I want you to pay me for my beauty, I think it's only right, Ani DiFranco sings in "Letter to a John," which is on the CD we play all winter during sessions. Because I have been paying for it all of my life. After her, Leonard Cohen's brassy baritone begins: "I smile when I'm angry, I cheat and I lie. I do what I have to do to get by. But I know what is wrong, and I know what is right, and I'd die for the truth in my secret life."
Usually, it's just massage. The clients want me to scratch their back and talk about politics with the adorable zest of a naked girl talking about politics. They want to hear stories of parties and movies and dreams and bisexual exploits. They like to imagine that we're naive, desperate, insane, disturbed, or just hopelessly avant garde. These traits don't exist in their lives. Most of them can come in three minutes. Anything else is bravado. I'd estimate an average of five inches hard, give or take. Some of them are cute. Decent, even.
"After 9/11," Robin tells me, "I had clients crying on the table. Three or four times a day, crying."
They don't ask for blowjobs, and only sometimes for sex. Robin suggests we "channel high school, when your boyfriend would keep trying, and you'd be charming but still push him away." If client did ask, I'd say okay — for $20,000 in college loans wiped clean. But even then, I'd be providing a service, not participating. Once an aggressive baseball player with firm arms wants to masturbate together, and I do, but I don't come. That's what they all want for us to come too. Each client believes this desire is unique, that he's the only one generous enough. If I like the guy, I'll let him do it for a hundred extra bucks and a rubber glove.
One night, I'm in the front room when I hear Camille's performance from the back. I edge toward the door, as close as I can get without tumbling in. It's the first time I've felt truly wet inside the apartment. I've always suspected that men
"So, when I was done faking my orgasm," she says, "I bent over, panting, and said, 'Thank you so much for sharing that with me.'"
never take Camille as seriously as they ought to, and I want this to bother her, but right then, listening to her moan, I just want to lie on a massage table with my ass at the edge and her head between my thighs.
"So, when I was done masturbating and faking my orgasm," Camille says later, grinning mischeviously, "I bent over, like, panting, and said 'Thank you so much for sharing that with me.'" She winks and returns to the back room with a warm washcloth for the client.
When the phones have stopped ringing, we eat cheese cubes and drink chardonnay on the carpet. "Get them in the peak of their addiction," Camille advises me, "when they have that dazed look in their eyes. Then you wring money out of them, twenty for this, twenty for that."
On Sundays, Robin holds meetings. Once she brings a longtime client to dispense advice on evading arrest. He used to work in the D.A.'s office and tells us they can arrest us for absolutely nothing, but indictment is easy to avoid. Camille is still wearing her boots and denim minidress from the night before. "No one will arrest me," she announces. "I'll just be like, 'Look at me, I'm innocent. I have braces!'"
The entertainment lawyer likes to lie on the massage table with me and talk. He's kind, but too often he asks if I can sit near his face so he can smell me. Sometimes I let him, but the whole thing feels so ridiculous that I usually make a joke and hop off. Once, I ask him about his wife and he answers: "She's my best friend, but she's not into sex. I plan to seduce her at some point in the next year or two."
I laugh. He's confused. "It's just funny," I tell him, "The way that you put it." He takes Zoloft, and even though he comes in for two-hour sessions, he rarely orgasms. He says he likes the build-up, even if it lasts for weeks.
He knows I'm bi, and he asks which AE girl I'm most attracted to. "They're all so beautiful," I gush. I feel guilty about this. When he asks again, I say "Emily." I know he likes her, and I'm hoping for my favorite job: the double session. You make out with a hot girl and get paid two hundred an hour.
The lawyer agrees to the double. Emily comes in. Her hair and skin smell like Marlboro Menthols and I wonder if she's faking it. I wonder, often, how much of actual sex is just faking it so well that you even fool yourself.
"When I watch you with each other," he purrs, stroking his dick,"I imagine one day you'll do these things to me."
I giggle and bite Emily's shoulder, wrap my legs around her waist. Emily runs her fingers over my nipples and all this feels right, somehow. She sees that deviant pit in my gut — the one that propels me toward parties destined for disaster, dates with incompatable lunatics, cross-country road trips to visit friendly enemies, every relationship I've had before this one (alluringly and endearingly unhealthy, co-dependent, romantically destructive, doomed).
"Susie's too good for her boyfriend," the lawyer tells Emily. "We need to find her someone else."
The next day, I go to the East Village to visit a girl I used to kiss. Her name is Susie; outside of Annette's, mine isn't. We eat steamed vegetables and smoke pot. When I step outside to call my boyfriend I tell him I'm going to the corner store to get candy, and like everything else these days, it's almost true.
Our office Christmas party is held in a Murray Hill loft that belongs to Robin's gay photographer friend. There are drinks and cheese trays, the works. I imagine it isn't much like the party my boyfriend is attending with his finance buddies. I hang out with Emily. She's twenty-six, a painter with an Ivy League
"My Mom and me came out to each other at the same time," says Emily. "My Mom's gay too," I say.
M.F.A. With brown bangs and round features, she's pretty and self-deprecating and commands the kind of attention I do when I'm comfortable in a room. I see that she probably strikes people as either overbearing or charming. I chose the latter, as I often do, because that's my type, regardless of gender.
A week later, we work together. In her black bikini, she's a different person, a shark's fin breaking through water. She says all her paintings are about fucking. I stare at the tattoos embracing her biceps and wish her fingers were inside me.
"My Mom and me came out to each other at the same time," she says.
"Your Mom is gay?" I ask.
"Yeah, so it was easy."
"My Mom's gay too," I say, incredulous.
"Seriously? That's crazy."
Emily was single when we started working together. Now she lives with a girlfriend. Her girlfriend knows about Annette's; her mom, of course, does not. None of our mothers do.
I hear Renee also has a dyke mom. Renee is twenty-six, an artist, dark, angular and thin like one of those Parisian women in the old cigarette ads. She's either mysterious or just plain flighty. On the phone to clients, she describes me in her husky seductress tones as having a body just like hers, but with "nice, wide hips." I think this means that I've got an ass and she's one long bone. She won't talk about herself or her mom. She calls me "sweetie" and touches me while she speaks.
"What do you think it is?" I say on the phone to Emily one painfully slow day. "I mean, four of us? That's absolutely not a typical ratio."
"There's always been a lot of dykes in sex work," Emily says.
"I know." I doodle over the schedule, drawing breasts that look like bowling balls. "I think it's just like we step out of the sexual norm? We have to be more flexible from the get-go, because we're already classified as deviants?"
