Call Girl. Jenny Angell

die. My world had disappeared. There was nothing but red, pulsing blood-red, beating rhythmically against my eyelids, and I struggled upward, backward – anything to be able to breathe again. That was all I wanted. Just to breathe again.

      He wasn’t concerned with my head; he was still trying to force his cock into my ass. And coming close to succeeding, despite the resistance that I was putting up. I gasped for air, my face up against his headboard, and I could hear him at it again. “You fucking whore, you fucking bitch, take it, fucking take it…”

      No amount of money was worth this. I took another deep breath and screamed. And did it again.

      Barry was suddenly struggling with me, trying to get me to stop. When he put his hand over my mouth, I bit it, hard, and he swore and pulled it away. I took advantage of his distraction to scramble out from under him, to get off the bed and stand in the beautiful arched doorway, my arms ineffectually covering my breasts. As though it were a moment for modesty. I guess that my mother taught me well, after all.

      He was furious, that was clear. He was shaking, and there was a tiny globule of spit at the edge of his mouth. “You fucking cunt!” he yelled. “No whore does that to me!”

      I didn’t dare take my eyes off him. “If you hurt me, Peach will never send anyone to you again,” I said, not knowing if it was true or not. I was thinking that I was really glad that I had gotten the money up front, because I was going to be doing well to get out of here with my clothes. Maybe the fact that Peach had said to collect the money right away should have told me something; with regulars, we usually got paid when the hour was over. “I’m leaving.”

      The threat, idle or not, worked. Later on, I learned how whipped Peach kept her regular clients, little boys who tried to push their luck with the callgirls, but who whimpered and apologized when confronted by Mummy on their bad behavior. Barry sat down on the bed, the fury draining from him, and said, merely, “Shit.”

      It seemed an apt commentary. I reached down to the floor and picked up my clothes, pulling the dress hurriedly over my head, not bothering to look for the missing buttons, stuffing underwear into my purse, not wanting to stay in that place a millisecond longer than I had to.

      He walked past me as I was slipping into my shoes and stalked over to the bathroom. “Don’t slam the door on your way out,” he said, coldly. “I’m taking a shower. You made me feel dirty, you lousy motherfucker cunt.”

      I had made him feel dirty.

      I called Peach immediately as soon as I hit the street. I had just bought a cell phone, and was grateful for the anonymity it provided as I unlocked my car and slipped inside. “It was pretty awful,” I told her, a little angry, a little tearful.

      “I know, honey,” Peach said, and in her voice I heard such a depth of understanding and compassion and caring that it suddenly didn’t matter anymore. “You don’t ever have to see him again if you don’t want to.” And I felt a rush of gratitude toward her that was as deep as the ocean.

      It wasn’t until months later that I remembered that conversation, and realized that she had known exactly what she was sending me into, and she hadn’t warned me. True, I probably wouldn’t have gone. And the bottom line was to make the money. But, still… she should have told me. And all the compassion and understanding and kindness that followed was calculated, too. But by then I knew all that.

      Later that year, I met a woman named Margot who also worked for the agency. We did a double together, then over drinks at Jillian’s we began sharing client experiences. Barry, it transpired, was one of Margot’s regulars. I stared at her, transfixed and a little shocked. “How can you stand him?” I wanted to know.

      “Well, see, I have this theory.” Margot took a liberal swallow of her Manhattan. I always thought I should be more creative in my choice of cocktails; she was inspiring me. Her breath was sweet, smelling of warm vermouth. “Guys like Barry, they have so much rage against women, you know?”

      “No shit,” I muttered. “So do about eighty percent of men.” I was remembering my class on insanity, and the fears that made men lock women away for life.

      “Granted. But with Barry, it’s a lot closer to the surface.”

      “Granted,” I echoed, fascinated at where this might be going.

      “Okay. So he keeps pacing around that little apartment of his and muttering about women being whores. Maybe he watches them through his windows, pretty women down on the Esplanade or Memorial Drive, sunning themselves or doing inline skating or something, and all the while it’s stoking up his feelings of insecurity and inadequacy – well, eventually there will be too much pressure, and it’ll blow.” She sipped her drink, demurely, before delivering the punch line. “And you probably know that I’ve just described a textbook rapist, by the way.”

      It had felt like rape, what had happened that night. I shivered at the flash of memory, my face in his pillow, suffocating, his weight on my spine, pushing my buttocks apart…

      Margot didn’t notice. “So if the pressure gets eased, sometimes, then maybe he won’t blow. Maybe if he can play out his sick little fantasy with one of us from time to time, with someone who can handle it, you know, then he won’t walk down Beacon Street one night and follow some innocent woman home. Maybe he won’t hurt her.” She looked around her at the flashing lights, marshalling her thoughts, and then turned back to me. “You see, Jen, I’m in control, even if he doesn’t think I am. I have power over him. I can always call Peach. She’s the only service he uses, I don’t know why, but if she cuts him off he’s got nothing, and he knows it. And I think that in his heart of hearts he knows how much he needs it.”

      “So by playing into his shit you’re keeping women from being molested?” I was still working that one out.

      “Sure, why not?” Margot shrugged. “Besides, Jen, look at it this way. I don’t have a lot of competition for him as a client. So you can either call it altruism or you can call it enlightened self-interest. Either way works.”

      But I liked Margot’s theory. I thought about it a lot. Everything that I’d been reading about prostitution and the sex trade was talking about how it contributed to the oppression of women, how it perpetuated men’s fantasies of control and power. And here was this woman, gorgeous, smart, calmly sipping her Manhattan and telling me that in the midst of this profession she was considering the needs of other women.

      I liked the thought. I liked the thought of that anonymous woman walking down Beacon Street at night, the streetlamps misting and her footsteps echoing on the pavement. I liked thinking that she was safe because, somewhere four stories up, Margot was there, sleeping with the enemy.

       FOUR

      After the Back Bay call, I definitely needed my fitness club. I went and worked out, sweating and pushing myself past my usual limit, then stood under the shower and scrubbed my body nearly raw. And then I sat for nearly an hour in the whirlpool, getting up every ten minutes to reset the timer. If they hadn’t had a closing time, I would have stayed in there all night.

      The fact that this was what I had anticipated before I started working, that I had actually imagined feeling soiled and used and unclean, didn’t help much. The fact was that I had gotten spoiled. “It’s a crap shoot,” Peach once said.

      Yeah. And sometimes, it seemed, you didn’t exactly roll a winner.

      But the feeling passed. There were enough neutral or good experiences to balance out my time with Barry; there was no obligation for me to ever see him again. And eventually, as one does, I pushed him into the back recesses of my consciousness and concentrated on what was essential. The money.

      The money was essential because by that time – by the time I’d been working for Peach for merely a few weeks – I was beginning to see my way out of my financial problems. Oh, I wasn’t there, not yet, not by