Callgirl

JENNY ANGELL

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

AVON

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This ebook edition 2007

First published in the U.S.A by

The Permanent Press, New York, NY, 2004

First published in Great Britain by

HarperCollinsPublishers 2007

Copyright © Jenny Angell 2007

Jenny Angell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Extract from Madam © Jenny Angell 2007.

This is taken from uncorrected material and does not necessarily reflect the finished book.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2009 ISBN: 9780007227886

Version: 2018-05-09

Contents

Title Page Introduction Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Prologue Night One Chez Peach Acknowledgments About the Author Copyright About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

People ask so many questions about it. You did that? You’re kidding, right? How did you start? What’s it really like? What kinds of people use the service? What kind of girls work for it?

Men, especially, are utterly fascinated by the subject. They want to talk about it, they ask the same questions over and over, they can’t get enough information. It’s like getting a glimpse into some mysterious semi-forbidden world, a world caricatured by pornography and attacked by conservatives and speculated about by just about everybody. Men get a vicarious sexual frisson thinking about it. Women wonder what it would be like to have someone pay – and pay well – for something they routinely give away for another kind of currency.

And, inescapably, people look at me and get a little scared. I could be – I am – one of them. I am their sister, their neighbor, their girlfriend. I’m nobody’s idea of what a whore looks like. Maybe that’s why I’m scary.

They want callgirls to be different, identifiable. That keeps them safe.

But the reality, of course, is that usually we’re not. Oh, the girls on the streets at night, yeah, with them, you know. But to be honest, those girls scare the shit out of me. I was out one night with Peach and we locked the car doors when we drove past them, and we’re supposedly in the same business. The truth is, we have nothing in common.

But callgirls – women who work for escort services, especially expensive ones, especially those run by other women – we don’t look any different than anyone else. Not even always prettier. So we’re scary: because, you know, we could be you, too.

Maybe we are.

* * * * * *

I hate using literature to refer to television, but I have to here. These days I regularly watch a program called The West Wing, an intelligent, witty, politically-aware and humanely sensitive weekly drama. I’m impressed with the characters, with their thoughtfulness and their dedication.

Yet in an early episode, a character articulates to a callgirl the same assumptions that appear to be virtually universal: that she has no ethics to speak of, that she would do anything for money, that she, essentially, is her profession. And that her profession is nothing to be proud of.

Who else among us would tolerate such an assumption?

Please hear this. Callgirls have ethics. We make decisions like everybody else does, based on our own religious and/or moral convictions. We are Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Socialists, and Libertarians. Some of us are kind to small animals. We are neither sex-obsessed nor nymphomaniacal. We have relationships, we build trust, and we keep secrets. We are daughters, sisters, and mothers; we are wives.

The reality is that men need us. And they don’t want to need us. So they blame us for it. It’s why Muslim women have to be hidden from men – it’s their fault, apparently, that the men feel tempted by them. It’s why “hookers” are amoral – because their job is to cater to that which is amoral in all of us.

So – try to put all of that aside. All your assumptions, all your conditioning. For just a little while, free yourself of your guilt, your prejudices, your judgments. Then you can hear my story.

* * * * * *

In 1995 I was close to receiving my doctorate in social anthropology and was anticipating full-time, tenure-track employment at some recognized institution of higher learning, eventually leading to a professorship. What I got, instead, was a series of lecturer positions, because most universities were no longer offering professorships, or offering very few. It was, after all, the nineties, and grants and other resources weren’t stretching as far as they once had. I was willing to keep at it, however, because it was my chosen profession. It was my vocation.

When I started working for an escort service I was teaching classes on a semester-by-semester basis, being paid – at the end of the semester – the less-than-princely sum (before taxes) of thirteen hundred dollars per class.

The woman I have called Peach ran an agency that could be considered a mid-level escort service. Let’s see: how can I explain it? She didn’t get the rock stars when they came to town, but she did get their entourages. She got people who owned companies, but not necessarily companies anyone had ever heard of. She got people with condos at the Four Seasons, but not luxury penthouses. She never got clients who wanted a quick blowjob in the car; but she also rarely got the clients who wanted to take the girl to the Bahamas with them for a week, either.

Peach ran ads looking for employees, and hers stood out from others in that she required a minimum of some college education. The fact is that she helped pay off a whole lot of graduate student loans. She had a specialty niche: she did well with clients who wanted intelligent conversation along with their sex. She inspired loyalty in both her callgirls and her clients, and she tried to be fair to everyone.

