first encounters. A little clumsy, a little awkward, and the thought occurring midway through that perhaps you don’t really like this person all that much after all.
It happens in real life all the time.
Of course, my situation had a certain advantage over real life. I could leave after an hour. In real life, you’re stuck with him for somewhat longer.
A lot of the clients told me what to do, which I found a little off-putting. I’ve never dealt too well with being told what to do. Not in real life, anyway. It didn’t matter: in this context it was acceptable. They got off on it. Sit here, do this, take that off. Do that again. Do it harder. Do it some more. Stand up, kiss me here, turn around, bend over.
Maybe nobody listened to them in real life. Maybe this was the only power they ever felt.
There was a guy out in the suburbs, up in North Andover, a handsome middle-aged African-American who I saw from time to time. After a semi-successful three quarters of an hour spent on his bed, he would make out a check (previously cleared with Peach, of course; this tends to be a cash-only business), always with something of a flourish. He winked at me as he added on the comment line that it was for “purchase of art work.” I guess that I qualified.
There was a ridiculously young man in South Boston, nice, who offered me a light beer and then never gave me a chance to drink it.
There was my first hotel client, a regular who visited Boston once a month on business. He was very busy, he informed me, gesturing toward the open laptop on the coffee table with papers scattered all around it. He was as good as his word, too, loudly encouraging me through an energetic blowjob, offering a ten-dollar tip on top of the agency fee after I’d finished. I was out of there in just under twenty minutes. It was eight-thirty at night, I was well-dressed and feeling attractive, walking down a hotel corridor, with one hundred and fifty dollars that I had made in less time than it had taken me to get dressed.
I had been firm with Peach when she called me with the hotel job. I had this idea of guys just passing though Boston, sitting in a hotel, looking up an escort service, maybe not being as careful as they should be. The one thing, I knew, that would bring me back down to earth with a resounding thud would be for me to get arrested. I was willing to have sex so that I could make a living. I wasn’t willing to give up my real career, however, and an arrest would do that in a heartbeat. “I only want regulars,” I told her. “I only want to see guys that you know.”
“It’s okay, Matt’s a regular,” she said, her voice comforting. “He’s fine, he’s been with us for over a year.”
“Okay.” I hesitated. “But, Peach, just for the record – I never want to see a new client. Ever. I just can’t take that chance.”
“Oh, honey,” she said. “I understand.”
There was the client in Brookline Village who extended his time to a second hour, and used the extra time to take me out for Chinese food after we’d had sex. Very sweet. Double the money, and an expensive dinner with someone I probably would not have chosen to date under different circumstances – but not altogether unpleasant.
Certainly not as unpleasant as some of the dates I’d been on in the past.
None of these men had a particularly scintillating personality. Most of them were, to be honest, incredibly unmemorable. One of them was gruff and pushy. Another kept following up his remarks with, “Oh, you probably don’t understand that. Like, who am I talking to here, Einstein or something?” I was new to the profession; I let that one get to me and couldn’t suppress a response. “True,” I agreed, the third time he said it. “Einstein’s doctorate wasn’t in anthropology; mine is.” He was pretty much quiet, after that.
But the reality is that, all in all, they weren’t bad people. Ordinary, marginally attractive, with questionable social skills, yes. Dull, predictable, full of insecurities that they projected onto me, sure. They weren’t unfamiliar, or scary, or detestable. I had dated men just like them, in the past, and for no compensation.
One Thursday – about one month after I’d started working regularly for Peach, doing about three or four calls a week – I was nearing the end of the On Death and Dying semester. This was my favorite time of all, a time to see what issues I had raised, what ideas I had sparked, what creativity I had unleashed. From the beginning of the semester, students knew that part of their grade would come from a final project, to be done either individually or as part of a group, something that had gripped them, interested them, brought out their passion. I saw amazing things, when projects were presented.
I was not disappointed on this Thursday.
Karen, one of the few students in the class who was not in the nursing program, had done a project on her own. She had gone to a hospice and interviewed dying AIDS patients, recording the interviews on tape. While she talked with them, Karen – who was a professional artist – drew their portraits (all of which she later gave to the subjects, a generous gesture that was a whole story in itself).
I don’t think that there was a person in that room who was not mesmerized by what was happening in front of them. The voices on the tape filled the space around us, strong and frightened, peaceful and angry… We listened to their words and stared at these achingly beautiful faces, these haunted eyes, these hollowed cheeks. I looked around the room, seeing tears, seeing entranced attention, seeing compassion, and my own heart swelled.
Then – how can I make sense of this? – in this wonderful, sacred moment, suddenly my mind flashed back to the night before, to the apartment in Chestnut Hill and the sleek Scandinavian furniture and the guy who was saying, “You teach a class about death? Man, that’s hot! Death’s the best aphrodisiac of all!”
I pushed the image away immediately and blocked it out fast, shocked by its intrusion into this moment. I listened to a man talk about losing his friends, about having his mother afraid to touch him, and my cheeks were flaming. In the midst of this important moment, while doing exactly what I knew that I had been born to do, I had left. I had left as surely as if I had opened the door and gone through it. I had betrayed Karen’s beautiful work, and I had betrayed myself.
I didn’t know what to do with that knowledge.
I didn’t want to think about it.
I tried to forget it.
* * * * * *
That night, if you believe in direct punishment immediately after a misdeed, you would be vindicated. I was punished. I went on a call to Back Bay.
Boston’s Back Bay is old brownstones, old families, old money. They are like the apartments of Paris and Budapest – inherited, not sold, and certainly never rented.
It is Commonwealth Avenue at its tree-lined, sweeping best, not the Comm. Ave. I lived near in Allston, with the sound of the creaky Green Line train and the Hispanic markets and the Russian pharmacies. This was Comm. Ave. down near the Public Gardens, where it was modeled on Haussman’s boulevards in Paris and almost makes one believe that one is there.
It is Beacon Street, with twisted wrought iron fences and staircases and balconies; it is Marlborough Street, with fanlights over heavy oaken doorways.
It is gaslights on corners and the quiet swish of traffic sounds coming up from Storrow Drive.
You walk along those streets and you wonder about who lives behind the mullioned windows, behind the thick velvet draperies. You imagine that it must be people of culture, people who discuss Rimbaud and Verlaine – or Hofstadter and Minsky – over snifters of brandy on a winter’s night.
And, to be honest, I did have some small margin of experience, at least with Beacon Street in the Back Bay. While I was still doing my doctoral coursework I had spent a couple of semesters as a teaching assistant for a professor who lived there, and it was to his apartment that I frequently delivered corrected term papers. The apartment was long and dark, the walls covered with huge dismal oil paintings framed in thick gold gilt frames, each frame nearly touching the next, so that you could