Madam Read online

  Which we did, with the phone ringing and being answered intermittently, for the next ten hours.

  Jesse had brought some wine, and I had a fair store of coke on my dressing table, courtesy of Robert, so sleep was pretty much out of the question. I stopped doing the phones after two in the morning, and I don’t remember what happened to the turkey dinner delivery. We stopped touching and moaning and probing and licking only long enough for a sip of wine, tipped from his mouth into mine, or a line of coke, expertly put out on my breast for him to snort, or a trip to the bathroom or refrigerator. I was fascinated; I’d never seen a man do coke and keep an erection. Jesse had amazing talents.

  Things are not what they seem, however.

  It turned out that Jesse was moving to Boston. He needed a place to stay for a few days. Could he stay with me? Panting in my postcoital exhaustion, of course I said yes. And it was fine, it really was. For a while.

  He wasn’t looking for a job, not right away, but that didn’t matter, because I had more girls needing rides than my regular driver Jake could manage. And what Jesse did have was a car. So off he went in the evenings, driving young, beautiful women to obscure destinations and then coming back at one or two in the morning to make love to me for the rest of the night. We’d finally fall asleep toward dawn, and I don’t think that I ever woke up before four or five in the afternoon. That was when I was starting to deal with the hangovers, right when the phones started ringing.

  Bad for business? You’d think that working with a hangover might be, though in reality I don’t think that anybody particularly cared. Both my clients and my employees were too self-centered to notice when I wasn’t really on my game.

  But I noticed it, and it was a problem for me. Another problem was my nights off, when I’d either get one of the girls I trusted to answer the phones for me or else shut down entirely for the night. Going out became a real problem. Jesse was witty and handsome. He had bought an Armani suit with the proceeds of his driving (though he never seemed to be getting enough together for an apartment of his own), and he loved the clubs, the chicest venues, the new restaurants. I lived off Columbus Avenue, in the center of Boston’s trendiest dining scene, and Jesse was at his best there, looking handsome, pronouncing on a wine, savoring a sauce.

  All this cost a bundle, of course, and since I was making the money, I invariably paid. But the excitement of being with the best-looking guy in the place starts to pale when you’re picking up his tab, night after night after night.

  It wasn‘t just the money, though. It was the girls. Girls who were supposed to be dropped off at a certain time were inexplicably late. Girls whose apartments were on Jesse’s way somewhere else. Somehow, I had a sneaking suspicion that I wasn’t the only woman in Boston succumbing to his California charms.

  He denied it all, of course. He soothed my worries with kisses and champagne and cocaine. I’d sigh, relent, and tell myself that it really was all right—but it wasn’t. Waking up with the late-afternoon sun slanting through my blinds, my mouth dry, my head feeling like a sledgehammer had taken up residence inside, and a nose filled with blood-encrusted snot, I was having a whole lot of second thoughts about my judgment.

  The trouble was that we never actually talked about anything. Not ever. We did things; we fucked; we ate and talked about the business when necessary; but other than that, we never talked. We certainly didn’t discuss anything as mundane as when he planned to stop freeloading off me.

  I knew that there was disappointment in Jesse, somewhere. I knew he felt that the world wasn’t giving him his due, that he deserved more than he was getting, and that I was somehow there in the mix, part of him feeling that he deserved to get something back. What that was, honestly, I don’t know. Certainly Jesse had never made any great contributions to the world that warranted his intense sense of entitlement.

  His disappointment made him restless. Even when he was with me, he was always moving—turning on the CD player, turning on the TV, pacing, talking, tapping, complaining, anything to keep from thinking, from dwelling on that narcissistic disappointment.

  I still am amazed at how forceful and strong I was with my clients, my drivers, my girls; and yet I lost all that strength and confidence when I was around Jesse. I spent month after month with this man—if you can call our loose liaison being together—and hated myself the entire time for not standing up to him.

  When I finally did, I learned another of life’s lessons: let someone into your life, and you’re handing them the means to hurt you on a silver platter.

  And he did.

  We had a fight, a dazzling, brilliant fight, with objects hurled and broken and the downstairs tenant pounding angrily on the door. The names Jesse called me were bad enough. The sneering references to my sexual preferences and performances were pretty awful. But the things that he said about me in the clubs, to other people, to people who mattered—I couldn’t understand how he could hate me so much to want to destroy me like that. I just didn’t get it.

  And it was humiliating, embarrassing in a way that I’d never been embarrassed before. I thought about wearing sunglasses all the time. I thought about not going out. I tried not to think about any of it.

  So he left, came back, left again, and came back again. My business and my popularity were growing, but here I was emotionally ensnared by a man with the temperament of a spoiled child.

  The irony is that I knew what I was doing. I could see it, I didn’t like it, and yet I kept doing it.

  And the whole time we were together, I can’t ever remember Jesse calling me Abby.

  That should have said it all.

