Adventures of the Artificial Woman

by Thomas Berger

  “Are you the house philosopher?” the man asked. He pushed his chair away from the table and patted his narrow lap. “Put it right there.” She stayed where she was. “Oh, that’s right,” said he, producing a bill that even in the dim light Phyllis could see was a ten. But two of those she had collected on stage had been tens. Surely a lap dance was worth more.

  “How much do you want, then?” the man asked.

  “I’m not a prostitute.”

  When he held out another ten, she sat down on him and brought her clothed breasts against his face. He pushed her far enough back to converse and, though the nearby tables were empty, spoke in an undertone. “I’ll pay another twenty if you slip your hand into my fly and jack me off.”

  “That’s against the law,” said Phyllis.

  “Only you and me will know.”

  “Do you want me to grind my behind into your groin?”

  “Let’s go somewhere private and you give me head. It’s worth fifty to me.”

  “The rubbing with front or back is the only thing that’s allowed here.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s the law,” said Phyllis. “As you know very well. You’re an undercover policeman.”

  “You’re nuts.”

  Her hasty departure from the man’s lap brought the waiter-bouncer. “Your ass is grass, pal.”

  “Step back, bonehead,” said the smaller man, rising from the chair with a badge in his hand.

  “Yes, sir. You bet.” The bouncer rapidly left the neighborhood.

  “You lucked out, baby,” the detective told Phyllis. “See you around.”

  “I never break the law if I know what it is,” said she. “That’s the way I was made.” When he was gone she counted her money and, finding she had accumulated fifty dollars, found Eddie in his office.

  “You’re quitting already?”

  “This is really not for me. It might be otherwise if I could dance.”

  Eddie grinned at her. “There’s something different about you, Phyl, though I can’t put my finger on it. Listen, you just leave the outfit in the dressing room, and I’ll call us even.” His grin widened to reveal the tips of his canine teeth. “We own the lawnjeray shop too. I’ll keep the fifty, and you can take the g-string with you.” He was of course not aware that she was incapable of soiling any intimate garment, nor did she perspire. He accepted the money, though not without counting it. “So, whatya going to do now, Phyl?”

  “Try to get into show business.”

  He rubbed the lobe of his nose, fingertip not quite penetrating the nostril. “Here’s something you might consider. My brother Larry’s got a phone-sex business. Can you talk filthy?”

  “I’m sure I can if I’m told how.”

  Eddie’s eyebrows rose and fell. “I always thought that was instinct. Discuss it with Larry. You’ll be wasting your good looks. Most of the women he hires are dogs. It doesn’t matter, because nobody sees them. But you’re a finicky kind, and hell, you won’t get your hands dirty.”

  Larry did not physically resemble Eddie, being tall, thin, and fair-complexioned, but Phyllis could see no reason to doubt the latter’s statement that they were brothers. Blood relationships were difficult for her to understand, having no blood.

  “It’s not just using profanity,” Larry told her. “Some fellows get turned off by raw talk and want something softer, you know. Play it by ear. Ten dollars a minute, the slower the better. Stretch it out. The whole idea is suspense. Just remember it’s all over once they come, so it’s the reverse of what a hooker does, who gets a guy off as soon as possible, because she’s already collected all the money she’s likely to get.” He frowned and asked, “Why’s somebody looks like you want to work a phone? You ain’t gonna make anywhere near what you could get selling tail.” He immediately answered his own question. “Well, you got your reasons.”

  Phyllis had already learned that if you didn’t volunteer information about yourself, you probably wouldn’t be asked by people in the sex industry. Larry said he paid a girl ten percent of what a caller was charged, which averaged out at around fifty dollars per five minutes, and you could talk a good fifty minutes out of every hour. You could take a break occasionally, go to the toilet or drink something if your throat got dry. You could stay on shift as long as you wanted, but most of his employees did only the four-hour minimum, because they had families to get home to, and anyway there weren’t many who could talk continuously—or in fact listen—much longer than that at one stretch.

