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An escort friend of mine met this man before I did and said he told her a story about intentionally hitting a cyclist with his car without stopping to see if he—or she?—was OK. “This sums up his respect for humans in general,” she emailed me in her reference. “I almost left the date right then.” And yet she didn’t. “He’s not a cop,” she told me, “and he’s good for the $.” The money was my excuse for taking the booking despite her anecdote, just as it was her excuse for staying for the rest of the date, but I didn’t need the money badly enough to use the word “need,” and I doubt she did either. I was there because of my curiosity and my arrogance, and many escorts I’ve known, the expensive ones anyway, are the same. Barring a history of nonpayment, stalking, or physical abuse, we say yes because we believe we’re tough and special. We want to prove that our peers don’t have our unique skills—they can’t seduce or civilize the way we can. We also find ways to dress up the greed; we pretend we’re Robin Hood, reclaiming money from bad people to spend it among the good (ourselves, our lovers, our friends). We convince ourselves the money is better off anywhere else than with the Man—than with That Man, at least.
I took pride in being able to endure. I cherished my stubbornness as much as I coveted the money. Maybe that was my talent, my trade secret: that I’d inherited the selfish obstinance of my father. It was how I affirmed and sustained self-respect; I didn’t give up because I didn’t have to. And I wasn’t worried because I believed in my power and control. Sometimes they asked if I was afraid. One man tied me up and went through my purse, but I’d left my ID at home and he couldn’t tie a knot for shit—and he, like the man from Chicago, hovered over the DNS (“do not see”) list. (The BDSM agency he’d given as his reference said two girls had blacklisted him, but one hadn’t.) No, I wasn’t afraid. I felt no alarm, only disdain for his ineptitude.
Whatever the men told themselves about who had the upper hand, I was my only boss. And I was there to prove something to myself, to undergo a ritual. It felt less like I was testing myself than that I was testing the world, waiting for something to give. It wouldn’t be me.
Each day in that Chicago hotel room, I shut the bathroom door and stared at my own eyes in the mirror. I would have had the look I usually had in private with my reflection at work: the suspicious and conspiratorial gaze of a woman studying her double, seeing herself when she was not quite herself—I mean, seeing myself not quite myself. My self was in a vault; that was what made the work possible then. In a vault even I couldn’t open. It didn’t matter whether the date lasted three hours or three days, whether I adored him or could hardly stand him—I always left with a part of me he hadn’t touched, a piece locked in a place without a key, without a door. An invincible dignity. An irreducible core. No other moments in my life made me so aware of its existence.
THOUGH ROGER WAS ASSIDUOUSLY honest with me, he didn’t extend the same courtesy to his wife. I wondered about her, as I wondered about most clients’ spouses, with lazy yet broad curiosity. Did the wives permit their husbands’ infidelity while feigning ignorance? Were they relieved to be free from the imposition of sex? At home, did the spouses speak to each other lovingly, touch each other casually? Were they physically affectionate, or was all skin-to-skin contact gone?
Bed death was the excuse offered by clients who felt obligated to explain why they were in a committed relationship and also naked with me, and to their credit it was normally presented with resignation but not accusation or enmity. “We don’t have sex anymore” held both parties responsible—or neither, as if they were just adapting to a circumstantial change, like they’d sold their sailboat or their outdoor cat had gone missing. If there really had been years of little to no erotic intimacy, surely the wives could figure out how the husbands coped. Maybe the wives coped by using adultery, too.
ack
It delighted me to glimpse people’s shadowed spots, the hidden recesses rarely visited even by themselves. I didn’t understand why any wife would want to stay out. Didn’t marrying the man indicate a willingness, if not a desire, to know him completely by sharing these sorts of private proclivities? But the implication of sharing is different when it’s someone you’re bound to. For me, a divulgence was simply interesting or amusing, but for some wives, perhaps, it happened within a context of long-standing imbalance or failure. If they felt neglected or put upon or rejected in their own ways, those sides of their husbands may have been irritating, disconcerting, disappointing, or they may not have had the energy to care. I think I handled my privileged information with respect. But it didn’t mean much to me because, usually, neither did the man.
