Calling Out

by Rae Meadows

  “Roxanne. My escort name.”

  “Nice,” he says.

  Nikyla gives Ford one last sideways smile and exits, sashaying out the door. He tips a nonexistent hat in her direction.

  *

  My shift is almost over. Jezebel picked up Albee and I am alone. I feed from a bag of Oreos Kendra has left and paint my fingernails Vamp as McCallister tells me that he thinks I’m sabotaging any chance at happiness. After our last conversation, I thought maybe I wouldn’t hear from him for a while but I’m glad for the distraction. Back in New York he’s looking for a winter coat.

  “Remember the hookers in Paris?” he asks.

  McCallister and I went to Paris a couple years ago and one day, wandering around at dusk, we came upon a strip of older prostitutes in the doorways of rue St. Denis. They were harshly made up, wrinkled and dyed, leaning with bored detachment in between grimy garment-district storefronts. Their age determined their designation to that zone, like animals let out to pasture. Their eyes were tired and lugubrious, as if they were mourning what they had once been. I went back to look at them again and again for the rest of the trip, feeling progressively worse with each visit.

  “I don’t get your point,” I say.

  “It’s how you react to people around you. When you’re not feeling good, you take them on. You were in a funk for the whole rest of that trip. And now you’re clearly depressed.”

  “I’m not depressed,” I say dismissively.

  He guffaws but lets it go. Our conversations occupy a delicate space, as we tiptoe around the edge of intimacy.

  “Hey, what do you think about orange for a down jacket? Too flashy?” he asks.

  I can hear him jostling with hangers.

  “I think it’s going to snow tonight,” I say, “and it’s not even December yet. I want it to snow. Snow is good.”

  “You should come back, Jane.”

  I wish this didn’t permeate, and I’m angry with myself that it does. His words melt into my skin like balm.

  “That’ll surely make me happy. It worked so well before. Maybe I can hang out with you and Maria. That sounds great.” I reach for another Oreo. “I wish I was one of those people who forgets to eat, like my sister. Or that I would lose my appetite when I was sad. Then at least I’d be thin.”

  “A) you are thin, and B) you just admitted that you’re sad,” he says. “This one isn’t so bad. It fits. Do you think orange is too much? Should I play it safe with black?”

  “Black is boring.”

  “All I’m saying, Jane, is that not being happy is sort of natural at times. It doesn’t mean you should run off and hide out in the Beehive State. That is not the antidote.”

  “How do you know? It’s not so bad here. There’s plenty of parking and everyone smiles. Rent is cheap. Not everyone is cool and stylish. No roaches.” I sweep cookie crumbs into a line with my finger.

  I hear him ask someone the time.

  “Jane? I better go. Call me if you get lonely,” McCallister says.

  “Go with the orange one,” I say. Then, maddeningly, my voice cracks at the end of saying “good-bye.”

  One of the reasons I fell for McCallister was that he was nothing like my father. It didn’t take me long to figure this out but there was some satisfaction in naming it. My dad, providing he has his Scotch, can sit through pork roast, mashed potatoes, and green beans, and on into coffee without saying a word. But McCallister always has something to say and this makes me feel safe. It was when he couldn’t get me to say much in return, after years of coaxing, that he finally gave up. “Love,” he announced one day, “is about taking that risk of losing control. And you, Jane, will not take that risk. At least not with me.” He was right, but I never believed that he was taking much of a risk either. I listened. I nurtured. I made no demands. I couldn’t ask for what I didn’t even know I wanted. Besides, he’d already met Maria.

  I blow on my nails to dry them but upon inspection they are smudged and messy around the edges so, instead, I scrape at the still-soft polish with a scissor blade. I slip, and I slice my pinkie. While foraging in the bathroom for a Band-Aid, the phone rings. I consider letting it go— there are only a few minutes left until I punch out—but as I peer around to my desk, I can see it’s Scott.