  The job sounded ideal to Phyllis, who, as long as her batteries were charged, needed no breaks whatsoever and, having no other life, could work interminably. Though perhaps not exactly show business, it was a close relative, calling as it did for acting at least with the voice.

  The phone-sex shop consisted of a half-dozen shallow cubicles of unpainted plywood, each furnished with a little table that held a telephone, a stopwatch, and a bottle of water. At every table but one sat a “hostess” wearing a headset, and as Larry led Phyllis to the unoccupied booth, all of them were speaking into their respective mouthpieces. Two, spotting her out of the corners of their eyes, waved amiably.

  All these women appeared to be of another kind than either the streetwalkers or the strippers, being overweight with irregular features and dressed for comfort and not for the enticement of men. By what seemed to be human standards, none could be considered young, though Phyllis had no training and little experience in assessing age numerically and was herself, so far as that went, less than a year old.

  When a call came in, the customer was first greeted automatically by an introductory message on audio tape announcing, quickly and not at all clearly, the fees for which he would be responsible if he stayed on the line after the introduction was concluded and he had stated his credit-card number and expiration date. He was then transferred to whichever woman whose line was open. If all the phones were in use, he was put on hold, for which time he was assured he would not be charged, but this was one of the several lies that Larry usually got away with. Few callers actually timed themselves precisely, and the waits were not often very long, for contrary to Larry’s projection, business was not always so brisk that one could earn the fifty dollars per hour of his estimate.

  There were periods in which as few as two lines were in use. After her first three hours, Phyllis estimated her take at only forty dollars, at a rate of $13.33 per hour.

  At off times, the idle women by turns visited the restroom. Having no reason to do so, Phyllis did not go there until her nearest neighbor praised her endurance.

  “If I could hold it, I sure would. The last time that place was cleaned will be the first,” said the woman, whose name was May Bellaver. May had been married for twenty-three years to a man who drove a machine called a backloader for some county department. She had borne three children, of whom the oldest was a college dropout who played guitar in a band that rarely found gigs; the youngest, a girl who had just got her period; and in between a male child of fifteen whom she suspected of computer hacking, though it was too complicated for her to figure out. The husband’s position regarding the kids had always been hands off. “Sports,” she added cryptically, and then explained: “All he does when he’s home is watch sports.”

  When Phyllis entered the washroom for the first time she saw what May meant about its lack of cleanliness, and having a few minutes of privacy owing to Larry’s rule that only one woman at a time could be away from the phones, she found a mop, a bucket, and other cleaning materials in a closet and quickly washed the floor, Ajaxed the washbasin and faucets, and swabbed out the toilet.

  Phyllis would have had no idea of what to say to a caller, but Larry had given her sufficient guidelines to get started, and she learned from every call she took.

  “I’m Phyllis. Tell me what I can do for you.” She could have used a pseudonym like the others—May’s was Felicity—but she had no personal identity to conceal.

  “I’ve been a bad boy,
Phyllis,” was the way many callers began. “I must be punished. My name is, uh, Paul.”

  It was not her business to ask what kind of crime could properly be punished by what a stranger said on the telephone. “You deserve no mercy, Paul,” she said sternly. “Get your clothes off, you worm.”

  “I’m naked, Mistress.”

  “My rawhide whip has been soaking in vinegar. Every time it hits your naked ass, it’ll open up a deep cut, and when the vinegar meets a bleeding wound, the pain will be agonizing.”

  “Ohhhh, do it, Mistress…. What about my balls?”

  “I’m going to rip them off.”

  “My God, I’m ready to come right now.”

  Phyllis was supposed to delay this outcome until the customer had been on the line for at least five minutes, arousing him but then periodically curbing the arousal, but she was by nature, which is to say by design, inclined to a mode of operation unsympathetic to delay. She also found it hard to understand why a man would find so desirable a postponement of his satisfaction that he would pay extra for it.

  But customers often wanted her to go into painstaking detail about what she would do with their sexual organs, rectum, mouth, even ears and nostrils. Some might by contrast provide a lengthy account of what they would do with hers. They could not of course be criticized for an ignorance of her material composition. Those who wanted to chew the crotch of her dirty underwear were not aware that it would smell exactly as it had when she put it on.

