JENNY ANGELL

Madam

Thanks as always to my husband, to my literary agents (Philip Spitzer, Lukas Ortiz, and Jane Judd), and to the wonderful editors at Avon/HarperCollins in London: Keshini Naidoo and Sammia Rafique. And thanks especially to Peach: this book is both for and about you, and all the fragile and lovely spirits we’ve known together.

This is a second-hand memoir, written about a person other than myself. Because of that, and because of the necessity of protecting people’s identities, particularly Peach, it can be viewed as true but not completely factual.

Most people in this book are composites. Most places have been changed. While I spent countless hours with Peach talking about this book, listening to her stories and thoughts and her feelings, I cannot guarantee the accuracy of anything that is written here that does not include me directly.

Readers are urged to take it as it is meant – as an example of living a life that many people could otherwise not imagine, and yet one that is familiar in enough ways to perhaps help people see that we are not so different from each other, after all.

For Peach, of course

CONTENTS

Prologue

Rendezvous

Working the Phones

The Making of a Madam

Losses

Leaving Mother Superior

Night One Chez Peach

A Head for Numbers

Jesse, Jesse, Jesse…

Escort Business Etiquette

The Belle of Boston

Callgirl Salon

Under… and Over… Jesse

Private Yellow Pages

The Client From Hell

Let’s See… How Can I Prove I Did It?

Catering by Any Other Name

Business and Family

Phoning It In

Addiction

Alla

The Road to Happiness

The Most Important Person

Baby Makes Three

Taking Charge

A Romantic at Heart

You’re Fired!

Can’t Get Enough of Muffy

Moving On

Epilogue

Original Titles from Mischief

Author's Note

About the Author

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

For three years of my life, I worked as a callgirl. I worked for a woman-owned and woman-operated escort service, and that agency is what made those three years more than just an emergency financial stopgap. It became, instead, an interesting and empowering experience for me.

I wrote my story of those years in a memoir titled Callgirl. And because the madam I worked for figured so importantly in that story, I decided to share what one madam’s life is like. It’s Peach’s turn; this is her story.

RENDEZVOUS

The couple had been sipping wine for almost half an hour when he made his first move.

They had already exhausted talk of his work (he was an accountant, so that part didn’t take too long) and hers (she was a graduate student, she told him, though when you purchase companionship through an escort service you never know whether you’re being told the truth), and he had been watching the ample cleavage defined by the black lace camisole long enough to be feeling excited. Very excited.

Still, he liked the sound of her voice, and he listened to it longer than he had planned.

He took the wineglass from her hand, gently, courteously, and placed it on the glass top of the coffee table in front of them. She was smiling. When he kissed her, her lips were as warm and yielding as he had thought they would be.

She put her arms around him and drew him in closer, her mouth, her lips against his, her tongue exploring inside his mouth, feeling hot, feeling impatient. He sensed a surge, a response inside himself, as though his groin were suddenly on fire.

She leaned back on the bed and pulled him on top of her, still fully dressed, and her legs came up and encircled him, pulling him down harder on top of her. She was kissing him back, his face, his neck, pulling at his clothes even as she held him pinned on top of her; it was as though a fire had been ignited inside of her when he made his first move. She must like me, he thought, as he returned her kisses, reaching between their two bodies to fondle her breasts. She must really be hot for me.

She gasped and pulled away from him, scrambling up further on the bed, still with that smile. Slowly, watching him, she started to undress. The black lace top that barely concealed the camisole, the skirt … she was wearing a garter belt and stockings – he caught his breath and felt that pulsing in his cock again. She knows what I want, he thought, and locking eyes with her, he stood up, unbuckled his belt, and unzipped his khakis.

She was just wearing the camisole and stockings now, no underpants – God, I love it when they don’t wear anything underneath – and she leaned back against the headboard, still watching him, her legs falling apart naturally. Slowly, she put a finger in her mouth, then withdrew it; slowly, she moved her hand down and slid the same finger into her pussy.

She’s so hot, he thought. He pulled off his shirt. He couldn’t take his eyes off her pussy. She didn’t shave it, like some girls did, and he was fascinated with the curly dark hair and the slender hand on it, moving, pulsing …

He crawled up to be with her, but she put one elegant, black-stockinged leg up, her foot against his chest, to hold him away from her. Her eyes were still holding his. She wet her finger once more and started really caressing herself, rocking her hips rhythmically, moving against her hand, her breathing coming faster, even moaning, and all the while her eyes were still on him.

He felt like his cock was going to burst.

She paused and then asked, her voice low, “Do you want me?”

Oh, God, like no one I’ve ever wanted before. “Yes,” he managed to say, licking his lips. “Yes, yes, I want you!”

The hand went to the nightstand. “Put this on,” she whispered, passing him the foil packet. He complied, fumbling with it a little, watching as she went back to touching herself, she’s getting ahead of me, he thought, and then it was on, finally it was on, and she slowly – too slowly, too slowly! – moved the foot that was holding him back from her, extending the leg gracefully to the side, her arms now up and open, pulling him down on her.

He fumbled for another moment, his cock in his hand, and then he was sliding inside her, fast, hard, and she moaned again. She was kissing his face, kissing his neck, his ear – and then she bit his ear, hard. He gasped, but she only whispered, “You’re so good …” before tipping her head back, her eyes finally closed, moaning as she moved with him.

She was soft and yielding and magnificent. He drove his cock into her pussy, again and again and again, feeling the fire building, feeling it engulf not only his groin, but then, suddenly, unexpectedly, his whole body – Christ, he thought, I’m on fire – and then he was coming, again and again and again, feeling it wash over him like waves, putting out the fire, leaving him weak, exhausted, and empty.

She didn’t hurry him, like some of them did. Finally, she slid out from under him and padded into the bathroom. He heard water running, and a few moments later she was back, a washcloth in her hand.

She moved him onto his back without saying a word, removed the condom, and used the washcloth on him. It was warm and wet, just like she had been. When she was finished, she lay down next to him, her head on his chest, her fingers slowly, lazily caressing him.

He started drifting off. He saw a farmhouse and a well next to it, fragments of some dream he’d been having the night before resurfacing as he drifted into a sleepier state, lulled by her warmth next to him and her fingertips on his body.

The telephone rang.

He jerked awake, aware suddenly of the hotel room, the woman next to him, the shrilling of the phone. It was his room, so he reached for it. Christ, that’s loud! “Hello?” he managed to say at last.

The voice on the other end managed to be both gentle and cheerful. “Craig, hi, this is Peach.”

He rolled over so that he was sitting on the edge of the bed. “Hi, Peach.”

“Can I talk to her?”

“Sure.” The girl was next to him; he handed her the phone. “Hi, Peach,” she said easily, and then listened for a moment. “Yes, I enjoyed it.” She reached over and took his hand, winking at him as she said it. “Anytime he calls again, I’d love to see him.” Another short pause. “Okay, thanks, Peach. Bye.”

She hung up the phone, put her arms around him, and kissed him again. That was unusual, too. “I had a lovely time,” she said, softly.

“You mean that?” She probably says it to everyone. Still, I really felt that she liked me.

“No,” she said softly. “Only when it’s true.”

She moved away, pulled on her skirt and blouse, and he realized with a start that that was all she had taken off. He’s had girls nude in the first five minutes who hadn’t gotten him off like this one had. This is going to be embarrassing, he thought. Here goes …

“Um,” he said, “I’d like to see you again.”

She was running fingertips through her long red hair, tangled now. “I’d like that, too,” she said, softly.

“But –” Just say it. “Umm … I’m sorry, I forgot your name.”

To his surprise, she grinned, a wide spontaneous smile. “That’s okay,” she said. “Sometimes I forget it myself.” She had on her black blazer and little black handbag that had been on the nightstand, where she had put the condoms. She came over to where he was still sitting, with just his pants pulled up haphazardly, and kissed the top of his head. “Tia,” she said. “My name is Tia.”