Her clients were university faculty, stockbrokers, and lawyers. They were underworld characters who offered to “fix” problems for her and computer geeks who couldn’t tell a C-cup from a C-drive. They owned restaurants, nightclubs, and health spas. They were disabled, busy, socially inept, about to be married. They saw girls in offices, restaurants, boats, and their own marriage beds, in seedy motels in strip malls and at suites in the Park Plaza Hotel. They were the most invisible, unremarkable group of men in Boston, having in common only that they could afford to spend two hundred dollars for an hour of company.

They used the time for which they paid in a variety of ways, and that is my usual response when someone – and someone will, inevitably, in any conversation about the profession – says something judgmental about the perceived degradation of exchanging sex for money. Because, in my experience, that doesn’t make sense.

You think I’m just manipulating semantics here, don’t you? I’m not: hear me out, and you’ll see that it’s not mere spin. Many people in a number of professions are paid by the hour, right? Employers hire consultants, for example, on the basis of certain areas of expertise that the consultant can offer, and that the employer wants to have, use, leverage, whatever. The employer – or client – pays for the consultant’s time by the hour. The consultant performs certain pre-arranged and mutually agreed-upon tasks for the client during that time.

The consultant is using his expertise and experience to create something for the client; he is not “selling” his expertise. He is a skilled professional possessing an area of knowledge for which there is a demand and for which the client is willing to pay a pre-determined rate per hour. What he is selling, in point of fact, is his time. He keeps the expertise; the client keeps the product; but the hours put into the project are gone.

A callgirl is a consultant, using her expertise and experience in seduction and giving pleasure to fulfill a verbal contract with a client who is paying her by the hour to complete an agreed-upon project. She is a skilled professional possessing an area of knowledge for which there is a demand, and for which the client is willing to pay her a pre-determined rate per hour. She is using her expertise and experience to create something for the client; she is not “selling” her expertise, or the tools that she uses to implement her work.

If there’s such a gulf between these two people, if there is more degradation in one than in the other, I’d like to have you explain it to me, because frankly I don’t see it.

I have women friends who are waitstaff, waitstaff in so-called sophisticated restaurants on Newbury Street and Columbus Avenue and on the waterfront, and I’m sorry, but I would never put up with what they have to endure every night. Not for any amount of money.

Speaking of the money, it’s a pretty good hourly rate. Remember that what we get, we don’t have to share with anybody – no state or federal tax, no social security. I take that back: it’s a damned good hourly rate.

Occasionally there is no sex. Lonely men sometimes are just looking for company, for someone to listen to them: that’s worth the fee. I remember an early scene in Frankie and Johnny, when Al Pacino, newly released from prison, hires a woman to “spoon” with him – allow him to fall asleep curled into the curve of her body, her arms around him. I always found that scene incredibly touching.

Some clients use the time for public appearances at restaurants or concerts, either because they genuinely want company for these activities, or because they want to show off their ability to date a pretty girl. Some clients mistake us for therapists and use the time to talk, to have someone listen to them, to their problems, to their emptiness.

However, the reality is that most clients do want sex. Some want it quickly and efficiently, after which the girl is free to go; others want it as part of a date-like interlude and argue if they think they’ve received a minute less than they paid for. And there’s every imaginable situation in between.

* * * * * *

I’ve changed all the names in this book, except my own, for a number of reasons that I’m sure you can appreciate. But it’s not make-believe. These people are real. I am real. This all happened, in Boston, in the mid to late nineties. Promise.

So … are you one of the curious, the inquiring minds who want to know? Do you want to know what we think, how we feel, who we are?

Then welcome to my world.

ONE

“Mind the gap … Mind the gap!” I was standing on a subway platform in London, in the Underground, listening to a disembodied voice telling me in the tones of a not-too-friendly nanny to watch my step. I appreciated the concern, if not its delivery.

So I stood there dutifully minding the gap, and I thought about the newspaper advertisement folded into the shoulder bag I carried. It felt conspicuous, as though everyone else on the train platform could tell exactly what was in there, and what it said.

I had picked up the Phoenix just before leaving Boston, on an impulse that wasn’t really an impulse but was disguised as one anyway. My impulses usually are. I was in London for a week, lecturing at the London School of Economics, and my mind wasn’t exactly on my work.

It should have been, of course. It was an honor and a privilege to be here, and my professional life shouldn’t be impacted just because I was having problems in my personal life. But that’s the way that it always works, isn’t it? You think you can separate it all out, put your life into neat little compartments where nothing overlaps with anything else. You think that, and you’re wrong.

