by Kris Bertin
This was a duty of hers, one that she took on out of big, aching love for her weirdly quiet and sometimes eloquent brother, and though it could be very dull, she enjoyed it. She enjoyed it because he only did it with her, and had changed—somewhere along the way—their scheduled conversation from once every five or six weeks to every single weekend, no matter what. She also liked it because whenever her mother or father or brother wanted to know something about Allan, they went to her first. He was the youngest, and she felt like he had been cut off from them in some unfair way. By time, and fashion, and culture. The rest of them looked the same, more or less, but Allan, with tattoos not just on a bicep or a shoulder blade, but from fingertip to jawbone, and sporting large-gauge tunnel earrings big enough to put two fingers through, looked like he belonged to some other world. The future, maybe.
Because he was the youngest, and everyone was waiting to see when he would join them in adulthood, theories abounded on what would become of him. Their mother believed he possessed incredible writing abilities based on his high school English papers, and that he might one day become a novelist, or at least someone important, an entertainer, a reporter, something. Maggie’s brother and father, however, imagined the worst—that Allan’s solitary life, punctuated by travel and dangerous sports, like surfing, would lead to kidnapping by Mexican cartels, accidental death, or some STD a rung or two below AIDS. These two imagined the worst, but wanted to do so. It was how they joked about it. They cast gayness upon him as an explanation for the length of his hair or the little wispy moustache he sometimes sported, then said drugs when he brought a girl to them who was decorated like him, with hair the colour of cotton candy or sno-cones. These women would be gone as quickly as they’d come, and Frank, the eldest, even declared that he was not going to learn their names until a ring appeared on a finger (forgetting that he, in his youth, had brought to them perhaps the same number of women, though his were always much more obnoxious).
Only Maggie had anything sensible to say about their little brother Allan, which was always that he was doing his own thing and that he was happy. She never knew if the latter was true, but said it, in his defense, with much conviction. Besides corresponding with him, defending him was her other job. She liked doing it, because it was the right thing to do, and she liked being right.
Then, sometime a few months in, Allan’s calls changed and he began confessing to things to her.
The first time, he said I need to confess something, but was polite enough to add if you want to hear it afterwards. And Maggie, who usually spent the call just waiting for it to be over so she could walk the dog and do the dozens of other things Sunday required of her, said Of course I do. She said it in her most sisterly and understanding-sounding voice, even though there was real excitement in her that she worried might come through. Nothing, she thought, had changed between them, and the content of their communication had been the same for so long that Maggie decided something must have changed for him. In her excitement, she imagined an engagement, or a baby. Even an accidental pregnancy could be good news, she thought. It would push him forward, into her world, and he would be one of them, finally.
The confession wasn’t about a baby. It was substantial, and confirmed that something had indeed changed. Before he began, Allan made her promise not to tell anyone, not even Frank, who she was undoubtedly closer to, geographically, socially, emotionally. The landline she used for these duties was wall-mounted, and old: a Touch-Tone phone that had come with the house and was painted at its edges from all the times the stairwell wall had changed colour. She remembered how, the first time he confessed to her, she had drawn the cord closer to her, through the stairwell, as though the cord itself contained secrets she should keep from the children.
She swore secrecy, and soon, it was out of his mouth, run through black power lines, and shot into her ear.
“I’m a male escort,” he said.
It was a big one, though, right away, it wasn’t particularly unbelievable to Maggie. He had told everyone that he was a Personal Masseuse, and even had, over the holidays, given their mother an astounding foot rub through her Christmas socks that seemed to impress even those who couldn’t feel it. In Maggie’s mind, his job had already reeked of sex. Her handsome, twentysomething brother driving to people’s houses with a big blue folding table, dressed all in white with erotically short sleeves, getting the customer to undress, producing oils from a case for their bare, splayed-out bodies. This was already, in her mind, almost a kind of prostitution.
When he said male escort, she saw her instinctual follow-ups, on cue cards, laid out in her mind’s eye.
You should stop.
Since when?
With men or women?
She swatted these away.
Allan had never told her anything the least bit meaningful when he called, and she knew this was at risk if she didn’t choose her words carefully. Her own credibility, she thought, was also on the line. Their brother Frank, who had been in a band, then bartended for a decade, only to make the unfathomable jump to a radio career in the United States was undoubtedly the coolest. Their father, a divorcee and chronic philanderer who travelled to craft shows and conventions selling militaria and handmade, historically accurate models of naval vessels and was still dating in his sixties, was even cooler than her. The only person whom she was more interesting than was their mother, who was a retired professor and grew vegetables. Maggie worked part-time at her friend’s kitschy jewellery store since their youngest was old enough for school, attended a non-denominational church, volunteered, and wrote a blog called Marriage Boot Camp, about strengthening your marriage. She knew she was extraordinarily lame, and that her brother knew it too. So, for Maggie, it was imperative that she be open about this. That she sell him on how progressive she could be.
