and extremely challenging. I read the poems as I always did, not really reading but reciting them by heart. I was watching the class, looking for reactions that I could use in the discussion that was going to follow. And then, suddenly, for a scary split second – it honestly was no more than that – I was back on the boat, sitting and sipping wine after getting dressed, having a packet of money pressed into my hand.
And I liked it. As though seeing it all in fast-motion, I stepped back from where I was standing, stepped out of my body and looked at myself, and I liked what I saw. I liked my professional competence, the fact that I was teaching something important and teaching it well. And I also liked the secret knowledge that the night before I had been paid to be sexy, beautiful, desirable. I liked both sides of myself. I liked them a lot.
These people, my students, listened to poetry that they fiercely believed had no place in their lives, simply because I had asked them to. I had built up a measure of trust with them over the weeks and months of this course so that I could ask them to listen to archaic words and find the truths spoken through them. They trusted me. I was an authority figure.
In fact, half of the class called me “Doctor.” The authority figure to the fore. It was a little scary. What if I was too much of an authority figure to be sexy? What if I couldn’t do another call for Peach? What if I went on a call and got rejected? What if Bruce had been an exception? What if I really was too old for all this? Would I end up remembering that first night and becoming bitter because I had glimpsed something that I wanted and couldn’t have? Wouldn’t it have been better, if that were to be the case, to never have started at all?
So when I called Peach later that afternoon, I told her once again – and somewhat more firmly – that I wanted to meet her in person.
She didn’t like it. She fought it. As I would find out later, she never liked meeting any of the girls, not at first. Sometimes not ever. She always waited until she had already formed an opinion of them through the telephone, through reports from the clients. I never knew why. Maybe seeing them would make the whole endeavor too real to her. Maybe she could keep some distance as long as both her employees and her clients remained disembodied voices on the other end of a telephone line.
But the reality – the necessary reality of her job – was that she sent some girls, knowingly, into some pretty awful places, and some even more awful situations. She had to. As she said to me once, in a curiously unguarded moment, “Jen, if I ever really thought about it, I could never send anyone anywhere.” I think that maybe her job was easier for her if she didn’t have to visualize them, feel that she had really encountered them, acknowledged them as individuals. At the end of the phone, a girl could be a list of statistics and lies: her measurements, her height and weight, the color of her eyes, the length of her hair, her approximate age. Add an invented abbreviated history (“She’s sweet, just moved here from Kansas to go to school.”), all the information adapted and re-adapted, tailored afresh for each client. And the clients were consistently (and, I thought at first, a little naïvely) surprised that Peach could meet their specifications so exactly.
A brief aside, a matter of mild interest: here’s a fact: Men can’t guess a woman’s age. There has to be some brain cell in men that doesn’t activate, some deficit encoded in male DNA, this inability to look at a woman and make reasonable chronological conclusions about her. Or maybe it’s just a result of intense sexual arousal, when, as we all know, only one head is fully functional. But in any case, they can’t tell how old a woman is. Especially if she’s already given them a number.
I was a few months away from turning thirty-four when I started working for the agency, but Peach’s assistant Ellie immediately took care of that.
The day after my first call with Bruce, I spoke with Peach when I called to confirm that I was available that evening. As it turned out, Peach herself wasn’t. “It’s my night off, I’m going out,” she said. “Don’t worry, I told my assistant Ellie about you, she’ll be talking to you shortly.” It made me a little nervous, but I had psyched myself up – and my bank account was reminding me that it wasn’t the moment yet to take a night off. Besides, if I chickened out now, I might never call again. I was on a roll. I had to take advantage of it.
Ellie was working the phones and called me around seven to take notes. She needed my general description, hopefully to connect it with a client’s request; and she asked me my age. Her reaction was direct and no-nonsense. “No way. No one wants to see someone who’s over thirty,” she said. I tried to tell her the number didn’t matter. I tried to explain that at work I was always mistaken for an undergraduate rather than a faculty member. I might have been thirty-three, but I didn’t look it.
Apparently the number mattered to Ellie. “These guys have no idea what anything over thirty looks like, they’re morons with only one thing in their little pea brains.” Ellie, as I was to discover, had a cynical view of the clientele. And, come to think of it, of life, too. “Even twenty-eight, twenty-nine, that’s pushing it, way old to them. I can’t get you a call if I tell them you’re thirty-three.”
“Okay.” I wasn’t going to argue. She knew more about it than I did. New game, new rules, I was willing to learn. I later found out that Ellie, herself, had only just turned twenty.
She was still talking. “We’ll say you’re twenty-four, that way you can be in grad school, the intellectual thing is a turn-on for some of these guys. You’ll be great with the smart ones; they’re always asking for someone who’s in school.”
Worked for me. Got me a client that night, in fact, a soft-spoken engineer from New Delhi. And after that, Peach generally told clients that I was anything from twenty-two to twenty-nine, depending on who the guy was and what he wanted. I thought that twenty-two was a little over the top, but none of the men I saw ever questioned the veracity of what she said.
I have to say, though, that in spite of my confidence in my looks, I was a little spooked by the age issue. After all, the common perception of prostitutes is that they are young, even underage sometimes, the cheerleader sort. If they were of the femme fatale type, it was always on the Lolita end of the spectrum. I had seen Pretty Woman, okay? She was young, young enough to still be idealistic, as the movie was quick to point out. I’d also seen Half Moon Street, but it was careful to indicate that Sigourney Weaver’s age and intelligence were the exception, that even her clients weren’t initially sure she was what they wanted. Julia Roberts’ character – young, hip, fast-talking, and sweet – was the conventional norm. The hooker with the heart of gold.
I was not young, hip, fast-talking, or sweet, and I had no illusions about the state of my heart. I wasn’t going to fit into the mold. That made me uneasy. After Peter the Rat Bastard, I really didn’t need another rejection.
The funny thing is that when I think about all the processing, all the thinking, all the planning that I did when I was starting out, there was never a moment when I doubted that I could do this. I sat in the dormitory in London staring at my notes for the following morning’s lecture, and I felt nervous about how the lecture would go over in another culture, what sort of questions people would be asking me, that sort of thing. I sat there feeling nervous, and even then half of my brain was rehearsing the lecture and the other half was considering whether or not to become a prostitute. It was an odd juxtaposition, and yet I never for one moment wondered whether I could.
I just knew. I knew that I was pretty, but my confidence really didn’t have a lot to do with that. It was more along the lines of knowing that I was powerful. I had had a succession of boyfriends – and, let’s be honest here, girlfriends too – before the rat bastard, and they all claimed that I was the best lover they’d ever had. Well, okay, maybe you’ve heard that too, perhaps they were just saying what they thought I wanted to hear. I’m willing to consider the possibility. I’ll grant you that they didn’t all mean it.
But you know it when you’re good at something, really good, you know it viscerally, in your muscles and your cells and your blood, at some non-rational and yet absolutely certain level. I knew I was good at sex, at romance, at seduction. It was something innate, something I didn’t think about. When I