  Scott the contractor used to fall into the once-amonther category. He usually calls as he’s driving up from Provo to a building site when he has some time to kill. He doesn’t show up on anyone’s 86ed list, which means he’s tolerable and not a bad tipper. Someone has penciled in on the margin of his client sheet, “handsome & sexy,” and another girl wrote, “cuuuuuuuute!!!!!! nice ass!!!!!” He’s been calling more frequently lately and he hasn’t booked an escort for two months. I’m beginning to think he’s calling for me.

  When I answer, he says, “Hi, beautiful.”

  Despite myself—he’s never seen me—I’m flattered, and I speak to him with perked-up conviviality.

  “Hey Scott. How are you?”

  “Just fine,” he says. “Enjoying this gorgeous fall day. Driving up from Happy Valley to check in on a job. Anyone available who I might like?”

  “You’re in luck. I have this girl who you’ll really like. Have you seen Nikyla before?”

  “Doesn’t sound familiar. Why don’t you describe her for me,” he says.

  I give him the standard rundown on Nikyla that hooks everyone.

  “I don’t know,” he says, seeming distracted, “she doesn’t sound like my type.”

  Nikyla is everyone’s type.

  “So what about you, Roxanne? Do you ever go out?” he asks.

  This is one of the perils of the job—phone-girl intrigue—but from Scott it does feel more substantial.

  “Now, now. None of that,” I say. I hope the tease in my voice belies my blush. “You know I just work the phone.”

  “You sure do. You have a great voice, you know. Sort of FM-radio sultry,” he says.

  “Thanks,” I say. “That’s nice of you. Now how about Nikyla? I think you two would have fun.”

  “You do, huh?” Scott laughs. “She’s a hair young for my taste. You sound more like what I’d like.”

  I fill in the letters of “handsome” on his information sheet. Under “Client Description” is written in girlie handwriting, “sandy hair, blue eyes, six feet.” I imagine he has sun-squint creases around his eyes like McCallister.

  “For all you know,” I say, “I could be sixty and weigh three hundred pounds.”

  “You and I both know that’s not true, Roxanne.”

  He says this in a way that is vaguely scolding, and despite there being no uncovered windows in the office, I have a fleeting sense of being watched.

  “So maybe you’d like to see Nikyla?” I ask in a lastditch effort to book a date, feeling like the real Jane is starting to show in my voice.

  “Well,” he sighs. “Unfortunately I don’t have all that much time this afternoon. Unless you change your mind. I’d blow off everything for you.”

  I laugh, relieved, back safely entrenched behind the façade.

  “It was nice talking to you, Scott,” I say. I let my voice meander.

  “As always,” he says. “Hey, are you working tomorrow?”

  I write “Yes!” on his client sheet.

  “Let’s just leave that as a surprise, shall we?”

  chapter 4

  Ford is working as part of a crew gutting a house north of the LDS temple and on the first day he befriended Ralf, a Mormon ex-vending machine supplier from Tooele, a town in the desert west of Salt Lake. They spent the afternoon breaking out the windows of the house with pickaxes, then covering them in plywood. But five minutes to shift end, Ralf tripped on a loop of copper wire and landed with a shard of glass in his chin. Even though I’d rather be in bed, Ford cajoles me into joining them—post-emergency room visit—at the Starlight Lounge so I can meet both Ralf and Ember, whose face I haven’t yet seen.

  Ralf is attractive in a dirty M
ormon kind of way. His shaggy light hair is in a shelf cut, a sort of John Denver, late-seventies style that half covers his ears. He looks at home just sitting here.

  “Where’s Ember?” I ask.

  “She went to see some friend of hers in town for the night. You’ll meet her soon, though,” Ford says. “I promise.”

  I haven’t yet told him they can stay but I know I could never tell him no.

  The vinyl of the booth squeaks as Ralf scoots in to make room for me. When I sit, it feels as though roots take hold, and I sink into weariness beneath the murmuring heat pouring down from the vent above our table. Ford, his hands red-roughed and dirt-stained, slides his beer to me.

  Although we are the same age, Ralf seems younger because Ford announces that he was a virgin until he was twenty-five, and also because his green eyes are so light they are almost gray, and so eager they glisten like those of a boy who has just seen his first centerfold. Ralf did his mission in Amsterdam. Although he drinks and smokes, he still believes.

