Calling Out (3 page)

“Hey. How come you don't ever go out?” she asks.
“You'd make more than on the phone, you know.”

When you work here, it is understood that escorting
is in no way in the same category as prostitution. We're an
entertainment company. A legal service. The girls have to
believe it and outwardly I never waver.

“You could do a bachelor party with me to start,” she
says. “The guys are sometimes cute. The tips are good. It'd
be fun.”

I feel bad about thinking it but what I don't say to
Jezebel is that I'm not an escort because I'm not that desperate. Self-imposed banishment is one thing, but taking
off my clothes for money is quite another.

“I'm too shy,” I tell her. “It's not something I could
ever do.” Looking down at my modest turtleneck sweater
and corduroys, it's probably not hard for her to believe.

“Albee,” she says, “come here, baby. You pain in my
ass.” She picks up the dog and puts him in my lap. “Well.
The offer stands if you ever have a change of heart.”

The phone rings and Jezebel's an easy sell. She always
is. She gets requested much more than other girls, which
certainly supports the sex-off-the-books theory. But then
again, she's young, warm, and cute.

“Don't forget Nikyla. She's probably getting the
creeps right about now,” she says. “That guy likes to show
and tell with the dead animals. He had me take his picture
naked with a stuffed mountain lion like he was fucking it.”

She sprays perfume, fluffs her hair with her fingers,
and smiles, giving me a dirty grind with her narrow hips
as a farewell salute. I can barely muster a smile back. This
gesture makes her look like a six-year-old imitating something she's seen a teenager do, not knowing what it means.
I'm nostalgic for the kid she must have been, or maybe
still is.

She answers her ringing cell phone—her mother—
with rolled-eyed annoyance.

“No. I can't. Oh come on. Yeah, well fuck you too,” she
says into the phone.

Jezebel waves at me as she slams the door and leaves
me alone again.

Every time I call an escort out at the end of a date, I have
a moment of worry until I hear her voice. Nikyla takes four rings to answer
but sounds normal and upbeat. Ephraim will stave off another night alone with
help from a vivacious teenager who is saving up for night-school business classes.

Unlike with Jezebel, I don't worry about Nikyla getting stuck in this lifestyle for long because escorting really
is just part of the larger plan. She doesn't get sidetracked
by spending to make herself feel better. She just got a job
at a clothing store in the mall so she won't have to declare
her escort earnings on her taxes, and she wants to have a
baby as soon as her boyfriend gets promoted to manager
at Circuit City. I told her she should try living somewhere
outside of Utah where maybe she wouldn't feel the need
to start having kids so young. She just smiled when I said
this, feeling sorry for me because I am thirty and single
and childless.

“Having babies is what human beings are supposed to
do,” she said. “It's our nature. Really Rox, it's all about getting more love.”

I couldn't argue with that.

With Nikyla on the road for another three hours, I
have no girls on call. If Mohammed knew, he'd hop up
and down like Rumpelstiltskin. I should just pack up and
go home, but getting no answer at an escort agency on
Thanksgiving is probably worse for a sad guy than a
recorded voice saying no one is available. And it's not like
I have somewhere better to be. So I embark upon some
improvement projects for the office, starting with scrubbing the puppy-urine spots from the carpet.

Over the months I've been here, I've come to view this
softly seedy office with affection. With the closed blinds
and the dim lamplight, it always looks like it's dusk. I light
the electric-purple jasmine candle on the counter, then
straighten the dog-eared fashion magazines on the goldand-glass coffee table. A dusty plastic spider plant is
lodged in the corner next to the TV. After I wipe its leaves
shiny, it makes a nice addition to my desk. I sink into one
of the black leather loveseats and look at the pictures of
“Fall on the Hudson River” on the front of the
Times
travel section.

