Madam Read online

  Dave Willis was a regular; Tiffany was semiregular, pretty, fresh, popular with the clients despite what I could only consider a total lack of personality. Well, no, I guess she was perky enough, but she was definitely one of the no-small-talk, let’s-get-down-to-business girls.

  Which I knew would be fine with Dave. He was on the upper end of middle age, with two failed marriages in his past and lingering child support and alimony in his present. I think his only form of recreation was calling the service, that and watching TV, and he pretty much scheduled the girls who came to see him to carefully allow for his TV viewing schedule. Dave was one of those clients who wouldn’t see somebody if she was late, so I always sent really reliable girls to his place. I didn’t want to lose his business.

  Tiffany, to my relief, arrived promptly and checked in with me about thirty seconds after the hour. This, I thought complacently, was going to be one of the good ones. She probably wouldn’t need to be called out—Dave usually finished well before the hour was up and sent the girl on her way—but I noted the time anyway, and went on with a more complicated call I was trying to set up, getting two girls from wildly different places in Boston coordinated to arrive together at one of the airport hotels, no small feat.

  When the telephone rang twenty minutes later, I thought nothing of it.

  “Peach?” It was Tiffany, sounding younger and more vulnerable than I had heard her before; I almost didn’t recognize the voice.

  “What’s up?”

  There was a sob on the other side of the line and a pause while she apparently got herself together. I could hear the fear in her voice. “Tiffany? What’s the problem?”

  “Peach—Peach –“

  “Calm down, honey,” I said, firmly and as soothingly as I could, putting out my cigarette in the ashtray next to me as though girding myself for action. “I can’t help you until you tell me what the problem is.” But my mind was racing frantically. What problem could there possibly be with Dave Willis?

  “Peach …” Another long, shuddering breath and she was able to say it. “He’s dead.”

  I had to remind myself to breathe. I had to remind myself that this girl was scared and was counting on me to help her. “Tiffany, okay, honey, you’re okay. Just take a deep breath, honey. Take a deep breath and tell me what happened.”

  She took two long, shaking, shuddering breaths. Another call was coming in and I ignored it. “Peach, it wasn’t my fault …”

  “Of course it wasn’t, honey. But you have to tell me what happened so I can help you.” What did she mean, it wasn’t her fault? Had she killed him?

  “I think it was a heart attack, Peach. It happened so fast. I mean, like, really fast. Like, I was on top of him with his—his thing inside me—and he just kind of gasped, and I thought that meant he was liking it, so I, like, started going faster, only I wasn’t really looking at his face, you know?” A brief pause. “Then he wasn’t moving or saying anything, and I looked at him and he’s this really weird purple color, Peach, so I got off him—I mean, how gross, a dead man’s dick inside me, only he was still hard, and I checked and he’s not breathing at all.”

  “Okay.” I’d had time to think. It wasn’t the first time that sex had induced a fatal heart attack, and at least now I knew what I was dealing with. “Tiffany, you need to hang up and call 911.”

  “What?” Her voice had risen at least an octave. “I can’t do that!”

  “You have to do that,” I said, firmly. “They’re not going to arrest you. But they have to take care of Dave.”

  “No!” There was a little wild scrabbling on the other end of the line. “Oh, God, my fingerprints are everywhere!”

  This was a novel reaction. “Why does that matter? Have you been arrested before?” She had said no, when I had hired her.

  “Just once. In New York.” Her voice had a slightly sullen tone to it now. “And it was a long time ago.”

  A long time ago for someone Tiffany’s age could be measured in months rather than years, but I was starting to lose patience with her. “Honey, listen. Get dressed. Call 911. They’ll come, they’ll see what happened, they’ll take your name and telephone number and that’s all there is to it.” Or so I rather fervently hoped.

