Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl

SUNDAY. 2/13/00

Update on the Tribeca 2BR. According to Karen’s bubbly e-mail, it’s got a breakfast nook and a balcony. The current occupants bought in ’92, before the market started going haywire, and the husband has persuaded his wife to relocate to East End Avenue so their daughter can walk to school. Karen has a special rapport with the co-op board, which insists on vetting all prospective renters—in the flesh. “I’ll get you in, no problem,” she threatened—I mean, promised.

This morning, while Matt was in the shower, I snuck in a quick call to Liane. “I can’t talk long,” I warned her. “My boyfriend and I are going to look at a rental on Franklin Street. I just have a minute.”

Like every madam I’ve known, Liane is exceedingly generous with her wisdom. At seventy-something, tall, slender, and Dioresque, she is still the epitome of 1950s elegance. And fifties ethics, too.

“Under no circumstances should a girl like you ‘live with’ a man,” she said. “These trial marriages are a big mistake.”

Trial marriage? Wow. If I tell Liane that I’m responsible for putting off the wedding date, I’ll never hear the end of it.

“Well, I’m not going to tell you how to conduct your life, dear. Don’t you know anyone who’s available tomorrow night?” she asked, changing the subject.

February fourteenth. A great night to be a call girl without a valentine and a terrible night for madams, because too many girls have relationships that tie them up (so to speak) for the evening.

“You, of course, have a good reason to take tomorrow night off,” Liane remarked. “Your fellow has made a commitment, and he’s a catch. Though you’ll soon see that commitment evaporating if you move in with him! What is your fiancé planning for Valentine’s Day?”

“We’re going to a chamber-music recital.” Liane indicated her approval. “Avoiding the crowds,” I said. “Don’t you think Valentine’s Day can be a bit—”

“Of a nuisance? Frankly, dear, yes. I have a lovely gentleman from Buenos Aires flying in. He’ll be in meetings all day tomorrow and he wants a brunette with real breasts to arrive at eight, leave at midnight. He’s at the Four Seasons. Dinner in his room, pleasant conversation, garter belt, stockings, two thousand.” She sighed. “He’s so easy, too! Or so I’ve heard. You’d be perfect.”

I felt a twinge of regret, despite the fact that 40 percent would go to Liane if I were to see him.

“How about Jasmine?”

“She’s too businesslike,” Liane objected. “And he prefers someone petite. Well, I suppose, in her little Chanel ballet flats, Jasmine really looks petite and she’s trim and pretty, so he’s not going to send her away…” Jasmine’s five feet five, but I held my tongue as Liane tried to sell herself on the idea. “She has a nice bust—not too big. She hasn’t had her breasts done, has she?”

“No way!” I assured her. “I’ll call you later.”

I quickly dialed my hairdresser’s number, allowed it to ring once, and quietly hung up. Just in case Matt happened to hit the redial button.

We’ve all heard the horror stories—innocent boyfriends accidentally hitting redial, stumbling across numbers and clients and…welcome to Hooker Hell. If that isn’t every call girl’s worst nightmare, it certainly should be!

MONDAY. 2/14/00

Today I showed Wendy the keys to Matt’s…bachelor pad, as Elspeth calls it. (What do you call the apartment of a man who wants to forsake bachelorhood for you and you alone?)

“So you have the keys to your ‘corporate sponsor’s’ headquarters?” my shrink asked, cocking her head to one side.

The keys were sitting on the small table between us, next to her tissue box.

“I never use them. Only to lock up when I’m leaving—if he’s not there.”

“Never?”

“Well, he might be inspired to ask for a set of mine. I couldn’t possibly let Matt have keys to my place! And I’m always afraid he’ll bring that up. This morning…” I scowled unhappily. “I resolved to throw them into the Hudson.”

“Really. What’s going on?”

I crossed my arms uncomfortably. “His sister’s pushing me to set a wedding date, and she introduced us to this real estate broker.” I told Wendy about the two-bedroom on Franklin Street. “Matt thinks it’s wonderful and he just assumes I do, too. He has this idea that we’ll become some kind of downtown couple, but his whole idea of what downtown is really about is just silly! And false! Moving downtown isn’t what makes you a downtown person. It’s so naive! He’s not really a New Yorker,” I explained, “and it’s becoming more obvious. How can I live in Tribeca with some guy who doesn’t even know that he’s not really living downtown, that the whole area has become an overpriced travesty! He has zero sense of real estate irony.”