“Tia,” he said. That name suits her. Maybe she’s Italian.

She kissed him again. “I have to go,” she said. “Call Peach and ask for me.”

“I will,” he said.

She started for the door, then suddenly turned, came back quickly, bent down, and gave him a full, deep, wet kiss on the mouth. A lot of the girls never did that, and especially not once they were leaving; there was a depressing postcoital efficiency in the profession that he found irritating. “Soon,” she whispered. “Please call soon.”

He started to say something, then cleared his throat. “I will,” he managed, “I will.”

She closed the hotel room door behind her and walked down the carpeted corridor. Waiting for the elevator, she once again fixed her hair with her fingertips, and straightened her skirt. By the time she emerged into the lobby she looked cool, collected, and still very sexy.

She went to the bank of phones located to the left of the front desk, put in coins that she had ready in her blazer pocket, and called me. “Peach? It’s Jenny. I’m done.”

“Great.” I mentally checked my roster of potential clients for the night. “Do you want another call?”

The woman in the hotel lobby stifled a yawn. “Not really. Only if it’s one of my regulars,” she said. “I have some reading to catch up on.”

“Okay, then,” I said. There was another call coming in. “Hey, honey, call me when you get home, okay? Maybe we can have lunch tomorrow.”

“Sure thing. Talk to you then.”

I disconnected her call and picked up the one that was waiting. “Hello?”

“Hey, Peach, it’s Crystal. I’m here with Mark.”

“Great, honey,” I said, checking the clock. “I’ll call you out in an hour.”

“Sure thing.”

I stretched and looked around for my novels and magazines. Always need my novels. It looked like it was going to be a busy night.

WORKING THE PHONES

The telephone was ringing.

That’s not unusual: in my world, the telephone is always ringing. It’s an occupational hazard. I don’t suppose that I should complain; I’m the one, after all, who has the advertisements in the local alternative newspaper asking people to call me. I’m the one who persuades guys to use my number, to see my girls, to become, in an odd, indescribable way, my friend. It’s my lifeline, the telephone.

But sometimes – once in a while – I do find myself wishing that it would just stop.

It was ringing this morning while I was trying to get Sam ready for his day. Yes: I am a madam, and I also have a child. It’s not an oxymoron; it’s my life. I checked the caller ID and saw that it was a new client, someone I’d sent a couple of girls to in the last few days. That kind of regularity translates as Very Good Client. “Hi, Gary.”

“Peach?” He sounded surprised that I knew who he was. As though he hadn’t heard about the latest in telephone technology. Although, to be fair, I’ve always been very good with numbers, and I’d matched the cell phone display to his name almost instantaneously. “Hi, Peach. Um – I was just, you know, thinking about what you said last night, and you’re right, I need to get out of my rut.”

Great. And now you want to talk about it. “That’s probably a good idea, Gary.” I was hunting for one of Sam’s missing shoes as I waited for the rest. I already knew what it was going to be about. When one of my clients says he wants to get out of a rut, he’s not talking about changing jobs, going on vacation, or taking up a new hobby.

My clients are much more specific than that.

“Well, you know what you said, about trying something new, and I guess that I just had this kind of fixation with blondes, you know, but I think …” He paused and took a deep breath, as though entering into an important pact, making a difficult commitment. “I think I’m ready for a change.”

I was watching the clock. The school bus waits for no madam. “Gary, that’s terrific. But can you call me back later? I’ve got a new girl working tonight. I think you’ll really like her. We can connect you once she checks in.”

“What’s she like, Peach?”

I sighed. I should have known I wasn’t going to get him off the phone that easily. “She’s got dark hair, five- seven, 122 pounds, 36-26-32. She’s gorgeous, Gary, and she’s really sweet.”

“What’s her name?”

Thinking fast, I said, “April. I’ll have her call you as soon as she checks in, does that work for you? She’s a college student. She’s in class right now.”

“Oh. Okay, Peach.”

No “Thank you, Peach,” or anything like that. Silly me, to expect courtesies from someone who calls an escort service at breakfast time just to chat. I frowned at the phone as I pressed the off button. April. I’d have to remember that.

Most of the girls who work for me use fictional names. I can’t blame them – after all, I do the same thing – but sometimes it’s a little tough keeping them straight. Especially when I assign one on the spur of the moment, as I just had.

In the kitchen, Sam was voicing his displeasure with the menu choices. I sighed and marched in to head him off before he decided to throw the offending food around. Now all I had to do was figure out who the hell I had that I could pass off as this April, who was, unfortunately, a total figment of my imagination.

* * * * * *

Sometimes I think I’m in the wrong profession altogether.

Mornings, in particular, are tough. I’m not supposed to be working then – we do most of our work in the late afternoons and at night – but I still answer the calls: it would be suicidal not to. Talking with Gary this morning hadn’t precisely made my day, but yesterday was worse. It was raining for the third day in a row, my husband was away, and Sam was adamantly refusing to eat the exact same breakfast he had loved only the day before.

And I had a new girl on the phone, asking for advice.

“Peach, should I get the wax done just before I go? Sometimes my skin is a little irritated right after I have a wax. And – there’s this other thing: what do you think – should I have all the hair removed, or leave a strip of it on?”

Wonderful. I haven’t had my first cup of coffee yet, and here I’m talking to this girl about her pubic hair. Ask me if I care.

Well, actually, the reality is that I do. I do care about these girls and I care about making things as comfortable for them as I can and I care about their confidence (if not, precisely, about their wax jobs); but sometimes it just gets a little … overwhelming. Like I’m a nanny with a particularly difficult and demanding set of charges.

The only difference between us is that my charges are all drop-dead gorgeous and in their twenties. The rest? I’d say it pretty much stays the same.

* * * * * *

Despite what you may be thinking after reading all of this, most of the time, I love what I do. I love owning my own business. I love having my days free. For a long time, I loved the cachet that went along with being a successful madam in a relatively small city where everyone who is anyone knows everybody else. I loved the entrée it gave me to events and parties and inner circles; I loved being seen as someone who people wanted to be seen with.

And then there’s the issue of power. After all, my profession involves providing something that men want, and I’m the gatekeeper. I’m the one who gives or doesn’t give what they are asking for. There are days when that feels pretty good.

This book is partly about that, partly about what it was like to be flashy and successful in a glittering world where it was always night, where the real world was somewhere else. Because that was a big part of my life. But it’s also about how that gets old, finally; about how the other side to the nightlife can be devastating and even deadly; about how, in a sense, I grew out of it and into something that is just as satisfying in a completely different way.

And, through it all, I ran – and continue to run – a very successful escort business.

THE MAKING OF A MADAM

I didn’t start out wanting to be a madam.

I mean, it’s not the kind of career choice that little girls consider when they talk together about what they’re going to be when they grow up. Let’s see: teacher, nurse, lawyer, bordello owner … nope, just doesn’t work. There are some careers that you choose, and some careers that choose you. This one definitely falls into the latter category.

So, how does a nice girl like me end up running an escort service?

I’m not sure exactly where to start. I could use all the excuses that people generally use when they’re trying to justify what others may see as questionable behavior. I could talk about boyfriends and about wanting to do well at Boston’s Emerson College; about my parents’ expectations that I would marry and buy a mock Tudor house somewhere in the suburbs. I could list my various jobs, give you a resumé or a list of recommendations; I could self-righteously mention exactly how few positions are available to people when they first leave a school like Emerson, which is so specialized in communications and acting and related fields. I could even say that I had put a lot of thought into it and decided that running an escort service would make me Businesswoman of the Year.

