Madam

The smile broadened, and he walked up the three stairs to where I was standing in the doorway, his body tall and hard and tanned, just inches away from mine.

This was definitely not good.

Then he kissed me. And the sunshine and the surf and the happiness of Manhattan Beach sparkled all around us, even on a rainy night in Boston. I put my arms around his neck and hung on for dear life. To his credit, the man carried me into my apartment. We barely got the door shut behind us before we were tearing at each other’s clothes, our breath coming in hot little spurts, his hands suddenly all over me again.

The phone rang.

I froze. Jesse didn’t. “Let the machine get it,” he murmured in my ear, before gently biting it. “You’re going nowhere.”

Well, actually, I was. I wrenched myself away from him, flustered. “I have to,” I whispered. “I’ll be right back.”

But of course I wasn’t. I ran into my bedroom – where I had all the phones – and immediately got tied up in negotiating with a client who wanted three girls. I couldn’t pass on that. So I sat and felt my heartbeat return to normal as I dealt with him, found three appropriate girls I could send, dispatched them, alerted my driver, and put out another call. When at last the dust had settled, I looked up and saw Jesse leaning against the doorjamb.

“Well,” I said, with an attempt at humor, “at least I don’t have to tell you what I do for a living these days.”

He smiled, that slow, crooked, heat-filled smile of his. “No,” he agreed. “You don’t.” He walked across the room and stood beside the bed. Without thinking about what I was doing, my hands – completely of their own free will – unbuckled his belt and unzipped his jeans. As soon as his cock was in my mouth the years disappeared, and all I wanted, all I could think about, was making love with him.

Which we did, with the phone ringing and being answered intermittently, for the next ten hours.

Jesse had brought some wine, and I had a fair store of coke on my dressing table, courtesy of Robert, so sleep was pretty much out of the question. I stopped doing the phones after two in the morning, and I don’t remember what happened to the turkey dinner delivery. We stopped touching and moaning and probing and licking only long enough for a sip of wine, tipped from his mouth into mine, or a line of coke, expertly put out on my breast for him to snort, or a trip to the bathroom or refrigerator. I was fascinated; I’d never seen a man do coke and keep an erection. Jesse had amazing talents.

Things are not what they seem, however.

It turned out that Jesse was moving to Boston. He needed a place to stay for a few days. Could he stay with me? Panting in my postcoital exhaustion, of course I said yes. And it was fine, it really was. For a while.

He wasn’t looking for a job, not right away, but that didn’t matter, because I had more girls needing rides than my regular driver Jake could manage. And what Jesse did have was a car. So off he went in the evenings, driving young, beautiful women to obscure destinations and then coming back at one or two in the morning to make love to me for the rest of the night. We’d finally fall asleep toward dawn, and I don’t think that I ever woke up before four or five in the afternoon. That was when I was starting to deal with the hangovers, right when the phones started ringing.

Bad for business? You’d think that working with a hangover might be, though in reality I don’t think that anybody particularly cared. Both my clients and my employees were too self-centered to notice when I wasn’t really on my game.

But I noticed it, and it was a problem for me. Another problem was my nights off, when I’d either get one of the girls I trusted to answer the phones for me or else shut down entirely for the night. Going out became a real problem. Jesse was witty and handsome. He had bought an Armani suit with the proceeds of his driving (though he never seemed to be getting enough together for an apartment of his own), and he loved the clubs, the chicest venues, the new restaurants. I lived off Columbus Avenue, in the center of Boston’s trendiest dining scene, and Jesse was at his best there, looking handsome, pronouncing on a wine, savoring a sauce.

All this cost a bundle, of course, and since I was making the money, I invariably paid. But the excitement of being with the best-looking guy in the place starts to pale when you’re picking up his tab, night after night after night.

It wasn’t just the money, though. It was the girls. Girls who were supposed to be dropped off at a certain time were inexplicably late. Girls whose apartments were on Jesse’s way somewhere else. Somehow, I had a sneaking suspicion that I wasn’t the only woman in Boston succumbing to his California charms.

He denied it all, of course. He soothed my worries with kisses and champagne and cocaine. I’d sigh, relent, and tell myself that it really was all right – but it wasn’t. Waking up with the late-afternoon sun slanting through my blinds, my mouth dry, my head feeling like a sledgehammer had taken up residence inside, and a nose filled with blood-encrusted snot, I was having a whole lot of second thoughts about my judgment.

The trouble was that we never actually talked about anything. Not ever. We did things; we fucked; we ate and talked about the business when necessary; but other than that, we never talked. We certainly didn’t discuss anything as mundane as when he planned to stop freeloading off me.

I knew that there was disappointment in Jesse, somewhere. I knew he felt that the world wasn’t giving him his due, that he deserved more than he was getting, and that I was somehow there in the mix, part of him feeling that he deserved to get something back. What that was, honestly, I don’t know. Certainly Jesse had never made any great contributions to the world that warranted his intense sense of entitlement.

His disappointment made him restless. Even when he was with me, he was always moving – turning on the CD player, turning on the TV, pacing, talking, tapping, complaining, anything to keep from thinking, from dwelling on that narcissistic disappointment.

I still am amazed at how forceful and strong I was with my clients, my drivers, my girls; and yet I lost all that strength and confidence when I was around Jesse. I spent month after month with this man – if you can call our loose liaison being together – and hated myself the entire time for not standing up to him.

When I finally did, I learned another of life’s lessons: let someone into your life, and you’re handing them the means to hurt you on a silver platter.

And he did.

We had a fight, a dazzling, brilliant fight, with objects hurled and broken and the downstairs tenant pounding angrily on the door. The names Jesse called me were bad enough. The sneering references to my sexual preferences and performances were pretty awful. But the things that he said about me in the clubs, to other people, to people who mattered – I couldn’t understand how he could hate me so much to want to destroy me like that. I just didn’t get it.

And it was humiliating, embarrassing in a way that I’d never been embarrassed before. I thought about wearing sunglasses all the time. I thought about not going out. I tried not to think about any of it.

So he left, came back, left again, and came back again. My business and my popularity were growing, but here I was emotionally ensnared by a man with the temperament of a spoiled child.

The irony is that I knew what I was doing. I could see it, I didn’t like it, and yet I kept doing it.

And the whole time we were together, I can’t ever remember Jesse calling me Abby.

That should have said it all.