Madam Page 19
She was quick, had a condom to hand immediately, but he was trying to wheedle his way into her without one. She said no, he got insistent, and in the middle of it all the wife started freaking again, seeing her husband attempting to fuck someone else. A disaster, any way one looked at it.
She finally left, with the wife in hysterics and the husband angry as hell. He called me and wanted his money back. I had to tell him in no uncertain terms that under no circumstances could he attempt to have sexual intercourse with any of my girls without her consent, much less without a condom. And all the while I could hear his wife wailing in the background.
Poor Benjamin. He had no idea why I was so unresponsive to him on that particular night.
I sat and looked out at the stars. You see them, here. I don’t think that I ever saw them when I lived in the city.
Losing the baby was making me think about what I want for Sam, and for Benjamin, and even for myself. And I’m not sure that I want to spend the rest of my life being a madam.
It’s easy: that’s the seductive part, I suppose. I can do it in my sleep. I can do it without thinking. I know my clients and I know how to handle the women who work for me and I can absorb—to some extent—the pain and crisis that sometimes go along with the job.
The question is whether I want to.
I looked out at the stars for a long time after I turned the phones off for the night. I watched them long enough to see them shift in the night sky. And then I went to bed and wrapped my arms around my husband and dreamed of all the people I had lost.
The next morning after Sam left for school, I called Caro and found out what I needed to do to get a real estate license.
Epilogue
I came from a dysfunctional family, and I became a madam. Connection? Probably, although the older I get, the more I realize that a lot of people come from dysfunctional families. Some of them can overcome their past; some can’t.
Sam is at school and Benjamin is at work and I’m getting ready to go out and do my very first open house. I’m a little excited, a little nervous, and very happy. As I put the key in the ignition, I’m suddenly overwhelmed by an image of my own past. I think about standing in that hallway, with my father dying on the other side of a closed door and a priceless Chinese vase next to me. It took me a long time to remember breaking that vase. I’ve wondered for an even longer time what its significance was.
Anger is best expressed, because if you keep it inside, it can poison you for the rest of your life. I showed my anguish in breaking my mother’s priceless artifact, in breaking something that I thought she loved more than she loved me—and then I buried that act deep in my subconscious. I didn’t remember it until I came close to joining my father, to killing myself.
I told Sam that I plan to change jobs, that I’m tired of the telephone and am studying to sell houses instead. One day last week, he brought home a picture he had done of me surrounded by houses and people with smiles on their faces. So maybe the two professions have something in common: making people happy.
Perhaps by the time Sam is in his teens or in college, sex work will have been legalized. It’s the only thing that makes any sense if the country believes—as it claims to do—in the safety of all. But I have my doubts. The sex industry is and will always be, it seems to me, shrouded in mystery: something that both titillates and horrifies. And those of us who participate in it fascinate and repel at the same time.
At some level, I understand that thinking. At another, I don’t. Wars are being waged around the world, children are dying of hunger, and there’s still no cure for AIDS. People paying for an hour of pleasure seems a small thing next to all of that.
I look at the popularity of television series that feature all sorts of illicit sex, which is apparently okay with middle America—just so long as there’s no money exchanged. And I look at all the rest: we apparently don’t mind our children being exposed in the media to guns, to cheating, to killing, but God forbid anyone should see a naked breast.
Funny old world we live in.
In the meantime, I’ve lost so much. My father, some of my friends, my unborn child. I can’t stay angry with the world for not understanding me. I can’t keep breaking that vase, over and over and over again. I need to look to the light, to the future, to realizing my dreams and raising my son.
That’s not such a bad plan for the rest of one’s life, now, is it?