Part 2 (1/2)
”Yes.”
”Maid?”
”I don't have to actually clean, right?”
To Ellie, she said, ”That's a yes.”
”Private dance?”
Diane turned to Ellie and talked over my final answer, saying, ”Will do whatever.”
Ellie nodded and checked a final box. Was there a box for whatever?
”Will do whatever” was pretty much accurate. In the peep shows and strip clubs I'd worked at, I had done more unseemly deeds for money before I turned eighteen than most women would ever contemplate in their whole lives. What was one more? But escort work was different, wasn't it? A tiny misgiving fluttered somewhere under my occipital bone. Call it whatever euphemism you chose; this was f.u.c.king for money we were talking about, right? I had been the embodiment of confidence until I stood in the middle of that room in my trashy dress while Ellie checked the ”whatever” box. I was flooded by a cascade of anxieties. What if I got a disease? What if it was disgusting? What if I got raped? Got killed? What if this next step would create a fissure in the landscape of my heart that could never be repaired?
”You bring your ID and pa.s.sport?”
I had been told that my interview would require two forms of ID. I handed them over.
Luckily, I had obtained a pa.s.sport as a gift to myself for my eighteenth birthday a few months earlier. I had been ensnared by tales of Paris in the twenties and it was my dearest hope to get my a.s.s there at all costs. I knew the Paris of seventy years before was long gone. Nevertheless, the call of that city resonated in my bones. The name alone could send me into hours of happy daydreams. I wanted to drop down right in the center of Paris, where I would drink wine and write poetry and let Paris infuse my soul with continental urbanity and sophistication. I had hoped to hand my pa.s.sport to a customs official at Charles De Gaulle International Airport. Instead I was handing it to Diane at the Crown Club, but it was a mere stopover, I told myself, a brief detour.
Diane gave me the same shtick about my clothing that Taylor had and I vowed to go get myself some cla.s.s as soon as I could afford to. I was catapulted into the job within a couple of hours. Taylor informed me that I was lucky to get a call on my first night of work. I was going to do well, she a.s.sured me, if for no other reason than my age. I was the youngest girl there and have always had the advantage of an innocent appearance. My most drastic attempts to be punk and hard never fooled anyone-I am a nice girl to the bone. It has served me well in my not-so-nice endeavors.
So that first night I got a call to go to the apartment of a well-known talk radio host. Ellie, who was basically a plump, cookie-baking, Laura Ashley-wearing a.s.sistant pimp, taught me how to use my own little credit-card machine and gave me specific instructions about how and when the transaction was to take place (immediately upon arrival), as well as the rules for reporting in. Before I left for my first ”date,” Taylor took me into the bedroom, sat me down on the bed, and gave me a few pointers. She had taken me under her wing.
”The whole trick is, how much can you get for how little you give, get it? You want to turn one hour into two into three and to make a b.l.o.w.j.o.b seem better than s.e.x.”
Like Scheherazade, we looked for the story that was so irresistible they had to keep us around for another hour to hear the end.
”Some nights suck,” she said. ”Some nights we hang out here with no calls at all, but some nights are eight-hour limousine windfalls with c.o.ked-up, limp-d.i.c.ked, out-of-town businessmen. It evens out. Always, always use a condom. Put it on with your mouth and he won't even notice.”
For my escort name, I picked Elizabeth because it sounded real and because it had been, along with Janice and Eduardo among others, one of the aliases I had used when playing make-believe games as a kid. I had been Elizabeth the Queen of France, Elizabeth and the Three Bears, Elizabeth the seventh Brady kid, Elizabeth the French Resistance fighter.
Add to that resume Elizabeth the call girl, Elizabeth the cheater. Sean and I didn't have the kind of relations.h.i.+p in which we checked in with each other every five minutes, so I hadn't exactly lied to him; I had just neglected to mention my whereabouts that evening. But if I stuck with the job some hard-core lying would definitely be called for. Taylor said that the girls sometimes told their boyfriends they had jobs as night temps. Waitressing was a risky lie, because your boyfriend could show up to surprise you at work and then you'd be screwed. I supposed that I could let Sean a.s.sume I was still dancing at the club. But though I had been a stripper, until that point I hadn't been much of a liar. To my parents, yes, but not to my friends. Not to my boyfriend, my kind boyfriend with the elegant hands.
Sean had introduced me to Elvis Costello. As I left that night for my first trick, the lyrics to ”Almost Blue” played in my head. There's a part of me that's always true. Always. There's a part of me that's always true. Always. The rest of me-Elizabeth, eighteen-year-old curvaceous theater student with a face like Winona Ryder's, will do whatever-stepped into the street alone and hailed a cab to an uptown high-rise. The rest of me-Elizabeth, eighteen-year-old curvaceous theater student with a face like Winona Ryder's, will do whatever-stepped into the street alone and hailed a cab to an uptown high-rise.