But the reality is different. The reality is that I was tired of coming home to the guy I was living with (for no reason other than that we had started living together and inertia had taken over) who did nothing but smoke pot and watch television. I was tired of looking for jobs in communications with a degree in Communications that meant absolutely nothing at the end of the day. I was tired, tired, tired …

I did try to follow one of the roads that lead to what others see as respectable careers. I tried sales first. I’ve always been pretty good at talking people into things, so I went to work in the sales area of some low-income housing developments on the edge of North Cambridge, Massachusetts, and moonlighted answering the telephone for the maintenance department. The first clue I had that I was in the wrong place was when a couple of the guys refused to fix the toilet in a certain tenant’s apartment. The tenant in question didn’t speak English, so I started giving the maintenance guys holy hell about discriminating against him.

When one of them could finally get a word in, it was to say, “You know, lady, no one’s gonna go there. Two other maintenance guys almost got killed fixing stuff for that creep.”

Oh.

The second clue came when the news trucks all started coming around and people began shoving microphones in my face, asking me questions about the guy on the eighteenth floor who had just gotten arrested for running a prostitution ring out of his apartment.

And all of that – those events, those situations that I can single out and point to – didn’t even touch the sheer bleakness of working there, in that world, with people who had lost every shred of hope they had ever had for a better life. Poverty is a grinding, daily, hurtful thing, and after a generation of it, most people cannot imagine a world that doesn’t involve welfare, or dealing drugs, or stints in prison, or wanting something with the only part of you that hasn’t accepted that you’ll never be able to have it. I know I’m a hypocrite to feel that way and not become a social worker, or something – anything to help ease people’s pain. Instead, I decided one thing: I wasn’t going to make a career out of being part of anybody’s misery. I wanted a modicum of happiness in my work.

So I made some New Year’s resolutions in the middle of the summer and kicked the boyfriend out and thought for a while about my assets – what is fashionable, these days, to call a skills set. And I realized right away that what I’m good at – what I’m brilliant at – is talking. I can talk anybody into anything. I can sweet-talk operators into giving me information they never planned to give out. I’ve always had this big double bed and I sit there with my telephone and my Yellow Pages and man, I’m all set. I can get just about anything I need with my phone and my Yellow Pages.

On the other hand, what do people do who are good on the telephone? I certainly didn’t want to do telemarketing. Yuck. Interrupting people having dinner to try and sell them subscriptions to some magazine they’d never read anyway. It just didn’t work for me.

So I sat and called everyone I knew and didn’t get any closer to figuring out what to do with my so- called career. I took a couple of temp jobs working as a receptionist for high-tech companies and resigned myself to doing something like that in the foreseeable future.

When I finally happened on the ad in the newspaper – almost accidentally, on a day I had not set aside for job-hunting – I had no idea that it was going to change my life forever.

* * * * * *

Laura lived out in one of Boston’s suburbs – Wilmington, was it? Or maybe Lynnfield? – someplace like that, that’s what I remember. And even though my departed boyfriend hadn’t been good for much, he had managed to pay half the rent. Now I was struggling to manage it by myself. Come work for me, Laura said, and you can stay in my basement.

It sounded pretty good to me. Work and a place to stay, just when I needed both. I said yes. I didn’t consider what people would think when they learned I was working for an escort service, even in the minor role of receptionist. I didn’t consider much of anything. This is probably typical of many of the women who work in the profession: it seems like an answer to a prayer, a way to make ends meet, a way to make a living, for heaven’s sake. And when the reactions trickle in, we’re always surprised by them.

I didn’t think about people’s reactions. I just went to work for Laura.

My first impression was how clean it was: everything was impeccable. Laura ran an escort service that was both in-call and out-call: some girls went out to clients’ homes; others saw the guys there, at Laura’s place. It was never called a bordello. In fact, in all my years in the business, I’ve never heard an in-call place called a bordello. We just called it Laura’s. Maybe it’s just a Boston thing.

So I finally had a job. I was the receptionist; I greeted clients and took all the telephone calls. And listened to the bickering.

“The sheets have to be clean,” Laura kept saying to the girls. That was her constant mantra. You wouldn’t think that clean sheets could ever become such an issue. Whose turn it was to change the sheets, who had last used the front room, who had done the laundry yesterday. That was all that the girls talked about: those damned sheets.

The sheets weren’t my department. I got to talk to the guys.

The clients came in all shapes and sizes, both figuratively and literally. Guys who knew exactly what they wanted, and guys who could be talked into seeing the girl who hadn’t had a call for two days. Young guys that you couldn’t figure out, for the life of you, why they couldn’t get a date on their own; and older men who clearly had no other recourse, even in Boston’s comparatively laid-back sexual climate.

I got good at working the phones, and I got good at it fast. You had to – they’d keep you on the line all night, otherwise. “You have a great voice – you sure I can’t see you? What do you look like? What are you wearing right now?” I got good at deflecting them, just the right edge of flirtatiousness in my voice, just the right edge of business. When I didn’t work, and Laura did the phones, the clients complained. “Where’s Abby?”

I was sleeping on a foldout sofa in her finished basement, sharing the room with an old foosball table and some castoff furniture and lamps from the bedrooms upstairs. That was just fine with me. I had a bank account, and every week I had more money to put into it – the eventual deposit on an apartment somewhere closer to the city than Wilmington.

Because, to tell you the truth, when I wasn’t working, I was bored.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I did have a car that ran most of the time, and when it was running there were a lot of things to do. It was summer, so I could go into Boston and sit on the Common or in the Public Gardens; in the fall I could go out to Concord and walk around Walden Pond. I could go to Lansdowne Street in town on my nights off and hang out in the clubs. But all of it, all the time, I did alone.

I really didn’t know very many people. To be honest, on a day-to-day basis, I was fairly lonely. I didn’t have much of a social life. I worked nights, for one thing. And for another … well, all of my friends from college were starting their careers, or had moved away, or gotten married, or something. I felt a little bereft, as if some train had already pulled out of the station and I had just then realized that I was supposed to be on it.

At Laura’s, though, I wasn’t bored. Here, things were always hopping. Guys stopping in, talking and laughing with me in the living room while they were passing the time before their “date” was free, the girls sitting around waiting to be chosen. It was a cattle call, and as a good feminist I wasn’t altogether comfortable with it. But it was money, extraordinarily good money. And it was more than that – okay, I’ll admit it: it really was exciting. As if I were on the cutting edge of something slightly risqué, slightly dangerous, slightly naughty. As, of course, I was.

I guess the best thing to compare that feeling to is going out at night to the bars, the clubs. How you dance around when you’re getting ready to go out. How you have that little edge of excitement when you first get there, not knowing exactly what you’ll find, who you’ll meet. The tension. And then, when you do strike up a conversation, the flirting, the games, the playfulness and mystery, and the newness of it all. And if it goes well, holding the guy in your power, deciding whether you’re going to sleep with him or not, deciding how far you’re going to let him go, deciding if you’re going to be nice to him or cut him down. All that power, and instead of getting dressed up and going looking for it, it came to me. And I got paid for it. It was my job to be hip and seductive – and unattainable.

“Hello?”

“Yeah, um, I wanted to, um –”

“Make an appointment?” Sweet and seductive.

“Um, yeah.”

“When did you want to come by, sir?” Can’t start by asking for a name – it spooked them. He would say tonight.

“Tonight? Now?”

“That’s fine. I just need to get a little information, sir.” Pretty voice now, nonthreatening. “I need your name and phone number, and I’ll call you right back.”

“Why?”

“It’s for everyone’s protection, sir. Then I can give you directions.”

He relaxed. There was something about that promise that always did it. “Okay. Ed Lawrence. 5551324.”

“I’ll call you right back, Ed.”

After that, it was easy. Directions. Sometimes they’d want to keep me on the phone, run down what they called the “menu,” but I learned how to handle that gracefully as well. “I’m sure that one of the young ladies will suit you, sir.” They always did; the guy just wanted the thrill of prolonging the phone call. His goal was for it to last; mine was to close the deal and move on. Usually I won.

One night Laura had a late arrival. I was asleep downstairs, and she thought – well, I don’t honestly know what she was thinking. Maybe none of the girls were around. Maybe she figured that he was easy and I wouldn’t mind. Whatever was going through her little brain, she sent him down to me.

