Madam

There wasn’t much time to rest on my laurels, though – the telephone kept ringing. The word was out, apparently, that Avanti was the newest, hottest service in town. Everyone wanted to try me out. Everyone wanted to work for me. I did quick phone interviews and prayed that the girls I was talking to had given me accurate descriptions of themselves. “Okay, that’s super, and what name do you want to use? Zoë? All right. Check in with me when you’re ready to go to work and I’ll see what we can do for you. Yes; I’m Peach, that’s right.”

I didn’t pick up the client line until I felt I was ready. I had a quick cheat sheet of who was available and what she looked like; then I took a deep breath and plugged in the work line, and we were off and running again.

Jake was elated. “Hot damn, this is the best it’s ever been. I’ve driven for other services and it was nothing like this. Anytime you need a driver, I’m your guy.”

I didn’t have time for mutual backslapping. “Can you meet Melanie at the Star Market on Commonwealth and pick up some money from her? She’s holding $360 for me. She’ll be there at six. She’s driving a red Subaru.”

“Sure thing, Peach.”

I yawned and walked into the kitchen to make some coffee. I’m not a big coffee-at-night drinker, but it looked like I was going to need it. Wearing my socks, my sweats, and my favorite Paris Hard Rock Café T-shirt, I probably didn’t look like anybody’s idea of a madam. Which was perfectly fine with me.

Around midnight, I got a call from Robert, a French guy I’d met at a party I’d gone to while I was still working for Laura. We’d hit it off – though in a strictly platonic sort of way, which I have to say was somewhat to my disappointment – and hung out together fairly often. He’d helped me decorate my apartment, getting so enthusiastic that at one point I wondered if his lack of interest in me, combined with his total devotion to interior design, added up to his being gay. “So how’s it going? Raking in the money?”

“Oh, you know,” I said, nonchalantly. “Just another so-so day.”

I could imagine the grin over the phone line. “Thought I’d stop by and give you a present to congratulate you.”

This was good news. Robert was, by profession, a drug dealer, and I had just been feeling sleepy. “I’m here, feel free to drop by.”

He arrived just as the phones were slowing down. He had beer, coke, and a friend. “This is Stuart,” he said. “Where’s your Scrabble board?”

My friend Jenny used to say that I ran an intellectual salon, with bright and interesting people clustering around me. She said what I did was hold court with them, on almost a nightly basis. If she was right – and I do think that she exaggerated things just a little – then those soirées started on my second night of business, with Robert, Stuart, and the Scrabble game. I waited until my last girl had been called out, then I unplugged the phones, opened a beer, did a line, and we were off.

* * * * * *

I worked out my own system. When a girl arrived at the client’s home or hotel room, I’d have her give me a call. She told the client that it was so I’d know that she had arrived safely. (“Peach worries about me, you know.”) But in reality I was both starting the clock running, and giving her an option to get out of a situation in which she felt uncomfortable.

It’s funny, as I look back on it now. These days, I give Sam secret code words to keep him safe. “The password is Twinkletoes. Don’t ever, ever go anywhere with anybody, even if that person is a grown-up, even if that person says that I sent them. Do you understand? If they say that I sent them, you ask them for the password. If they don’t know it, then run away from them.”

So I guess I had already started that same thing with my girls. “If you feel funny about anything, you can get out of there. When you call me, pretend that I just told you your sister called and is sick. You can apologize to the client, tell him to call me back, but that you have to leave. And then get out of there. You can tell me later what was wrong. Trust your instincts.”

In fact, I was actually a parent long before I had children: I had my clients and I had my girls. They were all as demanding as any two-year-old – maybe even more so. It goes with the territory.

These are people who are carrying around a lot of baggage. Well, honestly, think about it: you can’t live in the margins forever without eventually becoming marginal yourself.

At best, working as a callgirl can be a necessary interim step on your way to someplace else – as long as you keep that “someplace else” firmly in mind. It’s the women for whom the work becomes a run-on sentence who have the real problems.

But it can be good, believe it or not. It can be a way for a single mother to pay the rent and still spend her days with her children. It can be an abused woman getting the financial independence she needs to get out of a violent life. It can be the final stage of the Ugly Duckling becoming a beautiful swan, and proving it to herself and to the world. However – and this is a big however – those are the best-case scenarios, and they only work if you can manage to use the profession, rather than let the profession use you.

But it’s seductive, sometimes too seductive, and it’s easy to forget the password, the talisman, the way out.

It’s easy to think that this is the Real World.

First off, there’s the money. It’s been called the highest-paid profession in the world for women: that may not always be true, but in terms of hourly work, it has to be right up there. Certainly from my point of view, there is nowhere else on earth, with my education and my qualifications – or lack thereof – where I could be making the kind of money that I do. And it’s the same for the girls that work for me.

So this gets seductive after a while. You look at the other jobs you could have. They’re paying less than a tenth of what you’re making, and leaving becomes a really difficult decision to make. You have to have something set up, ready to segue into, otherwise you won’t make a clean break. People who keep coming back never really leave in the end. The longer they keep at it, the harder that decision will be, and the longer they’ll put it off.

