Add to that résumé Elizabeth the call girl, Elizabeth the cheater. Sean and I didn’t have the kind of relationship in which we checked in with each other every five minutes, so I hadn’t exactly lied to him; I had just neglected to mention my whereabouts that evening. But if I stuck with the job some hard-core lying would definitely be called for. Taylor said that the girls sometimes told their boyfriends they had jobs as night temps. Waitressing was a risky lie, because your boyfriend could show up to surprise you at work and then you’d be screwed. I supposed that I could let Sean assume I was still dancing at the club. But though I had been a stripper, until that point I hadn’t been much of a liar. To my parents, yes, but not to my friends. Not to my boyfriend, my kind boyfriend with the elegant hands.
Sean had introduced me to Elvis Costello. As I left that night for my first trick, the lyrics to “Almost Blue” played in my head.
There’s a part of me that’s always true. Always.
The rest of me—Elizabeth, eighteen-year-old curvaceous theater student with a face like Winona Ryder’s, will do whatever—stepped into the street alone and hailed a cab to an uptown high-rise.
It felt like a movie with a good jazz soundtrack. Like a Woody Allen New York love song. One of the characters is a young, lost actress who finds herself in a cab headed uptown to turn a trick with a radio personality. Starring Mariel Hemingway. Starring me. The film was already rolling. I couldn’t stop to reconsider.
I stepped out of the cab, my breath visible in the cold night, and plunged my hands into my pockets before walking past a doorman, who nodded politely. I rode the elevator to the almost-top floor and knocked on a door. Instantaneously, the radio host appeared in the doorway. I recognized his face from ads for his show that I had seen plastered on the insides of subway cars. He was holding a sweating, half-empty drink in his hand and his paisley robe hung open, the belt coming undone and revealing a pair of silk boxers underneath.
“You must be Elizabeth. Can I get you a drink, sweetheart?”
I readily accepted his offer for a drink, totally ignoring Taylor’s suggestion to stay sober. I wanted to be classy and in control like her, but I’d have to work up to it. Nothing sounded better than the comforting burn of a drink. I followed him into his apartment, where he took my coat, threw it over the back of a chair, and indicated a black leather sofa. I sat while he freshened his vodka tonic and poured mine.
The apartment was a classic bachelor pad with an elaborate entertainment center, five tall CD towers, and a panoramic view of the city. His back still turned, the radio host fired questions at me. Habit, I guess. He asked me how old I was and what I did when I wasn’t doing “this.” I told him I was an eighteen-year-old theater student at NYU.
“You’re older than eighteen, sweetheart. I can tell. It’s my job to read people.” His eyes sparkled with self-satisfaction as he sat down next to me and handed me my drink, his hand resting on my thigh. “You don’t have to lie to me. Now, how old are you really?”
He seemed so pleased with his intuitive gifts that I thought it best not to argue.
“You’re right. I’m twenty. I’m graduating next year.”
It occurred to me as we chatted more that I was going to be good at this. I was discovering a new talent. I had spent all this time in my acting training trying to uncover the authenticity in every moment, trying to lay myself bare. Here, I was going for pure artifice, the exact opposite result, but I was using the same skills of listening and improvisation.
I had been a good stripper—a natural, everyone always told me. I was never the prettiest or the girl with the best body, but I had that something that made people want to look at me. More important, I had that something that makes people feel seen themselves. Lonely guys couldn’t get enough of it. It was easy for me; it was acting, which was my thing, after all. And I suspected that I was going to be the same way as a call girl. A natural.
The radio host was very impressed that I was a theater student, which I had actually ceased to be six months before.
“I went to Yale drama,” he told me. “You should consider it.”
“Good idea. I’ll definitely consider it.”
“You like Sam Shepard?”
“I love Sam Shepard.”
“I’m a close personal friend of Sam Shepard. I could get you an audition one day.”
He gave me the tour of his hallway gallery, which consisted of black-and-white pictures of a younger him in Off-Broadway productions. All of them hung slightly crooked, as if someone had banged into the wall hard enough to shake it—maybe he himself, staggering from the bedroom to the bar.