  Escort Business Etiquette

  These days, after the school bus leaves, there’s peace in my house. Sunlight streams in through the living room windows, music is playing, and for a few minutes I could be the very picture of any stay-at-home mom. I tidy things up, make myself my own special coffee with cream and vanilla, and I think about how to spend my day. In some ways, once Sam leaves for school, my life isn’t all that different from what it had been before, back in what I some-times think of as the Bad Old Days.

  Except, of course, for the fact that last night I went to bed immediately after calling out the last girl, whereas in the past that was when the partying just got started. Then there’s also the fact that it is now eight o’clock in the morning, a time of day that I didn’t see all too often for a whole stretch of years.

  The drugs were part of it too, of course. You can’t do lines of coke all evening and expect to slide right off into a blissful sleep. But it was more than that; I really did feel that the night, the time after darkness fell, was when I came into my own. I’d stop putting out calls around midnight or one o’clock, and that was when my time truly began—or so I thought.

  If I was alone I’d sit and write—poetry, mostly, long tangled verses exploring the world as I saw it, trying to answer the questions I was constantly formulating. I had always loved to write, and those long silences after the frenzy of business finally gave me my space, my time.

  Often, though—probably three or four nights a week—someone would come by, and after I put the phones to bed we’d party. Wine and coke and Scrabble, the pillars of my nights. Often it was Robert, headed here after the bars closed at two, his leftover sales product in his pockets. He’d usually bring someone, and before long, it seemed, I had a lot of people who were happy to sit and discuss the secrets of the universe after hours chez moi.

  I never saw it the way that Jeannette did, as an intellectual salon; but perhaps it was. She always saw things in me that I never took seriously.

  As time went by, the Scrabble board began to disappear, and we mostly talked. I brought out my old books—James Dickey and Shelby Foote and Walker Percy. We argued about Southern versus Northern writers: who could claim which allegiance and what that meant. On the nights that I had too much pinot grigio, my drink of choice, I read aloud the poems and short stories that had filled my predawn hours of so
litude, and it became a critique group of sorts. We talked about immigration rules, the impending overpopulation of the planet, and Freud’s take on women.

  In retrospect, I don’t know how coherent we all were. I have a nasty suspicion that I get single-tracked once I’ve had too much to drink, but, lord, we had fun.

  Once in a great while I’d have become friendly enough with one of the girls who worked for me to invite her over on one of these nights. Usually I’d have her come by after her last call and give me my fee, and then she’d stay for the wine, the coke, and the company. That was how Jen and I became close at the beginning—she’d stop by and stay for Scrabble and conversation.

  I didn’t do that at first. In fact, I’ve always had a strong aversion to actually meeting the girls who work for me, but Jeannette insisted. After that I occasionally met some of my other women, though I was never comfortable doing that. I made few exceptions to this rule—though now I have several close friends who I met when they worked for Avanti. In general, though, as I said, I’ve wanted to keep the line firmly drawn between Work and Real Life. Between Peach and Abby. Between fantasy and reality.

  I know that at times this has seemed almost comical to people. Someone might be over, we’re talking, and I have to take a break to call a girl out or speak to a client. Then I turn back and resume whatever it is we’re doing, wherever it is we left off. I don’t talk about my work with anybody, because it’s just that: work. I don’t expect my programmer friends to bring up coding difficulties, and while my line of work may seem sexier and more interesting to a lot of people than writing code, frankly, it isn’t to me.

  In any case, I rarely meet the girls who work for me. Back then it was because of the distance I wanted to create; these days, it’s a matter of temperament, or lack of shared interests, or—well, okay, I’ll be honest—age. Most of them are young, in college or just out of it. Most of them haven’t been in some of the dark places I’ve been and haven’t the wisdom that comes from having been there.

  As I write this book, Massachusetts has just become the first state in the United States to legally perform gay marriages. I read an article written by a woman who had just married her long-term partner. She was responding to friends in the lesbian and feminist communities who were criticizing the marriage as buying into the status quo and abandoning their earlier sexual freedom. She said, in essence, middle age happens. We’re more concerned about mortgages and health care and parenting issues now than we are with sexual freedom and experimentation. In a sense, that’s true for me now, too. I played the game for a long time, but frankly, its discourses, philosophies, and problems simply aren’t relevant in my life anymore. I’ve moved on.

  And I know too much to go back.

  Also—and I probably only admit this to myself in those dark, predawn moments of honesty—there’s another issue at play here. I regularly send girls into places that I myself wouldn’t want to go. Uncomfortable places. Degrading places. Bad places. There’s a part of me that doesn’t feel all that good about that. Meeting them, knowing them, their lives and concerns, joys and personalities—that might make it worse.

  That might make it impossible.

  I’m not naïve enough to pretend that what I do is the most wholesome job on the planet. Mind you, I try to make it the best that it can be, but at the end of the day, it’s prostitution, and there aren’t a whole lot of ways to dress that up. If someone’s going to go into this line of work anyway, mine is probably the best service to work for, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the best calling in the world.

  I do believe that it makes a tremendous difference, my being a woman. I’ve heard horror stories about some of the services run by men in this town. Owners who are little more than pimps and help themselves to the services they offer—for free, of course, which lends a whole new meaning to the concept of sexual harassment on the job. There are drivers who take advantage of the girls, sell them drugs, take more than their cut from what the girls earn. Those are services run by men.