“So you’re angry at your boyfriend because he’s still an out-of-towner.”

Wendy blinked, betraying a hint of a smile, and I suddenly felt unfaithful. Boyfriend-bashing is fine if restricted to certain topics, but this was pushing the envelope. You’re supposed to be able to say anything about anybody in therapy, but I felt guilty. Admitting that he’s geographically unhip to the point of clueless! A good girlfriend doesn’t speak derisively about a guy who is so…invested in her.

“Where is Matt from, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Connecticut.”

“Irish-Catholic?”

“No, some kind of part-time Protestant. His mother came from one of those Hudson Valley Huguenot families. But he’s not very interested in his ancestors. Or his religion. He’s…” I smiled and blushed. “Very keen on the present and the future.”

“Yes?” Wendy looked quizzical. “You had a pleasurable thought.”

“Oh, nothing. He’s so cute,” I sighed. “Sometimes, I just want us to keep dating. I’d like to stop time and be old enough to know better and young enough to play the game and…be pursued by this up-and-coming guy for the rest of my life. I guess I’m like one of those clients—those men who keep holding back because they don’t want to come. They don’t want their session to end, and they just keep prolonging it.”

“And how do you feel about those men?”

“I used to hate them! But now I’m used to it. I know how to pace myself, how to hurry them along—gently, of course. But nobody feels upbeat about getting a difficult customer.”

“So if you’re a difficult customer, what does this new apartment signify? The end of an ‘exciting session’?”

“Look, any normal woman would be thrilled. It’s really a very nice place. It’s close to Wall Street, so it’s perfect for Matt, but it’s miles away from everything I do. Does he expect me to give up my home, my neighborhood, my entire life? Just like that?”

“To be fair, I don’t think Matt has any idea what you’ll be giving up if you move in with him.”

“No kidding! If I move in with him, I’ll—I’ll be reduced to doing outcalls.” (What else? Rent Jasmine’s bedroom by the hour? The bulk of my business today is in my apartment.) “He doesn’t understand how I support myself. I think he thinks I’m getting money from my family.”

“Did you tell him that?”

“Um, no. I just sort of let him think it. I mean, there’s no way I could dress the way I do and live where I live if I really made my entire living as a freelance copy editor.”

“Interesting. Why did you get engaged?” Dr. Wendy asked in a quieter voice.

Tears of self-pity began to pour down my cheeks. Fortunately, Dr. Wendy’s office and my bedroom are two places where you never have to hunt around for a tissue!

I blew my nose and explained, “It was totally unprofessional of me—I didn’t think it through! I accepted his ring. I was too dazzled to think—disoriented, afraid—”

“What were you afraid of?”

“He came over to pick up his keys.” I pointed to the keys on the table. “We had broken up a few days before, and he was acting strange. I started thinking he was going to assault me.”

“Has he assaulted you before?” Wendy was alarmed.

“Of course not!” Matt smacking a girl—that’s unthinkable. But you can’t even joke about such matters these days. Everybody, even your shrink who has known you for half a decade, will suspect that you’re protecting a social monster. “It was a misunderstanding,” I assured her. “I was disoriented. I felt so distant from him at first, and he seemed like a stranger to me, and I didn’t know why he was there. We weren’t seeing each other anymore. But he said he needed his keys because he was locked out of his apartment. And then my mind flashed on this terrible thing that happened when I was sixteen!”

“Yes?”

“A john who waved a gun in my face. I was terrified. And when I started screaming my head off, the client got so scared of the racket I was making, he begged me to leave.”

“He did?” Wendy sat up straighter. “You weren’t afraid to express your feelings. Your emotions saved your life! I think that’s something to be proud of. Especially at sixteen.”

“Well,” I sniffled, “I ran out of his apartment and I tripped on my own pants—I was wearing harem pants with those cords at the ankles, but they were loose—and when I tripped, I slid down the stairs on my back in my high heels.”

Wendy was now gripping the arms of her chair. “My god. At sixteen?”

“Oh.” I stopped crying. “I was fine. When I got to the bottom of the stairs, I was kind of shocked, but I wasn’t hurt.”

“You could have broken your neck! Or your back!”

“But I didn’t. I got right up, buttoned my blouse, found a cab, and went back to the escort agency. I was so relieved that none of the neighbors saw me.” I had just started working for Jeannie’s Dream Dates, an outcall service owned by a madam named Mary. She ran it from a midtown studio apartment, advertised in the Yellow Pages (and some other publications I prefer not to think about), and felt that Mary was a terrible name for a madam. So she called herself Jeannie.