He grabbed my hand and led me toward the bedroom.
“There’s something really cool I want to show you in here.”
Please don’t let it be a bottle of chloroform and a set of antique surgical instruments, I thought. I started to ask for another drink, but he didn’t give me a chance. With a flourish, he opened the door of one of his bedroom closets and yanked me inside. It was a walk-in, lined floor to ceiling with cowboy boots of all kinds.
“Wow. Cool.”
“I’m famous for wearing cowboy boots,” he said. “It’s my trademark. Would you like to undress?”
I reached behind me for my zipper and a chill shot up the back of my legs, the kind you get when you’re caught doing something wrong.
“No, in here,” he said, and indicated the bedroom. The bedroom had gray walls and gray berber carpeting. A garnet-red bed was the only furnishing, and it faced a set of mirrored closet doors. He sat on the edge of it and watched as I took off my dress and stockings and folded them, dropping them in a pile in the corner. The fishnets had embossed a pink honeycomb pattern in the flesh of my thighs. I put my heels back on and left my thong in place, planning to hold on to it until the last possible moment.
I stood awkwardly in front of him while he looked at me for a brief moment with no notable reaction and then began fiddling in the drawer of his nightstand. It was one thing to be naked and half drunk on stage with music and rosy lights and a rowdy audience. It was another entirely to stand under track lighting in silence in a stranger’s bedroom. My arms felt long and awkward. I didn’t know where to put my hands. I opted for my hips, with my feet in beauty-contest position. It seemed a bit stagy, but it was the best I could come up with.
“Have you ever done Rush?” he asked. He found what he was looking for. It was a bottle of poppers.
“I’m not in the mood, but you go ahead.”
I would have juggled chain saws for another drink right then, but I didn’t want to be passing out on the job. It was the first time I had seen amyl nitrate outside the dance floor of a gay club. Maybe this guy was gay? I had learned enough from fantasies revealed to me by customers at the club to know that there are many shades of gay.
The radio host slithered out of his silk ensemble and matter-of-factly asked me to get on my hands and knees on the bed, facing the wall of mirrored closets. Until then, he had only touched my leg once and grabbed my hand a couple of times, but it became clear that he had an aversion to further skin-on-skin contact. This was so different from guys at the club, who always wanted to hold my hand like it was some kind of date. Sometimes they asked me to the movies. Not this guy. He knelt on the bed behind me, straddling the back of my legs, not touching me at all.
“Just put your ass up in the air for me so I can look at it.”
I did what he asked, but he didn’t even really look at my ass or anything else about me. Instead he looked at himself in the mirror while he jerked off. He ran his other hand through his feathered hair and flexed his pec muscles.
“Lick your lips for me. Push your tits together,” he said, looking straight into his own eyes the whole time.
Just as he was about to come, he grabbed the Rush off the nightstand, inhaled deeply until his eyes rolled back, and then collapsed sideways in a heap. I only had to shift subtly so that he came on the bedspread and not on my back. I disentangled myself from his legs and took the precariously tilting bottle out of his hand, placing it on the nightstand so the toxic liquid inside wouldn’t spill. He quickly regained consciousness and smiled as he wiped the drool from his chin.
“Beautiful. That was great.”
He even gave me a nice tip on my way out the door. To help out with tuition.
I walked out past the doorman and found the sky swirling with an unusually early snow flurry that stirred something in my chest. I love the first few hours of snow in New York, before the days of winter wear on and the streets turn to a gray, sludgy mess. A New York winter’s first snowstorm is a magical thing, in which for a moment the whole city is blanketed in quiet and clean.
chapter 5
A
month later, Taylor and I walked into the lobby of the Ritz the way we always did—confident, conservative, purposeful. We were both exactly five feet nine in three-inch heels. Taylor wore a tan, tailored skirt suit hemmed extra short with a white camisole underneath and, as always, a pearl choker she got on her twelfth birthday as a gift from her grandmother. Her signature look was very little makeup and a bouncy, strawberry blond, blow-dried bob. I was her photonegative, with my black suit jacket nipped at the waist, shoulder-length, chestnut hair, and red lipstick. Red lipstick because above all there is no kissing. Yes, the
Pretty Woman
thing is true. The no-kissing part, at least; the rest is an insulting crock.