  Okay, I’ll be honest: yes, there was a part of me that agreed with Tiffany’s obvious desire to just bolt. Pretend it hadn’t happened. Get on with things. No one wants to talk to the police, especially when what you’re doing is clearly illegal. Vice wasn’t going to ride along on an ambulance call, but it still left a queasy feeling in one’s stomach, and I won’t deny that I was wondering if Dave had left my number next to his telephone.

  But it was the thought of Dave—alone, without a wife, without a lot of friends, with children who lived three states away—that kept me on the line with Tiffany. He was an honest man. I wasn’t going to leave his body to rot alone in his suburban house until somebody noticed the smell. I’d like to think I was more decent than that.

  So I called them myself.

  I called from my private number and I used my real name and said that a friend had called me. I gave his address and told them what had happened and that was that. Oddly, I never heard back from either the police or Tiffany. I did later see a notice of Dave’s funeral arrangements in the newspaper. I wondered which ex-wife had made them.

  I was more than ever grateful for Benjamin. If I died, he would be there. He would care, and I wouldn’t be alone in a suburban home with a television remote near my hand and a nameless girl giving me sex for money.

  What I wasn’t even remotely prepared for, however, was the next installment in the Abby-Benjamin saga.

  Baby Makes Three

  I was pregnant.

  The thing you least expect is what happens to you. I’ve always been convinced of that, and my own life has absolutely proven it to me.

  Like most of my friends, I have invested a great deal of effort and money and anxiety into making sure that I don’t end up enceinte. If you’re careful, it doesn’t happen, not in this day and age. On the other hand, I had had lapses in the past and nothing had come of them—apparently I didn’t conceive easily—so I think that my lackadaisical attitude toward birth control did have some foundation in reality. I wasn’t on the pill when it happened, and up until then, nothing had happened, or so I assumed.

  Oops.

  Benjamin was just finishing his last semester at the North Bennett Street School; he was already working part-time for a restoration company on the North Shore and had in fact been up on Gloucester’s Eastern Point for most of that week, doing some work on one of the crumbling mansions up there. I had absolutely no idea how he was going to react.

  That I was thinking about his reaction at all was indicative of a major sea change in my outlook on life. In the past, had the question arisen, I couldn’t imagine consulting the other individual involved: my body, my decision, and not a difficult one to make. But life with Benjamin was different somehow. I couldn’t imagine not telling him, and I couldn’t imagine what his reaction might be.

  It’s always been my philosophy to do everything with a flourish, so I called him on his cell phone. “Hey. Any good restaurants up in Gloucester?”

  He sounded bemused. “Depends on your definition of good,” he said, cautiously. “Good fish places.”

  I wrinkled my nose, but forged on nevertheless. “Thought I’d take the train up and meet you for dinner.”

  “What about work?” he meant mine, of course.

  “I can get Evelyn to do the phones.” Evelyn—or Taylor, as the clients called her—was as happy doing the phones as she was going on calls. She had just the right touch with clients, too. On a slow night, she could fit in a call herself between the phones, so she ended up happy either way.

  “Sure,” Benjamin said. “Come into West Gloucester, and call me from the station. I’ll pick you up there. Gotta get back to work, hon.”

  “Okay, I’ll see you later.” I disconnected. This was goi
ng to be fine, I told myself. Whatever happened would be fine. Or so I fervently hoped.

  The Gull restaurant is tucked away inside the Cape Ann Marina, almost invisible unless you know what you’re looking for. Once you’re there, however, it’s pretty unforgettable: floor-to-ceiling windows face the pleasure boats moored on the Annisquam River, all of them ready to head out to sea for a day of fishing, whale watching, or just relaxing.

  I had been watching them coming and going for almost an hour, and hadn’t yet found a way of saying what I was there to say.

  Benjamin wasn’t aware of my discomfort. He had picked me up at the train platform—the stops on the commuter rail running out of Boston hardly qualify as stations—and driven me by the castle-like edifice that he and a team from the North Bennett Street School were currently working on, proudly showing me his handiwork before bringing me here. “They have prime rib, too,” he said with enthusiasm, handing me a menu. “George comes here almost every day for lunch.”

