Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl

by Tracy Quan

  When I first went back to visit, after a long period of skittish paranoia punctuated by the occasional Christmas card, I was almost twenty. To their eyes, I seemed to be doing well, and I was successful at making the ruse of my “copyediting job” sound tedious, so they didn’t pry.

  They weren’t sure what to expect when they came to meet me at the airport—the only time they’ve driven anywhere together since their divorce. But I looked a little better than they did—more professionally coiffed than my granolafied mom (who never does a thing with her hair) and a lot less rumpled than my dad. (He’s Old School Geek, a programmer who refused to work for IBM in the sixties because you had to wear a tie.) Even when I toned my look down for visits to my hometown (no jewelry, no fur), Dad said I looked like a “Reaganite.” He pretended to be horrified—Dad always hated Ronald Reagan—but he was obviously relieved. I took more vitamins than my parents, exercised a lot, and sent them art postcards whenever I went to a lecture at the Frick. With details of the lecture in my note.

  All this evidence of Right Living was reassuring. They could live with my Reaganite wardrobe. They knew how bad it could get, even if your kids didn’t run away. My younger brother was dressing like Boy George—and boasting that his “seed” was being nurtured by a lesbian collective in Toronto. My childhood friend Vanessa (whose father had attended grad school with mine) now had an eating disorder. And these were the mild cases.

  The only person who suspected anything was my father’s second wife, who had a tendency to glare at me across the dinner table whenever Dad wasn’t looking. Occasionally, she would ask bitchy questions—about my luggage, for example. (Well, I couldn’t resist investing in some Louis Vuitton travel gear, and it was the eighties.)

  “Who bought that for you?” my stepmother asked when I arrived at Dad’s house for a visit. “That suitcase looks very expensive.”

  “Oh, I got it on sale,” I assured her.

  “The child descends from a long line of thrifty shoppers,” my father explained. “She has her mother’s genes—the Laytons have always known how to hunt down a bargain.”

  Louis Vuitton never goes on sale—but this is what I mean about my parents. Neither one has a clue about the most basic facts of life!

  On my twenty-first birthday, I received a good edition of the collected works of Robert W. Service—their way of saying that the rupture I caused at fourteen wasn’t permanent; these books were older than all that. On my last birthday, Mother hunted down a 1926 edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage.

  Today, when I showed Wally the Fowler’s, he complimented my mother’s excellent eye. Wally likes to chat, not so much about the contents of books as their care, their history. The lore of editions.

  “Never clean books with a cloth,” he counseled me today. “Do you know how they clean the books at the Morgan?” I shook my head and allowed my skirt to ride up as I crossed my legs. “Very gently, with a Dustbuster. I was hoping to read you some poetry, but we got sidetracked. By dust.” He checked his watch and smiled.

  “Next time?” I suggested, getting up from the couch.

  Today I was more relaxed than usual. Wally’s hand lingered between my legs and I didn’t feel like moving away. His fingers proceeded downward. I never encourage clients to use their hands on me. The average tongue is easier to take than the average man’s undisciplined fingers. But Wally’s so gentle that I didn’t bother to pull away this time. I used to be more disciplined about letting Wally touch me but he did “come back from the dead.” That puts a different spin on things!

  What’s more, I was getting rather wet, and he was curious to see how good he really was. His finger slipped, quickly and softly, between my smaller lips and almost entered—probably did enter for a second—then slid away. Maybe he was just checking for lubrication. Or maybe he’s smart enough to know that you can do these things with a working girl on special occasions—just don’t push your luck. He was gentlemanly enough to pull his hand away just as I was about to turn businesslike. Smart man.

  A session with Wally is like getting paid to watch Channel 13 when they’re not doing a membership drive. “In-cu-na-bu-la,” Wally was saying, as he adjusted his bow tie with one hand. He measured out the syllables as he felt around with the other for his wallet. “In the cradle. One of the most breathtaking collections of fifteenth-century books is in Philadelphia. Well, all the money was here, you see, and we just went around buying everything up after the Spanish-American War…”

  One day, just before Wally disappeared, he presented me with a first edition of High Windows. He sat on my sofa, reading Philip Larkin in a voice so mellow and accurate that I couldn’t help wondering: Who is this man?