I had perfected the art of not looking anyone in the eye as we walked toward the elevators. It could trip me up sometimes, how people looked at me, the barb of disapproval followed by the self-satisfied smirk—always so impressed with their own street smarts because they had spotted the hooker in the fancy hotel.
Taylor had convinced me to trade dancing for escort work with promises of easier money and a swankier life in general. In the span of a month I had seen nearly every five-star hotel in New York without ever staying the night. When we walked into the Ritz that day, I was queasy and exhausted. I had spent the previous evening at the St. Regis with an aging Italian art dealer who had freebased cocaine until yellow film edged the corners of his mouth and stretched in long strings when he talked. He had smoked until he was impotent and then opted to watch hotel porn and poke his dry, twitchy fingers inside me for what felt like about nine hours but was really only two. I was definitely making more money than I had before, but it wasn’t always as easy as Taylor had led me to believe.
It turned out that Taylor sometimes worked outside of the Crown Club. Occasionally she even engaged in the extremely risky practice of snaking the Crown Club’s clients. Diane didn’t scare me, exactly, but she wasn’t the highest rung on the ladder. We never saw or heard from the unseen hand that ran high-class prostitutes in our neighborhood, but it was safe to assume that these were people you didn’t want to steal from. But Taylor was a lionhearted free spirit, possibly a sociopath of sorts. She was someone I wanted to be near, whose love and approval I craved. I imagined I resembled Taylor. I, too, was that brave, in my dreams.
In spite of my outwardly bold existence, when I was alone I literally looked under the bed for monsters each night, consumed by irrational panic. I checked the locks on my doors and windows three times a night and insisted that my roommate, Penny, do the same. I often woke from night terrors, a constant in my life since childhood, in the early-morning hours and lay there frozen with fear, reminding myself to breathe, unable even to get up and go to the bathroom. But with Taylor I was fearless. I could breathe freely. I never once looked over my shoulder. So when she called me to go along with her on sketchy jobs—bachelor parties out in Westchester, a masochistic Columbia professor, a Japanese businessman who liked to talk about enemas while Taylor and I made out—I always said yes. It wasn’t exactly the money that motivated me. I could have made similar money coloring inside the escort-agency lines, but my transgressions with Taylor gave me a feeling of free fall, a sense that anything could happen, and that was worth the risk.
Taylor didn’t know much about the job we were interviewing for that day. All she knew was that a talent agent in L.A. had tipped her off to a meeting with a woman who was in New York looking for entertainers to amuse a rich businessman in Singapore. The money was meant to run into the tens of thousands.
“What if they peddle us to some third-world brothel?” I asked in the elevator.
“You’re always so negative.”
Taylor was taking a class in Dianetics. She was all about being positive and freeing herself of the limiting imprints left by her past (this lifetime and others) on the fabric of her existence. She believed that success was her birthright and was only a week or two away. It was an infectious faith.
When we reached the room a man in a suit opened the door. I couldn’t place where he was from. He looked kind of Persian but also kind of Asian. Taylor stuck her hand out and he ignored it. He went back across the room to join his friend, and the two of them acted as silent observers for the rest of the afternoon.
We were the last girls to arrive. A woman stood and came to greet us, introducing herself as Arabelle Lyon. When working as an escort, I usually tried not to have expectations, not to make assumptions, but Ari was a genuine surprise. She shook our hands and shot me a whole-milk-white smile. She wore almost no makeup and her hair was the natural sunny color that most mousy brunettes had when they were five years old. The two lurkers in the corner were mysterious, but it was this Gidget look-alike with the French name that made me suspect. How could she be anything but shady, with a disguise like that?
I looked around the room. Among the seven or so girls lined up on the couches there were one or two obvious duds, one or two who could be tough competition, and an anomaly named Destiny.