It felt like a movie with a good jazz soundtrack. Like a Woody Allen New York love song. One of the characters is a young, lost actress who finds herself in a cab headed uptown to turn a trick with a radio personality. Starring Mariel Hemingway. Starring me. The film was already rolling. I couldn't stop to reconsider.
I stepped out of the cab, my breath visible in the cold night, and plunged my hands into my pockets before walking past a doorman, who nodded politely. I rode the elevator to the almost-top floor and knocked on a door. Instantaneously, the radio host appeared in the doorway. I recognized his face from ads for his show that I had seen plastered on the insides of subway cars. He was holding a sweating, half-empty drink in his hand and his paisley robe hung open, the belt coming undone and revealing a pair of silk boxers underneath.
”You must be Elizabeth. Can I get you a drink, sweetheart?”
I readily accepted his offer for a drink, totally ignoring Taylor's suggestion to stay sober. I wanted to be cla.s.sy and in control like her, but I'd have to work up to it. Nothing sounded better than the comforting burn of a drink. I followed him into his apartment, where he took my coat, threw it over the back of a chair, and indicated a black leather sofa. I sat while he freshened his vodka tonic and poured mine.
The apartment was a cla.s.sic bachelor pad with an elaborate entertainment center, five tall CD towers, and a panoramic view of the city. His back still turned, the radio host fired questions at me. Habit, I guess. He asked me how old I was and what I did when I wasn't doing ”this.” I told him I was an eighteen-year-old theater student at NYU.
”You're older than eighteen, sweetheart. I can tell. It's my job to read people.” His eyes sparkled with self-satisfaction as he sat down next to me and handed me my drink, his hand resting on my thigh. ”You don't have to lie to me. Now, how old are you really?”
He seemed so pleased with his intuitive gifts that I thought it best not to argue.
”You're right. I'm twenty. I'm graduating next year.”
It occurred to me as we chatted more that I was going to be good at this. I was discovering a new talent. I had spent all this time in my acting training trying to uncover the authenticity in every moment, trying to lay myself bare. Here, I was going for pure artifice, the exact opposite result, but I was using the same skills of listening and improvisation.
I had been a good stripper-a natural, everyone always told me. I was never the prettiest or the girl with the best body, but I had that something that made people want to look at me. More important, I had that something that makes people feel seen themselves. Lonely guys couldn't get enough of it. It was easy for me; it was acting, which was my thing, after all. And I suspected that I was going to be the same way as a call girl. A natural.
The radio host was very impressed that I was a theater student, which I had actually ceased to be six months before.
”I went to Yale drama,” he told me. ”You should consider it.”
”Good idea. I'll definitely consider it.”
”You like Sam Shepard?”
”I love Sam Shepard.”
”I'm a close personal friend of Sam Shepard. I could get you an audition one day.”
He gave me the tour of his hallway gallery, which consisted of black-and-white pictures of a younger him in Off-Broadway productions. All of them hung slightly crooked, as if someone had banged into the wall hard enough to shake it-maybe he himself, staggering from the bedroom to the bar.
He grabbed my hand and led me toward the bedroom.
”There's something really cool I want to show you in here.”
Please don't let it be a bottle of chloroform and a set of antique surgical instruments, I thought. I started to ask for another drink, but he didn't give me a chance. With a flourish, he opened the door of one of his bedroom closets and yanked me inside. It was a walk-in, lined floor to ceiling with cowboy boots of all kinds.
”Wow. Cool.”
”I'm famous for wearing cowboy boots,” he said. ”It's my trademark. Would you like to undress?”
I reached behind me for my zipper and a chill shot up the back of my legs, the kind you get when you're caught doing something wrong.
”No, in here,” he said, and indicated the bedroom. The bedroom had gray walls and gray berber carpeting. A garnet-red bed was the only furnis.h.i.+ng, and it faced a set of mirrored closet doors. He sat on the edge of it and watched as I took off my dress and stockings and folded them, dropping them in a pile in the corner. The fishnets had embossed a pink honeycomb pattern in the flesh of my thighs. I put my heels back on and left my thong in place, planning to hold on to it until the last possible moment.
I stood awkwardly in front of him while he looked at me for a brief moment with no notable reaction and then began fiddling in the drawer of his nightstand. It was one thing to be naked and half drunk on stage with music and rosy lights and a rowdy audience. It was another entirely to stand under track lighting in silence in a stranger's bedroom. My arms felt long and awkward. I didn't know where to put my hands. I opted for my hips, with my feet in beauty-contest position. It seemed a bit stagy, but it was the best I could come up with.
”Have you ever done Rush?” he asked. He found what he was looking for. It was a bottle of poppers.