We hadn't been dating long the first time McCallister
took me up to his hometown in the Hudson Valley. We
played hooky on an October Tuesday and left the city
behind. The day was luminous, and in a borrowed car
outside our usual turf, we were smiley and shy, laughing
at everything. I told him that when I was young my mom
used to say to me and my sister with reverent breathiness
on particularly brilliant blue-skied afternoons, “Remember
this day, girls!” I imitated her with exaggerated flourish to
undermine the sincerity of the sentiment, but savoring the
day was exactly what I wanted to do. I felt full and solid, and
humbled by possibility. Now I wonder if being happy with
someone is really just stringing enough of these shiny
moments together.

Three and a half years of stilted commitment later,
McCallister declared an end to our relationship, citing, as
he put it, our pathological disconnectedness. I feigned
agreement and acceptance, even as inwardly I was devastated, and even as he started dating an actress named
Maria a week later. We still talk, but the distance and my
rule that I never call him make it feel like a safe arrangement. He likes to call and tell me what I'm missing in New
York. He feels some kind of duty to convince me to move
back though I'm not sure what for since he insists it's not
for him.

The phone rings, and as I reach for it I knock over the
candle, singeing a black spot on the carpet even larger
than the one Albee left. The caller ID reads, “Penitentiary.”
I hesitate. Sometimes when it's not busy I'll answer these
calls and proceed as if they are potential clients. It's not a
lot, but it's what I can offer. Tonight I appreciate the diversion, so I answer and describe Nikyla and Jezebel and Mimi
and Vivian and Miranda in glowing detail. Albee wrestles
with a purple satin pillow he found under the couch.

“What about you, Roxanne? You sound real nice,” the
caller says.

I smile and feel my lonesomeness fade just a bit.

“Sure. I go out,” I say. “I don't know if I'm your type,
though.”

“I bet you are. Why don't you describe what you look
like?”

I don't tell him that my body is long and reedy, my
eyes amber-brown, my hair walnut-colored and just past
my shoulders, my skin as pale as parchment. Instead I
peer down at the model on the cover of
Glamour
.

“I'm twenty-two. 115 pounds. About 5'6”, with
honey-blond hair—”

“Is it long?”

“Long and silky. Down to the curve of my back,” I say,
“and I have green eyes—”

“I bet you have some cute freckles across the bridge of
your nose.”

“How'd you know that?”

He laughs.

“I'm a 36-24-36 with full, real breasts.”

“Oh,” he sighs. “I'll take you.”

“What would you like me to wear tonight?”
“A short little skirt with some of those fishnet stockings. I bet you have a pair of legs on you.” He whistles
softly. “And wear some real sexy high spiked heels.”

“I think that can be arranged,” I say. “What else?”

“Tell me what your tits are like,” he says, his breathing
getting heavy, his voice louder and forceful.

I weigh the option to continue, seduced by his
urgency and my own longing to lose myself. But then a
voice in my head says, “Who
are
you?” I know it's time to
cut this short. Even I recognize that keeping the charade
going would be a momentary salve at best, one that would
make me feel worse in the end.

“You have yourself a good night,” I say, keeping the
purr in my voice.

“What? Oh come on. We're just getting started.”

“I'm sorry, baby. I have to go now,” I say.

I hear him say “Wait,” as I hang up.

And I'm alone again. The heater creaks and whistles
as it pumps dry, hot air into the room.

It is three a.m. and I'm gritty-eyed and worn out. I
have two hours to go. I don't want to think about anything, especially myself. I restock the invoices. I clean lint
from the pen drawer. I copy over Mohammed's escort
schedule for the week so it's legible. But the heater clicks
off, leaving cold, early-morning silence, and I realize that
I've forgotten something.

“Albee?” I call.

I stop to listen for him but the office is quiet. West of
town, the Union Pacific sounds its horn and I wait a
second before looking for the puppy. I close my eyes and
feel the rumbling.

Nikyla, still amazingly peppy at the end of the night, returns
from her date with the taxidermist and throws a silver fox pelt at me with a
scream as if it were alive. She is not, as I had imagined, in a Chinese silk
dress, but instead she's done up nicely in black velvet pants and a charcoal
sweater, her cleavage barely beckoning from the V neckline. Not even yet twenty,
Nikyla seems to have it much more together than I do. She counts out money for
the house with purpose and focus and then gives me two twenty-dollar bills.

