Callgirl: Confessions of a Double Life Read online

  I smiled as I slid the bills into my jacket pocket. “It was nice meeting you, too, Bruce. I hope I can see you again.”

  “I’d like that a lot.” He even sounded like he meant it.

  He escorted me off the gangway, kissed me again on the cheek, gave me a brief hug. “Good-night.”

  “Good-night, Bruce.” And I walked away toward my car; I felt like singing, or skipping, something joyous and happy. I had just spent a pleasant evening. After I took out the sixty dollars that was Peach’s fee, I had made one hundred and forty dollars. In one hour.

  Anybody else out there making that kind of money?

  I called her from the first pay phone I spotted; she asked politely how it had gone, and wished me a good night.

  I hung up the telephone and was struck by an incongruous thought. I remembered sitting in that whirlpool at the health club, and feeling grateful that I had the lifetime membership (a gift, ironically enough, from my mother), so that I would always be able to go there. I was grateful that they were open late at night. I remembered sitting there and thinking, when I start working, I’ll come and sit here and let all the bad feelings soak away with these bubbles. I’ll use this place to feel clean again.

  I was smiling broadly as I got back in my car to drive home. There was nothing that I needed to cleanse myself from. What bad feelings?

  I slept really well that night. No nightmares, no waking up sweating with the panic pressing in on me, no knots in my stomach. I was gainfully employed. I even wrote a check to the electric company.

  This was going to work. And I wasn’t even shocked that there weren’t any bad feelings at all.

  Chapter Two

  The next day dawned, as next days inevitably–and depressingly– do.I had showered when I got home, and did it again out of habit before getting dressed and heading out for class. I dressed in community college attire, which (per my definition, anyway) means professional enough to be able to be distinguished from the students and not so formal as to make people think that one is taking oneself too seriously. In the world of academia, community colleges are certainly not to be taken too seriously. That’s unfortunate and not even very accurate; but wasn’t it Lenin who said that perception is reality? It’s where a lot of people start – and where a lot of people finish up, too.

  I didn’t want to think about that.

  I was fortunate in my Death and Dying class. It was being offered as a partnership agreement between the college and a local hospital, and was largely populated by registered nurses going back to school to acquire a B.S.N. So there was not only a lot of motivation among the students, there was also a lot of expertise. I was talking about death: my students were people who dealt with it every time they went to work. It was more than a little humbling.

  That first morning after working for Peach, though, I have to admit that I wasn’t feeling particularly humble. I was feeling high.

  That day we were talking about death and war. It was one of my favorite classes on the syllabus, because there was so much material with which to challenge the students. I didn’t want to tell them whether war was right or wrong; I wanted to challenge their perceptions and help them come to their own conclusions. Or their own confusion. Either was acceptable.

  I read two poems aloud – Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “The Conscientious Objector,” and Randall Jarrell’s “Losses,” both of them highly emotional, exquisitely beautiful, and extremely challenging. I read the poems as I always did, not really reading but reciting them by heart. I was watching the class, looking for reactions that I could use in the discussion that was going to follow. And then, suddenly, for a scary split second – it honestly was no more than that – I was back on the boat, sitting and sipping wine after getting dressed, having a packet of money pressed into my hand.

  And I liked it. As though seeing it all in fast-motion, I stepped back from where I was standing, stepped out of my body and looked at myself, and I liked what I saw. I liked my professional competence, the fact that I was teaching something important and teaching it well. And I also liked the secret knowledge that the night before I had been paid to be sexy, beautiful, desirable. I liked both sides of myself. I liked them a lot.

  I came back fast. Randall Jarrell’s last words were echoing in the room. “But the night I died I dreamed that I was dead/ And the cities said to me: “Why are you dying?/ We are satisfied, if you are: but why did I die?”

  I waited. Silence is my friend. It makes people uncomfortable, and so they talk to end the silence, often saying things that they might not say otherwise. Edna St. Vincent Millay’s words echoed in the silence: “I shall die; but that is all I shall do for death./ I am not on his payroll.” And I hadn’t even given them the worst, this time around. Jarrell’s “Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner” could empty the room. I’d done that one the first year I’d taught the class, and I think that a third of the students got sick. They looked it, anyway.

  I waited. And in the silence, my own thoughts intruded.

  These people, my students, listened to poetry that they fiercely believed had no place in their lives, simply because I had asked them to. I had built up a measure of trust with them over the weeks and months of this course so that I could ask them to listen to archaic words and find the truths spoken through them. They trusted me. I was an authority figure.

  In fact, half of the class called me “Doctor.” The authority figure to the fore. It was a little scary. What if I was too much of an authority figure to be sexy? What if I couldn’t do another call for Peach? What if I went on a call and got rejected? What if Bruce had been an exception? What if I really was too old for all this? Would I end up remembering that first night and becoming bitter because I had glimpsed something that I wanted and couldn’t have? Wouldn’t it have been better, if that were to be the case, to never have started at all?

  So when I called Peach later that afternoon, I told her once again – and somewhat more firmly – that I wanted to meet her in person.

