Madam Read online

  As you get older, though, being an outlaw is less cool. I got pregnant. I got married. Being on the wrong side of the law might well have been a necessary part of my work, but I sure as hell wasn’t getting off on it anymore.

  So I’ve gone through being in love with my work, seeing it as glamorous and hip, to being slightly embarrassed by it, to being bored by it, to where I am now: it’s my job. I run a certain kind of business, and I run it well. And, like every working wife and mother, there’s a certain tricky part in trying to keep everything balanced.

  Any female corporate executive would tell you the same thing.

  I was more careful with things once we moved to Charlestown. In the past, I hadn’t particularly thought about how my neighbors perceived me. I hadn’t particularly thought about my neighbors, period. But now we became friendly with the elderly couple living in the other half of the townhouse, and I knew the people at the market on the corner, where I still went every day to buy cigarettes, even though Benjamin, my mother, his mother, and just about everybody else I knew was urging me to quit.

  The people who mattered to me—my friends, my family, even my clients—these were people who pretty much accepted who I was, what I did, everything about me. In the past the only persona that I’d ever wanted to project was that of the hip and successful madam-about-town. Now, however, things were changing, and the way I behaved had to change as well.

  I kept the cell phone, but only used it when I was away from the office; land lines are always more secure. I told my catering story until I was blue in the face. I wanted to be someone other than just Peach; I wanted the Abby side of me to be presentable as well.

  I don’t know if I did that for Benjamin or he did it for me, but by the time we got married I was seeing myself through a different prism. Perhaps, for the first time in my life, I was seeing myself as a whole person: as a Southern woman poet, as a madam, as a wife, as a mother-to-be. I was seeing myself as being made up of all the complicated parts that make us human.

  I joined a health club and started swimming every day, sitting by the pool just as I used to sit in cafés, with my leather-bound book open in front of me and the words to the poems I was creating dancing in the air all around me. I wrote about life beginning and life ending, about people who sold their bodies and people who sold their souls. I looked at the impossible chlorine color of the water and imagined lazy sun-drenched islands in the South Seas, impossibly long days, sands between my toes. And I wrote about it all.

  Then Sam was born and my world changed forever.

  You’re Fired!

  I hadn’t fired Jill, despite what I told John Wills. She was going to burn out on her own. In the meantime, I simply wasn’t willing to give up the kind of money she brought in. What I did do—I’m not altogether heartless—was change who I was sending her to. Clients like John, who were easily manipulated, couldn’t handle someone like Jill, but I had more than enough clients in my repertoire who could match her little act and do her one better. If Jill wanted to play hard, I could play harder.

  She was definitely coming unraveled, something I had seen before in others but hadn’t anticipated happening to her; she seemed too hard, too tough. I guess it can happen to anybody, but it was unpleasant to watch, uncomfortable, and sometimes nerve-wracking.

  Girls are rude to clients all the time; for that matter, clients are rude to girls too. But when girls start being rude to me, there’s a line I start drawing. No matter how much I need them, they need me more. There may well be other agencies in town, but there is also a never-ending supply of gorgeous young women in a city like Boston, as endless as the incoming freshman classes that arrive every August in a city that’s expensive to live in.

  To be perfectly fair to me, I took a lot from Jill before I started drawing that line.

  “Hey, Jill, it’s Peach. Work.”

  “Who is it?” A clear yawn on the other end of the line.

  “Henry Ramirez. He’s in Back Bay. He’s a regular. I need you there by eight.”

  “Do you have anyone else besides him? I don’t want to get dressed if I’m only seeing one guy.”

  “Nothing,” I said firmly, amazed at her level of selfabsorption. Not to mention rudeness. “I’m not sending you on any more calls. I can’t afford to.”

  There was a sharp intake of breath. “I can’t believe you’re firing me! After all the business I’ve brought you!”

  I thought of the complaints, the hang-ups, the headaches. “Not worth it, Jill, sorry. You’ll have to try another agency.”