  There’s something inside those men, in the inner recesses of their psyches, that says it’s okay to use women, it’s normal to use women, it’s nothing personal. But they’re wrong: it’s always personal. These are human beings, not kilos of coke.

  They lie to the girls. They don’t screen their clients. They make the girls do all the negotiating for what acts will be performed, and at what price. They make them do a minimum number of calls whenever they sign on and force them to go to clients they don’t want to see. They tie the girls to them by getting them hooked on drugs, then owing them money. After a while, it just starts feeling hopeless to the girl, like she’ll never get out.

  I’ve heard more horror stories than I can even remember. I’ve learned things I never wanted to know.

  Valerie should have come to me first, but she didn’t. She was in her first year at Boston University and her parents had just gotten a divorce, so there was really no place to go home to anymore, and there was a lot less money around, as her parents were spending it tearing each other apart in court. So she decided to earn her own money.

  She worked at a bar on Columbus for a while, graduated to Hammersley’s, but injured her ankle and couldn’t work the hours. She did data entry at the school, but funding ran out and the job disappeared.

  The bills, however, did not.

  She looked in the Yellow Pages and picked out a service that was advertising for escorts. She was interviewed over the phone that afternoon and told that a driver would pick her up that night at six.

  She was thrilled. The advertisement had a couple of line drawings of slinky women in little black dresses, sipping champagne. This was, she thought, her entrée to Boston’s nightlife, all the glitter and excitement that she had felt was passing her by as she confined her own social life to the student union and the coffee shops on Commonwealth Avenue.

  So she put on the little black dress and the black lace underwear and the stockings with the seams up the back, and waited, a little breathlessly, for the driver to pick her up.

  He wasn’t very nice to her, to start with. He gave her the rules: she had to negotiate separately for anything that the client wanted, and she’d better get at least $60 for a blow job, and get it in her hand before each agreed-upon act. She had to give all of the money to the driver when she left the client’s house; the driver would give her her share, himself. Oh, and she’d better be fast, because he wasn’t supposed to wait for anyone for more than a half hour.

  This is the way it’s supposed to be, thought Valerie, and agreed. But it turned out that they didn’t have any immediate destination, and as they waited for the driver’s beeper to go off, he offered her a nip from his flask, a snort from his stash. When she refused, he told her it was required. When she refused a second time, he raped her.

  “Who was I going to complain to?” Valerie asked me, her voice forlorn. “I had a black eye from struggling with him, and he threw me out of the car. He said no guy would want to see me all beaten up like that. Where was I supposed to go? To the police? They’d laugh. Women who put themselves in situations like that get what they deserve, that’s what they’d say.”

  So much for the glitter of the nightlife. When she came to me—she liked the ad that said I was looking for women with education—I tried to send her only to my nicest clients, the really good guys, but there weren’t that many of them, and I knew she was working for another service as well. After a while, she stopped checking in. A few months later she called and asked for work, and I sent her to Jimmy Pearlstein, a nice guy over in Brookline who I knew would treat her well. She didn’t stay for the whole hour, and he wasn’t too happy with me when he called me back. “Shit, Peach, she looked like hell, and she kept asking for a tip. What’s with this tip thing?”

  After that, I never heard from her again, and I tried never to think of her. If I let myself go there, I’d see a whole gallery of them, frightened voices, pale faces, the women who passed through my
agency and disappeared.

  Some of they didn’t, I’m pretty sure, go on to bigger and better things.

  I’ve talked about this before, and I can’t say it enough. The women who make it are the ones with a plan. The ones who see working as an escort as a step on a journey that has a selected ultimate destination. The ones who have a real life somewhere else, with real dreams and plans. Those are the ones who stay healthy, who move on, who follow other dreams.

  But the ones who start seeing the work a long, neverending path, a run-on sentence, those are the ones who drop through the cracks. Those are the ones who could really haunt me if I allowed them to.

  I’ve had people I’m proud to have worked with. One woman went on to open her own theater company in Seattle. Another got a teaching certificate and is now at an elite private school in Virginia. Yet another is doing someone’s taxes for a whole lot of money in Manhattan. Jeannette had written novels before, and working for me enabled her to realize her dream of doing it full-time.

  I like seeing that: I like thinking that I was some sort of way station for them on their way to somewhere else, that what I did didn’t just not hurt them, but helped them.

  They help me keep the nightmares at bay.

  If I didn’t have women like them, I couldn’t keep doing this job, not even for the money. And I won’t kid you—if there’s a lot of money in being an escort, there’s even more in being a madam.

  But being a madam—especially one with ethics, which is how I like to see myself—well, that’s tricky. Like picking your way through a bog at midnight, and there’s never a right answer.

  Having been brought up in the South, I am—of course—a great fan of Emily Post. I bought her book, the big white one that keeps getting revised from time to time as new and different social quandaries present themselves. I buy the new ones every time they come out. I love the thought that there’s one place where you can find all the answers.