  “Ford tells me you came here from the big city,” he says.“Why’d you leave?”

  Ford leans across the table. “I’d like to hear this too.”

  “Because my chronic dissatisfaction made me feel middle-aged,” I say, drinking three full gulps of Ford’s Corona.

  Ralf smiles and nods and drums his thumbs against his beer bottle. His chin is covered in a large bandage that looks like a flesh-colored beard. There is a darkened blood smear on the collar of his work shirt.

  When I got out of college, I imagined myself as a Peace Corps volunteer, or a writer, or an environmental activist, or a teacher, or, for a brief phase, a midwife. But when it came down to it, I lacked passion and I was a wimp. I moved to New York because my friends did, took a job at an ad agency because it was available, spent a lot of time in bars talking about books and pop culture because that’s what people did in Manhattan. I blundered through my twenties.

  “It’s that thing where no one can talk about anything really without irony,” Ford says, near drunk. “I’m glad you got out of there, Jane.”

  “Pretty soon whole years passed and other people were figuring out what they were going to be when they grew up and I was still pretending I didn’t have to. When really, I was becoming a loser,” I say.

  “Hey,” Ford says quietly, “take it easy. Don’t be so hard on yourself.” A sheen on his expansive forehead catches the low-wattage yellow light of the bar’s tavern lamps. “You should have hung out more with me out here. Drowning your sorrows in Gram Parsons,” he says.

  Ralf is still nodding and then wiggles his chin to get at the itch of his newly sewn wound. “Nothing wrong with Gram Parsons,” he says. “I’d like to propose a toast. To Utah.”

  “Here, here.” Ford says. “You took a long detour to get here, Jane, but I’m glad you made it.”

  “Aw, Ford. You old softie.”

  Ralf wears a broad, contented smile as he sits amidst his new friends, and he orders us another round. Ruddiness blooms in his cheeks. He licks his bee-stung bottom lip.

  “So, Jane,” he says. “I hear you work for a brothel.” “Not quite,” I say.

  “I know, I know. Tell me some stuff about it.” “What do you want to know?” I ask.

  “Ford here says it’s legal. But I don’t know how that can be true,” he says.

  “There is this sheet of paper that we give all new escorts that lists what they can and can’t do within the law.” I lower my voice as not to attract the ears of the university students at the next table. “Can’t do: sex, hand jobs, blow jobs, any touching of sexual areas, give a massage, allow or encourage masturbation.”

  “What? That last one seems for the birds,” Ralf says, slapping his palms on the table. “Isn’t that the whole point?”

  “Can do,” I say, “Kiss, cuddle, caress, tease, strip, take a shower, nibble on his ears, give a bubble bath, tell sexy stories, play with his nipples, sexy poses, spank, get a massage, model lingerie, talk dirty, role-play, tickle, talk about fantasies, lick chocolate off him, kiss his thighs, put on baby oil, moan and groan, tell secrets, tell jokes, dance, kiss his neck, lick his nipples, have your toes sucked, and anything else not on the can’t-do list.”

  “Tell jokes?” This item on the list makes Ford laugh so hard he’s silent and tears leak from his eyes.

  “But no hugging,” I say, “because a girl might press her breasts into a client, and in the eyes of Utah law, this evil far exceeds that of her having to explore the nether region of a stranger’s hot and hairy inner thighs.”

  “That is so gross,” Ralf says. He looks as if he just found out there’s no tooth fairy. “So you, like, set up these rendezvous-es?”

  “Yeah.” I fish around in my wallet and pull out the laminated card: “Salt Lake City Sexually Oriented Business Employee, Outcall.”

  “Nice picture,” Ralf says.

  “So, Jane,” Ford says, “maybe you should do it.”

  “What?”

  “That. Try it out.”

  “Be an escort?”

  “Yeah. Be an escort.”

  I laugh. “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah, why not? It’s legal,” he says. “I assume you don’t have a moral issue with it.”

  Ford’s challenge irks me. Ralf stares first at Ford, then at me.

  “Maybe it seems slightly degrading?”