  “I will!” The receiver came crashing down, hard. Jill wasn’t used to people saying no to her. I was pleased to have had the opportunity to give her the new experience.

  What was worse than her attitude was that Jill had managed to alienate my best driver, Cynthia. The reality is that good drivers are worth their weight in gold, and not the easiest people to get along with, either. The irregularity of what they do means that there has to be something unusual about a person who works well as a driver with me. I hesitate to use the word weird, but it’s there all the same, right on the tip of my tongue.

  First off, you’re spending your time driving beautiful women around, but beautiful woman are also self-absorbed. Many of them do drugs. Many of them think nothing of asking you to go out of your way to run errands or do favors for them. And yes, there is the occasional girl willing to augment her fare by giving the drivers an occasional blow job; but, by and large, that’s not enough to justify the trouble she puts you through.

  Then there is the income. People from the real world, I’ve found, have some expectations of an ongoing, reasonably steady income, even from part-time jobs, and that simply isn’t the case, here. One night a driver can make $30, the next night, $150. The amount is generally distance-dependent, and I try to make the client pay at least part of the freight so that it doesn’t all cut into the girl’s income; I’m moderately successful, I think, in striking a balance there; but it is, at best, erratic.

  The hours are horrific, and there is often pressure to get somewhere quickly. There are long periods with nothing to do, or an occasional client who tries to play mind games with the girls by giving them bad directions. Many of the clients live in quiet suburban areas where neighbors would call the police if they saw a strange car parked, waiting, so the driver often has to be creative about how and where to spend that hour while the girl is doing the call.

  And, finally, there is the surreal feeling that one gets when one drops a girl off, knowing she’s about to have sex with someone, and picks her up after she has done so. I mean, what kind of light conversation fills that particular void? I’m quite sure that’s one that Emily Post doesn’t cover in her big white book.

  At least there are drivers. I have my share of single mothers, girls who go on calls with their kids in the back seat, girls who interrupt calls because the babysitter has beeped them with an emergency.

  I guess that I started feeling differently about the mothers, once I became one myself.

  Can’t Get Enough of Muffy

  I never thought that there were actually women who called themselves Muffy.

  Don’t get me wrong. I grew up in one of the most snobbish and élitest homes one can imagine. We had a whole lot of ways of saying and showing that we were better than anybody else around. We only associated with the “right” people and we were as racist and sexist as any of our forebears; we just showed it differently. There is nothing progressive, much less kind, about high society in Charleston, South Carolina.

  Yet I had managed to get through my own expensive Southern prep school and debutante upbringing without ever meeting anybody named Muffy.

  Then again, we weren’t as big on college educations in the South. We didn’t expect internships at Cosmopolitan and Seventeen to show we have the makings of a career before making the marriage that will cement our future. We went pretty much right for the marriage itself.

  Muffy had done the requisite c
ollege sorority rituals at Wellesley and then had decided—against everyone’s recommendations—to stay on in Boston and work. She wanted to go into banking, a profession that was much respected on the male side of her family; and she wanted to do it on her own, which was pretty much unheard of in the circles from which she came.

  The only problem was that entry-level positions in the banking industry don’t pay the bills. Well, not Muffy’s kind of bills, anyway. What with the horse she kept stabled in Hamilton and the shoes from Aldo’s on Newbury Street, the requisite Donna Karan and Anna Molinari suits and dresses and the equally requisite appearances at charity balls and dinners—not to mention the condo on Beacon Hill—Muffy was going to have to ask Daddy for help. She’d been asking Daddy for help all her life and was tired of it. So she called me instead.

  She showed me a picture of her family once, all of them looking Kennedy Hyannis–casual, smiling into the late-afternoon Connecticut sun as it streamed down over an expanse of emerald lawn that had to have been trimmed with nail clippers, it was so perfect. Muffy’s mother showed what Muffy herself would look like in another twenty years or so, give or take a facelift or two: determined, cheerful, not a hair out of place. She probably organized a lot of charity events to help the poor, who she knew about in the abstract. Muffy’s father was smiling broadly, showing off his possessions, a bit of heaviness around the waist and jowls lending an air of seriousness to his demeanor. Her brother, Harrison (following the perfectly absurd WASP tradition of giving sons first names that are interchangeable with surnames), attended country day school in the picture but was on his way to Princeton and a seat on his father’s board of directors. Muffy and her sister Kerry were loose-limbed, tanned, entitled. It was the perfect family; it was everything that everybody else in the country wanted to be.

