Line of Fire (18 page)

I said, “Sometimes I see patients only for a couple of visits.”

Sam nodded, lowering his voice in pitch and in volume. “We have homework, both of us. We need to write down a transcript of everything we remember saying to each other while we were in that asshole’s hospital room that night. Every last word. Unless we can remember what we talked about, we really have no way to know how vulnerable we are.

“I’ll do mine tonight. You do yours as soon as you can. Let me know when you have it. Then we’ll use our combined recollections to fill in the blanks. And don’t use a computer. Single sheet of paper, not part of a pad or a notebook. Something burnable or shreddable would be best.”

My cell vibrated. Lauren was probably wondering where I was. I retrieved the phone from my pocket and looked at the screen.

It was Izza, not Lauren. The new prospective tenant for the cottage had failed his credit check.

Red flag from Experian from a previous landlord in OK. He hadn’t even told me he’d lived in OK. Ru interested? Can I tempt u?

Izza had followed the question mark at the end of the last sentence with an emoticon that I couldn’t interpret.

My interpretation skill with emoticons was pathetic. It was a source of significant amusement for my children. They had even begun creating nonsense emoticons to spoof me.

“Do you have to go?” Sam asked.

Sam would not be happy to learn that I’d just heard from Izza. Despite his discomfort with my involvement with her, I felt that Izza was one of the few advantages in my arsenal.

“Soon,” I said.

28

L
eaves were falling from the lesser trees. The elms and ash were tougher. They wouldn’t shed their foliage until winter screamed its arrival.

Amanda arrived for her session dressed for fall. And knowing where she wanted to start. “I work for two men. They know that they do not have exclusive access to my time. Neither knows the other’s identity.”

She had cut her hair. Her ode to autumn was jeans, boots, and a bulky cotton sweater. The trimmed hair fell just beyond her collar; the familiar ponytail look was no longer in the cards. I thought maybe she’d had some color done, too. What had been a deep mahogany brown seemed to approach the hue of the blackness of the leather of her ankle-high boots.

I didn’t know how an escort should look. I tried to turn the equation on its head. If I were a man looking for an escort, how would I expect her to look late in the morning on a weekday, while visiting a therapist?

Answer: not like an escort. That was how Amanda looked: not like an escort. I allowed for the likelihood that I crossed paths with escorts—adult service providers—at other times in my daily life, and that I never knew it because I had no way to know it. I assumed that was the way that the women preferred it.

Amanda said, “I’ve been doing this for just shy of a year and a half. I consider myself a novice. I know a few girls in the business, but I don’t feel much in common with traditional escorts, and I doubt that they consider me one of their own. It’s a volume thing, mostly.” Her face showed some consternation. “And sugar babies are definitely suspicious of me.”

Sugar babies?
I began keeping a mental list of things to look up later on Urban Dictionary. Urban Dictionary
was becoming my new go-to Web reference.

She sighed. “The men? My gentlemen. For one of them? I am a constant in his life. We go out often, discreetly. He visits me at my place.

“Where do I fit for him? For him, I try to be an island of calm, of predictability, in what feels to him like a most demanding world. He likes women. Women adore him. But he doesn’t
get
women. Women are work for him. I try to make that part easier.”

Amanda narrowed her eyes. “It might be tempting to think that I am talking mostly about sex right now. But I am not. Sex is part of it. A necessary but not sufficient part. But the piece that I make easier? That’s not the sex. I make the rest of being with a woman easier for him.”

I considered replying. Saner instincts prevailed.

“I have also—but this is less common—joined him in other cities on business. We have taken a couple of brief holidays together.” She smiled her one-dimple smile. “I recruited him. I convinced him of the potential advantages of the arrangement. After witnessing his misadventures over the years, it was not that difficult a case to make.”

She made firm eye contact and nodded succinctly. We were moving on.

“My relationship with my other current gentleman is almost the opposite. Logistically, in terms of what he needs, everything. The circumstances could hardly be more different. He lives in the area, but I see him, almost exclusively, when he is away on business. I fly to meet him somewhere. We don’t travel together. I’ve never been on the same plane with him. We have separate rooms in the hotels where he stays. On rare occasions I see him here, but always at the home I rent. He parks in my garage. We do not go out. I bring food in. Or he cooks. He is a good cook.”

She swept her hair to one side with her fingertips. It didn’t stay where she was encouraging it to go. Amanda was still getting used to the new haircut.

“I don’t know how much detail is necessary. Or appropriate.” She looked at me with wide eyes. “You probably don’t, either, do you? Shut me up if I go too far.”