  Now and again someone called who wanted her to play the bad child, to speak in a high-pitched voice and in fantasy lie across his naked lap while he lowered her little white cotton panties and spanked her tiny pink butt until she was so sexually excited that she would rape him by one means or another, which seemed to Phyllis impractical if she were as small as she was supposed to be.

  Occasionally she could not forbear from pointing out absurdities in what a customer would say or ask, even though Larry had warned her against negative expression that did not enhance the pleasure of the caller.

  For example, you could threaten to do physical harm, castration and other mutilations, flogging, choking, et cetera, but not reflect on the man’s taste, judgment, or morality. “Remember, this is all just talk, Phyl. The customer’s always right if he keeps paying.” Yet when a man told her that what he wanted to hear was the sounds she would make if after buggering her with a Coke bottle he snuffed her with a razor blade across the throat, Phyllis believed she should point out that while such fantasies were not illegal, any attempt to realize them would be against the law.

  Comparing notes with May during the periods when neither was on the phone, Phyllis observed that no callers yet had asked to speak about the straightforward sort of intercourse in which the penis is inserted into the vagina and agitated to the point of climax.

  May’s hearty laughter sent a vibration through her several chins. “You got a good sense of humor, Phyl. You’re right about these guys: If they was normal, they wouldn’t be calling here. My old man never heard of most of this stuff, I only hope. I never grew up in a convent, but most of it was new to me until I worked the phones, I don’t mind telling you.” She laughed till she had to dry her eyes on a Kleenex. “If you took it serious, you’d go nuts.”

  “Your husband approves of this job?”

  “I tell him it’s telemarketing, which I guess it is. He never asked what I was telemarketing.”

  “Sports.”

  “That’s right; he just watches sports. But he likes the money I bring home, damn if he don’t.”

  She added proudly, “I bought him a wide-screen TV.” She took a swig from her water bottle. “Excuse me asking, Phyl. You ever been married?”

  “I’m separated.”

  May’s phone rang at that point, and a second later, so did Phyllis’s.

  “I got ten inches at full erection,” said her caller, “and a great big pair of hairy balls. I want you to crawl across the floor on your naked belly, and when you get here rise to your knees and pray to this majestic god that looms above you, beg his forgiveness for your sins, swear your absolute loyalty to him, for which you may be asked the ultimate sacrifice, hail his grandeur, salute his glory—are you listening, you piece of nothing, to the mighty voice of King Cock?”

  “Yes,” said Phyllis.

  “Well, what are you going to do about it?”

  “Everything you mentioned.”

  “Not enough. I’m paying for this!”

  “What else do you want?”

  “You tell me, for Christ sake.”

  “I just wish I knew,” Phyllis said. “What can be done for the man who already has everything?”

  Larry appeared suddenly and took the phone from her. Into it he said, “I’m sorry, sir, your call got mistakenly switched to the wrong extension. Let me correct this.”

  “I’m not being charged for this, I hope.”

  “No, sir,” Larry lied. “First minute’s free. Hold on.” To Phyllis he said, with crooked finger, “C’mon. Listen to this.”

  She left her cubicle and, passing four others with hostesses on the phone, followed him to the last, the left-side partition of which was the wall. This was occupied by a woman who was doing the crossword puzzle in a magazine. She appeared to be the oldest of the lot, with completely white hair, crow’s-footed eyes, and withered cheeks. She squinted up at Larry through the top lenses of bifocal glasses.

  “Liz, pick up Five.”

  The old woman nodded briskly, punched the appropriate button, and lifted the telephone. Her voice was a surprise to Phyllis, being so much younger-sounding than she looked. “Master, Desirée at your service…. Oh, it’s the most magnificent I’ve ever seen. I live only to worship and adore it…. Yes, oh please, please, please do not deny me. I want only to serve it….”

  After a few moments of this, Larry drew Phyllis aside. “S’why I been monitoring your calls, Phyl. You got to develop some patience. Maybe that’s because you’re too good-looking for this job. You’re wasting it, is what you’re doing. Them others here, this is the best they can do.”