Wendy took a deep breath. “So this is what was going through your mind when Matt proposed? A narrow escape from a gun-toting john. Did that happen in New York?”

“Yes.” I laughed briefly. “In a very nice town house right off Park Avenue in Murray Hill. Too much coke. The client was upset because I couldn’t make him come and his hour was up.”

Maybe my flexible teenaged body saved me when I tumbled down those stairs. But the point is, I’ve gotten away with so much—how much longer can it go on? I’m not a teenager anymore.

“And Matt’s proposal—was it really a surprise?”

“God, yes. I never imagined…”

Wendy jutted her chin forward—her Listening Gesture.

“I had broken up with him and I was ready to devote myself to my business. I decided to swear off boyfriends. Then Matt called. He made up that story about the keys, which I believed.”

Wendy nodded.

“When he grabbed my hand, I got nervous. He was so much stronger. And suddenly, I remembered that guy with the gun. I thought: I’ve come this far, I have my own clients, I don’t have to work for some sleazy escort service, I’m well-connected and go to the best hotels. My clients are the movers and shakers of the universe. They run Manhattan. But my own boyfriend turns out to be a random nutcase just like that guy! I’ve allowed a maniac into my home! At least, when I was sixteen, that guy didn’t enter my life—I could leave his apartment! For a minute I wasn’t really a success after all. Women who get killed by guys they don’t understand are, by definition, failures. Right?”

There was a pause. Dr. Wendy doesn’t like to call anyone a failure. “And then what happened?”

“He pulled out this beautiful Lucida ring and he was so incredibly gentle and persuasive and passionate, and everything was okay again. I realized that I was a success. My nightmare was a delusion. I never dreamed, when I was a sixteen-year-old hooker, that a guy like Matt would propose to me—that I would even want him to! Don’t you see? I was spellbound! By my own respectability!”

“That’s a lot of material to be processing while your boyfriend’s trying to propose to you.”

“After all the stories I’ve told him, and all the lies he believed, that story about the keys—I really believed him!”

“You fell for his ruse.”

“Yes. I took it as a sign! It made me feel that we belonged together after all. He used his wits—he figured out a scheme to get back into my apartment and into my life. I was so…” My heart still skips a beat when I remember the confusion, the fear, and the sudden realization that I had been romantically snared—by this guy who didn’t know exactly who or what I was but could still get the better of me. “It made me, you know, respect him as a guy. We had…” I paused and remembered the reckless love-making that had followed. “We had very good sex that night,” I added primly.

“But when Matt came to collect his keys you were reminded of an unsatisfied sex partner from over a decade ago—a man who also wanted something more than you could give.”

This certainly appealed to my therapeutic vanity. And my latent Sinderella Complex. The commercial nymphet in danger, saved by her scheming Galahad. But I fessed up.

“I know marriage is supposed to be the alternative to strange guys waving their weapons in your face. But the truth is, that’s the only time anyone has ever threatened me with a gun. I’m not in that kind of danger. Most of my guys are regular clients. I was just so dazzled. My heart was pounding because he had captured me. He proved that he wasn’t just my mental toy—he surprised me totally.”

“And now? In the cooler light of day?”

“Maybe girls like me aren’t supposed to marry. Wasn’t that the first thing Gigi’s aunt taught her? We don’t marry. Maybe those Old World courtesans had the right idea.”

Wendy knows that Gigi is one of my favorite adult fairy tales. The book, the movie, even the corny songs. So does Matt. He, however, just thinks it’s some kind of strange retro quirk.

“Gigi comes from a family of courtesans,” Wendy began. “But the only successful courtesan in the story is her aunt, who also happens to be the head of the family. And she masterminds a marriage for Gigi, despite herself. So, Gigi is really a story about ambivalence in the demimonde.”

I savored the phrase, the emotional geography. In the demimonde: ambivalence. A golden age of hooking when girls like me could retreat into their own social country. No wonder they could say, without regret, “We don’t marry.”

“But ambivalence about marriage is not unique to your profession,” Wendy continued. “I meet hundreds of women in my practice—and a lot of men—who use their work to explain a romantic disappointment or a fractured relationship.”

I nodded in agreement but felt rather wistful. So much for my Belle Epoque fantasy of a romantic caste system!