Seven Types of Ambiguity

by Elliot Perlman

  “Will you calm down.”

  “What the hell do you think—”

  “Please! Please sit down. Let me explain,” he said.

  “I know what you think and—”

  “Angela, please. Here is what I think. Okay. I think that last night was a wonderful night. I think that you are virtually penniless and that all your earthly goods, or at least everything you own in this part of the earth, is currently in the care and custody of the proprietors of one of the sleaziest motels in town. I think that you owe those proprietors money, and I think that you have the best chance of getting your suitcase back if you pay them as soon as possible. This is the best and the quickest way of getting your suitcase back,” he said, pointing to the money.

  “So the money, is it a loan?” I asked him tentatively, wanting more than anything for the answer to be yes.

  “No. It’s not a loan.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because . . . I don’t want it back.”

  “Why the hell don’t you want it back?”

  “Look, Angela, Angelique, Angel, I’ve just paid my rent for the next month. I need much more money than that hundred dollars to make the slightest bit of difference to my life. You, on the other hand, are about a hundred dollars between vagrancy and whatever else the rest of your life holds. It’s worth a great deal more to you. You should have it. You would have earned much more than that last night had I not kidnapped you for a cameo role in the endless desperate self-indulgence that is currently my life. I owe you more than that in boredom money alone. Call it a disappointment fee. You had certain financial goals last night, which were thwarted entirely by me. But every minute you wait your tea grows colder and the chance of you getting your suitcase back gets smaller.”

  “Where will I go?”

  “What do you mean? Don’t you know the way from here?”

  “Simon, where will I go when I have my suitcase?”

  “Well,” he said, “I was expecting that you’d come back here. You don’t have to, but I didn’t think you had anywhere else to go. Try not to be too long though. I really owe Empson a walk.”

  It is difficult to describe my relief on hearing that. I felt that things might be starting to work out for me, just a little. My suitcase was behind the desk at reception and when I gave them the money I owed, no questions were asked. Money has that effect. When I got back Simon and I had breakfast, showered, and took Empson for a walk. It was during that walk that Simon made the first of his many pleas for me not to work as a prostitute. I told him that I would only do it until I had enough money to get a little settled. Of course, aiming to get a little settled graduated into aiming to get a car, to put a deposit on a place, and ultimately, to start a business of my own. The irony is that now, just when I am being forced to stop, he goes and shuts me out of his life completely.

  8. Simon begged me not to work the streets. It was, he said, in addition to being very dangerous, also illegal. Brothels and escort agencies are legal in the State of Victoria. I hadn’t known that. I looked through the yellow pages and phoned some places that charged three hundred, five hundred, and even a thousand dollars an hour. That was what I wanted. If I was going to do it, why not do it for a thousand an hour? Simon said I could stay with him for a few days, which became almost three weeks. In those three weeks I met Kelly, Simon started seeing Alex Klima, and I started earning real money.

  The first place I called was the thousand-dollar-an-hour escort agency. I had a lot of embarrassing misconceptions about the whole industry, embarrassing to me now. I expected to find a suntanning bed, manicurists, a team of people to set you up and do your hair and make-up so that you would go on expensive bookings looking like you were some kind of model, but it wasn’t like that at all. If you wanted to look that good, you had to do it yourself. I had expected it to be a team effort. I thought they would have standards, a reputation to protect. They didn’t have very much to protect at all.

  I sat in the waiting room as the other girls came and went. Many of them knew one another. I just sat there. I was scared every time the phone rang. It wasn’t that the manager was favoring the other girls. It was that they kept trying to send me to two-hundred-dollar bookings and I was holding out for at least a five-hundred-dollar booking. I didn’t really know if I was going to be able to go through with it or, if I could do it once, whether I was going to be able to do it again. If nothing else, I wanted to come away from the night with a clear two hundred and fifty dollars after the agency’s cut. I hadn’t taken into account the driver’s cut.

  Finally, after sitting in the waiting room for four hours looking at a TV screen, trying to pretend I wasn’t nervous, the manager came up to me. “We’ve just got a five-hundred-dollar booking at a hotel on St. Kilda Road. Will you take this one?”

  She spoke to me as though I were a little princess, too precious, not really interested in working. It was time for me to put my money where my mouth was. Or some permutation thereof. I said I’d take it.

  My stomach was churning. I trembled a little in the backseat of the car on the way there. There was a part of me that couldn’t believe I was actually going to go through with it, and it is possible I would have had cold feet had it not been for Kelly.

  It was a two-girl booking, and we met in the foyer of the hotel. My first thought on seeing her, as though it mattered, was that she was prettier than me. She was certainly much more relaxed. We introduced ourselves. For some reason I was even nervous talking to her. She commented that she hadn’t seen me before at the agency. I was debating whether or not to tell her that I hadn’t ever done this before when she said, “You’re new at this, aren’t you?”

  “First time,” I conceded.

  “First time! Okay, let’s have a drink before we go up.”

