Madam Page 6

  But there’s no Emily Post guide to being a madam. The job doesn’t come with an instruction manual. Sometimes you just have to cross your fingers and hope that you’re doing the right thing, because, man, you never know for sure.

  But back to the differences between Avanti and the other services in Boston. Am I trying too hard to justify what I’m doing? I think not; I’m trying to be the best tour guide that I can.

  I think there’s some sort of leftover pimp mentality that infects men when they run a business like this one. They have no idea, not really, what they’re asking women to do out there: I do.

  I do, and that makes all the difference.

  I know what all this feels like, and I really have sympathy and empathy for the girls. I try to be honest about who I’m sending someone to. I try and tell her at the beginning what the client is likely to want from her, and be there for her to vent to afterward if it’s necessary. I tell her when someone is obnoxious, or has poor hygiene, or will not be nice to her. I can’t picture any of these guys who run services offering their shoulder for the girl to cry on.

  And I know that I get a whole different clientele just because I’m a woman, and I think my girls get treated differently because I’m a woman, too. When a guy talks to another guy about sex, there’s this inherent frat-sleaze connection between them, and that is sure to translate into how the client sees the girl.

  But I’m everything to my clients: confessor, mother, sister. I am the one who promises them escape, delight, pleasure, who extols their manhood, who respects their privacy, who finds whatever they want to be normal and acceptable. In so doing, I am the unattainable Eros that they all long to meet and make love to, and because they can’t, at some level they make love to me through my girls.

  I didn’t learn all of this at once, of course. It was a slow realization, this understanding of the relationship that I form with my clients. I’ve lost a few along the way because I made mistakes, but as I am writing this, almost all of my business is composed of regulars, guys who have been calling me for years.

  So I must be doing something right.

  The Belle of Boston

  Jesse and I didn’t really break up—not so that you’d notice. It was more like that old song, “Break Up to Make Up.” We wouldn’t see each other for weeks at a time, and then he’d be back again, acting as if nothing had ever happened.

  I should have shut the door in his face.

  I should have done a lot of things, I suppose, but I didn’t do any of them. I let him in, again and again, over and over, and never questioned the sinking feeling that accompanied his arrival. I was always too glad to see him, grasping at the illusion that there was something real and good between us. Even after that illusion died, my need for it kept its ghost alive, haunting my nights and stressing my days. I thought that I couldn’t have an emotional life apart from Jesse, and that’s always a recipe for disaster.

  It was a sort of drifting existence: he’d drift in and out at will, and I’d wait for him to make the decisions about how and when to reappear. Passive. Helpless. Unconscious.

  My social life wasn’t doing too badly by then, and frankly, that made my tolerance of Jesse more baffling. I had slowly started to become someone, and I was liking it quite a lot. Robert took me with him to clubs and I got to know the right people, got placed on the right lists, and before long there wasn’t anything important on the social scene to which I wasn’t being invited.

  My clients were amazing, too. You have to remember, I talked with these guys on the phone, night after night. Sure, they wanted to see girls, but at the same time a relationship was being forged between them and me.

  We talked about all sorts of things—their work, my work, what I was reading. When all else failed we could always fall back on bemoaning the current crop of Red Sox players and the promise of victory that was always just beyond our grasp. (They finally made it, of course, in 2004, and my business was never as bad as it was during the playoffs!) When you talk with someone that much, that often, you start to get close, even if in the most superficial of ways.

  I lied to them and they lied to me; but in some cases real truths were told, real vulnerabilities exposed, and something unique and unexpected happened, the sort of thing that only happens after midnight when you’re both tired, your nerves are frayed, and you need someone—anyone—to be there for you.

  Then there were the ones who were just plain fun. There was a restaurant in those days attached to one of the hotels downtown—very chic, very expensive, some sort of fusion cuisine—that catered to a select group of out-of-town visitors. The owners used to call me to have girls meet the clients at the restaurant, have a meal together, and then go up to the hotel rooms after dinner.

  Whenever I went to that restaurant, I felt like a celebrity. I was treated like royalty. I was their guest for the evening. It was really nothing more than the standard quid pro quo that happens in any business, but this was one that gave me an entrée into ever-spiraling levels of social interaction that I’d never have dreamed of attaining on my own.

  Then there were the private parties, so many of them: big loft apartments on the waterfront filled with fine art and smoke and muted conversations, lines of cocaine laid out on marble tabletops and sucked up through hundred-dollar-bill straws, outrageous revealing dresses on the women and Armani casual on the men. I was meeting writers, politicians, creative people, powerful people, and all the while some little voice inside me was squeaking about how scintillating it all was, and about how cool I was.

  Those were the parties that we all went to in those days, plus gallery openings and private shows, and I found myself—somewhat to my surprise, although I can imagine how disingenuous this must seem to you now—at the center of the most animated conversations, the recipient of even more invitations, offers, gifts.

  Out in the suburbs, working for Laura, I hadn’t realized just how positively my profession was perceived in other places. The suburbs of America are as white-bread, status quo, sexist, racist, and narrow-minded in their own way as any group of religious fanatics has ever been. Not that the world of drugs and Armani suits is socialist; it’s just more determined to be diverse, open-minded, and quirky.

