Читать книгу Call Girl - Jenny Angell - Страница 9

FIVE

In the end, I took a few nights off after that. Stefano had been fun, most of my calls had been okay, but the experience with the guy in Back Bay had shaken me up more than I liked to admit.

So instead of working I sat in my apartment, sipped red wine, and wondered if I hadn’t made a mistake, after all. Maybe the world of prostitution was, in fact, as terrible as it had been portrayed in movies, in books. Maybe it would end up making me feel bad about myself. Maybe I needed to decide if the Stefanos made up for the Barrys.

What I really needed, I decided, was to get away from it, to get some perspective. I needed a dose of “real life” – whatever that is – to feel like I was really myself again.

So I spent a lot of time working on enhancing my classes. I arranged a field trip to a funeral home, and I followed up some leads I had heard concerning possible full-time faculty openings.

I also spent some time tracking down people I’d promised to get together with socially, but had neglected. I thought that I didn’t need a social life. I was wrong.

Friends had fallen out of touch, and I had done nothing about it. That happens a lot when a relationship ends: people who knew you as a couple feel awkward around you once you’re single, and I hadn’t exactly been active in pursuing anybody. So I tried to make up for it.

I had lunch with my friend Irene, who had been my study-partner at school. We ate at Jae’s on Tremont Street and talked over pad thai and sushi about our inability to secure tenure-track positions, and we both admitted that we had nothing even approaching a love life. We promised that we’d try to see each other more often.

I went to the Silhouette Lounge in Allston with my gay friend Roger, who certainly, according to his conversation, made up for Irene’s and my lack of a love life with his busy nocturnal agenda. We drank blue drinks and he provided a running commentary on every man who entered the room. We promised on parting that we’d try to see each other more often.

I even invited my next-door neighbor over for Indian food (delivered) and a rerun of Rear Window on cable, which was fun; but we didn’t promise to see each other more often. She got up early most mornings to take the train to the financial district, where she did something with stocks; my invitation appeared to be an opportunity for her to mention (which she did, several times) that sometimes she could hear my music playing after ten.

Peach obviously felt the lull and wanted to make things up to me. “I’ve got something special for you,” she said brightly on the following Wednesday.

“What is it?” Okay, so I was ready for a break from trying to convince myself that I really did have a social life.

“Not what, honey: who.”

Who was a client called Jerry Fulcher, and he wanted to go gamble at Foxwoods, a super-casino. He wanted me to go with him. Three days, two nights, an Earth, Wind and Fire show, and a massage and spa treatment if I wanted them. Just be my date, he said.

Peach had already negotiated a flat fee – you really can’t charge by the hour for a whole weekend – and it was looking good to go. Three days away from the city at the world’s largest resort casino and a thousand-dollar paycheck. I didn’t think it over for too long. I could use a vacation.

So, that weekend, off we went to Foxwoods.

We drove down together, Jerry’s plan, which I accepted without thinking much about it. Another mistake; but who knew? This was uncharted territory for me.

To get to Foxwoods, you drive on uninspired highways and then on back roads that look like you’re going nowhere in particular, and then suddenly there it is. Parking lot after parking lot ringing it like a concrete moat, and shuttle buses in pastel colors bustling in and out of them. And there, on top of the hill, is The Place itself.

It looks, and not unintentionally I suspect, very much like Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, the Disney version – only on steroids. The place just doesn’t know when to stop: towers and balconies and turrets and acres of glass reflecting back the green of the surrounding trees (we’re still working the Sleeping Beauty analogy here, in case you weren’t paying attention). Everything is clean and everyone is happy. The staff is all so perky, they have to be rejects from the Mouse Machine itself.

But hell, I was here for work, too. Perky, sexy, whatever it takes.

There were fresh flowers waiting in our room with a card that said “Tia,” which I have to admit was a classy touch. Jerry unfortunately also thought it was a classy touch, and said so, over and over. Nothing like a man who needs to keep telling you how subtle he is.

I was up for a shower and a walk to stretch my legs after the drive, but first we had to try out the bed, and that took longer than expected. Jerry was distracted, and distracted doesn’t really work well in this line of work. After a lengthy session involving a fair workout on my part, he finally came. He immediately sat up and explained his distraction. “I’ve been thinking. I don’t think they gave me all the credits I’m supposed to have on my Wampum loyalty card,” he said briskly, as he hustled us both into our clothes and out the door. “Gotta get this straightened out.”

I stood next to him as he spent ten minutes arguing with one of the Mouseketeers (who, to her credit, remained perky the whole time) over what turned out to be a difference of twenty dollars, and about which he was ultimately wrong, but which they gave to him anyway to make him go away. I was, even with only Mouseketeers and a couple of middle-aged gamblers for an audience, slightly embarrassed.