Big mistake.

First of all, I had never planned on a career in prostitution from anything other than an administrative point of view. Second of all, I was asleep. Third of all, the guy liked to give oral sex, which is why I think she sent him downstairs to me: the scenario would be, he’d go down, I’d never even have to completely wake up, he’d go back upstairs, pay, and leave. What neither Laura nor her client had counted on was the yeast infection I was treating at the time. Her little client went down, all right – and I woke up to this face looming above me, literally foaming at the mouth.

I don’t know which one of us was more freaked out.

And so my career as a call girl ended as soon as it had – albeit involuntarily – begun. But I learned a lot that year I spent doing the phones and working the desk for Laura. I learned about the specifics of running a business like hers, about what worked and what didn’t. I learned about clients and employees and the world’s perception of what we did. I learned a lot about power – about my power.

And most importantly, I learned that I could do it better than her.

So I took my almost-working car and my revived bank account, rented an apartment in Boston’s trendy Bay Village, and opened up my own business. That was nineteen years ago. I’ve been doing it ever since.

* * * * * *

I chose the name Peach from a short story.

It’s as good a source as any for finding a name, I suppose. But it also is weird, in a Twilight Zone kind of way, because the person who wrote that story later came to work for me for a couple of years. What are the chances of that happening? They must be a million to one.

What I didn’t want, above all, was to use my own name. I didn’t want the guys asking for Abby, or knowing anything about Abby. From the very beginning, I wanted an element of deniability to it all. I wanted to both be and not be this new persona.

So I became Peach.

I knew I had to keep my working life and my personal life very, very separate. To my friends and family, I would be Abby. To my girls and my clients, I’d be Peach. And that’s worked pretty well for me.

Which is not to say that I latched onto it right away. If I can sit here and talk calmly about having a family, having a business, juggling them the way any working mother does, you need to know that it didn’t come to me naturally.

In fact, for a whole lot of years, I was much more Peach than I was Abby. Sometimes I think I got a little lost in being Peach … so that’s part of what this story is about. Getting lost.

And getting found.

LOSSES

The door opened slowly, too slowly. The faces were grave.

I was pressed up against the wall in the corridor, scarcely daring to breathe. There was a very expensive vase on the table next to me, from some Chinese dynasty that’s remembered in the Western world only for its porcelain. I had been told to never touch the vase.

The voices inside the room had gone on for far too long, a steady murmur, the murmur of death.

Now the door was opening, and they were all coming out. My mother, her face red and blotchy from crying. Dr. Copeland. Two of my father’s business associates.

Dr. Copeland saw me first and, ignoring the other people – which was very unlike a grown-up – came over and squatted in the hallway next to me. “Abby,” he said, gently, “how long have you been here?”

I stifled a sob. “Forever,” I said. I felt that if I said anything more than that, I’d start crying, and it had been made clear to me that I was not to cry.

He didn’t go away, as I expected him to. He put a hand on my shoulder, instead. “You’re going to need to be a brave girl, Abby.”

“Yes, sir, I know.”

He frowned, as though that was the wrong answer. “But you can be brave and feel sad at the same time,” he said.

I glanced at my mother. She was standing with the light from the window behind her, and all I could see was her thin elegant outline. Her arms were crossed.

I didn’t have to see her face; I already knew what the expression was.

I looked back into the doctor’s kindly eyes with a quick indrawn breath and a little bit of panic. “I’ll be brave,” I assured him. Maybe if I said what he wanted me to say, he’d go away and not say things that made me want to cry.

He didn’t go away.

Instead, he scrunched down and sat on the floor next to me. I clearly heard my mother’s disapproving intake of breath, and stiffened, but she didn’t say anything. “Abby,” said Dr. Copeland, “you know that your daddy is very sick.”

No one had ever called him Daddy before, except me. My mother always prefaced references to him with “Your father.” I nodded.

He nodded, too, as though we had just shared a very deep secret. “Abby, I’m afraid that he’s going to die.”

My heart thudded, and I thought suddenly that I might throw up. I shouldn’t, I knew that I shouldn’t, but I wondered how I could keep it from happening. What can you do? Swallow it all back? I didn’t say anything and swallowed hard, and the feeling receded. Dr. Copeland squeezed my shoulders. “We’re all going to miss your daddy,” he said, “but do you know what, Abby? I think that you’re going to miss him most of all.”

I didn’t know how to respond, so I didn’t say anything.

The doctor gave me one last firm pat on the back and stood up, with some difficulty. One of my father’s business associates gave him a hand. My mother never moved.

Their voices faded away down the hallway and the big sweeping staircase that led downstairs. I stayed where I was, looking longingly at the closed door.

“Abby!” my mother called, her voice sharp. “Come downstairs now!”

I suppose that I went. I was good that way. Obedient.

I never saw my daddy again.

LEAVING MOTHER SUPERIOR

When I left Laura’s place, I had only the faintest idea how to make things work.

What I mean is, I knew what I didn’t want. In retrospect, maybe that’s a pretty good place to start.

I didn’t want to run an in-call service. That was the first decision. For a whole lot of reasons, I didn’t want in-call.

First of all, there was the risk associated with it. There’s always more risk when you have an actual physical place where something illegal is going on. But there was the intrusion, as well, the sense of never quite knowing where work ends and Real Life begins. Laura’s house was – well, Laura’s house. For Laura, my one and only role model in the business, there had never been a clear line between the two. If I didn’t make a distinction, it’s because she never did: her work was her life. I wanted my own space. I wanted my own life.

You have to understand something about this woman: this is someone who made arrangements for her son to get laid when he was fifteen. She sent one of her girls to him in his own bedroom, which was, incidentally, just up the stairs from where the girls all worked. Now that’s one hell of a birthday present from your mother.

I remember one Christmas party – Laura always threw these incredibly extravagant parties – watching her son dancing with the girls with a champagne glass in his hand and an erection in his pants. The girls took off more and more of their clothes as the evening wore on, and Chris was there, right in the middle of it all. He was loving it, of course, but I couldn’t help thinking that his time would have been better spent making out in the back seat of a car somewhere.

There was something about the way Laura dealt with Chris that seemed wrong, really wrong, to me. I realize that many people – maybe even most people – think that sex workers have no ethics, no morals, no code of conduct. Well, I do. I may differ with other people on the definition of that code, but I have one all the same.

Not that I ever had much in common with Laura: we’re both madams; and that is pretty much where the resemblance ends.

She was prissy about cleanliness, as I mentioned, to the point of covering all her furniture in plastic, just like they used to do in the 1950s. (“Well,” she said to me once, as though it were the most logical thing in the world, “you never know who’s going to sit there, or what they’re going to do.” Yuck. I don’t ever want to not know what people are doing on my living room sofa). And yet this prissy housekeeper regularly freebased, leaving all sorts of paraphernalia around in her kitchen – aluminum foil, cigarette ashes, little gram bags of coke.

She was organized beyond belief, keeping this small notebook, adding up, who owed what to whom every night. Yet she couldn’t be bothered with all the work that went into brewing coffee and always drank hers instant.

Laura was, suffice it to say, a study in contrasts.

This showed up in the way she worked, too. She was extremely stupendously generous to her girls, giving them gifts at unexpected moments, singling one or another out and taking her on a surprise shopping spree. Once, she took eight of the girls on a trip to Alaska all expenses paid. It was work, of course, a road show of sorts, but they made absolutely fantastic money and got to travel on top of it.

But she demanded – required – fanatical loyalty. You didn’t work for anybody else while you were working for Laura. Period. She’d cut you off; there were no second chances. And she would invariably find out, because everybody knows everybody else in Boston. A client would usually tip her off – most of the clients were hooked into more than one service. If they called another agency and got someone they’d already met through Laura, they told her. And that was that.

