Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl

by Tracy Quan

  “I saw her the other day,” I ad-libbed. “We were looking at china patterns.” A bit of a stretch—from dildos to dishes! “She’s being such a big, um, help. And we’re going to Vera Wang next week to look at dresses.” His eyes brightened at this reference to the wedding plans. “So I took her to lunch, and you know what she told me?” Strange pause. There must be a way to get some emotional support without getting my hands dirty. It’s the feelings, not the facts, that matter here. “She’s been seeing a married guy!” I blurted in exasperation.

  “She has? For how long?”

  I detected a voyeuristic twinkle, a hint of boyish interest in sleaze. Hoping to jog him back to Better Boyfriend Mode, I explained, with a womanly sigh, “They’ve been on and off for a long time. I was so relieved when she told me it was over! And now I find out she’s still seeing him. It’s just awful.”

  Matt looked thoughtful, more like a Sensitive Boyfriend again. “You know what I’ve never understood about women?” he said finally.

  “Um…I give up.”

  “Why does a woman take it so personally when a friend is doing something to herself? You act like—well, like she’s cheating on you, honey.”

  “Well, in a way she is.” I blushed with anger. “She lied to me! And it’s—it’s sort of disturbing to think that one of my bridesmaids is seeing a married guy!”

  “Don’t be so uptight,” Matt advised me. “When I first moved to the city, my roommate was seeing a married woman.”

  “Oh?” I tried to hide my curiosity. “And didn’t that bother you?”

  “No.” Matt looked amused. “Of course not. We had to change our phone number because she was always checking up on him—he said married women were even more possessive than single women. Look, I’m the guy’s buddy, I’m not his guardian. Guys are different, honey.” He gave me a paternalistic squeeze. “I’m glad you take marriage seriously, but Allison’s a different kind of person. Maybe she’s not ready to settle down.”

  He’s only met her three times! It spooks me to think that he’s given any thought at all to what “kind of person” she is.

  “Isn’t she a couple of years younger than you?” he added slyly.

  “Only three,” I said sharply. I didn’t like being cast as the interfering fusspot—how frumpy—who moralizes about married men because her partying days are over. But I couldn’t afford not to be frumpy at this moment. “Let’s get the check,” I said in a frosty voice. “I don’t want to miss the preconcert lecture.” When Matt started to organize his wallet, I glared at him with a flash of annoyance.

  At Lincoln Center, I ducked into the ladies’ room to check my messages. Nothing from Allison. And two beseeching messages from Milton trying to move our noon session to the evening. Damn! Didn’t Matt say we were having dinner with Elspeth and Jason tomorrow? Can I squeeze Milton in at five-thirty? But when I called Milton’s car, I ended up in AT&T limbo. And still felt vaguely frumpy.

  MONDAY MORNING. 3/20/00

  Last night, while I was bleaching my elbows with a fresh lemon, the phone rang. Thinking it might be Allison, I struggled to disengage from the lemon halves without getting pulp on my bed.

  “Guess what!” Jasmine said cheerfully. I put the lemon halves down on the towel and picked some stray pulp off the pillow. “Allison and I are going to Patroon this Thursday. I made a reservation for three, just in case you want to come. They do the greatest creamed spinach!”

  What? Allison can’t be bothered to return my call from Friday? And she’s making dinner plans with Jasmine? She has quite a nerve. Here I am, protecting her professional reputation from Jasmine and the other girls. Does she take my loyalty for granted?

  “Why did she call you?” I asked.

  “Well, she was trying to find that tape from the radio show and then she remembered that I had it. Now she’s trying to get me to attend the next ‘union meeting,’” Jasmine chuckled indulgently. “So we got to talking about Atkins.” Her entire attitude toward Allie is much warmer, ever since she discovered that they’re on the same diet. But I could change that pretty quickly by telling Jasmine about Jack’s visit! “So? Are you coming with us? You really should.”

  I’m the one who brings them together! What the hell is going on here?

  “She asked you to attend a meeting?” I said in a shrill voice. “Why?” Suddenly I felt like a pitiful schoolgirl tagging along in the shadow of the in crowd.