  “When I see a couple of kids / And guess he’s fucking her and she’s / Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, / I know this is paradise…”

  “Apparently Larkin didn’t think poetry should be read aloud,” I told Wally, “but he was wrong about that.”

  It was the right thing to say, but I meant it. A small part of me fell in love—perhaps not with him exactly, but certainly with his voice, with his open yet mannerly mind.

  When I didn’t hear from Wally again, I wondered, as I sometimes do with older clients, whether he had died. He was having mysterious health problems and what was I to think? When a client is absent for too long, I don’t want to know. I stopped myself from calling Wally’s office to see if he was still alive and kicking. I had my reasons.

  There’s a scenario that everyone talks about: the well-regarded pillar of society (married, of course) dying in a call girl’s bed.

  “What would you do?” girls ask each other. “Shove him in the elevator? Call 911? Search his address book? Call his office?”

  “Remove the cash from his wallet,” Jasmine once conjectured. “It’s okay if he’s dead—and you know that’s exactly what the emergency team would do. But only if he’s dead,” she added primly.

  Her notions of proper conduct aren’t everyone else’s, but she sticks by them religiously.

  If Wally or Etienne or Milt were to die in my bed, it would be a disaster! Unlike some clients, they’re prominent enough to make the news. It’s the classic fear. But if everybody abstained from activities that (in the event of sudden death) could lead to all-around embarrassment, nobody would do much of anything.

  Fortunately, this has been entirely theoretical for me. I’ve never had a client who died in flagrante with me. But two of my customers, Bill and Chip, died in ’96, and that was a strange year for me.

  In Bill’s case, I found out when I called his office. I had not heard from him for three months, and he’d had a habit of seeing me every four weeks. A receptionist told me Bill had died of a sudden heart attack, while playing tennis. I was astonished, and she agreed that it made no sense because he was so health conscious. She was a competent and good-natured angel of death who handled the conversation well; it went on for just as long as it had to, and she didn’t ask how I knew him.

  And, I thought, hanging up, it could have happened in my bed.

  That night, I dreamed about Bill. I was kneeling over his chest (as had been my habit with him) and he told me I would always be beautiful, that my pubic hair was really part of an epic poem that he was writing. Bill wasn’t literary in real life, so I woke up confused, half thinking that he was cultivating new hobbies in the afterlife, sort of like a retiree.

  Four months later, Chip, who was being treated for cancer, gave me ample warning. In a whimsical voice, he insisted, “I’m going in with a positive attitude. I have every intention of making it, and I’ll see you in a few weeks. With bells on.” Three months later, I got someone to confirm his death for me. Chip’s son, actually, who is also a client.

  I called Chip the Younger and casually said, “How are you?” He has no idea that I also knew his father. (I knew his father better than I knew him.)

  “Not too bad. Well, not so great,” he added with a resigned sigh. He didn’t elaborate—and wa
s politely cheerful—but I could tell.

  Chip the Younger doesn’t know that most of the girls who see him also knew his dad. He didn’t even know I was aware of his father’s illness. My detective work yielded a bonus: a paying visit.

  When the surviving Chip appeared in my doorway, I noticed his father’s quizzical expression more clearly reflected in his face. Had the son always looked like this? I had seen him a few times during the last five years and his face had been fuller, the expression more self-absorbed, more remote, the look of an arrogant Wasp Adonis. His face had thinned out, revealing a sensitive shadow effect, and he looked less like the virile smart aleck, more like, well, his thoughtful, sweet-natured dad. Less like himself. Perhaps he would now be more of a gentleman on the sheets?

  No such luck. Chip the Younger is nothing like Chip Senior in bed, and mourning didn’t temper his bedroom style. He was (and always has been) a sexual bounder, cajoling me about the condom, trying to trade on his good looks and his ample cock in the hopes that I might let down my guard and treat him like a boyfriend. He never stops trying. I once saw his face staring out at me from a New York magazine cover story on Manhattan’s most eligible bachelors. He’s young enough and important enough to get free sex from nonprofessionals—and cute enough to inspire nonprofessional enthusiasm in some hookers. But good-natured enough if you don’t fall for it.

