I have this problem. No matter how conservatively I dress, before I leave the house I instinctively add some emblem of what my girlfriends refer to as my ‘inner ho’. An ankle bracelet. Crimson lipstick. Spiked black heels I wobble in. And these items are only what the world sees. Underneath my suit could be a corset or silk thigh-high stockings—or sheer panties. I can’t help myself.
I have been teased for years by my closest friends—those who know about my fetishes for Victoria’s Secret undergarments and sexy shoes. I blame it on twelve years of Catholic school, because so many things can be blamed on that, but it goes deeper. I’ll dare call it a spiritual issue. Whatever my token of the moment—black stockings, a silver locket—it serves as shorthand for one important aspect of my self. It’s the shingle my Freudian id hangs out: certified vamp. If my soul were visible, she’d recline in a red silk robe on an animal skin, hearthside, sipping Chivas from a snifter.
Once that I know of, I’ve been mistaken for a working girl.
It happened in Houston. One a.m. at the Westin Galleria Hotel. The decadent lobby, with its Grecian pillars and palm trees and the blue light shining from the courtyard pool, was populated by last-call bandits. Two men asked me and my girlfriend if we “had dates”. Not knowing what that meant, we coyly said no, and they asked us “how much?” I’ll always regret not testing him. Just for trivia’s sake, it would be great to know how much I’m worth. My friend, the hellcat, handled the situation. The men followed us out, apologizing. We ran in spiked heels and slinky little mini-dresses through the parking garage, my friend turning occasionally and walking backwards to let go another string of obscenities at their receding silhouettes.
It depressed me. I didn’t tell anyone about the incident.
And I looked in the mirror when I got home: how could I seem to be for sale? I’m a bookworm. The dorky girl with glasses. I’m shy, introspective. So what if my lips are always vamp red? So what if I like short skirts and high-heeled shoes? How could he not see through my props to the real me?
But with some imagination, I’ve turned these misunderstandings into a narrative.
When I say I have a call girl fixation, I’m using call girl—inaccurately, creatively—as an umbrella for variations on a theme: kept woman, good-time girl, the go-go dancer in the cage at a downtown club, the stewardess and secretary and nurse of yore, party girl, trophy wife. Any woman between a societal rock and hard place. Any figure who symbolizes that tantalizing dichotomy of public propriety and private sin.
My call girl is a construction.
My call girl is not walking the streets. She exists only in books and films and the fantasies those breed. She’s Henry Miller’s dancehall slave and the YSL-dressed housewife in Belle du Jour. She’s Holly accepting a fifty for the powder room in Breakfast at Tiffany’s; Gloria stealing the wife’s mink in Butterfield 8. It’s the same character in Pretty Baby and Pretty Woman, in Sweet Charity and Taxi Driver: she’s the most jaded and most innocent woman in the room. We don’t know if we can trust her in Risky Business, because she won’t look him in the eye, and she paces, smoking, and tells stories that don’t match—until the scene on the train. Sex like that never lies.
By seventh grade, the girls in my class had been divided into ice queens, nerds, sluts and tomboys. The boys didn’t create these categories; they got them ready-made, handed down by previous generations, which leaves no one specific to blame. Nevertheless, whole diaries were filled out trying to figure out which one I was. If in fact I was an ice queen, which I seemed to be, how did other girls become tomboys, nerds or sluts? And was there really no fifth category? Hindsight has solved the mystery: I was actually nothing but a psychotically shy twelve-year-old girl.
I’m in my thirties, and still hunting for option number five.
Clinically shy people might relate: if you’re as introverted-to-the-bone-marrow as I am, you are not only unwillingly conscious of your self all the time, but of all selves within a mile radius. I’m not only aware of how I come off, but how that might insult someone else. I’ve thought about handing out business cards: I may seem cold, but I’m actually paralyzed by shyness.
In lieu of that, I make tribal markings. Seamed stockings. Stilettos. Wispy locks. Blood red lips. Notice how the shrinking violet is a French maid every Halloween? The message is that although this door is closed, it ain’t locked. My trinkets attempt to balance my temperament. It’s like slipping a paper Valentine into a boy’s desk when he’s not looking.
A few years ago, my friends and I sipped cosmopolitans on lacquer trays that came with side dishes of wasabi peas. A few of the girls scanned the Four Seasons bar for men to buy them round two, since at fifteen dollars a cocktail, round one was all they could afford. Around a jungle of flowers, a table was creating noise. The men lit cigars, the women took hacking puffs, and they all laughed. Almost sixty, strong and three-pieced-suited, these men were oil wells. Very handsome in a financial way. Dressed and groomed like any other woman in the place, the thirty-something blondes were not like any other woman in the place: they were definitely escorts.