It was as if Laura had this little circle of nuns around her, going off to do their assigned tasks (in this case, fucking men for money) and then returning docilely to the convent under their madam mother superior’s sphere of influence. She didn’t like any of them – including me – having friendships outside of the house. She sure as hell didn’t like any of us having boyfriends outside of the house.

These rules, such as they were, were never articulated, but we all understood them, and we all used them against each other.

I’ve never ever seen such a bunch of gossips as I saw in that house – and where I come from, gossiping is an art form. These girls were impressive. Well, it was only natural that we would gossip: there we all were, stuck in this nouveau-riche house in the back of beyond in suburbia, hanging out together all day with very little to do. No wonder all we talked about was laundry and each other. We probably sounded like junior high kids whispering and giggling by their lockers in a school corridor.

I take that back. We were worse than junior high kids. At least they have the excuse of age, inexperience, and innocence. None of us had any of that going for us.

We were all in our twenties, everyone (except me) dressed in lingerie of some kind, made up, nails lacquered, sitting around on the plastic-covered furniture, waiting. We’d keep the soaps on all day, until a client pulled up outside; then the TV had to be turned off. Major rule, that.

A guy would come in, and everyone would suddenly try to look like it’s a normal thing, all these girls sitting around in their lace and satin and high heels, each one of them competing with the next for his attention.

If that doesn’t make you want to do drugs, I don’t know what would.

If the guy had an appointment with someone, then that was different. Everyone would smile sweetly and the girl would take him off to one of the bedrooms. We’d switch the television back on as soon as we heard the door shut. These were the days before the Internet: we couldn’t just look up what we’d missed on the soaps, so clients were a major interruption.

When we weren’t watching TV, we were talking about anything and everything, but mostly about each other – and Laura. Lord, we gossiped about Laura, and we were vicious – who she was seeing (Laura was always seeing someone), how much coke she’d done the night before, and what she’d said somebody had said about somebody else. I remember, years later, seeing a high school rendition of The Music Man, and being absolutely amazed at how well Rogers and Hammerstein had described our activity.

Of course, the first thing that everyone wanted to do was find Laura and report back to her on who had said what.

In some ways, I guess, I do see some of Laura in myself. We can both be incredibly generous and incredibly selfish. We both have a lot of issues that we deal with by not dealing with them. We both talk – a lot, probably too much. We both manage to survive.

But her style never was my style, and when I left her house and got myself my dream apartment in Boston’s Bay Village, I knew that I had learned enough to know what I didn’t want.

That was a damned good start.

* * * * * *

At that time, the Boston Phoenix had a pullout adult section called “After Dark.” It still has this section, actually, but these days it’s been renamed and redesigned, which I find unfortunate. I’d always liked that name, thought it was pretty classy. Sort of belied the interior. There wasn’t much that you couldn’t find there.

I had a friend once, Claudia, who moved up to the Boston area from New York or New Jersey, someplace where they must be more sophisticated than she – apparently – was. It was late at night. She was tired, overshot the city, and ended up going north on Route 1. Exhausted, she saw a motel, pulled over and went to check in, figuring that she’d find her way to wherever it was that she was supposed to be going in the morning. The name of the motel was the Sir John. (Okay, I know, I know, so she was really tired.) The manager was a little surprised that she wanted the room for the whole night, but I guess he figured, what the hell. She didn’t notice that the motel was right next door to the Golden Banana, one of the North Shore’s biggest and most famous strip clubs. She sure as hell didn’t get much sleep that night.

Anyway, Claudia told me once – years later – that while she was sleepily driving back south on Route 1 into the city the next morning, she was looking around her, and figured that there wasn’t anything that anybody could possibly want in terms of commodities that they couldn’t buy on Route One.

That was how I felt about the After Dark supplement in the Phoenix. There wasn’t anything that you could possibly want that you couldn’t find there.

I thought that After Dark was as wicked as it got.

* * * * * *

My innocence was in part the product of my personality and in part the product of my past. I really do believe at some level that people are fundamentally good and that, given the opportunity, they do the right thing. My observation of and occasional participation in thoughts and actions that are less than pure haven’t completely tarnished this fundamental belief.

My experience – well, that’s something else altogether. If I went by my experience, I’d probably be as cynical as they come.

I grew up in the South, where ladies are ladies, “sir” and “ma’am” are common, and when people ask you how you are, they wait for an answer. That’s a far cry from the brisk how-ya-doin’? of the Northeast. I really do believe that there’s a little of Scarlett O’Hara in every white woman who grew up in the South, a fundamental belief that good manners can get you through just about any situation. For a very long time, I expected people to behave well – just because they should.

That was not exactly the best upbringing for my line of work, but I’ve also found that it tempers the cynicism that is part and parcel of my profession and makes me – or so I’m told – reasonably pleasant to work with. Perhaps not the most overwhelming of compliments, but there are days when I’m willing to settle for reasonably pleasant.

It also means that I smile and acknowledge toll collectors as people, am overwhelmingly polite to telephone operators, and am, of course, kind to dogs and small children. Or is that children and small dogs? I never seem to get that one quite right.

In any case, what the South did give me, besides that take on life and an accent I still cannot entirely get rid of, was a wealth of literature. I love to read; I read everything that is ever been set in front of me, from cereal boxes to VCR instructions, but the voices of the South are what echo the loudest in my world, then and now.

Though proper Southern ladies might blanch at the thought of running an escort service, I haven’t really gone overboard after all. For many of these writers are the same ladies who embrace sexuality with gusto and imagination, who write obsessively and far into the night of breaking free from the oppression of white society (and, some of them, of male society), who tell of awakening to a world where they can be managers of their own destinies. I think that, in the end, some of them might even have applauded me.

It was perhaps under their guidance that I made the final decision about my new business – choosing a niche, an area of specialization, if you will. And when I chose it I was completely aware of the ladies’ voices telling me that it was the right thing to do.

I decided to focus on guys who wanted more than just sex. I know that may sound odd, coming from a madam; but while sex is the blanket under which we sleep, so to speak, it’s not all about sex. Far from it.

It’s about power, and it’s about loneliness, and it’s about a media that constantly tells people that they can Have It All, then springs Real Life on them like some cruel joke. Sex is the battlefield. Sex is the forum where all this stuff gets negotiated, worked out, and practiced. We make so much of sex because we make it mean far more than it was ever supposed to mean. It is only we Americans, with that puritanical past that we can’t seem to rid ourselves of, who see sex in terms of its excesses: as everything or as nothing.

So it’s not surprising that all of our issues either have to do with, or get worked out via, our sexuality. It’s a pity, but it’s a reality; and a business that aims to take advantage of Americans’ hang-ups does well to note that.

In the end, what I decided to do was provide girls who were educated or on their way to being educated, girls who could talk about politics or literature or current events and keep up with the conversation, girls who could do more than just be blonde. Those were the girls, I thought, who would bring in the clientele that I wanted – middle-class guys who want vanilla sex and a chat.

That’s not as crazy as it sounds. It wasn’t just that I wanted the distinction of running a literary escort agency, though there’s something to be said for that – it evokes images of people reading erotica to each other while getting undressed, which is an image that I have to say I rather like.

No, my decision was completely practical. I wanted those clients, first and foremost, because they are the lowest risk around.

They weren’t going to get too weird and hurt somebody. They weren’t going to threaten me with exposure because they would mostly be married (or at the very least, in a career of some sort) and in no position to seek exposure themselves. They were going to order up their entertainment like they ordered takeout – and I planned to be their favorite restaurant.

It was a great plan. Has it worked out? More or less.

And therein, I suppose, lies the rest of this tale.

NIGHT ONE CHEZ PEACH

I placed my first ads in the After Dark section of the Boston Phoenix and waited with some trepidation for them to come out.

One of the ads was advertising for girls to come work for me (“education required,” I had written), and the other was for the service itself. Both had a boudoir-lace edging and stood out, if I do rather smugly say so myself, among all the screaming ads urging readers to “try out my tits” and to “cum all over my ass.”