  Kelly was great, really comforting. She need not have been. It can be a very catty industry. She took me to the bar and bought me a glass of champagne. I was dressed in a very conservative blue dress, not very hookerish at all. It was a dress that one might normally wear to the theater or something like that. Kelly later said it was a mistake to show no cleavage and to cover the knees. I looked shy rather than wanton. It mattered less than I could have imagined.

  Kelly told me to relax, she would look after me. Then she bought me another glass of champagne. This would be fine, she said, no problems at all. I asked her how she knew and she said, “Oh, it’s two Chinese guys.”

  “Why is that good?”

  “They’ll be clean, polite, and perhaps not so fluent in English so you won’t have to talk much. And they’ll be small.”

  “Small?”

  “Dicks. Won’t hurt. Women are generally five and a half inches deep, you know. Anything bigger than that on a man, if it’s used badly, can really hurt, especially on some young rammer who’s really proud of his equipment. These guys, Chinese business types, possibly shy, they’ll be easy. They’ll swim in you. It’s money for jam.”

  “Small? What about those sumo guys, the really fat ones?” I asked.

  “Sumo wrestlers? That’s Japanese, and anyway, there’s one part of their bodies they can’t beef up. Either they’ve got it or they haven’t, and, believe me, Asian guys haven’t. No, trust me, honey, Asians, especially Chinese, that’s really good. They all look the same so it’s hard to get an ugly one. I’ll do the talking, tell them you’re the new girl. They’ll treat you well.”

  “Why?”

  “A new girl, she’s . . . she’s almost a virgin, she’s special. They’ll feel lucky, like all their new years have come at once. And they’ll be gentler with you. We often tell guys it’s our first time. Everybody’s happier.”

  “I don’t get it,” I told her. She explained.

  “It’s like they’ll feel special being your first-ever client and they’ll want you to think well of them. You can use that.”

  “But it is my first time.”

  “Then it is special. It’s the last time that will ever be true.”r />
  She could see that I was still scared and she took my hand.

  “Honey, if you get in there and you don’t want to do it, you can call me. Here’s my cell-phone number,” she said, copying it down and putting it in my bag.

  We went up together. I stood beside her as she knocked on the door. When it opened, Kelly did the talking. She explained in a friendly but firmly patronizing way to the two men in their late thirties or early forties that we were there to show them a good time but first we needed to get the matter of money out of the way. The man who had opened the door pulled a credit card out of his wallet. I stood there nervously trying to avoid eye contact with the other one, the one I just assumed was mine. Neither of us was comfortable doing the talking. This was something we had in common.

  Kelly took the other man’s credit card and phoned the details through to the agency. As she waited for the agency to complete the transaction, she must have seen me looking like a little girl on her first day of school. That was how I felt. I wanted to go over to her side of the room and stand behind her as she spoke on the phone. Kelly discerned my discomfort and turned it to advantage by announcing rather loudly, their broken English being to her indicative of deafness, “It’s her first time, you know. You work out between you who wants me and who wants the new girl.”

  After a minute or two that took forever, Kelly signified that the payment had been accepted. It was really going to happen. I tried telling myself that I had a job to do and that it had to be done before I could go home. I just had to say a few things, not many, do a few things, and permit still other things to be done to me. The voice inside me shouted at me not to be afraid. If I wanted the money, I had to do whatever it took. That was my plan. The words came into my head, screaming to the exclusion of any other thoughts, “Just do it!” How strange were the fruits of the children working in the factories of Asia, Simon mused when I subsequently told him.

  There was an urgency to that instruction. It had no time for second thoughts, no stomach for anticipation, and no mind for wisdom. Ultimately, I could not be held responsible for what I was about to do. I would only be following orders.

  Kelly left with the holder of the credit card, and I was alone with my client. As I sat down on the bed he took a bottle of champagne out of the bar refrigerator, opened it, and poured me a glass. Then he told me that he was going to take a shower. He seemed pleasant enough, certainly not unpleasant. His shower and drying time was thirty minutes. I timed him because it was a one-hour booking and I couldn’t believe how long he was taking. It occurs to me now that perhaps he was masturbating in the shower to lengthen his performance with me. Men sometimes try things like that. It’s something Joe Geraghty told me. I was concerned that this guy might dispute the time.

  He came out of the bathroom in a dry towel. I didn’t know what to do, how to start, but he had clearly done this many times before. He lay naked facedown on the bed. For a moment I just looked at him. He was the first Chinese man I had ever seen naked. Then I started to massage him and once I’d started the massage, everything was okay.

  I relaxed. He seemed to be enjoying the massage, and I just went into boyfriend mode. You learn early from experience that a boyfriend will often want sex when you don’t. And it doesn’t even take a boyfriend. It can be someone you met in a bar or at a party, the territory of the one-night stand. You want to meet new people, to be admired. You feel relaxed after a few drinks. Then you suddenly find yourself somewhere thinking, I don’t really want to go through with this, not anymore, but it’s easier to go through with it than to back out. So you go through the motions. You pay lip service to the act. You don’t need to be a prostitute for this to happen. The only difference is that we take money for it up front. If everyone knew how easy it really is, after the first couple of times anyway, we’d earn less than waitresses.