As it turned out, I had only just begun to be embarrassed.

After that weekend, I understood the girls whose policy was to only see clients in private venues. No restaurants, no concerts, no trips. They had a point. A lot of these guys need additional training in social skills before they can be taken out in public.

We had dinner at the Cedars Steak House, in a section of the casino styled to look like the town in It’s a Wonderful Life or someplace equally perfect and equally fictional. “You can order anything on the menu,” Jerry told me expansively. “Even the most expensive stuff. That’s the lobster, I think. So, yeah, go ahead, order the lobster! It’s free, I have a Wampum card.”

I ordered the lobster. I didn’t get into a debate over whether the possession of a Wampum card, earned through hours of losing at the gaming tables, truly constituted a free meal. I had a far more immediate problem.

I was seriously overdressed.

All right, so laugh at my naïveté. Or use another word. Innocent. Gullible. Romantic. They all apply.

The truth is that I’d never been to a casino in my life. What I had done, however, was see a lot of sixties spy movies and adventure series episodes. James Bond. Steve McQueen in The Thomas Crown Affair. Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra in tuxedos. All from before my time, but recaptured thanks to modern technology on my VCR. I watched them because I loved them. I loved the smoking jackets and the dinner jackets and the martinis and Manhattans and the slinky women with false eyelashes and real breasts. Those were the days.

Those were also my only exposure to casino gambling.

Now, Jerry had made his needs clear: he wanted to look good. He wanted me standing next to him while he played blackjack. He wanted me to massage his shoulders at tense moments. He wanted me to order drinks for him, and then kiss him as I passed them over.

So this combination added up to one single assumption in my mind: go for glamour. I will be the slinky woman leaning over the hero in the tuxedo, while his steely gaze holds that of his adversary in the final moment before turning over the winning card. Yeah, well, like I said, I’m a romantic.

The only problem was that everybody here had signed on for a different movie. I was in Casablanca and they were in The Cable Guy.

Jerry was wearing maroon sweatpants and a t-shirt that read, “I Heart N.Y.” Nearly everybody around us seemed to have gotten the same memo that he had. I saw polyester. I saw – I actually saw, no lie – t-shirts on a middle-aged couple that read, respectively, “Old Fart” and “Old Fart’s Wife.” The snazzier dressers were into jeans.

And I, on the other hand, was wearing a little black-nothing dress from Lord and Taylor along with seamed stockings and high-heeled black fuck-me shoes.

Oops.

The food arrived, and was what you’d expect in a steak house in a casino. I was glad I that had followed Jerry’s suggestion – it’s really hard to fuck up lobster. We ordered a bottle of domestic white Zinfandel and Jerry made a joke when the waitress opened it, something about the ones at home all having screw tops. I tried to pretend that I was somewhere else.

He also watched her walk away with eyes that missed nothing.

“She’s got a great ass.”

I dutifully agreed, but my heart wasn’t in it. I was still worried about my dress.

Jerry pursed his lips. “Bet she digs chicks. I can always tell. She was checking out your tits.”

Small wonder, as mine are the only ones showing within, oh, a ten-mile radius. She was probably wondering how much my dress cost. I said half-heartedly, “Do you think so?”

He nodded vigorously. “Hey, I wonder. Maybe she’d like to join us later, when she gets off work. I’ll bet she’d get off on me watching her tongue you.”

Okay. We need to interrupt this broadcast. I’m going to say something that may burst a few bubbles, but what the hell. You know how there are all these urban myths out there, like the alligators living in the sewers and the kids who put the cat in the microwave and it exploded? Well, there are specialized urban legends. There’s a Catholic urban legend that says Mary Magdalene was a prostitute (I looked into this one; thought I could use a patron saint). News flash: she wasn’t, but we like believing it so much that we ignore little things like facts, evidence, that sort of thing.

Well, anyway, there are sexual urban legends, too. Different ones for men and for women, of course. And, guys, I’m here to tell you: We don’t get off on you watching two of us having sex together. In the privacy of our own intimate moments, we generally do not strap on oversized dildos and encourage our partners to engage in a plastic blowjob. I know that’s what you like to see. I know that’s what you want to believe. But if you are ever sitting and watching two women doing that, you need to know that they’re doing it solely for you and you’d better ask yourself why. You’ll pay for the show, one way or another.

At least when callgirls do it, the payment is unambiguous.

So I looked at Jerry and said, doubtfully, “Uh-huh.”

“Yeah,” he said, addressing his steak. “We’ll have to check her out.” Please God, I thought silently, please God, don’t let him make me ask her.