“That's too much,” I say. “Take half back.”

“Stop. He tipped big,” she says, pulling her long black
hair into a ponytail.

She applies a sheer lip gloss—her boyfriend always
waits up for her—and then waves as she trots for the door
without reporting anything from the date.

Sometimes the escorts volunteer details, but part of the
decorum around here is that we don't press for information
that isn't offered. My relationship with the girls overrides
my curiosity for salacious tidbits. They will talk about the
fetishists because they find the strange obsessions funny
and nonthreatening, and because, I assume, satisfying these
men doesn't seem degrading in a way that pleasing the
average john, with all his universally base urges, might.

Mark Benson calls once every other month to request
an escort with long hair. He is the prize date whom the
booker grants to a favorite girl because he pays $120 to
brush an escort's hair for an hour, with all her clothes on
and without her having to say a word. While she sits on
the bed, he runs the hairbrush softly from the top of her
head down through her hair with a hypnotic rhythm.
Then there is Stephen Newhouse, who sits in his Corvette
while an escort in a miniskirt walks back and forth in
front of the car in a grocery store parking lot. And Vernal
Shepherd, who takes his escort to the mall so she can
model clothes for him, which he then buys for her.

But these are the exceptions. There is also the
trucker who hasn't bathed in three days. The aggressive,
fundamentalist Mormon venting his repressed rage.
The obese shut-in who wants a body massage. The frat
boys on a ski trip who've been up for two days doing
coke and expect the kind of orgy they've seen in a porn
video. The walleyed dentist who likes his buttocks
licked. I marvel at the escorts' courage to face down
another hotel room door.

My shift finally grinds to its conclusion at five a.m. and
in a sleepy stupor I drive through the early-morning-empty
streets toward the Avenues, where I live, with Albee mewing
on the seat next to me. After the slight panic over his earlier
disappearance, I eventually found him asleep in one of the
lockers in the back room, on top of a crumpled blue latex
bodysuit, which he had chewed and clawed to ribbons.

By the time I get home, the ascending sun haloes the
Wasatch Mountains and my frosty breath hangs in the
morning air. I work my key into the door only to discover
that it's unlocked.

Inside my apartment, I'm barely surprised by the towheaded figure buried in a sleeping bag at the foot of the
couch. Ford. He has my other key. His appearance is a
welcome surprise; he wasn't due in for another couple
weeks. I go into my room, draw all the blinds against the
insistent morning, and sleep.

When I wake up a few hours later, I quickly splash my
face with water—disheartened by the bags under my
eyes—and brush my teeth before going out to greet my
houseguest.

Ford and I have known each other for twelve years.
We met in college, fooled around a few times, and then
became friends. His baby-blond hair and small features
give him an aura of innocence, though I know better. For
half the year he's a river guide in southern Utah where he
keeps a shingled trailer perched on the edge of a dry gulch
in Moab. The rest of the time he paints houses wherever
they need painting. Even though he hasn't lived in California for years, his beachy, laid-back aura is something
that's as integral to him as his butterscotch-leather, wornhard, resoled Frye boots. Proximity to Ford is one of the
reasons I have stayed in Utah. Someday we might even
decide that we found what we were looking for at eighteen,
but I keep that inchoate nugget snuggly tucked away with
my other unexamined rainy-day potentials such as journal
writing, motherhood, and learning to play the harmonica.

“Morning,” Ford says as I walk in to the living room.
He's propped up against the couch but still bundled
in his sleeping bag, watching Martha Stewart on TV. He
sips tea from a mug that says “AMF Bowling,” which he
bought for me during his last visit, after we rooted
through the housewares at Deseret Industries, the
Mormon thrift store. Albee is nosing around Ford's used
tea bag, which soaks through the front page of yesterday's
Salt Lake Tribune
fanned out on the floor.