My personal life was screaming for attention. Loudly. I needed money. I needed a lot of money, and I needed it quickly.

I needed the money because Peter, my most recent boyfriend, had not only decided to fly to San Francisco to meet up with some ex (whom he had been fucking behind my back the whole time we were together, as it turned out), but had also emptied my checking account before leaving. A prince among men.

Rent was due. The decimated bank account had held all the money I had to live on until the end of the semester. That was when the two community colleges where I taught sociology elective classes would be paying me. I had to live within those parameters, with budgets planned well in advance and no extra or surprise expenses allowed.

Peter’s desertion decidedly qualified as a surprise expense.

In any case, the end of the semester was two months off. Which was why I needed a lot of cash.

I dealt with the crisis in my usual way. I spent one night getting very drunk and feeling very sorry for myself, and I got up the next morning, did what I could to deal with my hangover, and made a list. I love lists, I always have. Lists give me the illusion of being in control. I listed every possible way I could get the money I needed.

It was a depressingly short list.

The one thing I was not going to do was ask for assistance in any way. Not from my family and not from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. I had been the one to make the bad judgment call, it made no sense to ask anyone else to pay for my mistakes. So even though I had written down the words “government assistance” on my list, I ignored them and moved on.

I frowned at the remaining items, crossed off “childcare,” both since I’m really incompetent with children and also the pay was too low to make much of a difference, and frowned again at what was left.

I was going to have to try one of these options. I didn’t have a lot of choices left. I took a deep breath, and I went to work.

I called a number I had found in some campus newspaper, Boston University or Northeastern or something, the ubiquitous one we’ve all seen, the one that is looking for people to sit in cubicles and respond to sex chatline calls. Talk sex, convince them that you’re hot for them, that sort of thing.

Well, the rat bastard boyfriend had told me that I had a sexy voice, so I figured it was worth a try. I’d only do it this once, of course.

I clearly hadn’t given the idea enough thought, because I was totally unprepared for the sleaziness of my interview. I hadn’t imagined ahead of time the really scary visuals: the rows of tiny cubicles, with women sitting in them wearing headsets and talking; they never stopped talking. Lights were flashing on their phones. Mostly they were middle-aged, with sagging flesh and garish makeup and an air of indifference that might have been cruel if it hadn’t felt so hopeless.

And I hadn’t visualized the way-too-young greasy guy with way too many piercings who never even looked at me as he squeezed words out past a toothpick sticking to his lower lip. His eyes didn’t leave the skin magazine he was thumbing through. “Okay, honey. Eight bucks an hour, two calls minimum.”

“What does that mean, two calls minimum? Two calls an hour?”

That earned me a glance. I couldn’t tell if it was amusement or pity. “Two calls minimum at a time.”

I stared at him. “You mean keep two different people on the phone…?”

“Yeah, that’s right.” He sounded bored beyond belief. “If one of ’em wants you to be a Ukrainian gymnast and the other wants you to be a tattooed lesbian, you go with it. Time’s money. Want the job?”

I was still stuck imagining the reactions of the clients when you got them mixed up. It was indescribable. Sure. For eight dollars an hour. This could happen.

So I gave up, tore up the list, and panicked again for a while about the money thing. The bills kept coming in, as they have a habit of doing: time stops for no bankruptcy. I could read the official-looking print through the rusted gap in my mailbox: computer-generated, thin envelopes. Some had a strip of red around the edges. No need to open them. I knew what they said.

Suitably enough, one of the classes I was teaching was a sociology elective called On Death and Dying. Suitably, of course, because I was accompanying it with such dark thoughts. I would break the class into discussion groups and stare over their heads out the window and feel that cold claw of fear somewhere in my stomach. One of those weeks we talked about suicide.

It didn’t sound like such an impossible option.

And then, slowly at first, my thoughts kept going back to the newspaper. I sometimes looked in the After Dark section of the Phoenix, even after I decided that I couldn’t possibly be both a Ukrainian gymnast and a tattooed lesbian, and I wasn’t stopping anymore at the chatline number ads.

The next pages, the ones after the telephone lines, were for the escort services.

I’d look, and then I’d shut the paper and let my cat Scuzzy sleep on it while I pretended that it wasn’t there, and corrected student essays instead. And yet … and yet.

Why not?

Was it such an impossible idea? Did I really want to add an extra fifty hours a week to my schedule, working at a Borders bookstore or a Starbucks coffeehouse for just over minimum wage? Those were the next options on the list, after all. I’d even interviewed. Borders said I could start any time.