How did we know? Everyone in the grand, gold-lit room knew. It wasn’t simply the age discrepancy, the newness or loudness of the money, the blondeness, or the fact that it was a hotel bar, but maybe a culmination of these factors, and something more: the men and women seemed to be strangers to each other. There was an unlikely comfort at the table. They enjoyed the luxury that came from being sure of the night’s arrangement.
Meanwhile my friends and I nursed our sweet drinks, stranded in the gray zone made by the black of chivalry and the white of feminism. Some of us bought our own drinks that night. Some of us waited for a suitor, dreading a suitor. Thirsty. Proud. Broke.
Most of us are familiar with the money anxiety of new romance. It’s powerfully silent, born from transactions at dark bars and box office windows and from a fear that the value of anyone’s love can be calculated, as exactly as a 1984 Chevy Impala. I’ve actually come home from first dates making mental notes like: I owe him a latte.
The call girl archetype answers a certain desire of mine: to deactivate the minefield of love, power, sex and money. Because those factors combine to affect any affair.
Lying in bed, my first love said something to me I can’t forget. The stage was set minimally: darkness, sheets, bodies, words. When he spoke, he was kidding but serious. He said: “I own you. Your ass belongs to me.” The moment was caught somewhere between a threat and a promise. I didn’t know whether to call 911 or to fall in love. I think I giggled nervously. I said: “Shut up,” or “You’re fucked up.” My heart was thumping. This guy was too broke to buy me lunch, but playacting the idea of ownership was exciting.
Memories of a Geisha wasn’t a bestseller for no reason. I picture myself in jeans and an obi, cross-legged, picking the strings of a mandolin for a Renaissance man. It’s a way for me to imagine myself a woman devoted to this man, to pleasure, to giving this man pleasure, to making beauty out of art, to making an art of beauty. It allows me to picture myself devoted to devotion. That’s more of a taboo these days than most sex acts I can name.
Certain friends of mine used to end their nights at strip clubs. One night, I went with them and ended up talking with one of the dancers. She’d just arrived in Houston from Louisiana, couldn’t have been older than sixteen, seemed pure and childlike. At first I made her a romantic figure: a hitchhiker, wrestling gators and eating ripe melons from roadside stands, barefoot and determined, working her way through the big bad city. Within minutes she revealed herself as dumb, strung out, desperate for money and doomed.
The call girl mirage doesn’t last. Like other spectacles, the magic works only if distance is maintained. I remember when I realized that ballerinas, those effortless swans, were actually dedicated artists with feet like gourds, spines like the trunks of thousand-year-old olive trees, and sweat pouring down their spangled and feathered arms.
You may have been wondering how naïve I might be about prostitution. The diseases, the drug addictions, the physical and metaphysical bruises, the circle of abuse, the legal and physical and emotional and spiritual vulnerability: I know these exist. In no way are they glamorous. These issues coincide with the worst things that have ever happened to me or to people I’ve loved, with the most acute fears I have for myself or the people I love. In other words, my call girl construction also houses pain and disaster.
There is strength in owning every possibility fate could enforce, in knowing thine enemy and keeping it close.
But the blonde women lingered in my mind.
And lying in bed thinking about my inner trappings—all at once fantasies filled my head. My mind shifted from the school girl images I tend to gravitate toward when I think of him. He brings her out in me—his eyes tell me stories, stories of seedy underground clubs and girls who paint their eyes black as night to hide broken promises. His eyes make me fidget with my clothes, and blush when he looks at me—taking me back to white cotton blouses and knee socks and want for those boys my mother told me to stay away from, who drove fast cars and listened to The Cure—full of angst and passion and misunderstood by everyone but me.
But his hands open the door. And my inner-ho pushes out from within. She walks into the room and there is an arrangement she has with him—she’s laid the ground rules, and anything goes. Whatever his fancy of the moment, whatever fetish he wants to explore—she is there to make it happen. She imagines meeting him at some fashionable downtown hotel bar—dressed to the nine in a slinky little dress and stiletto heels. And he waits for her with a cocktail and a room key.
There are no awkward silences, no rudimentary feelers for whether she’s going to put out. Their motives are clear. And when they’ve finished their cocktails, he reaches for the room key sitting on the bar, and leaves cash for the bartender. She follows him upstairs to his room, passing by couples who stare curiously at them. Once inside the room he pours himself a drink and sits on the edge of the bed, watching her move about the room and waiting.
And she asks him how he likes it.
No comments:
Post a Comment