  Here in the city I was seen as a woman of substance, a woman of power. I suppose that was when I really started seeing myself that way as well.

  Then there were the adventures, the countless, ongoing, gossiped-about sexual liaisons and events! Even apart from my work, my world, it seemed, was permeated with sexuality.

  I wasn’t beyond succumbing myself. I met strangers with dark eyes in smoky bars and ended up sliding my hands into the waistband of their trousers in narrow passageways leading to restrooms or kitchens. I leaned my head on a shoulder at a party and found myself half undressed in a taxi on my way someplace I had never been before, kissing someone whose name I couldn’t for the life of me recall. And I woke up on more than one occasion, my head pounding with a hangover, focusing blearily on the body next to me in the bed, wondering who he was and how he had come to be there.

  I went to parties, parties that played fast and loose with intimacy and ended up in the late mornings with naked bodies and haggard faces. I started to read erotica—Anais Nin and Henry James and Anne Rice and my personal favorite, Anonymous. The French writers from the turn of the century, drinking absinthe and smoking hashish, dining in restaurants that had heavy embroidered privacy curtains—I loved those books. An era where sex could be bawdy and still retain its mystique, where elegance and outrageous liaisons went hand in hand. I sighed over those books, I really did.

  Since I was acquiring a reputation, it was suddenly important to me to act the part. Whereas once I might have dallied with someone young and good-looking, I also realized that who I slept with affected people’s perceptions of me, a little like my mother’s admonitions, except in reverse. Back then, it was, Don’t sleep with anyone, what will people say? Nowadays it was, Sleep with the right people, other
wise what will people say?

  A slight shift in perception, nothing more.

  This shift had a lot more to do with not sleeping with certain people than it did with actually augmenting my list of sexual liaisons. In other words, I didn’t go out and decide to sleep with one person or another because it was the chic thing to do. Hell, I can barely wear clothes that someone else dictates is the chic thing to do, much less have fashion dictate anything else in my life. Au contraire, I like to think that I may have been the trendsetter in such matters.

  In the past, I’d used the excuse of too much partying to not really mind who I woke up with the next morning. Now I suddenly realized that this was like eating fast food: initially satisfying, but not really good for you. And if people know you eat fast food, they’re not going to ask your opinion about a gourmet meal. If you’re going to be a respected chef, you don’t eat at McDonald’s.

  I wanted to be respected in my line of work, so I started trying very hard to actually decide who I was going to sleep with before I actually did it.

  Not a bad policy for anyone, I think.

  Jesse was there all the time, too, on the periphery, coming back to me when it suited him. I tried to ignore him, and, when that didn’t work, I obsessed instead. I stood around the corner from the apartment he had finally rented over in Bay Village, lurking, lighting cigarettes and putting them out again, watching to see who he went home with, who he woke up with.

  The pain of seeing him with someone else was as titillating as it was hurtful. While my heart seemed to turn over inside my chest, my nipples hardened and there was a warmth spreading in my jeans that I couldn’t seem to get by any other means.

  The reality was that my life, everything I did or didn’t do, was under Jesse’s influence. I couldn’t eat something without wondering whether it was something he would like. I couldn’t finally go to sleep in the mornings without wishing that he were with me, and having wretched painful needy thoughts about where he might be.

  I couldn’t see a movie without wanting to discuss it with him, and this in glaring defiance of the fact that we had never ever discussed anything at all during our time together. I couldn’t do anything, say anything, think anything, without immediately relating it to Jesse in some way.

  I wasn’t totally alive when he wasn’t there. I was in a sort of stasis where one goes through the motions, unable to see any part of my life except through the prism of how Jesse would see it. I was marking time until the next telephone call, the next encounter, the next time he would be part of who I am so that I could really feel alive.

  He had gotten a beeper by then—God knows why he thought he needed it, though I can make a pretty educated guess—and I can remember with a sort of deep despairing shame the nights, too countless to quantify, when I punched his beeper number into my telephone keypad, over and over and over again. Expecting him to answer. Growing wretched, restless, and upset when he did not. It was a charade, and it was a charade that took a tremendous toll on me.

  When he finally came around, I turned into an accusing harridan, a bitch from hell, hardly someone with whom anyone, especially Jesse, would want to spend time. Someone I myself didn’t recognize.

  When I saw him, it was just so that I could hurl accusations at him. “Where have you been? Why didn’t you answer my calls?”

  “Baby, I’m busy.”

  “Why are you doing this to me?” I wailed.

  He looked into my eyes. “You’re doing it to yourself,” he said.

  I was too angered by the truth of it, in too much pain by the sting of it, to be reasonable. “You hate me!” I cried. “After everything I’ve done for you.”

  He looked at me with something that might have been pity in another person. “Look what you’re doing to yourself,” he said curtly. “Look at who you’re turning into.” He closed the door quietly behind him.

  Just in time for the vase I had thrown to shatter against it.