  I see Chip Junior once every six months; I don’t want him as a regular. He’s too much work, and it would make me miss his father’s visits more acutely. The elder Chip never had any problem staying hard with a condom—wouldn’t dream of going without one. Chip Senior used condoms long before AIDS paranoia hit the scene. In his day, men wore condoms with hookers, no ifs, ands, or buts. His were the pre-Pill days, a deeply sensible time when everything was terribly clear, and he had never bothered to leave that era.

  After the demise of Bill, then of Chip the Elder, I stopped wanting to know.

  Because death isn’t fair. The customers who die are never the ones you merely tolerate to make up your weekly quota. If a customer dies unexpectedly, it’ll be someone like Bill—whom I was really looking forward to seeing again. Or a respectful clean freak (like Chip) who always washed his hands before touching me. A guy who pops the instant he’s inside (that would be Bill and Chip with just about any attractive female). The worshipful client who makes you feel like a minigoddess when you undress for him (Bill more than Chip).

  Pushy clients never die. They keep trying to kiss you (or worse!) long after more sensitive johns have been cremated and committed to urns. I bet Chip Junior lives to a grand old age.

  TUESDAY. 4/11/00

  Other people’s shrinks disappear in August; mine likes to buck the trend and take off just before income-tax time. She hangs around the city during the summer, then disappears around Christmas. The two most god-awful stress points in the annual cycle—and she’s gone, poof. This time, on a tour of the Greek islands with a bunch of her ecotourist friends.

  Today she offered me the number of her colleague, June Pepper, in case I felt an Emergency Need. “She’s actually much closer to your part of town,” Wendy said. “Dr. Pepper is practically a neighbor! She’s on Fifth and Seventy-ninth.”

  “Dr. Pepper?” I echoed. “I don’t think so. And Fifth Avenue is practically the West Side,” I pointed out. “I’m wayyyy east. Anyway, I’ve been doing business with you all these years. And I’m not likely to have a suicidal breakdown while you’re on vacation.”

  “That’s quite true,” she agreed. “I see your issues as a very slow-cooking stew…” I could sort of picture it. A great cauldron of adult men, adolescent memories, and childhood dreams, simmering gently on a kitchen stove. But which kitchen stove? Well, certainly not my own—I’ve never cooked anything more elaborate than an omelette in this apartment.

  “And I don’t think it’s likely to boil over and scald you,” she was saying.

  Maybe the kitchen on Waverly Street, in the house where my parents got divorced. For completely irrational reasons, I think of that as the last permanent household we lived in, when in fact it was the least.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “My mind sort of wandered. You said I wasn’t going to boil over…”

  “Don’t be sorry. Where did it wander to?”

  “The kitchen where I watched my grandmother making steamed pork. I haven’t thought about that in years. My father’s mother. She lived with us for a while.” Many decades after abandoning her flapper look. She was round-bodied and sharp-tempered when I knew her, no longer a handsome girl with smoldering eyes. “My mouth still waters when I think about her cooking.”

  Wendy smiled. I can tell that she understands pleasure—food, sex, beauty—and that’s why I feel okay telling her that I hook. She has the frumpy hair of a West Side liberal, the trim, toned body of an Upper East Side housewife, and a smile that radiates love of pleasure. If it weren’t for those last two qualities, I would mistrust her on the basis of the first.

  “I have an idea,” she said. “How do you feel about homework? Therapy homework. I could give you an assignment to complete while I’m away. But of course you won’t get graded,” she added with a sly smile.

  “Well,” I said, crossing my arms. “Maybe this is just to reassure you. So you don’t have separation anxiety while you’re on vacation.”

