Callgirl. Jenny Angell
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Название: Callgirl
Автор: Jenny Angell
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007278886
isbn:
And it got better. There was none of the postcoital abruptness I usually associate with one-night stands. He rolled off me and pulled me over to him, my head on his chest, listening to the thudding of his heart. I continued to caress him, gently, my fingertips playing lightly over his chest. I blew gently on the sweat, and he shivered and tightened his arm around me. Better, on the whole, than any other one-night encounter I’d ever had.
Bruce disappeared into the bathroom and was dressed first, but had wine waiting when I emerged from the bedroom, and he kissed my cheek as he handed it to me.
The telephone rang. He picked it up, said, “Yeah, Tia’s here, hang on a minute,” and passed the receiver over to me. “For you.”
I was puzzled. “Hello?”
It was Peach. “All set?”
“Yes.” I had no idea what she meant.
“Okay, good, call me when you get out.” She must have sensed that I didn’t understand. She sighed. “I always call when the hour’s up. Some guys play games. Sometimes they try to make you stay longer. He pays for your time, and I make sure that he gets what he paid for. And that you get out safely, that you’re not stuck or stranded or anything like that. So leave now, and call me from a pay phone.”
“Okay.” I handed the telephone back to Bruce. He obviously knew the drill: he had the money in his hand already. “I really liked meeting you, Tia.”
I smiled as I slid the bills into my jacket pocket. “It was nice meeting you, too, Bruce. I hope I can see you again.”
“I’d like that a lot.” He even sounded like he meant it.
He escorted me off the gangway, kissed me again on the cheek, gave me a brief hug. “Good-night.”
“Good-night, Bruce.” And I walked away toward my car; I felt like singing, or skipping, something joyous and happy. I had just spent a pleasant evening. After I took out the sixty dollars that was Peach’s fee, I had made one hundred and forty dollars. In one hour.
Anybody else out there making that kind of money?
I called her from the first pay phone I spotted; she asked politely how it had gone, and wished me a good night.
I hung up the telephone and was struck by an incongruous thought. I remembered sitting in that whirlpool at the health club, and feeling grateful that I had the lifetime membership (a gift, ironically enough, from my mother), so that I would always be able to go there. I was grateful that they were open late at night. I remembered sitting there and thinking, when I start working, I’ll come and sit here and let all the bad feelings soak away with these bubbles. I’ll use this place to feel clean again.
I was smiling broadly as I got back in my car to drive home. There was nothing that I needed to cleanse myself from. What bad feelings?
I slept really well that night. No nightmares, no waking up sweating with the panic pressing in on me, no knots in my stomach. I was gainfully employed. I even wrote a check to the electric company.
This was going to work. And I wasn’t even shocked that there weren’t any bad feelings at all.
The next day dawned, as next days inevitably – and depressingly – do. I had showered when I got home, and did it again out of habit before getting dressed and heading out for class. I dressed in community college attire, which (per my definition, anyway) means professional enough to be able to be distinguished from the students and not so formal as to make people think that one is taking oneself too seriously. In the world of academia, community colleges are certainly not to be taken too seriously. That’s unfortunate and not even very accurate; but wasn’t it Lenin who said that perception is reality? It’s where a lot of people start – and where a lot of people finish up, too.
I didn’t want to think about that.
I was fortunate in my Death and Dying class. It was being offered as a partnership agreement between the college and a local hospital, and was largely populated by registered nurses going back to school to acquire a Bachelor of Science in Nursing. So there was not only a lot of motivation among the students, there was also a lot of expertise. I was talking about death: my students were people who dealt with it every time they went to work. It was more than a little humbling.
That first morning after working for Peach, though, I have to admit that I wasn’t feeling particularly humble. I was feeling high.
That day we were talking about death and war. It was one of my favorite classes on the syllabus, because there was so much material with which to challenge the students. I didn’t want to tell them whether war was right or wrong; I wanted to challenge their perceptions and help them come to their own conclusions. Or their own confusion. Either was acceptable.
I read two poems aloud – Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “The Conscientious Objector,” and Randall Jarrell’s “Losses,” both of them highly emotional, exquisitely beautiful, and extremely challenging. I read the poems as I always did, not really reading but reciting them by heart. I was watching the class, looking for reactions that I could use in the discussion that was going to follow. And then, suddenly, for a scary split second – it honestly was no more than that – I was back on the boat, sitting and sipping wine after getting dressed, having a packet of money pressed into my hand.
And I liked it. As though seeing it all in fast-motion, I stepped back from where I was standing, stepped out of my body and looked at myself, and I liked what I saw. I liked my professional competence, the fact that I was teaching something important and teaching it well. And I also liked the secret knowledge that the night before I had been paid to be sexy, beautiful, desirable. I liked both sides of myself. I liked them a lot.
These people, my students, listened to poetry that they fiercely believed had no place in their lives, simply because I had asked them to. I had built up a measure of trust with them over the weeks and months of this course so that I could ask them to listen to archaic words and find the truths spoken through them. They trusted me. I was an authority figure.
In fact, half of the class called me “Doctor.” The authority figure to the fore. It was a little scary. What if I was too much of an authority figure to be sexy? What if I couldn’t do another call for Peach? What if I went on a call and got rejected? What if Bruce had been an exception? What if I really was too old for all this? Would I end up remembering that first night and becoming bitter because I had glimpsed something that I wanted and couldn’t have? Wouldn’t it have been better, if that were to be the case, to never have started at all?
So when I called Peach later that afternoon, I told her once again – and somewhat more firmly – that I wanted to meet her in person.
She didn’t like it. She fought it. As I would find out later, she never liked meeting any of the girls, not at first. Sometimes not ever. She always waited until she had already formed an opinion of them through the telephone, through reports from the clients. I never knew why. Maybe seeing them would make the whole endeavor too real to her. Maybe she could keep some distance as long as both her employees and her clients remained disembodied voices on the other end of a telephone line.
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