  “I’m really trying to get into show business.”

  “Eddie tells me it didn’t work out forya at the club,” said Larry. “Listen, I got an idea. C’mon in the office, talk it over.”

  His office was much more sparsely furnished than his brother Eddie’s, with unpainted plywood walls like those of the cubicles, a table made from a flat door resting on sawhorses, atop which were a laptop computer and a telephone. He gestured Phyllis to a folding metal chair and, behind the table, took another for himself.

  “In my opinion, the best opportunities for a hot girl in the sex business these days is websites.” He threw a thumb at the open laptop. “According to Eddie, you had some difficulty in relating to the live audience. Well, it isn’t for everybody. Neither is phones. But on the internet, you got a variety to choose from. What I think might work for you is a voyeur site. Now, you got different kinds of them, too. You got your houses where a number of girls go about their business twenty-four/seven while cameras watch everything they do, undressing, showering, the toilet included, and everything in the bedrooms including blowing and fucking their boyfriends.” Larry smiled abstractly, looking just past Phyllis. “Just living, not acting. And then there’s the individual sites: One girl performs for the camera, you know? Plays with her titties and cooze, talks dirty, uses a dildo, and so on, and will do requests by e-mail. She doesn’t see them, so it’s personal for them but not her. That might be the ticket for you, Phyl. Takes some acting ability. Fingering your pussy over and over again for hours is, once again, not for every girl, and then there’s the audio: You got to keep ad-libbing, like on the phones.”

  “I’d be willing to try it,” said Phyllis.

  “Great.” Larry pulled the laptop in front of him and began to press its keys. “This is how me and my brother communicate nowadays.”

  “Your brother Eddie?”

  He looked a
t her over the machine. “My brother Harry. He’s right downstairs in this building. We got the two floors.” He leaned forward to peer at the screen. “Harry says … come right down.” Larry pushed his chair away from the table.

  “Thank you,” said Phyllis. “I believe I have fifty-five dollars coming for the four hours I worked the phone.”

  Larry returned to the computer and manipulated the keys. “Okay, Phyl, here’s how it looks. During the training period you get only five percent, which I think you’ll agree is generous in view of that last call which you bungled. There’s a slight charge for the bottled water.”

  “Which I didn’t touch.”

  Larry ignored her comment and consulted the screen again. “You’ve got thirty bucks coming, but I have to owe it to you till the end of the month. I don’t get paid for the calls till the credit-card companies pay me.” He pushed his chair back again and spread his legs. “You owe me for sending you to Harry. If you want to go down on me as a thank-you, I might find a few extra dollars.”

  Phyllis still had two-thirds of her last charge, and her coordination was not disordered as it had been the night she went temporarily haywire and tried to punch Ellery Pierce. Rational now, she stood up, went to Larry, and knocked him out with one blow to a chin made prominent by a triumphant smirk. She found a leather wallet in the breast pocket of his jacket. From its abundant supply of bills she extracted a twenty and a ten.

  As she returned the wallet to his pocket, Larry groaned and without opening his eyes murmured, “You can’t kill a man for tryin’.”

  The statement made no sense to Phyllis, but then thus far very little had in the area of human morality. In her opinion, people should stick to what they did well, namely, technology.

  5

  Before long, Ellery Pierce and Janet Hallstrom were so comfortable with each other as no longer to be sexually intimate, and since they did not live together, there seemed little point in maintaining their connection. Soon he saw her, often with Hallstrom, only by chance, at the entrance to the apartment building or in the hallway, and though it could well be only because he knew the latter for an animatronic creature, Pierce no longer found it or him altogether credible. The old sparkle in the eye of apparent vitality, though of course always simulated, was missing now. Hallstrom’s responses seemed diminished from what they had been. He no longer initiated the banal polite conversations of old, the platitudes about the weather, the clichés on the traffic problem, and other minutiae of quotidian life. Whether he was still being nasty to Janet could not be discerned from the countenance of either.