  “Who knows?” Jasmine replied. “Sexual socialists have strange ideas. Maybe I’ll attend her political circus, if I don’t have business that night. What’s wrong? You don’t sound like yourself.”

  My other line, the business phone, was ringing.

  “Nothing,” I said more stoically. “I’ll try to make it Thursday but I have to take this call.”

  Milton, sounding distorted but happy. “I’ve been trying to reach you! Quick. I’m about to enter a tunnel—can we do it at six tomorrow night?”

  I resumed bleaching my left elbow. “That’s too late for me! How about…four-thirty? Then we’ll have time to relax.” But I knew we would settle on five. Never one to argue about money, Milton is a haggler when it comes to setting a time.

  LATER

  Today, I had one of those therapy sessions where you spend half an hour nibbling on your appetizer and, finally, when it’s almost too late, the main course appears. The appetizer course being my weekend with Matt, the entree my nagging sense of displacement when I heard about Allison’s dinner date with Jasmine.

  “It seems,” Wendy said, “that you view Jasmine as the more reliable friend. Aren’t you closer to Jasmine?”

  “No. I’m closer to Allie. Well, you see, I’ve had dinner with her parents, and that’s a sign of trust in this business. Allie and I met each other’s relatives. I don’t even know if ‘Jasmine’ is Jasmine’s real name!”

  “So you’ve never met Jasmine’s family.” Wendy paused. “And what did you think of Allison’s parents?”

  “Normal to the point of weird! Mom’s a housewife and Dad plays a lot of golf. But they like me. They’re glad she has a friend who doesn’t look like a character on Sex and the City. I looked very Lands’ End catalog that day,” I said, unable to hide my satisfaction. “No makeup. And thanks to me, they’re less afraid of Manhattan. Less nosy.”

  Snowing the straight world is one of the perverse little perks of this business—but I sometimes wonder: Is it mature to take so much pleasure in getting away with stuff? Shouldn’t I be outgrowing this streak of delinquency?

  “Who was your closest friend when you were small? Growing up?” Wendy asked.

  I sat up sharply and looked at my watch.

  “Why? Uh…Vanessa. My dad and hers were in grad school together. We were best friends until…”

  “Until?”

  “Until we outgrew each other.”

  I left Dr. Wendy’s office clutching an invisible doggy bag containing my hastily prepared and leftover emotions. In the cab, I sank into bittersweet reverie. I remembered a muggy afternoon, late in the day, when I was about five years old. I was sitting on the swing set in my backyard, conspiring with Vanessa against one of the local baby-sitters.

  We told each other dirty stories about Debbie, the tall freckled sixteen-year-old who lived across the street. We had no idea what sixteen-year-olds did with their clothes off, but we did our best to keep a tantalizing narrative going. Debbie was forced to strip by groups of marauding boys who broke into the girls’ bathroom. We imagined high school to be an unspeakably wild place where bigger girls lost their intriguing inhibitions. In one of our Debbie Stories, she was locked out of her house, naked, because her entire family had gone to the beach without her. She slept over in the home of a neighbor who took her in but refused to lend her clothes.

  The houses where these imaginary atrocities were supposed to take place lined the quiet city block where I lived, a picturesque street with tall trees, small bushes, and modest patches of green grass. Debbie lived ac
ross the street with her five younger siblings and her parents, next to a shop with an old sign that read JIMMY’S CONFECTIONERY.

  Vanessa lived in the suburbs, thirty minutes away from our Centertown neighborhood. There were vistas instead of shops, wide lawns, no shadows on the bare curved streets. Everything was so new, and there weren’t many trees. When I slept over at Vanessa’s house, we waited for everyone to fall asleep, then tiptoed around in the basement without our pj’s on. We would lie in bed, exchanging lurid Debbie Tales. We also found ourselves exploring each other’s bodies—comparing, looking, touching. We both entered puberty early. But Vanessa was a year older, so I felt slightly left out when her breasts began to sprout first. I bemoaned my flat chest.

  “Don’t worry,” she said smugly. “It’s going to happen. You’re only eight!”