  I had no idea who George was. I cared even less. I ordered wine and then after two sips remembered that I wasn’t supposed to be drinking, if I was really pregnant, if we were going to keep the baby, if, if, if. The nausea that had prompted me, almost incidentally, to buy the pregnancy test was back.

  I pushed some salad around on a plate for a while and then I did the same with some seafood au gratin, trying not to look at Benjamin’s prime rib (which he ordered rare, naturally), and finally decided that I didn’t know how to say it. “I have to tell you something,” I said, only at that moment realizing that he had been in the middle of explaining something to me about cornices. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be rude. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  Concern creased his forehead. “What’s up?”

  I thought about all the ways I had practiced saying this on the train ride and then gave up. Wordlessly, I opened my purse, took out the plastic pregnancy tester, and passed it across the table to him.

  And then I threw up.

  There are moments in my life when I imagine myself to be one of the elegant divas of days gone by: Audrey Hepburn, Katharine Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Lauren Bacall.

  But in my heart of hearts, in those moments when reality takes over, I realize that I am and will be forever closest to Lucille Ball as Lucy Ricardo.

  Certainly throwing up in a restaurant is more up her alley than anybody else’s.

  Everyone was very sweet, I’ll say that for them. The mess was cleaned up quickly and efficiently; Benjamin stayed behind to deal with the bill and apologies, while I sat and waited outside on the dock. It creaked from time to time, which suited me well; I was feeling fairly creaky myself.

  A footstep, and Benjamin sat down beside me. “Well, that’s all set.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, miserably, inadequately. “That was awful.”

  He put his arm around my shoulders. “I’ll say this, it was memorable. We’ll be able to tell our firstborn that he or she was making waves from the very beginning.”

  I half-turned to face him. “You mean …” My voice trailed off. I was suddenly too tired to articulate anything.

  Benjamin pulled the long slender plastic tester out of his pocket. “Here we go,” he said, taking out a pen, clicking it open. Frowning slightly with concentration, he inscribed the date, then handed it to me. “A souvenir,” he said, with a smile. “A souvenir of the beginning.”

  And that was how we found out about Sam. It was, suddenly, just that simple.

  Taking Charge

  Benjamin and I may have decided that we were okay with the idea of having a child, but that didn’t mean that I’d even begun to assimilate exactly what it meant for my life. I wasn’t ready to be pregnant, to buy the books, to think about the clothes … oh, God, to not see my feet for nearly a year. Ugh. I was still a madam, after all. Sleek and sexy, someone to which accidents don’t happen. It was hard to make those two perceptions—those two realities—combine in a way that made sense for me.

  My immediate response was to ignore the pregnancy. I saw a doctor and took some extra vitamins and made some half-hearted attempts to quit smoking; I had wine only once a week and eliminated drugs altogether; and that was it.

  It wasn’t as though my life didn’t hold enough challenges. Three days after the dinner in Gloucester I turned on the local news and heard that a prostitute, a woman who worked the streets down on Kneeland Street, had been murdered. Nice of them to note, I thought sourly, that she had been a prostitute. Much better news value than had she been a waitress, an investment banker, or an administrative assistant. Of course, if she had been any of those things, she also would probably still have been alive. Denying the danger inherent in any line of work that’s illegal and attracts people with problems is denying the obvious.

  While I offer my employees more security and less exposure to ongoing violence than they’d have if they worked the streets, with or without a pimp, there’s still that specter in the background for me.

  I read recently that some city in Canada—Montreal, perhaps—has started a database of DNA samples from local prostitutes; if something happens to them, their bodies can be identified more easily. Quite a few of them have signed—a sad, and scary commentary on a prostitute’s life. It presumes not only that a violent end is a real possibility, but that there will be no one around who knows them and can identify their remains. I shiver when I think about it, and I try very hard not to think about it.