  We both laughed, and I took Dr. Pepper’s phone number before I left. But I screwed the little piece of paper up into a ball and left it on the seat of the taxicab. Somehow, I would feel unfaithful going to another shrink. It would be like cheating on my hairdresser! And who knows what I might find: A therapist with better hair and a prudish smile? A not-so-great-looking female shrink with a hearty but unsatisfied sexual appetite? The last thing I need now is to start negotiating that minefield. And I’d like to keep the number of shrinks who know my business narrowed down to one.

  FRIDAY. 4/14/0. First day of storage

  This afternoon, Jasmine and I shared a cab to Seventh Avenue and stashed our furs for the summer.

  “It’s so liberating to have that extra foot of closet space! Don’t you feel about twenty pounds lighter?” I said.

  Jasmine agreed. “Ever since you-know-what I’ve been so hard up for storage space.” Ever since Jasmine turned her coat closet into an illegal bathroom! “But you won’t have space problems when you move in with Matt,” she added. “You guys are getting a nice big apartment!”

  “Oh. Not those kind of space problems.”

  “Right, well. The other kind. You signed on for those! The emotional piper must be paid. Relationships are supposed to be a hassle! Why do you think people choose not to have ’em? So,” she said cheerfully. “How’s the apartment hunt going?” We were on the sidewalk now, squinting into the sunlight. Jasmine pulled out her sunglasses, then her phone. She frowned at the display and began dialing.

  “I think we’re about to close,” I said in a resigned voice. “It’s fine. I’ve joined a bridal e-mail list, and I went to Scully and Scully to look at china, and I called Vera Wang this morning. Sometimes I’d rather be looking at handbags.”

  “No pain, no gain. You can’t look at handbags your entire life. For a girl like you…there comes a point when it’s time to start looking at china. He’s a stable guy. Go for it. Besides, you have enough handbags—for now.”

  “A girl like me?”

  “Well, you never did save any money—I can’t believe you’ve been doing this for longer than I have and you don’t own any property! But you do own this guy! So make the most of it!” She was listening to her voice mail. “I have to be at the St. Regis in twenty minutes. Let’s share a cab.”

  When I got home, there was a message from Etienne, one from Milton, a confirmation from Howard, the usual lineup of obligations and opportunities. As I picked up the phone to call Milton, my cell started buzzing. I fished it out of my handbag. Allie, calling from her cell.

  “I’m at Starbucks,” she said in an excited voice. “Why don�
�t you come and join us? It’s that guy who donated the shoes. He’ll be here any minute. I want you to meet him and tell me what you think.”

  “I’d love to,” I lied, “but I’ve got a client coming over.”

  “Oh, too bad. I mean, that you can’t come, not that you have a client.” She giggled nervously. “I’m just kind of—this is the second time we’ve had coffee together. He’s bringing me a copy of his novel. He says I have a unique perspective and he wants my feedback.”

  “He published a novel?”

  “He’s writing a novel—about Mary Magdalene, a modern reincarnation of Mary Magdalene living in the meatpacking district before gentrification. Or was that after gentrification? Well, I’m about to find out.”

  “Why not during gentrification?” I pondered aloud, but she ignored the hint of sarcasm.

  “I don’t know! I’ll have to ask him that. He’s bringing the manuscript. I’m the only person he’s ever—he hasn’t shown it to anyone yet. What do you think that means?” she asked in a giddy voice.

  “What what means? I have no idea what you mean.”

  “What does it mean if I’m the only person he’s ever shown it to? If that’s really true, do you think he, well, maybe likes me?”

  “Who is this guy? What’s his name?” I asked her. “Do you know anything about him?”

  “I have to go,” she said in a stage whisper. “He’s coming in the door. I didn’t realize this before but—he’s really cute!”

  Uh-oh. I don’t think I’ve heard that feverish gasp in quite some time. Like any other working girl, Allie enjoys being desired, and she has a tendency to reciprocate a john’s admiration with a glowy love of being loved. But this other kind of attraction—the kind that might even cause a girl to lose weight without trying—this is different. And where Allie can resist an extra trick on Jack’s behalf, I have a funny feeling about this new admirer. That musical hint of a giggle. It was missing from her voice when she told me about the deal she had made with Jack: fidelity for cash…