Madam Read online

  And, through it all, I ran—and continue to run—a very successful escort business.

  The Making of a Madam

  I didn’t start out wanting to be a madam.

  I mean, it’s not the kind of career choice that little girls consider when they talk together about what they’re going to be when they grow up. Let’s see: teacher, nurse, lawyer, bordello owner … Nope, just doesn’t work. There are some careers that you choose, and some careers that choose you. This one definitely falls into the latter category.

  So, how does a nice girl like me end up running an escort service?

  I’m not sure exactly where to start. I could use all the excuses that people generally use when they’re trying to justify what others may see as questionable behavior. I could talk about boyfriends and about wanting to do well at Boston’s Emerson College; about my parents’ expectations that I would marry and buy a mock Tudor somewhere in the suburbs. I could list my various jobs, give you a resumé or a list of recommendations; I could self-righteously mention exactly how few positions are available to people when they first leave a school like Emerson, which is so specialized in communications and acting and related fields. I could even say that I had put a lot of thought into it and decided that running an escort service would make me businesswoman of the Year.

  But the reality is different. The reality is that I was tired of coming home to the guy I was living with (for no reason other than that we had started living together and inertia had taken over) who did nothing but smoke pot and watch television. I was tired of looking for jobs in communications with a degree in Communications that meant absolutely nothing at the end of the day. I was tired, tired, tired …

  I did try to follow one of the roads that lead to what others see as respectable careers. I tried sales first. I’ve always been pretty good at talking people into things, so I went to work in the sales area of some low-income housing developments on the edge of North Cambridge, Massachusetts, and moonlighted answering the telephone for the maintenance department. The first clue I had that I was in the wrong place was when a couple of the guys refused to fix the toilet in a certain tenant’s apartment. The tenant in question didn’t speak English, so I started giving the maintenance guys holy hell about discriminating against him. When one of them could finally get a word in, it was to say, “You know, lady, no one’s gonna go there. Two other maintenance guys almost got killed fixing stuff for that creep.”

  Oh.

  The second clue came when the news trucks all started coming around and people began shoving microphones in my face, asking me questions about the guy on the eighteenth floor who had just gotten arrested for running a prostitution ring out of his apartment.

  And all of that—those events, those situations that I can single out and point to—didn’t even touch the sheer bleakness of working there, in that world, with people who had lost every shred of hope they had ever had for a better life. Poverty is a grinding, daily, hurtful thing, and after a generation of it, most people cannot imagine a world that doesn’t involve welfare, or dealing drugs, or stints in prison, or wanting something with the only part of you that hasn’t accepted that you’ll never be able to have it. I know I’m a hypocrite to feel that way and not become a social worker, or something—anything to help ease people’s pain. Instead, I decided one thing: I wasn’t going to make a career out of being part of anybody’s misery. I wanted a modicum of happiness in my work.

  So I made some New Year’s resolutions in the middle of the summer and kicked the boyfriend out and thought for a while about my assets—what is fashionable, these days, to call a skills set. And I realized right away that what I’m good at—what I’m brilliant at—is talking. I can talk anybody into anything. I can sweet-talk operators into giving me information they never planned to give out. I’ve always had this big double bed and I sit there with my telephone and my Yellow Pages and man, I’m all set. I can get just about anything I need with my phone and my Yellow Pages.

  On the other hand, what do people do who are good on the telephone? I certainly didn’t want to do telemarketing. Yuck. Interrupting people having dinner to try and sell them subscriptions to some magazine they’d never read anyway. It just didn’t work for me.

  So I sat and called everyone I knew and didn’t get any closer to figuring out what to do with my so-called career. I took a couple of temp jobs working as a receptionist for high-tech companies and resigned myself to doing something like that in the foreseeable future.

  When I finally happened on the ad in the newspaper—almost accidentally, on a day I had not set aside for jobhunting—I had no idea that it was going to change my life forever.

  Laura lived out in one of Boston’s suburbs—Wilmington, was it? Or maybe Lynnfield?—someplace like that, that’s what I remember. And even though my departed boyfriend hadn’t been good for much, he had managed to pay half the rent. Now I was struggling to manage it by myself. Come work for me, Laura said, and you can stay in my basement.

  It sounded pretty good to me. Work and a place to stay, just when I needed both. I said yes. I didn’t consider what people would think when they learned I was working for an escort service, even in the minor role of receptionist. I didn’t consider much of anything. This is probably typical of many of the women who work in the profession: it seems like an answer to a prayer, a way to make ends meet, a way to make a living, for heaven’s sake. And when the reactions trickle in, we’re always surprised by them.

  I didn’t think about people’s reactions. I just went to work for Laura.

  My first impression was how clean it was: everything was impeccable. Laura ran an escort service that was both in-call and out-call: some girls went out to clients’ homes; others saw the guys there, at Laura’s place. It was never called a bordello. In fact, in all my years in the business, I’ve never heard an in-call place called a bordello. We just called it Laura’s. Maybe that’s just an eastern seaboard thing. Maybe it’s just a Boston thing.