I had already hedged my bets. During my transition between the suburbs and the Bay Village, I had been doing more than just decorating (although I have to say that my new apartment, with its skylights, exposed brick walls, and claw-footed bathtub, had indeed been absorbing quite a lot of my energy). I had also been talking to my former colleagues, asking them if they knew anyone who would like to work for me. That wasn’t stealing from Laura, I rationalized. I was employing a network, something altogether different. And of course I got names.

To tell the truth, I don’t always run the employment ad these days. Not every week, anyway. Maybe one week out of the month. The reality is that from the beginning I’ve had the most success getting potential employees through a network – friends, acquaintances, cousins, colleagues, fellow students.

It makes them happy, since they are referred by someone who knows how I work, who knows that I won’t be weird or dangerous or take advantage of them. It makes me happy, too, because referrals aren’t very likely to be cops.

So the first Thursday that the Phoenix came out with my ad, I was ready. The phone lines were set up: one for clients to call in on, one for my outgoing calls, another as a strictly personal line. I had voice mail, I had call waiting and call forwarding, and, just for security, I had my Yellow Pages. I had my textbooks. I had a stack of mindless magazines, a pen, some scrap paper. I was sitting in the middle of my canopied bed with my television on to keep me from getting too nervous, and I was ready.

My voice mail message implied much more than it said. “Hi, we’re busy right now, but someone can talk to you if you call us back after five today.” I could imagine what the caller might think when he heard those words, filled with a breathy double entendre. He probably was fantasizing that the place was filled with women, maybe having sex with each other while they wait. (That, I have discovered, is a premiere fantasy for most of my clients, the idea that women just can’t wait to rip each other’s clothes off every chance they get.) I know what callers had assumed when they called Laura’s place. Of course, in her case, they were correct – minus the jumping on each other part of it: a lot of beautiful girls, scantily clad, each one sitting patiently, just waiting for that one caller to ask for her. Well, chez Peach, it was a little different. It was just me.

But they didn’t have to know that.

I had hoped for some modest business. Maybe a couple of calls on my first night, some contacts for future work. I knew that my voice, with its Southern undertones of peach blossom and bourbon and hot nights, was seductive but businesslike. I knew that anybody who called could easily be enticed to call again. I had some confidence and I expected a nice opening night.

What I got was an avalanche.

This was a step on the learning curve. Clients, I learned, absolutely love new girls, girls they have never seen before, girls who are new to the business. They adore them. I don’t know if it’s some sort of little sick initiation rite that they’re imagining doing, or something leftover from the ever-popular deflowering-the-virgin concept, but whatever it is, they love new girls.

Their assumption was that a new agency must be full of them.

I was hard-pressed to handle all my calls that night. Some weren’t serious, they were just checking me out, testing the waters, trying to pull me into some erotic chat, but my time at Laura’s had taught me how to deflect them – I wasn’t going to play their reindeer games. Others were dead serious: who did I have that I could send out to them right now? There were the perusers of menus, sitting back comfortably, perhaps with a snifter of brandy to hand, asking me to go through my offerings one course at a time. “Ah, yes, and you said that you might have someone else a little older? Can you tell me about her, too? Okay, now remind me again – the one named Tina …?”

There I was, in the midst of it all, answering phones, putting people on hold, racking my brains to keep names straight and numbers remembered, trying to screen these guys so that I wouldn’t send someone out to see a homicidal maniac my first night in business.

The three women I had lined up already were frantically working the telephones, themselves calling up possible recruits.

“Hi, Peach? This is Kara, I’m a friend of Stacey’s, she asked me to call you.”

I cut right to the chase. “Super. What do you look like?”

Kara, no beginner herself, was clearly used to the drill and rattled her stats off in a practiced manner. “I’m a redhead, shoulder-length hair, I’m twenty-two. C cup bra. I weigh 123 pounds, five-foot-six, and I’ve got a car.”

The last part snagged me right away. “Okay. Can you get over to Newton in half an hour?”

“Sure.” She sounded amused.

I riffled through my scribbled notes, most of them in the margins of my textbook. If anyone were ever to read it after me, they’d be in for a shock as the pages were scrawled with my notes … CARL AT THE FOUR SEASONS, BLONDE …

I found what I was looking for. “Okay, give this guy a call, Bill Thompson, 555-5454. Call me back after you talk to him, to confirm.” I disconnected, then called Bill myself. “I’ve got this adorable redhead who’s dying to see you. She’ll give you a call in a minute, and she can be there in half an hour. Her name is Kara. Just give her directions.” I hung up before Bill could say anything. This was not the time to chat: I was on a roll.

“Hello? Hi, yes, this is Peach. Where are you located, sir? The Plaza? Can I confirm your name with the reception desk? Great. Do you have any particular preferences? Okay, yes, I do have a stunning blonde, she’s a college student, she’s 34-24-32 and weighs 110 pounds. Her name is Lacey. I know that you’ll like her.”

Looking back, I don’t know how I got through that night. I don’t even remember what was on television (for me, that’s an extraordinary statement, because TV is definitely my friend). My magazines and Yellow Pages had been kicked off the bed. The ashtray was overflowing with cigarettes I had lit and then forgotten. I was setting up calls one after the other, stretching out late into the night. “Pam? Honey, can you take another two calls? You’re the best, thanks. I have John in Cambridge and Louis at the Four Seasons, in that order. You can call them both now. Here are their numbers. Do you have something to write on?”

Finally, I had to begin telling people they needed to call back the next day. Some took it well; others, not so well. I remember hanging up the phone after one guy called me names at the top of his voice, tiredly massaging the back of my neck, the realization dawning that this was going to work.

It wasn’t until three-thirty in the morning that I shut off the phones, padded into the kitchen, opened the bottle of Veuve Cliquot that I had left chilling in the refrigerator, and toasted myself. My new agency – Avanti – lived!

I had suddenly, mysteriously, become a madam.

A HEAD FOR NUMBERS

I don’t think that I left my apartment for three days after that.

I was blessed with a great memory for numbers, so I didn’t need to develop a routine for keeping information that would leave traces behind: no one will ever break into my place and find a mythical “little black book,” because it simply doesn’t exist. I found that the memorization skills that had served me well in school were again coming to the fore, and that I could, absurdly, remember nearly all the numbers of the people who had called me that first crazy night.

I probably found the only job in the world where my favorite party trick is a professional asset.

I had hired Jake, a driver, through one of the girls I’d met at Laura’s place. It was the girl’s brother, actually, who worked for a taxi service by day and picked up whatever jobs he could find in the evenings; she said he spent all his time and money at the Suffolk Downs horse races. Since three of the girls working for me that first night didn’t have cars, I’d kept him busy. He stopped by my apartment at the end of the night and dropped off the money the girls had given him to hold for me, my part of what they had earned. Back then, my agency fee was sixty dollars an hour, and I just asked the girls to give the fees to Jake. They paid him out of their own take from the call, usually around $20, depending on the distance he had to drive.

Now I called him and asked him to meet up with the girls who had their own cars and pick up their fees, as well; I wasn’t about to leave anyone holding my money for too long. Not this soon in the relationship, anyway.

I sat on my bed and counted my money. Then I counted it again. And again. I had put out eighteen calls that first night, at $60 a call for me. I had calculated what to charge based on what I had learned from Laura – and a few surreptitious calls to some other agencies. Prepared, that’s me.

Even better than all that, I had a waiting list for the next couple of days.

There wasn’t much time to rest on my laurels, though – the telephone kept ringing. The word was out, apparently, that Avanti was the newest, hottest service in town. Everyone wanted to try me out. Everyone wanted to work for me. I did quick phone interviews and prayed that the girls I was talking to had given me accurate descriptions of themselves. “Okay, that’s super, and what name do you want to use? Zoë? All right. Check in with me when you’re ready to go to work and I’ll see what we can do for you. Yes; I’m Peach, that’s right.”

