Whip Smart: A Memoir (28 page)

He made a surprisingly heartrending sight, waiting for me by the entrance in his matching hat and mittens.

“You came!” he said gratefully.

“I said I would, didn’t I?” I gave him a lopsided smile and kissed the air near his cheek.

I followed him through the aisles of merchandise tables, carefully sifting through piles of ankle reflectors, water bottle belts, packets of carbohydrate gel, and sweatbands. After a half an hour of smiling encouragingly every time he looked back and proudly held up a find, like a kid doing tricks in the pool, I began tiring.

“How about a T-shirt?” I asked him, holding out a find of my own. He hesitated before adding it to his shopping basket.
Asshole,
I thought; he was ungrateful like a child, too. I suddenly wanted to go home, to get away from him and his cloying loneliness. He was a finicky, needy man; it was no wonder he was lonely. That was my job: a guard against loneliness so that he could enjoy his hobby for an hour. I imagined running a marathon with no one to cheer me on. The dense mixture of frustration and depression I felt at his vulnerability was familiar, an old burden. It was the feeling that had hung like a perpetual dusk over our home during my parents’ breakup. The dark outside seemed to mimic it, the smell of imminent winter leaking in through the lobby’s revolving doors.

Laden with plastic shopping bags, he found me staring out of the giant windows by the escalator.

“Time to go home?” he said. His acknowledgment of that single authentic feeling of mine prodded my own loneliness, and I felt a surge of gratitude.

“Yeah, I think so.”

We glided down the escalator in silence. Out on the chilly sidewalk, he insisted on hailing me a cab.

“See you in two weeks?” he asked as I slid into the backseat.

“Sure,” I said, and squeezed out a smile.

“Oh, wait!” He grabbed the taxi door with his mittened hand as I went to close it. Pulling off the mitten with his teeth, he reached into his back pocket and pulled out a wad of folded bills. “I almost forgot.” He smiled again sheepishly as he tucked them into my hand and slammed the door, waving as we pulled away. As my cab sped down the highway, I counted the bills. It was $300 in twenties, the same as for a session.

And so this became our new routine. For formality’s sake, we did have one more session after that, but when he called to invite me to dinner the following week we both knew there would be no spanking, no Mean Mommy. He took me to restaurants uptown that he had carefully researched to make sure they had vegetarian options. I learned all about his students, his aging mother, his psoriasis and obsessive-compulsive streak. There was a mood we maintained that prevented it from ever feeling like a therapy session, a lightness that I know he kept calling me for, which he didn’t feel in his immaculate Westchester condo. I talked about myself, too. I didn’t lie about anything, but there was a way the truth was omitted, even from those facts. Maybe it was a natural result of my altered personality. He called me Melissa, knew where I was from, where I had gone to college, that my parents were divorced, even about my addiction history. But any evidence of grief had been bled out of my story; I might have been pulling figurines off of a shelf for him to examine, they had so little to do with my actual experiences. That was what he wanted, to borrow an aura of ease for a few hours. He believed that being me was light and fun and easy, and so with him I got to become that.

There were bad moments, a sucking black hole of loneliness that opened in me, when our conversation lulled, but mostly not. Mostly I felt safe, in a contained space. We stayed far enough outside of my usual stomping grounds that I didn’t often fear bumping into anyone I knew. And oh, the getting over! I was making money to be taken out to dinner! Yes, something flinched in me when I
realized that I was being paid to go on dates with him, that that was what we were simulating. But what else had I simulated? What was this by comparison? I knew it couldn’t last forever, that I couldn’t simulate what develops after so many dates, but I didn’t know who would stop first.

“STOP
!” Dylan shrugged me off as I tried to kiss his cheek. I had just arrived at his apartment, coming straight from a session at Jacob’s place. Dylan frowned. “I need you to feel my forehead. I think I’m running a fever again.”

I sighed.

“What? Do you think I like being sick?”

“Of course not.” I wasn’t so sure, though. I knew
I
didn’t like his being sick and it was only getting worse. Dylan seemed to come down with something every other week. Last time it had been a bizarre infection in his elbow, an unlikely affliction prompted by nothing the doctor could think of.

“Then why are you looking at me like that?”

“I’m not looking at you like that; I’m feeling your forehead.” I pressed my fingers below his hairline and looked at the floor. While he didn’t act like someone enjoying himself, chronic sickness did give him a convenient reason to act like a miserable bastard, I thought. I sure spent a lot of time taking care of him for how contemptuous he could be. More and more frequently, his minor
emergencies seemed to coincide with my private sessions. A guilty conscience could have been a factor in my noticing this; Dylan had called while I had been in the car with Jacob, laughing. I felt a pang of annoyance when I saw my boyfriend’s name on the phone, followed by shame. The sound of his voice when I answered—forlorn and a little desperate—intensified both my annoyance and my shame. His neediness when sick disgusted me sometimes. How could a man who found it nearly impossible to tell me he loved me expect me to coddle him? I couldn’t help tallying the affection owed me, and I was losing hope that he’d ever pay up.

“How was work?” he asked me.

“Fine,” I said, ignoring his tone. I didn’t really want to get into it with him, not when I was already feeling guilty. “You need some Advil to bring the fever down. I’ll go to my place and get some.”

“Thanks,” he said, and rolled over to face the wall. I still had my coat on and was outside in seconds, tasting the freshness of the open air. By the time I got back he’d be asleep.