  So I finally had a job. I was the receptionist; I greeted clients and took all the telephone calls. And listened to the bickering.

  “The sheets have to be clean,” Laura kept saying to the girls. That was her constant mantra. You wouldn’t think that clean sheets could ever become such an issue. Whose turn it was to change the sheets, who had last used the front room, who had done the laundry yesterday. That was all that the girls talked about: those damned sheets.

  The sheets weren’t my department. I got to talk to the guys.

  The clients came in all shapes and sizes, both figuratively and literally. Guys who knew exactly what they wanted, and guys who could be talked into seeing the girl who hadn’t had a call for two days. Young guys that you couldn’t figure out, for the life of you, why they couldn’t get a date on their own; and older men who clearly had no other recourse, even in Boston’s comparatively laid-back sexual climate.

  I got good at working the phones, and I got good at it fast. You had to—they’d keep you on the line all night, otherwise. “You have a great voice—you sure I can’t see you? What do you look like? What are you wearing right now?” I got good at deflecting them, just the right edge of flirtatiousness in my voice, just the right edge of business. When I didn’t work, and Laura did the phones, the clients complained. “Where’s Abby?”

  I was sleeping on a foldout sofa in her finished basement, sharing the room with an old foosball table and some cast-off furniture and lamps from the bedrooms upstairs. That was just fine with me. I had a bank account, and every week I had more money to put into it—the eventual deposit on an apartment somewhere closer to the city than Wilmington.

  Because, to tell you the truth, when I wasn’t working, I was bored.

  Well, that’s not entirely true. I did have a car that ran most of the time, and when it was running there were a lot of things to do. It was summer, so I could go into Boston and sit on the Common or in the Public Gardens; in the fall I could go out to Concord and walk around
Walden Pond. I could go to Lansdowne Street in town on my nights off and hang out in the clubs. But all of it, all the time, I did alone.

  I really didn’t know very many people. To be honest, on a day-to-day basis, I was fairly lonely. I didn’t have much of a social life. I worked nights, for one thing. And for another … well, all of my friends from college were starting their careers, or had moved away, or gotten married, or something. I felt a little bereft, as if some train had already pulled out of the station and I had just then realized that I was supposed to be on it.

  At Laura’s, though, I wasn’t bored. Here, things were always hopping. Guys stopping in, talking and laughing with me in the living room while they were passing the time before their “date” was free, the girls sitting around waiting to be chosen. It was a cattle call, and as a good feminist I wasn’t altogether comfortable with it. But it was money, extraordinarily good money. And it was more than that—okay, I’ll admit it: it really was exciting. As if I were on the cutting edge of something slightly risqué, slightly dangerous, slightly naughty. As, of course, I was.

  I guess the best thing to compare that feeling to is going out at night to the bars, the clubs. How you dance around when you’re getting ready to go out. How you have that little edge of excitement when you first get there, not knowing exactly what you’ll find, who you’ll meet. The tension. And then, when you do strike up a conversation, the flirting, the games, the playfulness and mystery, and the newness of it all. And if it goes well, holding the guy in your power, deciding whether you’re going to sleep with him or not, deciding how far you’re going to let him go, deciding if you’re going to be nice to him or cut him down. All that power, and instead of getting dressed up and going looking for it, it came to me. And I got paid for it. It was my job to be hip and seductive—and unattainable.

  “Hello?”

  “Yeah, um, I wanted to, um—”

  “Make an appointment?” Sweet and seductive.

  “Um, yeah.”

  “When did you want to come by, sir?” Can’t start by asking for a name—it spooked them. He would say tonight.

  “Tonight? Now?”

  “That’s fine. I just need to get a little information, sir.” Pretty voice now, nonthreatening. “I need your name and phone number, and I’ll call you right back.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s for everyone’s protection, sir. Then I can give you directions.”

  He relaxed. There was something about that promise that always did it. “Okay. Ed Lawrence. 555-1324.”

  “I’ll call you right back, Ed.”

  After that, it was easy. Directions. Sometimes they’d want to keep me on the phone, run down what they called the “menu,” but I learned how to handle that gracefully as well. “I’m sure that one of the young ladies will suit you, sir.” They always did; the guy just wanted the thrill of prolonging the phone call. His goal was for it to last; mine was to close the deal and move on. Usually I won.

  One night Laura had a late arrival. I was asleep downstairs, and she thought—well, I don’t honestly know what she was thinking. Maybe none of the girls were around. Maybe she figured that he was easy and I wouldn’t mind. Whatever was going through her little brain, she sent him down to me.

  Big mistake.

  First of all, I had never planned on a career in prostitution from anything other than an administrative point of view. Second of all, I was asleep. Third of all, the guy liked to give oral sex, which is why I think she sent him downstairs to me: the scenario would be, he’d go down, I’d never even have to completely wake up, he’d go back upstairs, pay, and leave. What neither Laura nor her client had counted on was the yeast infection I was treating at the time. Her little client went down, all right—and I woke up to this face looming above me, literally foaming at the mouth.

  I don’t know which one of us was more freaked out.