I didn’t pick up the client line until I felt I was ready. I had a quick cheat sheet of who was available and what she looked like; then I took a deep breath and plugged in the work line, and we were off and running again.

Jake was elated. “Hot damn, this is the best it’s ever been. I’ve driven for other services and it was nothing like this. Anytime you need a driver, I’m your guy.”

I didn’t have time for mutual backslapping. “Can you meet Melanie at the Star Market on Commonwealth and pick up some money from her? She’s holding $360 for me. She’ll be there at six. She’s driving a red Subaru.”

“Sure thing, Peach.”

I yawned and walked into the kitchen to make some coffee. I’m not a big coffee-at-night drinker, but it looked like I was going to need it. Wearing my socks, my sweats, and my favorite Paris Hard Rock Café T-shirt, I probably didn’t look like anybody’s idea of a madam. Which was perfectly fine with me.

Around midnight, I got a call from Robert, a French guy I’d met at a party I’d gone to while I was still working for Laura. We’d hit it off – though in a strictly platonic sort of way, which I have to say was somewhat to my disappointment – and hung out together fairly often. He’d helped me decorate my apartment, getting so enthusiastic that at one point I wondered if his lack of interest in me, combined with his total devotion to interior design, added up to his being gay. “So how’s it going? Raking in the money?”

“Oh, you know,” I said, nonchalantly. “Just another so-so day.”

I could imagine the grin over the phone line. “Thought I’d stop by and give you a present to congratulate you.”

This was good news. Robert was, by profession, a drug dealer, and I had just been feeling sleepy. “I’m here, feel free to drop by.”

He arrived just as the phones were slowing down. He had beer, coke, and a friend. “This is Stuart,” he said. “Where’s your Scrabble board?”

My friend Jenny used to say that I ran an intellectual salon, with bright and interesting people clustering around me. She said what I did was hold court with them, on almost a nightly basis. If she was right – and I do think that she exaggerated things just a little – then those soirées started on my second night of business, with Robert, Stuart, and the Scrabble game. I waited until my last girl had been called out, then I unplugged the phones, opened a beer, did a line, and we were off.

* * * * * *

I worked out my own system. When a girl arrived at the client’s home or hotel room, I’d have her give me a call. She told the client that it was so I’d know that she had arrived safely. (“Peach worries about me, you know.”) But in reality I was both starting the clock running, and giving her an option to get out of a situation in which she felt uncomfortable.

It’s funny, as I look back on it now. These days, I give Sam secret code words to keep him safe. “The password is Twinkletoes. Don’t ever, ever go anywhere with anybody, even if that person is a grown-up, even if that person says that I sent them. Do you understand? If they say that I sent them, you ask them for the password. If they don’t know it, then run away from them.”

So I guess I had already started that same thing with my girls. “If you feel funny about anything, you can get out of there. When you call me, pretend that I just told you your sister called and is sick. You can apologize to the client, tell him to call me back, but that you have to leave. And then get out of there. You can tell me later what was wrong. Trust your instincts.”

In fact, I was actually a parent long before I had children: I had my clients and I had my girls. They were all as demanding as any two-year-old – maybe even more so. It goes with the territory.

These are people who are carrying around a lot of baggage. Well, honestly, think about it: you can’t live in the margins forever without eventually becoming marginal yourself.

At best, working as a callgirl can be a necessary interim step on your way to someplace else – as long as you keep that “someplace else” firmly in mind. It’s the women for whom the work becomes a run-on sentence who have the real problems.

But it can be good, believe it or not. It can be a way for a single mother to pay the rent and still spend her days with her children. It can be an abused woman getting the financial independence she needs to get out of a violent life. It can be the final stage of the Ugly Duckling becoming a beautiful swan, and proving it to herself and to the world. However – and this is a big however – those are the best-case scenarios, and they only work if you can manage to use the profession, rather than let the profession use you.

But it’s seductive, sometimes too seductive, and it’s easy to forget the password, the talisman, the way out.

It’s easy to think that this is the Real World.

First off, there’s the money. It’s been called the highest-paid profession in the world for women: that may not always be true, but in terms of hourly work, it has to be right up there. Certainly from my point of view, there is nowhere else on earth, with my education and my qualifications – or lack thereof – where I could be making the kind of money that I do. And it’s the same for the girls that work for me.

So this gets seductive after a while. You look at the other jobs you could have. They’re paying less than a tenth of what you’re making, and leaving becomes a really difficult decision to make. You have to have something set up, ready to segue into, otherwise you won’t make a clean break. People who keep coming back never really leave in the end. The longer they keep at it, the harder that decision will be, and the longer they’ll put it off.

Then there are the drugs – there are always the drugs. They’re so pervasive in this life that there’s almost no way of avoiding them. The names change, the highs change, but the drugs remain.

Wherever you go, it’s easier than easy to get drugs. You practically have to fight off people trying to sell them to you. This was truer at the beginning of my career as a madam, though some drug use remains a constant even today.

That was how Robert made his living in those days. He’d get some coke and divide it into lots of little bags, then he’d go hang out in the clubs, selling the stuff. When it’s past midnight and people are drunk and have run out of their stash and want to keep going, Robert can pretty much charge whatever he wants – for whatever they want.

There’s the whole countercultural thing, too. It’s probably the same dynamic that you see in teenagers, the ones who despise anything “normal” and feel themselves to be above all that. They turn pagan or Goth or grunge, and soon their friends are the only ones who understand them and the rest of the world is just oh-so-boring. That same dynamic operates in adults, too. Or maybe just so-called adults.

But after a while, you live most of your life at night, you make a lot of money and you spend a lot of money and people want to hang out with you. Eventually you’re going to lose interest in any other kind of life. Owning a house? Having kids? Going to work every day? Please. That’s for people who aren’t as hip and cool as I am.

To my mind, that’s the worst of it all. We’re not cooler than anyone else; we just think we are. We feed on each other’s need to believe that, like vampires, and end up like them, too, exhausted and empty, unable to face the light of dawn.

But when you’re in it … while it lasts … oh, man, it’s fucking magic.

JESSE, JESSE, JESSE …

Of course, if you’re anything like me, as soon as one thing in your life starts going well, everything else falls apart.

Work was great. I had opened an escort agency. I had some slow nights after the first mad rush, but work was regular, if not predictable. There were problems, but so far, nothing that I couldn’t handle.

And then the one thing that I couldn’t handle came along. His name was Jesse.

Jesse had, oddly enough, known me before, during a wild and unlucky trip I took to California while I was still at college myself. I had gone with some friends who were convinced that they could beat the odds in Vegas, which they probably could have done, in retrospect, if they hadn’t been caught counting cards the first night out. So much for subtlety. So we took the rest of our money and headed for Palm Springs instead. We had no idea how ludicrously expensive it would be. We lived out of the car for a few days – there were five of us – and then spent the rest of the summer in a kind of leftover hippie place on Manhattan Beach. That was where I met Jesse.

We had a fling, of course. Every proper Eastern girl who goes to California when she’s in college has a fling. Don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise. He was, to my inexperienced eyes, quintessentially Californian, with smooth, tanned skin and dirty blond hair and blue eyes that looked like they were looking straight through you, into your soul, into your secrets. He had gorgeous hands, too, with long, sensitive fingers – what my mother would have called musician’s fingers. And he knew how to use them.

Within a day I was spending every night, every day, every moment of time I could manage with Jesse and his sensitive fingers. And tongue. And other body parts. He was intoxicating, more intoxicating than any liquor I had ever tasted. He did things to my body I hadn’t dreamed could be done. When he undressed he could have leapt from the cover of a romance novel (not that I ever read them, but Jesse was definitely cover material if I had – and I wasn’t immune to that).