  She didn’t like it. She fought it. As I would find out later, she never liked meeting any of the girls, not at first. Sometimes not ever. She always waited until she had already formed an opinion of them through the telephone, through reports from the clients. I never knew why. Maybe seeing them would make the whole endeavor too real to her. Maybe she could keep some distance as long as both her employees and her clients remained disembodied voices on the other end of a telephone line.

  But the reality – the necessary reality of her job – was that she sent some girls, knowingly, into some pretty awful places, and some even more awful situations. She had to. As she said to me once, in a curiously unguarded moment, “Jen, if I ever really thought about it, I could never send anyone anywhere.” I think that maybe her job was easier for her if she didn’t have to visualize them, feel that she had really encountered them, acknowledged them as individuals. At the end of the phone, a girl could be a list of statistics and lies: her measurements, her height and weight, the color of her eyes, the length of her hair, her approximate age. Add an invented abbreviated history (“She’s sweet, just moved here from Kansas to go to school,”), all the information adapted and re-adapted, tailored afresh for each client. And the clients were consistently (and, I thought at first, a little naïvely) surprised that Peach could meet their specifications so exactly.

  A brief aside, a matter of mild interest: here’s a fact: Men can’t guess a woman’s age. There has to be some brain cell in men that doesn’t activate, some deficit encoded in male DNA, this inability to look at a woman and make reasonable chronological conclusions about her. Or maybe it’s just a result of intense sexual arousal, when, as we all know, only one head is fully functional. But in any case, they can’t tell how old a woman is. Especially if she’s already given them a number.

  I was a few months away from turning thirty-four when I started working for the agency, but Peach’s assistant Ellie immediately took care of that.

  The day after my f
irst call with Bruce, I spoke with Peach when I called to confirm that I was available that evening. As it turned out, Peach herself wasn’t. “It’s my night off, I’m going out,” she said.

  “Don’t worry, I told my assistant Ellie about you, she’ll be talking to you shortly.” It made me a little nervous, but I had psyched myself up – and my bank account was reminding me that it wasn’t the moment yet to take a night off. Besides, if I chickened out now, I might never call again. I was on a roll. I had to take advantage of it.

  Ellie was working the phones and called me around seven to take notes. She needed my general description, hopefully to connect it with a client’s request; and she asked me my age. Her reaction was direct and no-nonsense. “No way. No one wants to see someone who’s over thirty,” she said. I tried to tell her the number didn’t matter. I tried to explain that at work I was always mistaken for an undergraduate rather than a faculty member. I might have been thirty-three, but I didn’t look it.

  Apparently the number mattered to Ellie. “These guys have no idea what anything over thirty looks like, they’re morons with only one thing in their little pea brains.” Ellie, as I was to discover, had a cynical view of the clientele. And, come to think of it, of life, too. “Even twenty-eight, twenty-nine, that’s pushing it, ‘way old to them. I can’t get you a call if I tell them you’re thirty-three.”

  “Okay.” I wasn’t going to argue. She knew more about it than I did. New game, new rules, I was willing to learn. I later found out that Ellie, herself, had only just turned twenty.

  She was still talking. “We’ll say you’re twenty-four, that way you can be in grad school, the intellectual thing is a turn-on for some of these guys. You’ll be great with the smart ones; they’re always asking for someone who’s in school.”

  Worked for me. Got me a client that night, in fact, a soft-spoken engineer from New Delhi. And after that, Peach generally told clients that I was anything from twenty-two to twenty-nine, depending on who the guy was and what he wanted. I thought that twenty-two was a little over the top, but none of the men I saw ever questioned the veracity of what she said.

  I have to say, though, that in spite of my confidence in my looks, I was a little spooked by the age issue. After all, the common perception of prostitutes is that they are young, even underage sometimes, the cheerleader sort. If they were of the femme fatale type, it was always on the Lolita end of the spectrum. I had seen Pretty Woman, okay? She was young, young enough to still be idealistic, as the movie was quick to point out. I’d also seen Half Moon Street, but it was careful to indicate that Sigourney Weaver’s age and intelligence were the exception, that even her clients weren’t initially sure she was what they wanted. Julia Roberts’ character – young, hip, fast-talking, and sweet – was the conventional norm. The hooker with the heart of gold.

  I was not young, hip, fast-talking, or sweet, and I had no illusions about the state of my heart. I wasn’t going to fit into the mold. That made me uneasy. After Peter the Rat Bastard, I really didn’t need another rejection.

  The funny thing is that when I think about all the processing, all the thinking, all the planning that I did when I was starting out, there was never a moment when I doubted that I could do this. I sat in the dormitory in London staring at my notes for the following morning’s lecture, and I felt nervous about how the lecture would go over in another culture, what sort of questions people would be asking me, that sort of thing. I sat there feeling nervous, and even then half of my brain was rehearsing the lecture and the other half was considering whether or not to become a prostitute. It was an odd juxtaposition, and yet I never for one moment wondered whether I could.