  The clients couldn’t get enough of Muffy. She was everything that they wanted, too: the elusive high school girl that none of them had ever managed to date because she lived in a different world, a different galaxy. Muffy was the girl they had never dared ask to the prom, because she wouldn’t have even known that they existed. Even then, in the 1990s, in the middle of the dot-com boom, when being a nerd was a good thing, all my little entrepreneurial clients could remember, when they met Muffy, was how they had been in the chess club when she was the homecoming queen. Muffy made them realize just how nouveau nouveau riche actually was.

  But there was a light at the end of their tunnel. Thanks to the wonderful world of capitalism, they too could have a Muffy of their very own. At least for an hour at a time.

  She wore little black-nothing dresses and pearls and perfume to go on calls, flashed seamed stockings that cost $50 a pair, and got outrageous tips. She was laughingly insulting, too sure of herself to feel any qualms about sharing her true reactions. I think that for some of the guys, being insulted by Muffy was better than being complimented by any of the other girls.

  Like most of the women who work for me, Muffy knew nothing about my private life. To her I was Peach, with an office somewhere that she really didn’t care much about. She drove herself to her calls in an antique Jaguar E-type that had been her siblings’ graduation gift (her parents had given her a down payment on her condo to celebrate the same occasion) and met one of my drivers every so often to pay the fees she was holding for me.

  One day, though, I really needed to get some cash from her, and Andy, my current driver-errands guy, was nowhere to be found. I called Muffy and arranged to meet her at Sonsie’s on Newbury Street. I was late; I usually am. I think that I plan things perfectly but the world always seems to intervene between me and my schedule. But it didn’t matter, because she was later. I had ordered a latte and pastry when she showed up, and I have to say that, jaded as I am both to inherited wealth and to beautiful women, Muffy still managed to take my breath away. She was actually wearing a cashmere twin set and a plaid skirt and a string of pearls. I had thought that people put those on for portraits. Her honey-colored hair was perfect. Her creamy skin was flawless. I suddenly thought of all the hyphenated Americans I had on my client roster and how, for them, having sex with Muffy must be like sleeping with the Mayflower itself.

  She didn’t apologize, just took her seat and turned a six-hundred-watt smile on the waiter, who immediately succumbed and rushed her a dry martini with a lot more alacrity than he had brought my coffee. “Peach! It’s you! I’m so thrilled to meet you!”

  I smiled amiably and handed her the book I’d been reading. She blinked at it. “If you can put the money in the book,” I suggested delicately, and she laughed, really laughed, tipping her head back, enjoying herself. I’d never seen a woman laugh like that. I was fascinated.

  She took an envelope from her Gucci bag and slid it into the book, which she then passed back to me. “I feel so James Bond,” she said, the laughter still in her eyes and her voice and playing with the edges of her mouth. “What fun, Peach! It’s much more boring when I give it to Andy!”

  I stirred my latte. “I like to be discreet.” Almost immediately, my telephone rang. Okay, so much for being discreet. I feel comfortable with myself, and yet I swear this woman made me feel like I had two left hands. “Excuse me a moment.”

  It was Siobhan, Sam’s nanny. “I’m sorry to bother you, Mrs. Townsend,” she said, her Irish accent sharp and melodic across the phone line. “But Sam’s little friend Jamie wants him to come play at his house. D’you mind if I take him on over? I’ll have him back before supper.”

  “That’s fine.” Sam was a precocious two and a half, already at ease with other kids. I almost wished that he were more dependent on me. “Just leave the number in the kitchen for me, won’t you?”

  “Sure thing, Mrs. Townsend.”

