Callgirl. Jenny Angell

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СКАЧАТЬ places, and some even more awful situations. She had to. As she said to me once, in a curiously unguarded moment, “Jen, if I ever really thought about it, I could never send anyone anywhere.” I think that maybe her job was easier for her if she didn’t have to visualize them, feel that she had really encountered them, acknowledged them as individuals. At the end of the phone, a girl could be a list of statistics and lies: her measurements, her height and weight, the color of her eyes, the length of her hair, her approximate age. Add an invented abbreviated history (“She’s sweet, just moved here from Kansas to go to school.”), all the information adapted and re-adapted, tailored afresh for each client. And the clients were consistently (and, I thought at first, a little naïvely) surprised that Peach could meet their specifications so exactly.

      A brief aside, a matter of mild interest: here’s a fact: Men can’t guess a woman’s age. There has to be some brain cell in men that doesn’t activate, some deficit encoded in male DNA, this inability to look at a woman and make reasonable chronological conclusions about her. Or maybe it’s just a result of intense sexual arousal, when, as we all know, only one head is fully functional. But in any case, they can’t tell how old a woman is. Especially if she’s already given them a number.

      I was a few months away from turning thirty-four when I started working for the agency, but Peach’s assistant Ellie immediately took care of that.

      The day after my first call with Bruce, I spoke with Peach when I called to confirm that I was available that evening. As it turned out, Peach herself wasn’t. “It’s my night off, I’m going out,” she said. “Don’t worry, I told my assistant Ellie about you, she’ll be talking to you shortly.” It made me a little nervous, but I had psyched myself up – and my bank account was reminding me that it wasn’t the moment yet to take a night off. Besides, if I chickened out now, I might never call again. I was on a roll. I had to take advantage of it.

      Ellie was working the phones and called me around seven to take notes. She needed my general description, hopefully to connect it with a client’s request; and she asked me my age. Her reaction was direct and no-nonsense. “No way. No one wants to see someone who’s over thirty,” she said. I tried to tell her the number didn’t matter. I tried to explain that at work I was always mistaken for an undergraduate rather than a faculty member. I might have been thirty-three, but I didn’t look it.

      Apparently the number mattered to Ellie. “These guys have no idea what anything over thirty looks like, they’re morons with only one thing in their little pea brains.” Ellie, as I was to discover, had a cynical view of the clientele. And, come to think of it, of life, too. “Even twenty-eight, twenty-nine, that’s pushing it, way old to them. I can’t get you a call if I tell them you’re thirty-three.”

      “Okay.” I wasn’t going to argue. She knew more about it than I did. New game, new rules, I was willing to learn. I later found out that Ellie, herself, had only just turned twenty.

      She was still talking. “We’ll say you’re twenty-four, that way you can be in grad school, the intellectual thing is a turn-on for some of these guys. You’ll be great with the smart ones; they’re always asking for someone who’s in school.”

      Worked for me. Got me a client that night, in fact, a soft-spoken engineer from New Delhi. And after that, Peach generally told clients that I was anything from twenty-two to twenty-nine, depending on who the guy was and what he wanted. I thought that twenty-two was a little over the top, but none of the men I saw ever questioned the veracity of what she said.

      I have to say, though, that in spite of my confidence in my looks, I was a little spooked by the age issue. After all, the common perception of prostitutes is that they are young, even underage sometimes, the cheerleader sort. If they were of the femme fatale type, it was always on the Lolita end of the spectrum. I had seen Pretty Woman, okay? She was young, young enough to still be idealistic, as the movie was quick to point out. I’d also seen Half Moon Street, but it was careful to indicate that Sigourney Weaver’s age and intelligence were the exception, that even her clients weren’t initially sure she was what they wanted. Julia Roberts’ character – young, hip, fast-talking, and sweet – was the conventional norm. The hooker with the heart of gold.

      I was not young, hip, fast-talking, or sweet, and I had no illusions about the state of my heart. I wasn’t going to fit into the mold. That made me uneasy. After Peter the Rat Bastard, I really didn’t need another rejection.

      The funny thing is that when I think about all the processing, all the thinking, all the planning that I did when I was starting out, there was never a moment when I doubted that I could do this. I sat in the dormitory in London staring at my notes for the following morning’s lecture, and I felt nervous about how the lecture would go over in another culture, what sort of questions people would be asking me, that sort of thing. I sat there feeling nervous, and even then half of my brain was rehearsing the lecture and the other half was considering whether or not to become a prostitute. It was an odd juxtaposition, and yet I never for one moment wondered whether I could.

      I just knew. I knew that I was pretty, but my confidence really didn’t have a lot to do with that. It was more along the lines of knowing that I was powerful. I had had a succession of boyfriends – and, let’s be honest here, girlfriends too – before the rat bastard, and they all claimed that I was the best lover they’d ever had. Well, okay, maybe you’ve heard that too, perhaps they were just saying what they thought I wanted to hear. I’m willing to consider the possibility. I’ll grant you that they didn’t all mean it.

      But you know it when you’re good at something, really good, you know it viscerally, in your muscles and your cells and your blood, at some non-rational and yet absolutely certain level. I knew I was good at sex, at romance, at seduction. It was something innate, something I didn’t think about. When I was flirting with a man I went into automatic pilot. I just did. I didn’t think. I flirted. And I always got him. Whomever I wanted, I got.

      It was just my bad judgment that I had once wanted the rat bastard.

      Once preliminaries were aside, I was confident of my power. I knew that once I had a man – any man – alone in a room with our clothes off, I would please him. I could make him crazy, make him ecstatic, make him want more and more and more. I knew that there is a certain sexiness about experience and education, that I had something to offer that the twenty-year-olds did not.

      That was why I had circled Peach’s ad in the first place. I had been dazed by the array of pictures of silicone-enhanced breasts and blonde women with pouting lips claiming, “I want you in my hot cunt now!” But there among them were the two advertisements that Peach ran. One was for the clients, and it was simple: “Avanti,” it declared, in a medium-sized box with a lace border. “When you want more than just the ordinary.”

      Well, okay, so that could mean anything. But there wasn’t any silicone, either, which had to be a good sign.

      The other ad, presented on another page in the same typeface, was looking for help: “Part-time work available to complement your real life,” it said. “Some college required.” That was what got me. No one else mentioned college. This agency had clients who wanted education, clients who presumably wanted to talk intelligently with their escorts, who were looking for something beyond firm breasts and empty thoughts.

      These were the clients I wanted to see, men who would view my graduate degrees as enhancing my sexuality rather than detracting from it. This was a possibility.

      It was the only one I circled. I sometimes wonder what I would have done if it hadn’t worked out. Would I have returned to the ads, found another one to try, one that was less offensive than the others? I don’t know.

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