Then he’d take off my clothes, too, and start moving his tongue all over me. Insistently, like he needed me, like he was restraining himself from devouring me. That was a such a turn-on – women like to feel that there’s a storm building somewhere – and his cock would be hard and throbbing against me, but his hands would keep moving all the time, and when he finally pushed himself inside me it was always as though every millimeter of my skin was responding, I had become so achingly aware of and in tune with him. Even the air on my skin felt erotic, charged, electric. He would move enough to build the tension, to build the passion, to make me ache for him to continue, then stop thrusting, and the hands would start again, moving, feeling, caressing; and then he’d begin thrusting again. This went on and on and on, through sweat-soaked afternoons, into sweat-drenched nights, until I finally begged him to let me come.

When I did, he would, too. And then he’d start caressing me all over again.

I’d never known a man who didn’t go to sleep, or get up, or do something else irritating after an orgasm. Never. I’d had boyfriends reach for the remote and turn on the game after an orgasm, for heaven’s sake (and, in one unfortunate instance, I had one who reached for it before the orgasm; but that was most decidedly the end of him). Not only did Jesse stay there; he started in all over again.

It was every girl’s wet dream, and, for that marvelous, magical summer, it was mine.

But summers end. I went back to Emerson college, paid attention to my studies, and Jesse became a memory etched in sunlight.

Until he showed up at my doorstep, five years later.

I fell for him all over again.

* * * * * *

I opened the door and stood there, staring at him, in shock. I had been anticipating the cab driver with my turkey dinner from the Union Oyster House.

So I was thinking about turkey and mashed potatoes and gravy, and then suddenly there was Jesse.

“Hey, baby,” he said, a little awkwardly, and then he smiled and the world around us lit up.

“Hi.” I couldn’t say much more – my breathing was a little ragged at that point. “Jesse.”

The smile broadened, and he walked up the three stairs to where I was standing in the doorway, his body tall and hard and tanned, just inches away from mine.

This was definitely not good.

Then he kissed me. And the sunshine and the surf and the happiness of Manhattan Beach sparkled all around us, even on a rainy night in Boston. I put my arms around his neck and hung on for dear life. To his credit, the man carried me into my apartment. We barely got the door shut behind us before we were tearing at each other’s clothes, our breath coming in hot little spurts, his hands suddenly all over me again.

The phone rang.

I froze. Jesse didn’t. “Let the machine get it,” he murmured in my ear, before gently biting it. “You’re going nowhere.”

Well, actually, I was. I wrenched myself away from him, flustered. “I have to,” I whispered. “I’ll be right back.”

But of course I wasn’t. I ran into my bedroom – where I had all the phones – and immediately got tied up in negotiating with a client who wanted three girls. I couldn’t pass on that. So I sat and felt my heartbeat return to normal as I dealt with him, found three appropriate girls I could send, dispatched them, alerted my driver, and put out another call. When at last the dust had settled, I looked up and saw Jesse leaning against the doorjamb.

“Well,” I said, with an attempt at humor, “at least I don’t have to tell you what I do for a living these days.”

He smiled, that slow, crooked, heat-filled smile of his. “No,” he agreed. “You don’t.” He walked across the room and stood beside the bed. Without thinking about what I was doing, my hands – completely of their own free will – unbuckled his belt and unzipped his jeans. As soon as his cock was in my mouth the years disappeared, and all I wanted, all I could think about, was making love with him.

Which we did, with the phone ringing and being answered intermittently, for the next ten hours.

Jesse had brought some wine, and I had a fair store of coke on my dressing table, courtesy of Robert, so sleep was pretty much out of the question. I stopped doing the phones after two in the morning, and I don’t remember what happened to the turkey dinner delivery. We stopped touching and moaning and probing and licking only long enough for a sip of wine, tipped from his mouth into mine, or a line of coke, expertly put out on my breast for him to snort, or a trip to the bathroom or refrigerator. I was fascinated; I’d never seen a man do coke and keep an erection. Jesse had amazing talents.

Things are not what they seem, however.

It turned out that Jesse was moving to Boston. He needed a place to stay for a few days. Could he stay with me? Panting in my postcoital exhaustion, of course I said yes. And it was fine, it really was. For a while.

He wasn’t looking for a job, not right away, but that didn’t matter, because I had more girls needing rides than my regular driver Jake could manage. And what Jesse did have was a car. So off he went in the evenings, driving young, beautiful women to obscure destinations and then coming back at one or two in the morning to make love to me for the rest of the night. We’d finally fall asleep toward dawn, and I don’t think that I ever woke up before four or five in the afternoon. That was when I was starting to deal with the hangovers, right when the phones started ringing.

Bad for business? You’d think that working with a hangover might be, though in reality I don’t think that anybody particularly cared. Both my clients and my employees were too self-centered to notice when I wasn’t really on my game.

But I noticed it, and it was a problem for me. Another problem was my nights off, when I’d either get one of the girls I trusted to answer the phones for me or else shut down entirely for the night. Going out became a real problem. Jesse was witty and handsome. He had bought an Armani suit with the proceeds of his driving (though he never seemed to be getting enough together for an apartment of his own), and he loved the clubs, the chicest venues, the new restaurants. I lived off Columbus Avenue, in the center of Boston’s trendiest dining scene, and Jesse was at his best there, looking handsome, pronouncing on a wine, savoring a sauce.

All this cost a bundle, of course, and since I was making the money, I invariably paid. But the excitement of being with the best-looking guy in the place starts to pale when you’re picking up his tab, night after night after night.

It wasn’t just the money, though. It was the girls. Girls who were supposed to be dropped off at a certain time were inexplicably late. Girls whose apartments were on Jesse’s way somewhere else. Somehow, I had a sneaking suspicion that I wasn’t the only woman in Boston succumbing to his California charms.

He denied it all, of course. He soothed my worries with kisses and champagne and cocaine. I’d sigh, relent, and tell myself that it really was all right – but it wasn’t. Waking up with the late-afternoon sun slanting through my blinds, my mouth dry, my head feeling like a sledgehammer had taken up residence inside, and a nose filled with blood-encrusted snot, I was having a whole lot of second thoughts about my judgment.

The trouble was that we never actually talked about anything. Not ever. We did things; we fucked; we ate and talked about the business when necessary; but other than that, we never talked. We certainly didn’t discuss anything as mundane as when he planned to stop freeloading off me.

I knew that there was disappointment in Jesse, somewhere. I knew he felt that the world wasn’t giving him his due, that he deserved more than he was getting, and that I was somehow there in the mix, part of him feeling that he deserved to get something back. What that was, honestly, I don’t know. Certainly Jesse had never made any great contributions to the world that warranted his intense sense of entitlement.

His disappointment made him restless. Even when he was with me, he was always moving – turning on the CD player, turning on the TV, pacing, talking, tapping, complaining, anything to keep from thinking, from dwelling on that narcissistic disappointment.

I still am amazed at how forceful and strong I was with my clients, my drivers, my girls; and yet I lost all that strength and confidence when I was around Jesse. I spent month after month with this man – if you can call our loose liaison being together – and hated myself the entire time for not standing up to him.

When I finally did, I learned another of life’s lessons: let someone into your life, and you’re handing them the means to hurt you on a silver platter.

And he did.

We had a fight, a dazzling, brilliant fight, with objects hurled and broken and the downstairs tenant pounding angrily on the door. The names Jesse called me were bad enough. The sneering references to my sexual preferences and performances were pretty awful. But the things that he said about me in the clubs, to other people, to people who mattered – I couldn’t understand how he could hate me so much to want to destroy me like that. I just didn’t get it.

And it was humiliating, embarrassing in a way that I’d never been embarrassed before. I thought about wearing sunglasses all the time. I thought about not going out. I tried not to think about any of it.

So he left, came back, left again, and came back again. My business and my popularity were growing, but here I was emotionally ensnared by a man with the temperament of a spoiled child.

The irony is that I knew what I was doing. I could see it, I didn’t like it, and yet I kept doing it.

And the whole time we were together, I can’t ever remember Jesse calling me Abby.

That should have said it all.

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