  I pressed the off button. Muffy was watching me. “My son,” I explained, helplessly. Not only did I rarely meet the women who work for me, I certainly never let them know I have a family.

  “You have a son?” Had she been brought up anywhere but in private schools in Connecticut, her voice would have been a squeal. “Oh, Peach, you have to show me a picture!”

  The waiter brought her martini, and she flashed him The Smile again. I almost told her not to bother, that he was clearly gay, but then I realized that she wasn’t turning it on for him in particular, that it was something she had learned a long time ago, probably the day the braces came off and revealed those perfect white teeth. I was going to have to start charging clients extra for that smile, I thought.

  I guess there’s a first time for everything. I pulled out my wallet and opened it to the picture portfolio, carefully sliding Sam’s pictures out from the rest. Benjamin was there, too, but I wasn’t going to invite comment on my husband. There’s just so close I’m going to let anyone come.

  Muffy took the pictures from me and looked at them slowly, seriously, really looking at them. “He’s gorgeous,” she breathed. She kept studying his face and it was starting to give me the creeps. I reached across to take the pictures from her.

  She looked up and met my eyes. There was a slight flush on her cheeks and her eyes were bright. “He’s beautiful,” she said, again, and handed the pictures back. “You’re so amazing, Peach. You run a business and you have a family.”

  I wasn’t feeling particularly amazing. “It’s a matter of priorities,” I said, as though I had set out and planned the life I had. I’d very nearly lost Benjamin by not taking him seriously enough; and Sam, who was truly the most delightful part of my life, had been conceived completely by accident. But no one needed to know that.

  “I know …” Muffy’s voice had gotten dreamy. She sipped her martini and watched people walking by outside. Newbury Street is one of those places where you can sit in a café and watch people and eventually see the same ones go by, once, twice, three times, as much there to be seen as to see. “Back in college,” she said, making it sound like she was referring to something that had happened decades before, “I was so much in love … he was perfect, Peach, warm and kind
and sexy.” She shivered. She was speaking to me, but watching the people walking by in the sunshine. “I thought of him as mine, somehow. I thought that everything—I don’t know—whenever I looked into the future, he was there, he was part of it. Any future I could imagine, I could only imagine with him in it.”

  “What happened?”

  She shrugged. “I lost him,” she said. “I lost him, and I thought there couldn’t be any more futures. That was when I decided to stay on here and get a job. I decided to build something that wasn’t dependent on someone else being part of it.”

  I didn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry.”

  The impossible green eyes looked at me directly for the first time. “I’m not,” Muffy said, her voice a little surprised. “Too many women are afraid of losing someone, so they don’t try.” She sipped her drink again, delicately, as though savoring its taste. “I thought that nothing counted anymore, because I’d lost him. All I could think about was the loss, not the fact that I once had had him and was happy then. And that’s what matters, in the end. We’re made up of what we’ve had, not what we’ve lost.”

  Interesting to see it all in terms of ownership, I thought. But now Muffy was moving along, brisk and superficial again, pulling out her own snapshot, the picture of her family smiling into the late afternoon Connecticut sun with the palatial white mansion behind them, the future in their genes, and I understood her perspective. She seemed to have sifted a little wisdom through that prism of WASP entitlement, after all.

  She was on and off my radar for the rest of that year, though I didn‘t give her a lot of thought, any more than I gave any of my employees a lot of thought. As I said, it didn’t do to think too much about them as individuals; it got in the way of business. I sent Muffy on calls and the clients continued to adore her, and the afternoon we’d spent together at Sonsie’s faded away. Sometimes I wondered if I had dreamed it all.

  Sam’s fifth Christmas, the skirt that had seemed too tight after coming back from the cleaners told the tale: I was pregnant again. Benjamin had long since graduated from the North Bennett Street School, and was working on a home restoration over on Brattle Street in Cambridge. He was scared out of his head about an expanding family, and yet at the same time so excited that he tended to babble about it to anyone who would listen. For someone who had never thought he’d have children, Benjamin had taken to fatherhood with delight.