LITMIR.BIZ

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Pretty Woman, okay? She was young, young enough to still be idealistic, as the movie was quick to point out. I’d also seen Half Moon Street, but it was careful to indicate that Sigourney Weaver’s age and intelligence were the exception, that even her clients weren’t initially sure she was what they wanted. Julia Roberts’ character – young, hip, fast-talking, and sweet – was the conventional norm. The hooker with the heart of gold.

      I was not young, hip, fast-talking, or sweet, and I had no illusions about the state of my heart. I wasn’t going to fit into the mold. That made me uneasy. After Peter the Rat Bastard, I really didn’t need another rejection.

      The funny thing is that when I think about all the processing, all the thinking, all the planning that I did when I was starting out, there was never a moment when I doubted that I could do this. I sat in the dormitory in London staring at my notes for the following morning’s lecture, and I felt nervous about how the lecture would go over in another culture, what sort of questions people would be asking me, that sort of thing. I sat there feeling nervous, and even then half of my brain was rehearsing the lecture and the other half was considering whether or not to become a prostitute. It was an odd juxtaposition, and yet I never for one moment wondered whether I could.

      I just knew. I knew that I was pretty, but my confidence really didn’t have a lot to do with that. It was more along the lines of knowing that I was powerful. I had had a succession of boyfriends – and, let’s be honest here, girlfriends too – before the rat bastard, and they all claimed that I was the best lover they’d ever had. Well, okay, maybe you’ve heard that too, perhaps they were just saying what they thought I wanted to hear. I’m willing to consider the possibility. I’ll grant you that they didn’t all mean it.

      But you know it when you’re good at something, really good, you know it viscerally, in your muscles and your cells and your blood, at some non-rational and yet absolutely certain level. I knew I was good at sex, at romance, at seduction. It was something innate, something I didn’t think about. When I was flirting with a man I went into automatic pilot. I just did. I didn’t think. I flirted. And I always got him. Whomever I wanted, I got.

      It was just my bad judgment that I had once wanted the rat bastard.

      Once preliminaries were aside, I was confident of my power. I knew that once I had a man – any man – alone in a room with our clothes off, I would please him. I could make him crazy, make him ecstatic, make him want more and more and more. I knew that there is a certain sexiness about experience and education, that I had something to offer that the twenty-year-olds did not.

      That was why I had circled Peach’s ad in the first place. I had been dazed by the array of pictures of silicone-enhanced breasts and blonde women with pouting lips claiming, “I want you in my hot cunt now!” But there among them were the two advertisements that Peach ran. One was for the clients, and it was simple: “Avanti,” it declared, in a medium-sized box with a lace border. “When you want more than just the ordinary.”

      Well, okay, so that could mean anything. But there wasn’t any silicone, either, which had to be a good sign.

      The other ad, presented on another page in the same typeface, was looking for help: “Part-time work available to complement your real life,” it said. “Some college required.” That was what got me. No one else mentioned college. This agency had clients who wanted education, clients who presumably wanted to talk intelligently with their escorts, who were looking for something beyond firm breasts and empty thoughts.

      These were the clients I wanted to see, men who would view my graduate degrees as enhancing my sexuality rather than detracting from it. This was a possibility.

      It was the only one I circled. I sometimes wonder what I would have done if it hadn’t worked out. Would I have returned to the ads, found another one to try, one that was less offensive than the others? I don’t know.

      I took the paper with me to London and the name Avanti sat in the back of my brain while I talked to lecture-halls of students for four days.

      I got home, and before I even unpacked I called Peach. And that was the day she sent me to see Bruce.

      And so I found that there were people willing to see me – Bruce, the Indian engineer, a legislative aide from the state house; but I was still intensely unsure of my place in a youth-dominated profession. I pressed her again. Just to be sure that “the professor” could fit into her world, that Bruce and the others hadn’t been total aberrations.

      I guess that by then she figured I was worth the investment of her time. A few days after I saw the legislative aide, she agreed to meet. “All right. What about lunch on Thursday, Legal Seafoods restaurant at Copley, one o’clock?” Rapid decision, rapid planning; it was all so typical Peach.

      My palms were sweating. “Okay, great, I’ll be there.”

      I was there. She wasn’t. She managed, in point of fact, to avoid me for a week. She didn’t go to Legal Seafoods; when I called her at two she had some excuse about a sprained ankle. I, in the meantime, was overdressed even for a downtown mall in a short business suit, had been on my feet in uncomfortable heels for the past hour, and had spent that time nervously scrutinizing every woman who walked in the door in case it was Peach. I was exhausted.

      She cancelled two more appointments with me, fortunately with somewhat more notice. I had already paid a teaching assistant I knew from graduate school to cover my class for one of the appointments. I really couldn’t keep doing this, letting a potential job screw up what was, after all, my real career. And her choices of venue were never convenient: it was a fair commute to get downtown from my studio apartment in Allston, and then I needed time to find a place in the parking garage and time to locate the restaurant and start guessing which person could be her.

      I was beginning to seriously think it wasn’t going to happen. It was as though the time spent on the boat with Bruce had been nothing but an image, a snapshot, something so fleeting that it was hardly worthy of the memory. The Indian engineer that Ellie had sent me to see hadn’t counted, not really: I had been with him for twenty minutes, tops, and I don’t think that he looked at my face once. The guy at the State House had been more interested in the daring aspect of his act than in whom he was doing it with. So I didn’t have a lot of experience to draw from.

      At the same time, I was also slowly becoming obsessed with the concept of prostitution. My brief brush with it seemed to have sucked me into a well of curiosity – or was it just the researcher in me, the academic? I had started reading about prostitution and was constantly thinking about it.

      But I couldn’t even manage to meet with my own madam.

      I finally was instructed to go to another Legal Seafoods restaurant, this one in the Prudential Mall, and I went, resigned to being blown off again. I didn’t even bother dressing up; there seemed to be no point to it. I was wearing my usual at-home uniform of jeans, a sweatshirt, my Ryka sneakers.

      I had a plan this time: I was going to wait fruitlessly for her, call her number and collect yet another improbable excuse, and then I was going to spend the afternoon at the Boston College library. I was dressed for it, rather than for her. This time I was prepared, and I had at least brought work to do while I was in town. I wasn’t going to waste precious time that could be spent constructively. I had gotten a little jaded by then. I didn’t believe for a moment that Peach would keep the appointment.

      She did.

      She was anything but what I expected. I had been eyeing the brittle, mannequin-like women one sees downtown in Boston, the products of hours spent in the spas and shops of Newbury Street. I assumed she would look like one of them, those women who wear clothes like a challenge, like an armor.

      My friend Irene and I had sat once and giggled about them, feeling quite complacent in our assumed superiority. They fell into two categories, we’d decided. Some of them were wealthy non-working wives in from the suburbs for their weekly dosage of collagen, hairspray, and gossip, trying to convince themselves by this contact with the city that their lives in Andover or Acton or southern New Hampshire had meaning and beauty. The others were

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