Callgirl - Jenny Angell

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it. I had betrayed Karen’s beautiful work, and I had betrayed myself.

      I didn’t know what to do with that knowledge.

      I didn’t want to think about it.

      I tried to forget it.

      * * * * * *

      That night, if you believe in direct punishment immediately after a misdeed, you would be vindicated. I was punished. I went on a call to Back Bay.

      Boston’s Back Bay is old brownstones, old families, old money. They are like the apartments of Paris and Budapest – inherited, not sold, and certainly never rented.

      It is Commonwealth Avenue at its tree-lined, sweeping best, not the Comm. Ave. I lived near in Allston, with the sound of the creaky Green Line train and the Hispanic markets and the Russian pharmacies. This was Comm. Ave. down near the Public Gardens, where it was modeled on Haussman’s boulevards in Paris and almost makes one believe that one is there.

      It is Beacon Street, with twisted wrought iron fences and staircases and balconies; it is Marlborough Street, with fanlights over heavy oaken doorways.

      It is gaslights on corners and the quiet swish of traffic sounds coming up from Storrow Drive.

      You walk along those streets and you wonder about who lives behind the mullioned windows, behind the thick velvet draperies. You imagine that it must be people of culture, people who discuss Rimbaud and Verlaine – or Hofstadter and Minsky – over snifters of brandy on a winter’s night.

      And, to be honest, I did have some small margin of experience, at least with Beacon Street in the Back Bay. While I was still doing my doctoral coursework I had spent a couple of semesters as a teaching assistant for a professor who lived there, and it was to his apartment that I frequently delivered corrected term papers. The apartment was long and dark, the walls covered with huge dismal oil paintings framed in thick gold gilt frames, each frame nearly touching the next, so that you could barely discern the wallpaper behind them. The rugs were hand-made Orientals, the furniture heavy and mahogany, the books all bound in leather. He gave me tea sometimes, a delicate blend that I couldn’t identify, and that I have never tasted since.

      So when Peach sent me to Beacon Street, I felt nothing but a sense of mild anticipation. The guy wasn’t particularly pleasant on the telephone when I called to set it up, but by then I was amassing my own wisdom about such things. That wisdom said that in general the clients who were the most obnoxious on the telephone were the least so in person, and vice-versa.

      Well, so I was wrong about that, too.

      But I was still operating from that framework when I talked to him, so I was taking the whole conversation with a grain of salt.

      “So, what do you like?”

      In my short time in the business, I had already developed an aversion to that question. The point was never what I liked, but rather what the client liked, and sometimes this opening felt like an exam, a trick question, a way to get me to say something that he could then pick apart. I was starting to understand clients’ minds, you see.

      I cleared my throat. “I like lots of things. I’m sure that I’ll like you. Why don’t I come over, and we’ll see how it feels together?”

      It was a fourth-floor apartment, one of the apartments that directly overlook the Charles River, and as soon as I got there I moved toward the window with an exclamation of delight. Most guys appreciate that, you complimenting their place. And this was truly magnificent.

      All around me, below me, the darkness was punctuated by pinpoints of dazzling brightness, windows spilling out warm yellow light into the night, the flashing red lights on the roofs of the buildings across the river, sparkling unknown reflections in the dark water itself.

      The client – Barry by name – wasn’t paying me to enjoy the view. I know this to be true because he said so, even as he grasped my arm and pulled me away from the window and toward him, a grasp that was to leave clear deep imprints of his fingers on my bruised skin later.

      That first kiss bruised my mouth, too.

      He was pinning me against a brick wall and it was uneven, cutting into my back, and it hurt. And his hands hurt, too, pushing against me, squeezing my breasts – hard, too hard. I gasped and pulled away, as far as I could, told him to stop, and he laughed, he actually laughed. “You don’t tell me to do anything,” he said. “You’re just a whore. You hear that? You do what I say.”

      I probably should have left then. I had that option; Peach wouldn’t have been happy about it, although she would have supported me. I was still feeling my way in the profession, still in my heart of hearts wondering if I really could do it. I still had something to prove.

      So I thought, okay, I can handle this. It’s only an hour. I can do this for an hour.

      He pushed me through an arched doorway into an extremely small bedroom, the bed unmade, a slight undefinable unpleasant odor in the air. There was track lighting, all of it pointing to the bed. A class act, all the way.

      He hadn’t taken his hands off me once – squeezing, pinching, mauling. He was taking my clothes off and ripped two of the buttons at the neckline to the dress. When I tried to get a modicum of control back, saying that I’d take off my clothes, he grabbed a handful of my hair and shoved his face to within a half-inch of mine. “Shut up, whore!”

      Oddly enough, he took a moment to spread towels on the bed. With the mess that the room was already in, the gesture seemed a little ominous.

      You probably won’t believe this, but the truth is that I don’t really remember exactly what happened next. Everything happened so fast, everything became such a blur of pain and fear, that I cannot fashion the experience into words, into a coherent narrative.

      Here’s what I remember. I remember being pushed down onto the bed, with him on top of me, pinning my hands up above my head, his weight pushing down on my lungs and making me struggle for breath. I remember his voice, over and over: “You’re just a whore, aren’t you? You’re just a dirty little whore. Say it! Say you’re a whore! Say you love it!”

      I remember being terrified about having no control over what was happening, terrified he wouldn’t use a condom and I wouldn’t be able to stop him. I remember the moment of relief when he put one on and the immediate fear again as he started to tie my wrists together with a pillowcase. I screamed, then. I knew that once I was tied up there would be no control at all, and I struggled and flailed until he gave up. After that, he was even nastier in what he had to say.

      I remember him fucking me, hard, slamming into me with a force that had more to do with rage than anything else, ramming so hard that I thought I couldn’t take another stroke, the pain was so intense. He was hitting my cervix, he was ramming it so hard that I was convinced he was ripping my flesh, ripping my insides. I remember him pulling back and pushing me onto my stomach, and I remember the horror I felt as I realized that he was trying to push his way into my ass.

      I’m not a prude; far from it. I’ve had anal sex many times and have enjoyed it. I’ve role-played all sorts of things that involved submission and dominance, and, with the requisite safe words in place, felt free to explore all sorts of facets of my sexuality.

      But there was nothing that felt safe or free about this transaction, and I reacted intensely.

      Barry was not pleased. “Hookers take it in the ass,” he snarled.

      “Not this one,” I said.

      Most people would have left it there. Most people, even people with only a modicum of social skills, would have accepted that it wasn’t going to happen and would have moved on as gracefully as possible. Some might even have apologized. Later, I learned that many of Peach’s girls shared my fear of having anal sex with a stranger – and particularly one who has already inflicted pain – so Barry, who had a long history with Peach, might well have known that I would refuse. He might have requested it during our brief telephone conversation. It seemed clear, now,

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