“Awesome,” she said, smiling strangely.
She realized this was the same awesome her husband Michael would deliver when something went wrong. When a pet or a child vomited, or when the neighbour inexplicably blocked his car with theirs. He had said it when their family doctor verified that the lump on his testicle was indeed a tumour, and referred him to an oncologist.
In the silence that followed, she imagined that she had blown it, that this was the end of Allan confiding in her. She watched her husband, bent over some piece of electronics at the coffee table, trying to solder something to something else with the good reading lamp stretched over his workspace. She heard her daughters telling each other something about someone named Gurpreet. She imagined Allan, in his one-bedroom apartment, sitting on his kitchenette counter, regretting his decision to confide in her.
“That’s really awesome,” she said again, her heart thumping in her ear.
She was suddenly hot with worry in her pajamas and bathrobe. Her feet were sweating inside her slipper-socks.
Then came another sound through their connection. His breath, escaping his body. A sigh.
“I’m really relieved to hear that,” he said, and then laughed. He laughed some more, and she did, too.
“It’s fine!” she said, loud enough that her husband looked at her and she made a mind-your-own-business face and waved a hand at him.
Then, without any more prompting, he explained that he hadn’t been lying to them, not exactly. He really was a licensed massage therapist, and had been practicing, but that this, what he called other avenue of employment, had become available to him. He was technically still both, but escorting had become his primary occupation. She was amused by the language he was using, imagined that he was trying to sanitize it in some way, for his boring sister. She used the same kind in response:
“I’m sure it’s a perfectly acceptable income stream,” she said.
Because of her position, on the stairway in the middle of the house, she quickly realized that she couldn’t really ask any follow-up questions anyway. Nearly anything she asked co
uld be seized upon by the girls or her husband, who were always listening, each in their own way, for different things. The girls, for clues about the adult world. Her husband, for any emotional matter which he might later know to avoid.
She was thankful when Allan elaborated without prompting.
He told her that it started when one of his clients, an older woman (though what older was to a twenty-eight-year-old could be anything, she thought) had asked him, post-massage, on a date. He’d been asked out more than once before, and had replied that this wasn’t something he could do. He was still with the home-massage agency, and their rules forbid anything approaching this sort of thing. But when the woman said that she would pay him for his time, that she just wanted someone to have dinner with, he surprised himself by agreeing to it. He did like her, after all. She had paid him seven hundred dollars to eat Italian food, go for a late-night stroll, and receive a deep, open-mouthed kiss, standing outside of a bar that she went into after he got in a cab and went home.
“It was actually great,” he said. “The next day, she hired me again and I went over to her house and we made pizza. Then she told her friends about me.”
Maggie chose her next question carefully. It was her first real question, one of the ones her brain had immediately broadcasted through her skull. The second one.
“How long have you been doing this?” she asked.
“About two years now,” he said.
“Two years?”
The question that shot out of her was even louder than the last one. She covered her mouth. This time, her daughters came to her with wet hands and dishtowels. Her husband put down his soldering iron. She made a demonic face and waved at each of them, turning in to face the stairway wall. Allan was laughing on the other line.
She excused herself and covered the phone. She shoved her mug into the younger one’s hand.
“Put more coffee in here,” she hissed, then shooed the older one away. “Go.”
When the mug came back in Emma’s little hands, she pretended to put it to her lips and have a sip. She knows there is alcohol in it, that alcohol is forbidden, even though, in the past, Maggie had allowed this. One morning, while no one was looking, she had given her a little sip of the delicious, creamy liqueur, which usually was about a third of the drink’s composition.
This time, Maggie widened her eyes threateningly and grabbed it through the banister before saying Get lost. The little one would not leave until Maggie gave her a thumbs-up. She gave her one.
Clearing her throat, she apologized, and resumed her Sunday call with Allan as though it were the same as the rest. Normally, she did all the talking, all the questioning, and it was over abruptly, when Allan fell silent and excused himself, hanging up without much in the way of a formal goodbye. This time, she was unusually silent for nearly an hour while he talked about what his life was like now.
He explained that he knew what she was thinking, but that sex wasn’t usually even part of the job. That it almost never happened, and that mostly, he just hung out with lonely old ladies. That it could get weird, sometimes, and that he would sometimes get someone who was crazy, or who wanted a Harlequin romance encounter with rose petals and candles and passion. These, he said, he was learning to avoid. That the worst thing he could get was a woman who wanted to act out what society insisted they want, rather than something they actually desired.
“I see those kinds of emails now,” he said, “and politely decline.”
He said that the last one like this had been ruined when he was unable to stop laughing: the client wanted him to stand on a footstool and flex his muscles for her. As far as Maggie knew, Allan had no muscles. He said the worst that could happen was if he couldn’t get a conversation going, but that in the end he always realized it was their fault, not his. Sometimes the women would have no social skills, and were sent his way when someone found his ad and told the client that he might help them open up. These cases were almost therapeutic, he said, and they used him as a surrogate dating partner. He said that he’d been better equipped to deal with it once he started reading about female autism, and changed his behaviour to suit them. She was surprised to hear this.