It was around then that a voice in my head started speaking up. It sounded suspiciously like my mother’s voice, and the voice was not happy at all about the direction my thoughts were taking. It was interesting that the voice hadn’t spoken up when I looked into the sex-on-the-phone idea, but that was another issue altogether. The voice was certainly going into overtime now.

Just wait, I said to the voice. Hold on a moment. Let’s think about this. You can sit in a cubicle and pretend to be having sex with two (or more, as seemed to be the assumption) men at once, keeping them on the phone for as long as you can, and having the same conversations twenty or thirty or forty times a night. Or you can do the real thing. Once a night. For a hell of a lot more than eight dollars.

And what’s the difference? Honestly?

There’s a huge difference, the voice responded. It sounded exasperated, as my mother’s had when I was disagreeing with her on a moral question. Okay, I said, trying to be open: but why? Where do you draw the line? Why is one thing semi-acceptable and the other not at all? You wouldn’t exchange sex for five dollars; I’ll accept that. But, let’s see: would you for five hundred? For five thousand? For five million? Ah, yes, that’s a different question, isn’t it? So, as Churchill once said, now we know what you are, we just have to determine your price.

The voice had fallen oddly silent. I couldn’t blame it: it’s hard to talk back to Churchill.

Later on, when I got to know some of the other callgirls, I asked them the same question. Why is having casual sex with a man you pick up in a singles bar considered acceptable, but having sex as a business proposition is not? Which is more ethical? Marie said that what decided her to start working for the service was the moment she stopped and really thought about how many men she had allowed to put their penises inside her, men who later made her skin crawl with disgust – and that for no money at all.

It gives you pause, it really does.

I had let the rat bastard boyfriend touch me, kiss me, fuck me. Now the mere thought of his dick, his hands, his tongue made me feel queasy, dirty somehow.

And in the end, as it turned out, I had paid him.

So I picked up the Phoenix on my way to Logan Airport and England, and I sat in the student dormitory that was all I could afford for the week I was lecturing there, and I opened the After Dark section and read the ads.

I circled one.

* * * * * *

Peach was brisk when we spoke on the telephone. “You can refuse any call if you don’t like the sound of the guy, or how it feels,” she said. “You can say no to anything that he asks for that you don’t want to do, and I’ll back you up. The only thing you can’t do is steal clients.”

“Steal clients?” I must have sounded blank.

“Yeah, slip them your phone number, make a deal with them. Arrange to see them without going through the service. They try it all the time. I’ve got the regulars pretty much whipped, but they’ll always try it with a new girl.”

It had never occurred to me to steal clients. The whole point of going through an agency, I had thought, was so that I would be protected by that agency. Okay, so I was still pretty naïve at that point.

She had a little canned, obviously well-rehearsed speech. I tried to take it all in. This business is a crapshoot, sometimes it’s okay, sometimes less so. You’ve never done this before? That’s good: they like that. They like to think that they’re the first. Remember: you can say no to anything. One hour exactly. I get sixty dollars, you get the rest. Tips are all yours, but don’t get too excited; the eighties are over. No one tips anymore. So why don’t you try it out, just one call? Just give me your description and I’ll send you out, after that you can decide whether it’s something that you want to do again or not.

I could have sworn that somewhere in the narrative she stifled a yawn.

I was far from yawning, myself. I answered with some trepidation, but apparently they were the right answers; apparently I passed whatever internal test I was being subjected to. There was the briefest of pauses when I had finished. “Hmm. All right. I’ll have you see Bruce tonight. I know he’ll like you.”

“Tonight?” For all my eagerness, that seemed very soon. Too real, too fast. Panic set in. “Peach, I’m not dressed up –” I was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, with a black vest and an olive linen jacket over it. Not my image of how a callgirl should dress. (Like I knew anything: I had seen Pretty Woman and that film starring Sigourney Weaver as a scholar by day, callgirl by night and that was about it. What you might call a limited frame of reference.)

Besides, how I was dressed was not the only issue here. “You see, I had hoped to meet you in person before I started,” I said. You know, like a real interview.

“That’s not necessary,” she said, her voice brisk. “You can’t lie about your description, the guy you see will tell me the truth. I don’t need to see you first.”

“I want you to,” I said, thinking that I was sounding petulant and not knowing what to do about it. I had wanted to come across as – oh, say, at least marginally sophisticated. “I mean, there’s no problem, I look young, I look good, but…” My voice trailed off. Now I was definitely sounding lame. Great interview. Articulate as hell. Try that on one of your classes someday.