  And so my career as a call girl ended as soon as it had—albeit involuntarily—begun. But I learned a lot that year I spent doing the phones and working the desk for Laura. I learned about the specifics of running a business like hers, about what worked and what didn’t. I learned about clients and employees and the world’s perception of what we did. I learned a lot about power—about my power.

  And most importantly, I learned that I could do it better than her.

  So I took my almost-working car and my revived bank account, rented an apartment in Boston’s trendy Bay Village, and opened up my own business. That was nineteen years ago. I’ve been doing it ever since.

  I chose the name Peach from a short story.

  It’s as good a source as any for finding a name, I suppose. But it also is weird, in a Twilight Zone kind of way, because the person who wrote that story later came to work for me for a couple of years. What are the chances of that happening? They must be a million to one.

  What I didn’t want, above all, was to use my own name. I didn’t want the guys asking for Abby, or knowing anything about Abby. From the very beginning, I wanted an element of deniability to it all. I wanted to both be and not be this new persona.

  So I became Peach.

  I knew I had to keep my working life and my personal life very, very separate. To my friends and family, I would be Abby. To my girls and my clients, I’d be Peach. And that’s worked pretty well for me.

  Which is not to say that I latched onto it right away. If I can sit here and talk calmly about having a family, having a business, juggling them the way any working mother does, you need to know that it didn’t come to me naturally.

  In fact, for a whole lot of years, I was much more Peach than I was Abby. Sometimes I think I got a little lost in being Peach … so that’s part of what this story is about. Getting lost.

  And getting found.

  Losses

  The door opened slowly, too slowly. The faces were grave.

  I was pressed up against the wall in the corridor, scarcely daring to breathe. There was a very expensive vase on the table next to me, from some Chinese dynasty that’s remembered in the Western world only for its porcelain. I had been told to never touch the vase.

  The voices inside the room had gone on for far too long, a steady murmur, the murmur of death.

  Now the door was opening, and they were all coming out. My mother, her face red and blotchy from crying. Dr. Copeland. Two of my father’s business associates.

  Dr. Copeland saw me first and, ignoring the other people—which was very unlike a grown-up—came over and squatted in the hallway next to me. “Abby,” he said, gently, “how long have you been here?”

  I stifled a sob. “Forever,” I said. I felt that if I said anything more than that, I’d start crying, and it had been made clear to me that I was not to cry.

  He didn’t go away, as I expected him to. He put a hand on my shoulder, instead. “You’re going to need to be a brave girl, Abby.”

  “Yes, sir, I know.”

  He frowned, as though that was the wrong answer. “But you can be brave and feel sad at the same time,” he said.

  I glanced at my mother. She was standing with the light from the window behind her, and all I could see was her thin elegant outline. Her arms were crossed.

  I didn’t have to see her face; I already knew what the expression was.

  I looked back into the doctor’s kindly eyes with a quick indrawn breath and a little bit of panic. “I’ll be brave,” I assured him. Maybe if I said what he wanted me to say, he’d go away and not say things that made me want to cry.

  He didn’t go away.

  Instead, he scrunched down and sat on the floor next to me. I clearly heard my mother’s disapproving intake of breath, and stiffened, but she didn’t say anything. “Abby,” said Dr. Copeland, “you know that your daddy is very sick.”

  No one had ever called him Daddy before, except me. My mother always prefaced references to him with “Your father.” I nodded.

  He nodded, too, as though we had just shared a very deep secret. “Abby,
I’m afraid that he’s going to die.”

  My heart thudded, and I thought suddenly that I might throw up. I shouldn’t, I knew that I shouldn’t, but I wondered how I could keep it from happening. What can you do? Swallow it all back? I didn’t say anything and swallowed hard, and the feeling receded. Dr. Copeland squeezed my shoulders. “We’re all going to miss your daddy,” he said, “but do you know what, Abby? I think that you’re going to miss him most of all.”

  I didn’t know how to respond, so I didn’t say anything.

  The doctor gave me one last firm pat on the back and stood up, with some difficulty. One of my father’s business associates gave him a hand. My mother never moved.

  Their voices faded away down the hallway and the big sweeping staircase that led downstairs. I stayed where I was, looking longingly at the closed door.

  “Abby!” my mother called, her voice sharp. “Come downstairs now!”

  I suppose that I went. I was good that way. Obedient.

  I never saw him again.

  Leaving Mother Superior

  When I left Laura’s place, I had only the faintest idea how to make things work.

  What I mean is, I knew what I didn’t want. In retrospect, maybe that’s a pretty good place to start.

  I didn’t want to run an in-call service. That was the first decision. For a whole lot of reasons, I didn’t want in-call.

  First of all, there was the risk associated with it. There’s always more risk when you have an actual physical place where something illegal is going on. But there was the intrusion, as well, the sense of never quite knowing where work ends and Real Life begins. Laura’s house was—well, Laura’s house. For Laura, my one and only role model in the business, there had never been a clear line between the two. If I didn’t make a distinction, it’s because she never did: her work was her life. I wanted my own space. I wanted my own life.