  I put a condom on him, and he took five minutes. I timed that too. He turned over, and I gave him another massage. He barely spoke. It was a great introduction. If only they were all like that. He didn’t even try to kiss me or bargain for any extras. We call them “extras,” whatever else they can think of. When we quote, what we are really quoting for is basic or straight sex. We charge more for any fetish or aberration. But you soon learn that sexual aberration is largely a myth or, rather, a misnomer. It is “normal” sex that is a myth. Aberration is the norm. The fetishes, the games, the role play, costumes, and equipment, they are so common. If every woman knew that, we would certainly earn less than waitresses.

  Alex says a man’s fetish begins at a moment of conjoined anxiety and stimulation when, for some reason, the man is made to feel that if he expresses his sexuality at that precise moment, he will be breaking some rule and love will be withheld from him. He says fetishes are about the search for love. I’m not sure about this. I am sure that I could have earned considerably more if I’d been more willing to help them revisit their moments of conjoined anxiety and stimulation but, as much as I’ve wanted to make money, the “extras” can play games with your mind. Kelly is stronger than me. Simon thought I was mentally strong, stronger than him, but he never really knew Kelly. She’s the strong one. He was constantly amazed that I could walk out of a place and wipe the booking from my mind. Nor could he understand how I could leave the safety of the brothel to do escort work. He thought, like most people, that the kind of work I was doing was likely, sooner or later, to lead me, through alienation and depersonalization, to a sense of what he called “agonizing aloneness” and despair. But he was quite wrong. I got there through love.

  Kelly introduced me to the brothel where she worked most of the time. She said that the management there watched out for their girls better than they had to. She was right. They have taken good care of me. They’ve helped me get well-paid escort work when I’ve wanted it, although they try to discourage their “career” girls from escorting because they say it’s more dangerous, wears you out, and is usually the refuge of girls who wouldn’t be able to attract bookings from men who have a choice of women they can see. Fran, the manager, said a girl as pretty as me didn’t need to take the risks inherent in escorting but that she would get the work for me if I really wanted it. Kelly was pretty enough not to have to escort but because she was obsessed with making money, she did it on the side. She freelanced with the other agency, the one I had picked out of the phone book. She chose them in order not to alienate Fran. Somehow I think Fran knew about it.

  This was the beginning of a time that Alex calls my “golden age.” I was earning good money for the first time ever. Kelly had taken me under her wing and was showing me the ropes. We hit it off almost immediately. I felt that I could trust her, and she obviously felt the same way because she invited me to live with her. We found a two-bedroom place to rent with security doors, high ceilings, and French windows looking onto a little courtyard where we would often sit and have coffee. I got a little car and a little self-esteem.

  And then there was Simon. He was always trying to give me money even though, within a week or two of starting work, I had more money than he had. He had hardly any, but he would take me out to secondhand bookshops and buy me the books he thought I should have. Poetry particularly excited him. He said that if you had books you need never be alone. But of course, during that time, during the golden age, I never was alone. I bought him food and I cooked for him. We went for walks with Alex and Empson, went out for coffee, for drinks. I read many of the books he fed me, and he was right. When the words dance privately for you it is possible to feel not alone. I didn’t pretend to understand all the words but Simon explained how they wait for you inside the covers, how they wait for you to need them. I know, since Alex brings Simon’s books to him, that he is using them now. But it seems my best words have been spent. The only words I have left are not able to describe what has happened to me, to us.

  9. Sometimes Simon would talk about Anna. Occasionally, he’d show me photos of her I hadn’t seen before, pulled from boxes in cupbo
ards or drawers. Of course I was curious at first, but eventually I saw more photos of her than the satisfaction of my curiosity required. She is pretty, very pretty. You can see the Italian in her. I thought for a while that maybe that was the part of her that was so special to him. I felt very Anglo, very white compared to her. At other times, the way he talked about her made me feel stupid, or, if not stupid in the sense of unintelligent, then uncultured. Whatever I read, and most of what I thought about, Simon had introduced me to; it was all just a regurgitation of things he had told me. While this was a kind of membership in the world that was important to him, it was not a full membership and I didn’t really belong. She did. She hadn’t needed to be taught. She had come to him educated and sophisticated.

  And so when it emerged that the Joe Geraghty I was seeing once a week was her husband, I thought Simon’s fascination with their lives was understandable. Perhaps it was even to my advantage. Here was Joe, the husband of the great and lovely Anna, the woman who had rejected Simon, and Joe was cheating on her, weekly, preferring me, Simon’s girlfriend, to her. The fairy-tale life of the affluent young couple in their half-acre home by the beach was a sham and I was in a position to bring him fresh and intimate reports of just how much of a sham it was. What spurned lover would not find this interesting?

  I saw this interest in their lives, in Anna, Sam, and even in Joe, grow into an obsession. For a long while I repressed what I was seeing. When that became impossible, I coped by telling myself that if it were an obsession then at least it was one that required my input, one that I was, so to speak, a part of. There were times, however, when something Simon had said about her a day or so earlier would come to mind and my eyes would fill uncontrollably and without warning. I always meant to ask Alex if that was a sympathetic or a parasympathetic response, or if it was just part of my “inconvenience.”