  When I wasn’t thinking about Jesse, I was thinking about myself. I’ll be the first to admit it: in the beginning of owning my business, I was about as self-absorbed as they come. I’d call out the last girl for the night and, more often than not, pour a glass of Pinot Grigio and do a couple of lines, even if no one was coming over, thinking I was pretty pleased with myself. It made Jesse’s unreasonableness even more inexplicable. I was an outlaw, under the radar, doing this thrilling, sophisticated, and illegal thing, and doing it well.

  Of course, there was the down side to being the coolest thing around. Waking up in the mornings (or, indeed, in the afternoons) was getting harder and harder, but I shrugged that off as a necessary component of my very exciting life. I don’t think that I saw noon for months at a time. No matter: that was what we cool people did.

  There was only one window in my bedroom, and it was covered—permanently—with a thick velvet drape, elegant and giving the feeling that one was inside a cocoon. I entertained in my living room, held my salon, laughed and smoked and ate, got high and read, but it was in my bedroom that I worked, with my books and magazines and television, sitting on my brass double bed surrounded by my music and my comforts, ignoring the world into which I sent my girls.

  It was never ever daytime in my bedroom.

  Callgirl Salon

  That September a woman called and asked about working for me. She’d left a couple of messages in the daytime—as if I would ever pick up the phone in the daytime!—and I finally talked to her. She sounded cultured and both anxious and amused, a combination I found fascinating. She was older than most of my employees; she said that she was teaching somewhere and only wanted part-time hours. I offered to send her out right away, but she demurred, insisting on meeting me first.

  “Sure, right, okay,” I said, carelessly, and made a date for lunch, which I then promptly forgot about. I partied after work that night and the next, and on the third day she called again. “I waited for you. Did I misunderstand our appointment?”

  Shit. Okay. “No, no, you won’t believe this, but I sprained my ankle,” I said, glibly. “Let’s try for tomorrow.”

  There was that trace of amusement in her voice again. “Okay, I’ll be there.” As if she knew already that I wasn’t going to be. “Third time’s the charm,” I promised when she called the following afternoon, and it did look as though I was going to have to see her, if only to get her to leave me alone. She clearly was not planning on going away anytime soon.

  We met at Legal’s, but went outside to talk. She was pretty—not the standard twenty-something gorgeous, like some of my girls, but beautiful in a refined, European way. When she smiled, her face lit up. She had studied overseas, spoke a number of different languages, talked about Descartes—for God’s sake, here she is interviewing to be a callgirl, and she’s talking about Descartes! I was entranced.

  More importantly, I already had a niche for her. She decided on a work name—Tia—and I sent her that night to my nicest and easiest client. I didn’t tell her for three years how much she had intimidated me that first day.

  To tell the truth, when I met Jeannette, all I could think was that it could have been me, there, with the academic degrees, wearing culture like a sweater draped carelessly around her shoulders. I might have gone that route myself, and I was looking at who I might have become if I had. Sort of a doppelgänger effect.

  She was smart and elegant and writing a novel at the time, trying to get out of teaching and make enough money to undo the financial damage some asshole boyfriend had done. That was a little too close to home for me; I didn’t talk about it much, but we did talk about other things. She became one of my first really close women friends. Somehow, she brought out the best in me. She listened to my poetry—I used to call her up in the middle of the night, waking her sometimes to read to her; and she listened, not like everybody else did, in order to move on, but she really listened. When I was with Jen I wanted to be better, to be smarter, to stretch myself. I started looking askance at the tabloids and c
elebrity magazines that surrounded me, and I began rereading some of the classics that I had put aside when I decided that I needed fluff to insulate me from too much thinking.

  Eudora Welty writes somewhere about the importance of places—that there are places that become second homes, spiritual homes, which are more real than our actual ones. I wonder if you can extrapolate her sense of space into people. If so, Jeannette became, and was for a certain period of time, a spiritual home for me. I mean that intellectually, but also, oddly enough, in a sort of religious sense as well. She was Catholic and talked frequently about her connection to her church, its liturgy, its spirituality. And when she did I found awakening in myself a desire to recover my own Lutheran roots. If it did so much for her, maybe there was something there that I had missed.

  She had published novels in the past and had just started thinking about another when we met. That taught me something, too: watching her set a goal, work for it, and achieve it, even though it took years; watching that book go from an idea that she tossed around at my afterwork soirées, fueled by the French red wine she insisted on drinking and the lines that we did as she talked about it and worked out scenarios. Years later, The Illusionist was published, and I can still read passages from it and remember the same words first being spoken in my apartment in the Bay Village.

  She did well with the clients because she attracted guys who were smart and classy, the kind of guys I wanted using my service. She had a couple of regulars, one of whom even bought bottles of her favorite wine to keep on hand for her visits. I was only mildly shocked when I discovered that the wine went for $150 a bottle. She made guys feel that a little bit of class had touched their lives.

  Of course, not all of the clients wanted that, and as the months passed I started sensing a little wariness in her, a certain feeling that her days as an escort were numbered. She was the kind of girl who survives the life, precisely because it is not her life, and after the first year together I felt her pulling away gradually but firmly. It took her another year and a half to finally give it up; but I think that I knew she was leaving long before she herself did.