Then there are the drugs – there are always the drugs. They’re so pervasive in this life that there’s almost no way of avoiding them. The names change, the highs change, but the drugs remain.

Wherever you go, it’s easier than easy to get drugs. You practically have to fight off people trying to sell them to you. This was truer at the beginning of my career as a madam, though some drug use remains a constant even today.

That was how Robert made his living in those days. He’d get some coke and divide it into lots of little bags, then he’d go hang out in the clubs, selling the stuff. When it’s past midnight and people are drunk and have run out of their stash and want to keep going, Robert can pretty much charge whatever he wants – for whatever they want.

There’s the whole countercultural thing, too. It’s probably the same dynamic that you see in teenagers, the ones who despise anything “normal” and feel themselves to be above all that. They turn pagan or Goth or grunge, and soon their friends are the only ones who understand them and the rest of the world is just oh-so-boring. That same dynamic operates in adults, too. Or maybe just so-called adults.

But after a while, you live most of your life at night, you make a lot of money and you spend a lot of money and people want to hang out with you. Eventually you’re going to lose interest in any other kind of life. Owning a house? Having kids? Going to work every day? Please. That’s for people who aren’t as hip and cool as I am.

To my mind, that’s the worst of it all. We’re not cooler than anyone else; we just think we are. We feed on each other’s need to believe that, like vampires, and end up like them, too, exhausted and empty, unable to face the light of dawn.

But when you’re in it … while it lasts … oh, man, it’s fucking magic.

JESSE, JESSE, JESSE … (#u33f14c4f-9104-531b-aac0-8d6d4d795a7a)

Of course, if you’re anything like me, as soon as one thing in your life starts going well, everything else falls apart.

Work was great. I had opened an escort agency. I had some slow nights after the first mad rush, but work was regular, if not predictable. There were problems, but so far, nothing that I couldn’t handle.

And then the one thing that I couldn’t handle came along. His name was Jesse.

Jesse had, oddly enough, known me before, during a wild and unlucky trip I took to California while I was still at college myself. I had gone with some friends who were convinced that they could beat the odds in Vegas, which they probably could have done, in retrospect, if they hadn’t been caught counting cards the first night out. So much for subtlety. So we took the rest of our money and headed for Palm Springs instead. We had no idea how ludicrously expensive it would be. We lived out of the car for a few days – there were five of us – and then spent the rest of the summer in a kind of leftover hippie place on Manhattan Beach. That was where I met Jesse.

We had a fling, of course. Every proper Eastern girl who goes to California when she’s in college has a fling. Don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise. He was, to my inexperienced eyes, quintessentially Californian, with smooth, tanned skin and dirty blond hair and blue eyes that looked like they were looking straight through you, into your soul, into your secrets. He had gorgeous hands, too, with long, sensitive fingers – what my mother would have called musician’s fingers. And he knew how to use them.

Within a day I was spending every night, every day, every moment of time I could manage with Jesse and his sensitive fingers. And tongue. And other body parts. He was intoxicating, more intoxicating than any liquor I had ever tasted. He did things to my body I hadn’t dreamed could be done. When he undressed he could have leapt from the cover of a romance novel (not that I ever read them, but Jesse was definitely cover material if I had – and I wasn’t immune to that).

Then he’d take off my clothes, too, and start moving his tongue all over me. Insistently, like he needed me, like he was restraining himself from devouring me. That was a such a turn-on – women like to feel that there’s a storm building somewhere – and his cock would be hard and throbbing against me, but his hands would keep moving all the time, and when he finally pushed himself inside me it was always as though every millimeter of my skin was responding, I had become so achingly aware of and in tune with him. Even the air on my skin felt erotic, charged, electric. He would move enough to build the tension, to build the passion, to make me ache for him to continue, then stop thrusting, and the hands would start again, moving, feeling, caressing; and then he’d begin thrusting again. This went on and on and on, through sweat-soaked afternoons, into sweat-drenched nights, until I finally begged him to let me come.

When I did, he would, too. And then he’d start caressing me all over again.

I’d never known a man who didn’t go to sleep, or get up, or do something else irritating after an orgasm. Never. I’d had boyfriends reach for the remote and turn on the game after an orgasm, for heaven’s sake (and, in one unfortunate instance, I had one who reached for it before the orgasm; but that was most decidedly the end of him). Not only did Jesse stay there; he started in all over again.

It was every girl’s wet dream, and, for that marvelous, magical summer, it was mine.

But summers end. I went back to Emerson college, paid attention to my studies, and Jesse became a memory etched in sunlight.

Until he showed up at my doorstep, five years later.

I fell for him all over again.

* * * * * *

I opened the door and stood there, staring at him, in shock. I had been anticipating the cab driver with my turkey dinner from the Union Oyster House.

So I was thinking about turkey and mashed potatoes and gravy, and then suddenly there was Jesse.

“Hey, baby,” he said, a little awkwardly, and then he smiled and the world around us lit up.

“Hi.” I couldn’t say much more – my breathing was a little ragged at that point. “Jesse.”