As it turned out, once dinner was over, Jerry had other things on his mind. Maybe there is a God, after all. “Time to win some serious cash,” he informed me, and we proceeded into the casino proper.

I thanked Mary Magdalene for my reprieve, just in case.

* * * * * *

I know a little less about blackjack than does your average five-year-old. It’s cards, okay? It’s one of the games that the steely-eyed men in dinner jackets used to play on my VCR.

It became obvious very quickly that my understanding the game was fortunately not necessary. I was there in a strictly ornamental capacity. And if I had misjudged how others were going to be dressed, at least I wasn’t far off in their responses to my choice of clothes. Of those people who were not intently absorbed in the play of cards on the tables in front of them, it became immediately clear that the men all wanted me and the women all hated me.

Par for the course.

So I watched Jerry settle at a blackjack table and nod to the dealer; the cards were dealt and I tried to look slinky rather than bored. I have to say that Jerry seemed to do rather well, so well in fact that he turned to me soon and gave me a hundred-dollar chip. “Here,” he said, loud enough for the table to hear, “go have a little fun for yourself.”

I took the chip – I’m no fool – but hesitated. He looked up impatiently. “Go play roulette,” he urged. “You’ll have fun. Come back when you’re finished.”

“If you’re sure, baby,” I said automatically, but I was starting to walk away even as I said the words. Three hours with him and I was already needing space.

I didn’t play roulette. I cashed in the chip and put the money in my bag (small and sexy and expensive, another faux pas, since most of the women I saw were carrying large vinyl bags into which they could pour their winnings from the slot machines) and wandered around to satisfy my genuine curiosity about the casino.

My friend Irene had had a lot to say about Foxwoods when I told her I was going (“just with a friend, nothing special”). “Oh, my God, Jen, do you know about that place?”

I think I’ve made it fairly obvious that I did not. “No,” I said.

“It’s supposed to belong to this Indian tribe, they got all this land and these loans because of some sort of payback for white people having taken everything from them.”

That much I knew. “So? That seems fair.”

“Maybe,” Irene continued, excited now. “Except that it turns out that the guy who started the whole thing was a dirtbag. There aren’t any Pequots, they died out years ago, and this guy – Skip something – got his family declared a tribe without having to prove it, the way all the other tribes had to.” Irene shrugged. “I actually think the idea is good, too,” she said. “I think that there should be some accounting. It’s just that the right people should benefit, not some scumbag out to make an easy buck.”

I was thinking about that as I walked around. I saw a lot of pseudo-Indians, that was for sure: all the cocktail waitresses were dressed in colorful fringed suede dresses and had headbands with single feathers stuck in the back of them. I’m not sure about the authenticity of the feather, but I am pretty sure that no Native Americans would have recognized the length of those dresses (as in barely covering the ass), nor certainly the fishnet tights and high heels that went with them.

Hiawatha meets Moulin Rouge.

I wandered in and out of several rooms filled with people intently staring at cards or dice, and eventually I got back to Jerry, only losing my way once, which was a pleasant surprise. He hadn’t moved, although I saw that several faces around the semi-circle of gamblers had changed.

He noticed me peripherally. “There you are. Get me a drink, will you, hon?” he asked. Then, as an afterthought, “How’d you do?”

I looked contrite. “I lost it, baby. I bet on my birthday and lost.” Or I would have, if I had been foolish enough to play.

“That’s okay.” He squeezed my waist and looked around the table to see if anyone was watching. “I just want you to have fun, that’s all. Get me a drink, will ya?”

I signaled to one of the pseudo-Indians. She hadn’t been to the same Mouseketeer training as the front-desk people. Or maybe she just hated me on principle because I was better dressed than she was. “Yes, what is it?”

“A Chivas on the rocks, please.” Jerry had already given me a lengthy list of his preferences – sexual and otherwise – during our drive down from Boston. “And I’ll have a gin and tonic.” Might as well enjoy myself, I thought. Experience has taught me that being slightly buzzed can often be a good thing in an uncomfortable situation.

Jerry was getting twitchy. I waited until the drinks came and took a couple of chips from the pile he had left for me to use. He had told me about that, too, on the ride down: “Those chicks, they work their asses off and deserve something. I always tip them.” Like that was an extraordinary act of selflessness. Well, maybe for Jerry it was.

I tipped the waitress, which mollified her not one bit. Okay, I thought, fine, I tried, fuck you too. I put his drink discreetly beside him on the wooden rail provided for that purpose, sipped my gin and tonic, and tried to pay attention to the table.

Jerry, it transpired, was getting twitchy because Jerry was losing.