Jacob was the counterpoint to Rick. Jacob and I talked on the phone at least once a week, those hour-long, muffled-because-you’re-lying-in-bed type of phone calls, the kind that only happen between girlfriends and new lovers. We also went out for meals, but their pleasure was wholly different from that of sharing a table with Rick or any of my other clients. I missed Jacob when he didn’t call. Then I started calling him. We went Christmas shopping together, to the movies, The Home Depot, and the flea market. He bought me a vacuum cleaner for my birthday. We traded mix CDs and family stories. He paid for everything, and he paid me, though we always did a session. I made sure of that. Even when I knew his interest in them was waning. I wanted the money, I thought, but that wasn’t what I missed when I missed him.

When we had been sessioning privately for a few months we would go out to eat afterward and he would drive me home to
Brooklyn. One night, as we parked outside of my building, he handed me some money and I put it in my pocket but didn’t get out of the car. I could smell night through the cracked car windows and thought of how I’d feel walking into my apartment, slightly less alive.

“It feels like Sunday night.” I said.

“I think it
is
Sunday night.”

“Ha-ha. No, I mean it feels like Sunday night used to feel when I was a kid.”

“School the next morning, homework not done.”

“Yeah, but just that
sad
, too, like something is over. Like the night is just a symbol of something else that found you after all, something else you can’t escape.”

“I don’t want to go home alone.”

“Me, neither.”

We looked at each other in the almost dark, and then he started the car again. We drove farther out into Brooklyn. “Right!” I would shout at a red stoplight, and he’d turn. “Left!” I’d shout at the next. It became night, and we drove through neighborhoods where trash cans rolled through the street; those where inside every lamppost outside of every brownstone a light blinked cheerily; those where the streets widened and buildings hulked gray and industrial, no soul in sight. I felt happy. In his car there crackled the known magic of desire, the comfort of his wanting me, but that wasn’t all. There was something else, some other sweetness that I didn’t want to let go of. I wasn’t in love with or attracted to him, not in any regular sense. But I wanted that feeling with him more than I did any other then. It wasn’t only in that dusk that I was reminded of my childhood. There was a safety with him that came from more than just his wanting me. I felt known by him in a way no one else made me feel. Autumn and I had an unspoken understanding about each other’s sessions; I am fairly certain that ours took a similar path. Now, more than then, she and I can admit that there was more to it than money or rebellion, but then it was tacit
at best. She and I did plenty of sessions together, but their pleasure was only ever of humor. She, like most of my friends, only knew the “real” me. Then there were clients, like Larry, in whose company I enjoyed things that would have shocked most of those who knew that “real” me. That pleasure was also real. Jacob was the only person with whom I felt known in both senses. I never privately practiced the things that aroused me with him, but I related to his pleasure freely. He was the only man I knew of who embodied both truths. Sure, there had been young, attractive clients before, photographers who wanted to trade photo shoots for sessions, a personal trainer at my gym once, but I always felt estranged in the company of these men from that “real” me; with them I still had to maintain an invulnerable persona, and it was often more lonely than the company of my usual clientele, who didn’t presume to relate to me socially.

Of course, I never thought any of this at the time. My experience of it was instinctual. I wanted to be around Jacob, and sessions were the way to be around Jacob. Even when he stopped wanting them. I could tell, perhaps even before he could, that he was losing interest in that part of our relationship. For me they were as fun and invigorating as ever, but that wasn’t why I kept initiating them. The intimacy of our friendship had surpassed the power of his fantasies, and they started to feel false. Both of us wanted to simply be around each other more than we wanted to act out those familiar scenarios. We would go out to eat, watch television on his couch, laugh. Before the evening could end, I would start something, and he wasn’t able to say no. Partly, the impulse was still strong in him, and partly, he knew that I required it. I felt guilty but relieved every time we parked outside of my building and he handed me that money. Eventually we talked about it. He told me how his exasperated friends kept insisting that I was using him for the money, that he was a dupe for believing that we were actually friends. To myself, I thought that it was about the money, but also I knew that we were genuine friends, that
the comfort and pleasure of being with him was separate from the comfort of the money. I told him it was because I had a boyfriend.

“It satisfies my conscience. It doesn’t feel like an infidelity if it is still technically a business relationship.”

“And just being friends would?”

“Friends who used to have this kind of business relationship, yeah.”

“But if you already
know
that that’s why you’re doing it, how can it still work?”

I laughed then, because it was a good question and one I hadn’t bothered asking myself about years of past rationalizations, because it
did
still work and I didn’t need to know why. Also, because my excuse was a lie. It was so ironic; I knew my self-deceits well enough to create an incredibly realistic lie, and to him it sounded implausible. In truth, I hardly felt guilty at all on my boyfriend’s behalf. But there was something about the money that did seem to legitimize mine and Jacob’s relationship, and the prospect of not having it made me uncomfortable. So we went on that way until our comforts went threadbare and he started to resent me. I wasn’t ever going to transcend the pageantry of our business relationship and become his girlfriend.

“I’m too short,” he’d say.

“You’re too nice,” I’d reply, half-kidding.

A whiny, childish side of him emerged as his frustration grew, and our barbed joking increased. We bickered. I became crueler and condescending, angry at him for changing what we had, for needing more. Then he fell in love with someone else, and I was relieved, and scared. I felt splintered again, not sure how to go on as I was, and not sure if I could stop.