I WONDERED ABOUT THE wives, but I wondered about the husbands, too. Some of them had plenty of sex at home. And some had gorgeous wives, young and vibrant wives, at least from what I could see in the images that came up when I googled the man’s name during screening. (Unsolicited, they might show me pictures during our appointment, not only of their wives but of their kids, in-laws, pets, and homes. Because I’m nosy, I loved it.) One man said his wife was a former model; another bragged that his wife never ate carbs. Yet another showed me a picture of his wife in lingerie to illustrate her fitness. They knew how attractive their partners were and how much time their wives spent alone while they themselves were away for work (and “for work”). Yet they didn’t worry about being on the other end of the cheating. I suspect their complacency came from knowing they had the money, and that their wives were unlikely to forfeit their lifestyles and incite the gossipy local scandal of a divorce. The husbands may also have assumed their wives were too busy with the kids.
My allegiance was forever shifting between the two, the husband and his invisible wife. Sometimes a tender, mild-mannered client who was especially talented in bed would say his wife denied him and I’d feel so bad for him and so unhappy with her, angry that she was wasting him and hurting his feelings. Throw the fish back if you’re not going to eat it. More often, on my back, I’d think about how well I understood the wife, how refusal was the only conceivable stance; if I could have outsourced or refused this onerous chore, I would have. You may want to think this was a matter of personal preference, and a different woman would have been overjoyed to fuck the man in question. But I think some guys would be fobbed off on someone else until they died.
Whether or not a wife sounded likable, I knew I usually had more in common with her than with him. The clients, almost all of them, made a strong case for the impossibility of male fidelity. Any person can be cheated on at any time, but it feels like a uniquely humiliating and female position to be put in. More than that, my identification with the wife was based on my assumption that she and I both hated having sex with him or listening to him bloviate, yet we relied on him for money. And this key commonality rendered us enemies or at least rivals. I didn’t see it as a strictly her vs. me struggle, and it wasn’t that I wanted any wife left destitute, but her presence limited his freedom, and he couldn’t hire me if he didn’t have time to himself. Family trips in particular took the husbands and therefore their money away from me. I felt put out by those.
At the start of my career, I believed sex work would teach me something about men, and it did, but fitfully. The lessons were impermanent, just pulses of knowledge. I kept glimpsing flickers. I kept trying to catch the flash. It was like fishing with bare hands. The slipperiness of wisdom—the Sisyphean struggle to not just achieve revelation but to make it stay put—isn’t a unique challenge but a feature of the human brain. Sometimes a savant, like a Zen monk, will train so rigorously and for so long that they’re able to hold the wisdom fish and show it to the rest of us, but we can’t stare at someone else’s fish for our whole lives. Looking isn’t the same as holding, anyway. One can examine their own pathology and still be bereft of a why. Even rarer is the why that lingers long enough to make a change, to eliminate the need for the behavior and spoil the enjoyment of its ephemeral satisfaction.
Despite this wishful thinking, resentment constituted much of my reaction to the news. Roger’s progressively incoherent emails and the assertive, bitchy-feeling replies they warranted from me highlighted how siloed our lives were. I knew him well—maybe I knew more of him than his kids or his wife, or at least I knew him differently, because the version of him I knew was obscured from them and from everyone else. But I didn’t have his health history. I had his ATM card, but I didn’t have his home address. I couldn’t have arranged a doctor’s appointment for him no matter how badly he needed one. I couldn’t even visit him in the hospital. We’d played prominent roles in each other’s lives for almost a decade, but I couldn’t talk to anyone in his family. No one would recognize that I meant something to him excepting, maybe, the doorman at his condo building in DC.
:(
It was easier to obsess over concrete factors, like money, than to confront my existential and actual helplessness. I thought a lot about other mistresses during those days, the ones in positions more precarious than mine because they were in love with their married men or completely relied upon them financially. When you’re the other woman, there’s no dignified way to announce yourself. You blast into his larger life like a bomb, or you don’t enter at all. What radical loneliness those women must feel in these situations. So much loss, including the horrible finality of being closed out of his life and public record of the same.