I didn’t shut her up. I knew I was allowing Amanda to lead me in over my head, but I kept following. I also knew I was curious about facts, which was not always a useful place for a therapist to be.

She said, “Girls have rules. My rules are simple, as far as that goes. This is how it works: I am a student. Mutual respect comes first. School comes second. Each man knows he is involved with a full-time student who is serious about her studies.

“They are aware that they must arrange for my availability in advance. Seeing me always requires at least an hour’s notice—I need the hour to prepare, to get pretty, to preserve . . . my allure. For an extended trip out of town, if I have to juggle my school schedule, or exams, I might require a month’s notice. The men do not come to my home uninvited. Ever.” She raised her eyebrows and looked to the side. “That’s about it.

“Beyond those basics, I am as accommodating as I am able to be. At the end of the day, the thing that the gentlemen are most appreciative of is that I am . . . accommodating.” Amanda narrowed her eyes, repeating her earlier caution: “Again, I am concerned that you think I am speaking about sex when I speak of accommodation.”

I suspected she was seeking acknowledgment. I didn’t offer any.

“In my world the difference between a pro and an amateur isn’t just about the sex. A talented amateur can manage the sex. It’s about attitude, about the before, and the after. And the sex.” She wrinkled her nose. “I have sex rules, too. Things I . . . don’t do. That’s common, in the business. Do you need to know those?”

Was I curious? Sure. But Amanda’s sex rules sounded like a distraction trap to me. I replied that it was her call. She said she would think about it. She knew she was tantalizing. I knew she was tantalizing. We both knew control of the session was up for grabs.

I had expected Amanda to begin the session by renewing her challenge that I communicate to her how I felt about her work. I reminded her of her earlier comments before I said, “You seem to expect that I will misunderstand the work you do.”

“I guess I do. I presume that you’re not . . . familiar. Perhaps that is an error.”

Her words were intentionally coy. I left her musing unaddressed. She hadn’t expected an answer; she had been making a point.

I thought I saw a flash of surprise in her eyes at the first question I did pose to her that day. I asked, “You’re in school? I didn’t know.” Her surprise, I guessed, was that my question had not been about sex.

“First time around, when I was younger? I was a finance major. My work background, before, is in financial analysis. Up until the economy tanked I was a freelance consultant doing due diligence, mostly on the acquisition side. I had a dozen or so reasonably reliable clients, big regional law firms and VC outfits. But the bottom fell out in 2007 when IPOs and M and A—I’m sorry, initial public offerings and mergers and acquisitions—disappeared to almost zero. I burned through too much of my savings before I finally threw up my hands and tried to find a corporate job. Waiting was a major mistake. By the time I got serious, in 2009, no one was hiring.

“I’d been dreaming about doing something else for a while, so I decided to treat the economic downturn as an opportunity to reinvent myself. I wanted something more oriented to people than to numbers. You know what? Turns out I am good with people. Now I’m studying management at CU; I’ll get my degree in the spring. I have a position lined up in Atlanta with a girlfriend from my consultant days who started a corporate training firm. Fortune 500 clients. Lots of travel.” She smiled. One dimple.

The smile faded. She crossed her legs. She made the act of crossing her legs seem like punctuation, which left me wondering what would come next.

“This job? I had done work for one of my gentlemen’s businesses. I knew he was physically attracted to me, but he had always treated me well. In late 2009, when I was desperate about finding a real job, I ran into him at an industry meeting in Palo Alto.

“A girlfriend and I were in the City for dinner, on the Embarcadero. He was there, too. George. With an attractive woman. We ended up in the bar waiting for tables. George excused himself to take a call. After a few minutes chatting with his friend, I realized she didn’t know him. At all.

“She was funny, and she was smart—educated smart, well-traveled smart, literate smart—but George hadn’t revealed the first thing about his life to her. I tried to pick up a first-date vibe from them, but that wasn’t it.

“I found myself wondering if George had hired an escort. After they got a table, I didn’t give it another thought.

“A couple of months later, almost the same thing happened in Las Vegas at another business thing. I was still unemployed, still networking. A group of us had left the Mandalay Bay, where the meeting was being held, to check out the new Wynn casino. George was at a bar across the lobby talking to a woman. She got up and headed toward the elevators. A few minutes later, he did the same. Again, I thought,
Huh, escort.

“Grown-ups, you know? Doing grown-up things? Not my business.

“It’s an hour later, two hours later, George takes the seat next to me at the blackjack table. My friends are playing craps. I have the end stool at the only small-stakes table in the room, nursing a rapidly diminishing pile of chips.