Even without knowing about blackjack, I could tell Jerry was losing. He didn’t have nearly the number of chips in front of him that he had had before. Worse still, it seemed that everybody else at the table had more chips than he did.

Now, what I do understand about blackjack is that you’re not playing against the other people. They’re just there. You’re playing against the dealer. You play, then the dealer moves to somebody else and plays against them, and so on around the table, all these separate little dramas acting themselves out in near silence, everybody just waiting for the moment when it’s their turn with the dealer. So it doesn’t matter in the least how the other people at the table are doing.

But of course it really does. Jerry kept looking at their chips, and with every hand he lost, he got a little more twitchy.

He finished the Chivas and looked around impatiently for more. He got irritable with me when I couldn’t get the Pocahontas-wannabe over fast enough. He started sighing, loudly, when other people were playing their hands. He was, in short, being a poor loser. And annoying the hell out of everyone.

“I’d be doing better if the other people here knew how to play,” he said to me, his voice loud enough to carry nicely to everyone at the table. I caressed his back and neck and murmured comforting things like, Baby, it’s okay, I’m impressed with you, the next hand will be the best; but he shook me off him and said, “What the fuck do you know about it? Some fucking bitch’s trying to teach me to play!”

I froze. Everyone at the table froze, except for the dealer, who must have been used to that kind of thing. What I was thinking was that I had never heard James Bond say anything like that to any of his slinky women.

Jerry glared at the other players. “It’d help if there were some fucking Americans here,” he snarled as an afterthought.

Long pause. I looked at the other players. Three were clearly of Asian nationality or descent. This wasn’t going to be pretty.

And I was quite certain that I was the only one to find irony in his reference to “Americans” in the context of a casino that had been thrown to the Native Americans much as one might throw a bone to a dog by way of reparations. And, having done so, had missed.

It was time, in any case, to take matters into my own hands. “Come on, baby,” I urged Jerry, again putting the seductive tone in my voice and the promising touch in my fingertips. “Let’s take a break. I miss you. Come on, just a few minutes…”

Man, I don’t care if Mary Magdalene wasn’t really a prostitute, I’m lighting a candle to her anyway: he actually left the table with me.

We found a dark bar (there seemed to be any number of them around) and I played with his dick under the table and talked as soothingly as I could while he downed two more Chivases, which didn’t seem like a good sign. He was convinced that others’ poor playing meant that the cards were lined up against him. Of course, “What can you expect from a bunch of goddamned Chinks? The whole place is full of them.”

Yeah, well, there’s just so much of this that I could listen to, even for a thousand dollars. I moved closer to him and slid my tongue slowly down his neck, my fingers still lightly fondling his dick that I could feel getting hard through the sweatpants. It’s not so much the having sex in exchange for money: it’s not being able to tell racist, sexist, self-absorbed assholes like this what you really think of them.

“It’s time for me, now,” I murmured against his neck. “Baby, I need you… please…”

He fell for it. Thank God I still had my touch. He grumbled about us always doing what I wanted, about how I really was a nympho and couldn’t get enough of him, I was lucky he was a real stud and not like some of those other losers I see, and I agreed with it all and pulled him into the elevator after me. Whatever it takes.

And that was just the first night.

By the time we were packing to go, I could barely speak civilly to him. He had embarrassed me in front of bartenders, waitstaff, card dealers, pit bosses, maids, and polyester-clad patrons. He had made loud boorish comments in the high stakes rooms and had felt up one of the Pocanatas cocktail waitresses. He had sent food back to the kitchen three times. He asked the African-American couple sharing our table at the Earth, Wind, and Fire concert to stop dancing around so much, and muttered something rather loudly about how “those people” had to behave like monkeys.

Fortunately, you don’t have to speak to your partner in order to have sex with him. Or at least you don’t need to have a conversation. Because I might have said any number of things that might have been regrettable.

I paid for the time I spent away from him at the promised spa session by playing prolonged games in bed. “Tell me I’ve got the biggest cock you’ve ever seen. Come on, bitch, say it again. Say it loud!”

He had me bring him to the brink of orgasm and then stop, over and over again, until I was dizzy with the effort and he lay back and said, “What’s the matter? Come on, kiss me here, I want some tongue this time.”

“I need to rest a moment,” I protested.

He grabbed my hair and pulled my head to his crotch with such force that it brought tears to my eyes. “You’re not here to rest, bitch, you’re here to do what I want, so suck me!”

We ended up having long sessions of increasingly violent sex, silent uneasy meals together, and lengthy hours gambling in the casino during which I cringed at his behavior.

Saturday night I fled for a half-hour, pleading the classic headache, and found myself in one of the dark little bars, the only person there. “What’ll it be?” The bartender, at least, was not dressed like a Hollywood Indian.