“That’s actually really nice,” Maggie said, and this time meant it. “Good for you.”
Then, just short of the hour mark, he let out another sigh, and got to his point:
He wanted to talk to her because had just got home from a full booking, which, he explained, meant he was paid to stay over, but that it had been a bad one. Maybe the worst he’d ever had, he said.
A client whom he only ever met in public finally asked him to come over. She was sixty-five, divorced, and had just retired. He said that, when he went to her house, there was giant basket with a card congratulating her on twenty-five years with RE/MAX. The place was messy, he said, not hoarder messy, but disorganized, with clothes on hangers everywhere in the living room, and canned foods overtaking the dining room from a nearby pantry. He said it was like each room was slowly invading the next, so that bathroom stuff was in the hallway, bedroom items were in the living room; that everything was changing into something else, like a tide was moving them. He said that she mentioned, as an explanation for the state of things, that she had been so busy these last few years, and that she didn’t usually have anyone over. He said could see how, if you were never home, you might slowly lose control over the way things worked there.
“That’s true,” Maggie said.
When he described it, Maggie saw him, in his usual hooded sweatshirt and jeans, standing in a weird, chaotic living room opposite some professional-looking woman with short hair and bifocals. Then she realized she was imagining their mother, and forcibly re-imagined her. Before he got to saying why it was so bad, Maggie jumped ahead of the story and imagined something truly awful, the worst thing her brain could come up with: some combination of utter perversion and insanity being thrust upon her little brother. Vague, unspeakable sex acts, or something worse. She imagined gnarled old hands brandishing a paring knife at him and showing him tea-stained teeth, or pulling aside a stack of old coats to reveal a dead husband that she needed help dismembering. Then the answer came.
It had been bad because, after being unable to make plans for the evening, this woman somehow settled on wanting him to try on outfits. Hanging on curtain rods were expensive men’s clothes, dust-clad and in sun-softened suit bags and dry-cleaning plastic. She had him to take them down, one by one, laying them out on the carpet before them both.
There were three-piece and two-piece suits, single- and double-breasted, seersucker and herringbone and houndstooth, three different tuxedos (two black, one crushed green velvet). All different cuts and lapel types, mostly out of fashion.
He was made to try on each of them.
There was no fanfare about his undressing, about his inked and uncovered body standing before her, but much attention paid to the suit, once he was in it. Much remarking on its cut and fabric, colour and design. She ran her hands over them when she thought they looked good on him. Then, when she thought it was a particularly good one, she would select a tie from a drawstring gym bag with a Nike swoosh, match it somehow, and tie it for him, stuffing the pocket with a kerchief from the same bag.
For the first hour or so, Allan believed she was selecting something he might wear out to dinner with her, but after the sun went down, he understood that this was all she wanted.
“She had been looking at all of these suits for however long they were there, taking up space,” he said. “Then decided she wanted to see them with a person in them.”
The mere act of putting them on was fulfilling something for her, Allan thought. She made no reference as to whom they once belonged to, or what significance they held, and didn’t engage with Allan as though he was a person. Instead, he was like a living mannequin. From five o’clock to nine-thirty, he tried on outfits for her while she s
at and watched, occasionally rising to get a closer look or make an adjustment, smiling proudly at the gentleman she was creating.
Then, Maggie experienced another intermission where it sounded like Allan was upset, like he might be trying to control himself. His voice wavered when he cleared his throat and said Um, anyway, and then he had to do it a second time, with a sniffle, before he could continue.
“Long story short, they were her son’s clothes,” he said. “She told me the next day, over breakfast. And when I asked about him, she didn’t cry or anything, but she shut down.”
“I thought it might be something like that,” Maggie said quietly.
“I did too,” he said, with another sniff. “Obviously, something had happened.”
“I see,” Maggie said.
“Yeah,” Allan replied, “anyway, it was sad, that’s all. And I—well—I didn’t have anybody else to tell this to.”
Maggie tilted her head with compassion.
“Come on,” she said. “No one?”
“No one,” he said quietly.
Maggie had nothing to say so she nodded, which he couldn’t hear.
“Maggie?” he asked.
“I’m here,” she replied, scrambling. “Thanks for thinking of me, Allan.”
After another throat clearing, she heard him blowing his nose.
Is he actually crying?
“Anyways, I’m going bowling with my neighbours. I love you.”
“Oh. I love you, too,” she said, suddenly realizing it was over.
And then came the lie, which was the worst kind, because it was also a promise. When she said it, she felt a twinge.
“You can always talk to me,” she said.
When he hung up, she felt like she did when she disembarked from a plane after a cross-country flight: dazed and weak-legged. She handed herself the phone from between the rungs of the banister, and walked it around the stairwell and back to the wall. By then, everyone was somewhere else in the house.