  We both read Anne of Green Gables. On a cold March day, we stood over a puddle and reenacted a ritual we’d read about, when Anne and Diana solemnly vow to be faithful bosom friends. We discussed the plot twists of Harriet the Spy, Black Beauty, and Little Women. We overcame some differences: She didn’t share my fascination with the boarding school tales of Enid Blyton; I found the Trixie Belden series flat and boring. My parents were from a British colony and hers were not. She couldn’t understand why on earth I’d be so caught up in the soap opera of an English institution. I couldn’t grasp what it was like to belong so easily to the present, to have parents who used Webster’s instead of Oxford, who regarded most things British as irrelevant and dusty—and vaguely humorous.

  But we had many shared rituals, and not just at bedtime. We spent Sunday mornings melting the butter on our toast by popping the buttered toast back into the toaster—much to our mothers’ shared dismay. For a brief time, we shared a craze for preserving autumn leaves between waxed paper, using a hot iron without asking for permission. Another eccentricity of ours that brought our mothers together.

  As Vanessa had predicted, my breasts began to grow—and sooner than I expected. The tenderness in my chest revealed itself one afternoon, just before spring break, when I was moving my desk to the back of the classroom. I bumped into the desk. Though I had no bruise—the impact had been minimal—I was still feeling sore two days later. But my breasts took forever! When I finally qualified for a training bra, I was nine and a half.

  One afternoon, I came home from school and called Vanessa. I told her I had graduated from a puerile AAA to a full-fledged A-cup. She was already a bodacious 30B.

  “I think we should cool it,” she said abruptly.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I just think we should.”

  She had recently started attending a prestigious girls’ school located in a ritzy suburb. A school with no boys—and she had asked her parents to send her there. Although I had voiced my surprise, I had accepted this as a difference we could both live with. It never occurred to me that going to this new school would interfere with her feelings for me. And it struck me as odd that the girl who had been so dismissive of my school-story fetish chose to attend a girls’ school. I would have been horrified if my parents had removed me from the company of males.

  I ran into her, a couple of years later, in the lobby of a movie theater. She was the tallest member of a uniformed gaggle: Five charismatic teenyboppers in pleated green tunics, white blouses, and wedge-heeled shoes with ankle straps were loudly purchasing popcorn and Coke at the concession stand. Vanessa saw me and waved.

  “Nancy!” she shouted, rushing over as if we were the most terrific chums. I suddenly felt like a member of another species in my desert boots, frayed jeans, and loose plaid shirt. I had never worn a school uniform and found it remarkable that she had chosen to attend a school where you had to wear one.

  I also felt tiny—never having worn heels—though I knew I was now the cooler kid. I traveled to the movies by bus and bicycle. In fact, I traveled everywhere in our small town by myself and even knew how to get two fares out of one bus ticket. These girls, dependent giants bred in the ’burbs, never went anywhere without a ride. They had no idea how uncool it was to be driven places by a parent because, apparently, they had their own code of coolness.

  “Come sit with us,” Vanessa said.

  I had just finished watching the movie, but in any case the thought of sitting with these Stepford Teens repelled me. And I didn’t entirely believe her invitation.

  “I have to go,” I told her. “I’m baby-sitting.” If I left now, I would have just enough time to eat supper at home before my baby-sitting gig.

  “Veeeeee!” someone screamed. “ Vee! Do you want a Fresca?”

  Vee? My bookish, dirty-minded childhood friend was now an eighth grader called Vee. I sauntered off to the bus stop, sadder but wiser. I was still hurt by the way she had dropped me two years ago. So efficiently! At eleven, she had grown sick of playing childish sex games with a ten-year-old. Now I was an earnest twelve-year-old with avant-garde aspirations and a small babysitting income. And Vanessa was a silly thirteen-year-old who ran with a pack. In their confusing outfits—childish uniforms, heavy lip gloss—her friends were foreign to me. My casual outfit—no makeup, frayed denim, natural hair—was, I felt, consistent. I was sure I had put more thought into my appearance than they had.

  On the bus, I opened my paperback copy of Knots and got so engrossed in R. D. Laing’s stark mind games that I almost missed my stop. And my dinner.

  But that was more than twenty years ago. And that was Vanessa.

  Allie and I are not small-town teenyboppers torn asunder by competing codes of coolness. We’re call girls, for god’s sake. In our thirties! And I’m the one who is now in a position to devastate her—if I spilled the beans. Oh, Christ. What is wrong with me?

