,’ and ‘You give me a decent massage as well as making me feel great,’ were some of the words that satisfied my constant question: Am I on the right track?

  These men gave me their money but none of them ever took me out to dinner or wanted to be seen with me in public, and I went to bed alone all those nights I was separated from Hal. It was enough to be loved by several men in secret, to be pleasured to orgasm every day, or twice a day—some of my men dared to say that they should be paid instead.

  My independent nature learned to appreciate having the house to myself at night. Victoria often chose to stay with her father; it was easier for both of us this way. I was forty-four but looked at least ten years younger. I never felt the need to dissociate from my work by taking drugs, or by smoking or drinking. I was radiantly healthy and could be forgiven for thinking I had it all, for ever.

  THE VASE CRACKS

  PHIL LAY ON MY massage table, a burly man, thickset and about fifty-five years old. He had his eyes closed and was breathing rather noisily. Phil was one of my regulars and I had poured all my care into his back, his neck and his legs. He now turned over and I got busy with the front of his legs, his chest and the most important part of his anatomy—his penis.

  I knew bodies. Phil’s had been in an agony of longing this last half hour. I could tell by the unconscious slightly upward thrust of his pelvis, propelled not just by my touch but by his myriad of unused sperm—hormones unsatisfied by constantly deferred lovemaking. Phil came to me because I could relieve him of this stress while giving him the most intense pleasure he’d ever experienced—a heightened sexual climax. Years of practice had taught me where the tender spots were, where to be firmer; when to be slow, when to be fast. I knew how to build up a wave of energy slowly and let it drop, then pick it up again, and again.

  Phil came closer to climaxing: I expected a feeling of the greatest wellbeing begin to surge through him. Phil’s longing—and my hands—made him come. It was a great orgasm. Surely better than when he last had sex with his wife, which, Phil had confided, was several months ago. He should have been happy, but I heard a sound I’d not expected: with one hand over his eyes, Phil was suppressing a heart-rending sob. His naked, vulnerable body shook helplessly as he lay beneath my wondering eyes, penis flaccid now and every ounce of spare fat shivering around his frame.

  I didn’t know what to do so I reached for a towel to cover up his exposed distress. I laid one hand gently on his forehead, and when he opened his eyes I saw an inexpressible sadness. What I read in a single glance was that he was infinitely more lonely now, after his indulgence, than before. That his spilling of sexual energy had proven to him how empty life was without love, without real intimacy.

  I helped Phil sit up. Silently he wrapped the towel around his waist and made his way to the shower.

  Something of Phil’s feelings found a corresponding reverberation in me, and I did nothing to stop it. Whatever Phil had been looking for, and had received from me, was not the answer for him. The greatest pleasure in the world seemed to have produced the greatest emptiness. I felt disturbed. A small crack had appeared in the pristine Chinese vase that was my icon.

  Still, I told myself, not all of my clients were like Phil, coming to me with unrealistic expectations. But surely, said another voice, many of my clients were substituting sensual massage for a real relationship. If that was so, then what they had with me was a false relationship.

  A false relationship! Was it true that the men who came to me equated sex with love, even with nurturing? If so, the more skilled I became at providing sexual services, the stronger I reinforced their illusion! I wanted to be a real person in a real relationship while I did my work. In my lucid moments, I knew that my fantasy of the Chinese nun wasn’t real. Oh, it was all so confusing!

  A terrible thought—too terrible to look at for long—hissed into my unwilling ears: You might be making your clients’ alienation worse. You might be intensifying their inability to have real intimacy and underpinning their lack of self-confidence…Like Eve, I heard the snake in the garden, but unlike Eve I wasn’t able to distinguish where the voice came from. I knew, however, that the choice between good and evil beckoned. If only I could distinguish between the two.

  After Phil left that afternoon, life would never be exactly the same again. More than anything, I now wanted to be real. To learn to be real, so my reasoning went, I needed to define more exactly what was good and what was bad. Having thrown out my Christian God at the end of 1969, I had failed to replace him with any other sort of God. I felt now that I was missing something in the depth of me, a longing that wasn’t being fulfilled by my work. There must be some kind of wisdom out there that surpassed what the Catholic Church had to offer; I just hadn’t come across it yet. I wanted an ultimate truth, something that could command my entire devotion.

  Not that I had neglected the search entirely. With Hal, I had become interested in metaphysics and had begun to study Madame Blavatsky’s huge tomes of esoteric knowledge from the Theosophical Society. Now I accepted an invitation from June—a woman I had met in a bookshop—to go and live in the country with her for a while. I was profoundly grateful for a break from life in the emotional fast lane. The rent would be low for the makeshift cottage a little distance from the main house (where she lived), which functioned as a country post office, sandwich shop and a petrol station. I expected to be there for about six months, and had my furniture stored.

  I also used my time there to recover from having some varicose veins removed. I had put up with the pain and disfigurement in my legs for long enough, and looked up a specialist with a good reputation. He made me stand on a chair, hitch up my dress and turn around slowly while he scrutinised the possibilities. ‘Hmm, worth doing,’ he concluded, but warned me that it wouldn’t be easy. ‘The pain will be bad for at least two months while your blood vessels adjust to new pathways.’

  ‘I’ll be delighted to massage away the pain in your legs,’ June said in her sweet, light voice; she was a healer and a generous woman.

  Victoria and I enjoyed our new surroundings. Victoria found a friend in June’s daughter and loved learning to ride the neighbour’s horses. We both enjoyed living with the sound of chickens, turkeys, geese and guinea fowl. As soon as my legs allowed it, I rode a bicycle around the magnificent summer-dry countryside, breathing in the smell of hay and of trees giving up their eucalyptus oil to the heat.

  As soon as I was well enough, I helped June in the sandwich shop and around the yard. I enjoyed having a girlfriend, and June enjoyed my company, espe
cially since she had become estranged from her husband, Sam. A quiet, practical and rather handsome man, Sam had had enough of being asked to become the ‘new age’ husband his wife expected him to be and had removed himself to another part of their property, where he had started to build a new house. Whenever he came around—which was inevitable on account of their shared workload—and sat down for a cup of coffee, she started on him, presenting the truths that should matter to him, her personal convictions, her new religion. She always began gently, then became more and more insistent, finally shouting after him as he left.

  June confided to me that Sam was impotent. On the few occasions they’d had sex these last few months, he hadn’t been able to get it up, no matter what they did to arouse him. ‘You can have him, Carla!’ she taunted repeatedly, after each tirade of complaints.

  So four months into my stay, I finally did, and managed to prove to my friend that her husband wasn’t impotent at all. I found him to be sweet and spicy, like hot mulled wine.

  Human nature being what it is, June’s friendship turned to rage. She screamed like a banshee and gave me a week’s notice to move out of my tiny cottage near the stream. But I shall always remember her for the kindness she showed me while my legs were so sore. I would never have dreamt of seducing Sam—and he would not have dreamt of being seduced—if she hadn’t thrown the gauntlet at our feet.