  The one inevitable result of my moving into a new space with Benjamin and of becoming pregnant was that I had a tremendous nesting urge. I was loving Charlestown even more than I had Bay Village. It was quirky, a little upscale, and a little strange, the kind of place where I immediately and wonderfully felt at home.

  Charlestown wasn’t always much of a place to live, of course. When the Charlestown Navy Yard was the only game in town (well, that and my own profession, thank you very much) it was rough, blue-collar, and safe only because of the Mafia’s interests in the community. But Nixon closed down the Navy Yard in a final act of revenge against Massachusetts. After a brief slump, it became gentrified when people working in the financial district discovered that they could afford to live in town, after all. Which meant in turn that very soon thereafter, almost nobody else could. I had a lot of clients who lived in Charlestown. Still do, as a matter of fact.

  The history stretches back well beyond the establishment of the Naval Yard, though. One of the things I’ve always loved about Charlestown is the inability of Bostonians to get things right. Never mind if we’re wrong, we’re sticking to our story, anyway.

  First of all, the Bunker Hill monument, visible for miles around, is an Egyptian-style obelisk that commemorates a battle that the patriots lost. And it’s not even actually Bunker Hill at all. A minor detail, perhaps; but true nonetheless.

  It was supposed to be Bunker Hill, mind you. The British were planning on fortifying it, so the patriots tried to get there first. They got there in the dark, though, and so actually fortified the wrong hill. So after the famous Battle of Bunker Hill took place, the monument was erected on a different hill altogether, one called Breed’s Hill.

  To top it all off, the British won. You have to love that kind of quirky history lesson.

  Benjamin and I walked all over Charlestown that first spring. We even made the requisite tourist visit to the Constitution, but mostly we strolled, through squares filled with fragrant lilac and spreading wisteria, up narrow cobbled streets lit by old-fashioned gas lamps. My major coup was being able to secure a table at Olive’s on a fairly regular basis; that alone is worth its weight in gold.

  I finally started telling a few people—really, really good friends—that I was, as the euphemism goes, expecting. I tried a whole lot of different ones—euphemisms, that is. Preggers. Knocked up. Benjamin suggested the old “bun in the oven” and I threw a pillow at him. To say that people were surprised was the understatement of the century.

  I guess that was really my faul
t, though. For years I had tried to surround myself with a mystique, an air of sophistication, this sense of me being more Peach than Abby, and perceptions don’t change just because your heart does.

  I didn’t let any of the clients know, of course. They were quite sure that they knew what I looked like. High-heeled shoes, seamed stockings, a little black-nothing dress, long legs up on the desk as I leaned back and talked to them—that was the illusion. Even at the time when I bought into my own mystique, I never dressed like that for work; comfort was always the first priority. But I was a magician with words, with inflection, with tone of my voice. I’d imply just about anything, I’d lie about just about anything. The sexier the clients think I am, the better my business.

  To this day, my clients know nothing about my private life, my marriage, my son, where I live, what I do, what I look like. Peach is still a figment of their imaginations, and of mine.

  Jill started working for me shortly after I moved to Charlestown with Benjamin.

  I was delighted. For one thing, she was absolutely, sensationally gorgeous—skin like ivory, a pre-Raphaelite face framed by wavy black hair, dark eyes. She had just gotten out of the Israeli army and wanted to make as much money in as short a time as she could. Which was perfectly fine with me.

  She had no car, but what she did have was limitless energy and a willingness to go on any call, anywhere, at any time, which I appreciated more than I could articulate. At times it feels as though I employ nothing but prima donnas: I can’t see that one, I can’t do calls before seven, after nine, on Thursdays, in the suburbs, in Southie, with an Asian, with a married man—the list was long and so comprehensive that sometimes I felt like I needed a database to keep up with it all. A big one.

  But Jill was fine doing whatever—or whomever—and whenever, and the clients loved her. She was young, fresh, and good at doing sales in addition to her other responsibilities, something I didn’t see all that frequently.