  TUESDAY MORNING. 3/21/00

  Milton was mercifully late for his appointment yesterday. I was sitting on the couch repairing some chipped toenail polish when, five minutes before his session, he called from his car. “There’s an accident on the FDR,” he shouted into his car phone. “Nothing’s moving.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said sweetly. “I’ll keep everything nice and warm for you. There’s plenty of time to relax.”

  (And time for my polish to dry!)

  “Boy, do I ever need to see you, kiddo. Did you rewind—” Terrific honking drowned him out for a second.

  “I rewound the video, you filthy dog, to your favorite scene.”

  “That’s the spirit! I’ll call when I get to Sixty-first Street.”

  Our long-awaited reunion cheered me right up. Formative betrayals disappeared in the warm glow of Milt’s easygoing lechery.

  “It’s been too long,” he said, when I answered the door. “And I’ve missed those firm…fresh…natural breasts.” They were spilling out of my afternoon costume—an uplifting one-piece number that wouldn’t look out of place at a midtown lingerie bar. “I’ll bet you’re going out with your boyfriend tonight.”

  “As a matter of fact, I am.” I rubbed up against Milton’s suited self, and we hugged—a brief but noticeable hug that felt as spontaneous to me as it did to him.

  “And you’ll be wearing something sweet and wholesome, almost preppy, won’t you?”

  “How’d you know?” I said, loosening his tie for him.

  He reached around to fondle my exposed rump.

  “Because I know you…and you’re just a little too excited about wearing that—what do you call this?” He laughed. “Anyway it looks great on you.”

  We settled onto the couch, where Milt revisited a truly awful porn video—Back Door Girls—left behind by another customer. (A “runner” who never returned to reclaim his dirty movie! I forget his name, but his video has served me well. Glossy erotica for couples this definitely is not.)

  “Come on,” Milt insisted. “Are you telling me that doesn’t turn you on just a little?”

  “Maybe as a fantasy,” I allowed, showing as little enthusiasm as permissible.

  Three guys were doing something rather gros
s with a tall siliconed blonde on a tatty-looking bedspread, and I didn’t want to encourage any of this unladylike stuff in my bed.

  “She’s hot looking,” I added, though I thought she looked a bit, well, plastic.

  “How does she do that? Is she double-jointed?”

  I snuggled up to him and unzipped his pants. “This is what really turns me on,” I hinted. “You’re awfully hard, Uncle Milt! How do you do that?”

  “And you’re a thoughtful hostess,” he added congenially. “Do you think she’s really into it?”

  “Oh, no doubt…But why are guys so obsessed with anal sex?” I asked him. “It’s not exactly necessary for a woman’s pleasure.”

  Milton never tries to follow through, but he’s always up for watching it on video. (A balance I can live with at work—though I think I’d freak if my boyfriend even tried to discuss anal sex.)

  “Because, as we’ve established many times, we’re lowlifes.” Milton chuckled.

  “And you’re one of the lowest,” I said affectionately. “Let’s get these pants off, Sir Lowlife.”

  My feelings for Milton don’t make sense. His lewd tastes do nothing for me. I’ve never had an orgasm with him because I’m too conscious of what I’m doing. I can’t relax long enough to get turned on; though I can tell, objectively, that he has some oral talent. He’s a gentle bedmate, and his graceful caresses are at odds with his trashy taste in videos. But he’s also a lot of work. Last night, I felt like one of the figures in that art deco A-to-Z poster—naked women turning themselves into letters of the alphabet. It’s not just the constant changing of positions, it’s the effort that goes into looking smooth, svelte, and chipper, no matter what part of him I’m sitting on…or how long he’s taking to come.

  And yet Milton is the only client I feel possessive about. A girl can’t stop a client from straying—and Milt knows that I know that he knows. But he’s sensitive to my feelings. He shows up almost every week (unless he’s on the road), and when I arrange a threesome (or a foursome), he’s financially faithful—never asks for another girl’s phone number. This way, I always make some extra cash when we party with a third or fourth. Of course, we never discuss those finer points, Milt and I. When it comes to money—and feelings—he’s a polished professional John, a gentleman.