  I just knew. I knew that I was pretty, but my confidence really didn’t have a lot to do with that. It was more along the lines of knowing that I was powerful. I had had a succession of boyfriends – and, let’s be honest here, girlfriends too – before the rat bastard, and they all claimed that I was the best lover they’d ever had. Well, okay, maybe you’ve heard that too, perhaps they were just saying what they thought I wanted to hear. I’m willing to consider the possibility. I’ll grant you that they didn’t all mean it.

  But you know it when you’re good at something, really good, you know it viscerally, in your muscles and your cells and your blood, at some non-rational and yet absolutely certain level. I knew I was good at sex, at romance, at seduction. It was something innate, something I didn’t think about. When I was flirting with a man I went into automatic pilot. I just did. I didn’t think. I flirted. And I always got him. Whomever I wanted, I got.

  It was just my bad judgment that I had once wanted the rat bastard.

  Once preliminaries were aside, I was confident of my power. I knew that once I had a man – any man – alone in a room with our clothes off, I would please him. I could make him crazy, make him ecstatic, make him want more and more and more. I knew that there is a certain sexiness about experience and education, that I had something to offer that the twenty-year-olds did not.

  That was why I had circled Peach’s ad in the first place. I had been dazed by the array of pictures of silicone-enhanced breasts and blonde women with pouting lips claiming, “I want you in my hot cunt now!” But there among them were the two advertisements that Peach ran. One was for the clients, and it was simple: “Avanti,” it declared, in a medium-sized box with a lace border. “When you want more than just the ordinary.”

  Well, okay, so that could mean anything. But there wasn’t any silicone, either, which had to be a good sign.

  The other ad, presented on another page in the same typeface, was looking for help: “Part-time work available to complement your real life,” it said; “Some college required.” That was what got me.

  No one else mentioned college. This agency had clients who wanted education, clients who presumably wanted to talk intelligently with their escorts, who were looking for something beyond firm breasts and empty thoughts.

  These were the clients I wanted to see, men who would view my graduate degrees as enhancing my sexuality rather than detracting from it. This was a possibility.

  It was the only one I circled. I sometimes wonder what I would have done if it hadn’t worked out. Would I have returned to the ads, found another one to try, one that was less offensive than the others? I don’t know.

  I took the paper with me to London and the name Avanti sat in the back of my brain while I talked to lecture-halls of students for four days.

  I got home, and before I even unpacked I called Peach. And that was the day she sent me to see Bruce.

  And so I found that there were people willing to see me – Bruce, the Indian engineer, a legislative aide from the state house; but I was still intensely unsure of my place in a youth-dominated profession. I pressed her again. Just to be sure that “the professor” could fit into her world, that Bruce and the others hadn’t been total aberrations.

  I guess that by then she figured I was worth the investment of her time. A few days after I saw the legislative aide, she agreed to meet. “All right. What about lunch on Thursday, Legal Seafoods at Copley, one o’clock?” Rapid decision, rapid planning; it was all so typical Peach.

  My palms were sweating. “Okay, great, I’ll be there.”

  I was there. She wasn’t. She managed, in point of fact, to avoid me for a week. She didn’t go to Legal Seafoods; when I called her at two she had some excuse about a sprained ankle. I, in the meantime, was overdressed even for a downtown mall in a short business suit, had been on my feet in uncomfortable heels for the past hour, and had spent that time nervously scrutinizing every woman who walked in the door in case it was Peach. I was exhausted.

  She cancelled two more appointments with me, fortunately with somewhat more notice. I had already paid a teaching assistant I knew from graduate school to cover my class for one of the appointments. I really couldn’t keep doing this, letting a potential job screw up what was, after all, my real career. And her choices of venue were never conve
nient: it was a fair commute to get downtown from my studio apartment in Allston, and then I needed time to find a place in the parking garage and time to locate the restaurant and start guessing which person could be her.

  I was beginning to seriously think it wasn’t going to happen. It was as though the time spent on the boat with Bruce had been nothing but an image, a snapshot, something so fleeting that it was hardly worthy of the memory. The Indian engineer that Ellie had sent me to see hadn’t counted, not really: I had been with him for twenty minutes, tops, and I don’t think that he looked at my face once. The guy at the State House had been more interested in the daring aspect of his act than in whom he was doing it with. So I didn’t have a lot of experience to draw from.

  At the same time, I was also slowly becoming obsessed with the concept of prostitution. My brief brush with it seemed to have sucked me into a well of curiosity – or was it just the researcher in me, the academic? I had started reading about prostitution and was constantly thinking about it.

  But I couldn’t even manage to meet with my own madam.

  I finally was instructed to go to another Legal Seafoods, this one in the Prudential Mall, and I went, resigned to being blown off again.

  I didn’t even bother dressing up; there seemed to be no point to it. I was wearing my usual at-home uniform of jeans, a sweatshirt, my Ryka sneakers.

  I had a plan this time: I was going to wait fruitlessly for her, call her number and collect yet another improbable excuse, and then I was going to spend the afternoon at the Boston College library. I was dressed for it, rather than for her. This time I was prepared, and I had at least brought work to do while I was in town. I wasn’t going to waste precious time that could be spent constructively. I had gotten a little jaded by then. I didn’t believe for a moment that Peach would keep the appointment.

  She did.