  “I don’t know, does it? I mean is it that different from getting compensated for a bad blind date? Or being a therapist of sorts? Who’s to say you wouldn’t find it kind of satisfying. You go for the needy ones.”

  “You’re drunk,” I say.

  “You’d be popular if you did it, though,” Ralf says.

  My eyes are dry and I don’t have the energy to respond to either of them.

  “I’m going to go,” I say. “It’s been a long few days.”

  Outside it’s a bone-chilling night; the desert sky is vast and clear. My old car creaks and coughs like a codger with emphysema until the engine catches.

  *

  When I arrive at the office the next day, Mohammed is already there trying to fix the perpetually running toilet.

  “Did you bring toilet paper?” I ask.

  “I’ll bring some over from the restaurant. I can’t get this stupid thing to stop,” he says.

  “You could call a plumber.”

  “Hah. That’s so American. Plumbers just rip you off. I can fix this. You people don’t know what hard work is.”

  “Yeah, tell that to the girls who have to kiss some creepy old guy who’s taken out his teeth.”

  Mohammed emerges from the bathroom wiping his hands with a paper towel, the sleeves of his silk suit rolled up to his elbows. He has the jittery diligence of someone who has somewhere else to be.

  “You always think I should feel sorry for them. Like I force them to do what they do,” he says. “It’s good money. It beats working three times as many hours at McDonald’s, doesn’t it? Or being a hooker? They’re not walking State Street to get picked up by crazies and murderers. It’s good money. It’s legal. I file taxes.”

  I think that something about our ongoing antagonism helps settle any ethical dilemmas Mohammed has. And it makes me feel better too.

  “But maybe if they didn’t have the option, they’d go to school or something,” I say.

  “You are a dreamer,” Mohammed says. “You see how it all works—the way these girls like the money, why they choose to do it—but you still make believe it can be different. It is a masquerade.” He rattles off something in Arabic and rolls down his sleeves. “Did you know I was going to be a doctor? I was accepted at the medical school at the University of Bologna. My father liked the idea. I might have been a good doctor, no?” His cell phone rings.

  “Someday you’ll tell me how you ended up here,” I say.

  “Okay, okay. I’ll be right over,” he says into the phone before flipping it closed. To me he says, “Before I forget, you have to go on a recruiting
trip to American Bush.”

  “No way, Mohammed.”

  “I told you it was part of the job when I hired you. Just have a few drinks. Give out cards to the pretty dancers.”

  “There is no way I am doing that,” I say, mortified by the notion of being a public escorting emissary.

  “Tell them they’ll make more money working here. Wear something classy like a suit. Twenty-five-dollar finder’s fee for each one. It’s a good deal for you.”

  I shake my head as he scuttles out the door.

  The sound of rustled silk and rattled window blinds resonates until the soft insistence of the ticking wall clock reasserts itself on the room. It is noon but in the darkened office, with the candle ablaze on the counter, it could be the middle of the night.

  Jezebel blows in, puppy in hand, her skirt slit up to her underwear. She plops the dog in my lap and looks over my shoulder at the night’s escort list.

  “Please push me. Please, please, please? I need cash. Rent is late again. I swear, I just paid it. I don’t know how it could be due already.”

  “I’ll do my damnedest,” I say, holding up my fingers in the scout’s-honor position. “How’s Albee?”

  “I don’t know what to do about him. I’m hoping my brother will take him. They already have two kids anyway, what’s a dog?”

  Albee clamps his teeth on my watch and I can feel his incisors against my wrist. Jezebel has disappeared into the tanning closet. I call back to her that tanning will give her wrinkles but she ignores me and the hum of the old UV lamp makes me think I’m getting my own dose of carcinogenic radiation without any of the benefits. Albee starts to pee on my leg, and before I can deposit him on the floor, the phone rings. I trade the puppy for the phone and answer without looking at the number.

  “Hello, this is Roxanne. How may I help you?” I blot the warm blotch of urine on my thigh with a wad of tissues, my voice not revealing my perturbed scowl.

  “Hey, beautiful. I thought you might be in. How are you today?”

  Scott’s intimate manner catches me off guard.