“George gives the dealer some hundred-dollar bills. Eight, ten. They come off a pile he keeps unfolded in his inside jacket pocket. The bills are so crisp the dealer has to peel them apart to count them. George pushes a couple of stacks of chips in front of me, tells me he doesn’t like to gamble alone. I ask if his friend would be joining him. He makes eye contact. Shakes his head.

“He knows I know. He doesn’t care. He was telling me she was history. And he was telling me he trusted me knowing that.”

I thought of Amanda’s brother. His trust that she wouldn’t tell. How much that meant to her. I filed it.

“We played blackjack. George won, I lost. Without giving it enough thought, I placed a big bet: I said, ‘She’s lovely, George. Beautiful. But you can do better.’

“He didn’t respond at first. After another hand he said, ‘You think I want better?’

“I said, ‘I think you’re missing my point.’

“We played cards for most of an hour. George continued to win, mostly. I continued to lose, mostly. He flirted a little bit. I flirted back a little bit less. When it was time for me to go, I thanked him for his generosity and returned the rest of his chips. He cashed out. He tried to give me some of the remaining money. I declined. We shared a cab back to Mandalay. Then we shared an elevator up into the tower. I got off first, of course—his suite was on a higher floor.

“I knew how little savings I had left. Maybe three months, if I was careful. I opened Excel on my laptop. I stayed up for another hour and I ran numbers. I had no trouble conjuring a plan that would work for me, one that would give me the financial freedom to go back to school. The dollar number I came up with? It would be inconsequential to George.

“That was the easy part. The math, and the money. I pulled a chair over to the window and I stared down the Strip. I forced myself to examine my recent romantic history—actually, almost all of my romantic history—and I tried to be honest with myself about whether I could really do what I was contemplating doing. Not perform the job I had in mind; I knew I could do that. I wondered if I could tolerate the job. Emotionally.

“I wasn’t sure that I could. To make it work, I decided I would need to have a buffer—some insulation—in place. Why? I knew George could be serious trouble for me. Other than his age—he’s older than I am—he was the kind of man I’d always gotten into trouble with in relationships. He’s comfortable with power. I love that in a man. I love his . . . complete assurance about his place in the world. He expects people to make room for him. And they do. I find that sexy as hell.

“If I let my guard down, I knew that in a week, or a month, or a few months, I could end up the proverbial smitten kitten, completely attached to George. Maybe even in love with George. Vulnerable, with a capital
V
. Stupid with a capital
S
.

“But I’m a realist”—Amanda offered the one-dimple smile—“or at least I am until that moment that I’m smitten. And that side of me knew that George wasn’t going to get attached. No matter how good a companion I turned out to be. No matter how tantalizing a courtesan I became.”

I wondered if her name was Amanda. I hadn’t wondered that before.

“And thus the need to find a buffer. I went back to the laptop and I altered my new business plan to make room for two Georges. I redid all the numbers. Came up with a set of guidelines that I could live with that would allow me to juggle two men, even three, and still allow me to have the life I needed as a student. The numbers worked; I knew that by graduation I would be able to put aside a decent cushion to replace what I’d spent. Cover my tuition and expenses. Enjoy a few luxuries.

“I presented the proposal to George over a late breakfast the next morning. His initial reply? ‘I have no interest in being a sugar daddy. For you or anyone else.’

“I said, ‘Good. I have no interest in being your sugar baby. That’s why this will be business. A deal, with parameters.’

“He chuckled. ‘Parameters? Like rules? The other girls have no rules. They are younger and more beautiful.’

“George wasn’t belittling me. He was doing what he does—identifying weaknesses in my proposal. I was judging that George trusted the young women just enough to . . . rent them. George would not put enough faith in unfamiliar drop-dead-gorgeous young women to lease one. For that he would want emotional maturity. Some experience in her life. Some intuition about his life. And discretion that would last longer than a date.

“I told him we both knew I was attractive enough for him. I told him he deserved a girl who wasn’t pretending to enjoy him because she was hoping he’d leave another hundred on the table before he walked out the door.

“He was far from convinced. Commitment, he thought, even a business partnership, would bring potential problems. ‘I know that what I’m doing is not ideal. Every decision has trade-offs. That is life. Certain risks are unavoidable.’

“I said, ‘Those trade-offs? Ten girls? Ten potential problems. The right girl? No potential problems. No trade-offs.’

“Either way, with his escorts, or with my proposal, it was pay-for-play for him—a clean business transaction. I had to offer something different. With value added. I said, ‘The big difference? If you yearn to slide behind the wheel of a familiar Ferrari, you won’t find it waiting for you at Zipcar. For the quality you want, for the sincerity you deserve, you will need to commit to a lease. Why? Because what you really want is not available by the hour. You know that.’