“Well, maybe as a stopgap,” I said, “if we couldn’t be together for some reason. But I think I’d feel too self-conscious to get into the spirit of it.”
“Idiot,” she said affectionately. “Not for us. To make money. A woman I know claims it’s very lucrative. You’re in a room with ten or a dozen other girls. There are partitions for privacy, and you sit at a desk and talk on a telephone. No hassles about getting paid. No worries about AIDS or herpes. No physical danger, no physical contact even, you never see the clients and they never see you. They don’t even know your name.”
“What do they call you?”
“You make up a street name, except you wouldn’t call it that because you’d never get anywhere near the street. A phone name, but I’ll bet the French have a word for it.” She found a dictionary, paged through it. “Nom de téléphone. I think I like it better in English.”
“And who would you be? Trixie? Vanessa?”
“Maybe Audrey.”
“You didn’t have to stop and think, did you?”
“I talked to Pauline hours ago. How long does it take to think up a name?” She drew a breath. “She says she can get me on where she works. But how would you feel about it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s hard to predict. Maybe you should try it and we’ll both see how we feel. That’s what you want to do, isn’t it?”
“I think so.”
“Well, what is it they used to say about masturbation? Do it until you need glasses.”
“Or a hearing aid,” she said.
She started the following Monday and lasted all of four hours of a six-hour shift. “Impossible,” she said. “Out of the question. It turns out I’d rather fuck strangers than talk dirty to them. Do you want to explain that to me?”
“What happened?”
“I couldn’t do it. I was hopeless at it. This one dimwit wanted to hear how big his cock was. ‘Oh, it’s huge,’ I said. ‘It’s the biggest one I ever saw. God, I don’t see how I can possibly get the whole thing inside me. Are you positive it’s your dick? I’d swear it was your arm.’ He got very upset. ‘You’re not doing it right,’ he said. Nobody ever told me that before. ‘You’re exaggerating. You’re making the whole thing ridiculous.’ Well, I fucking lost it. I said, ‘Ridiculous? You’re sitting there with the phone in one hand and your dick in the other, paying a total stranger to tell you you’re hung like Secretariat, and I’m the one’s making it ridiculous?’ And I told him he was an asshole and I hung up on him, which is the one absolute no-no because they reach you by calling a 900 number so the meter’s running as long as they’re on the line. The one thing you don’t do is hang up before they do, but I didn’t care.
“Another genius wanted me to tell him stories. ‘Tell me about the time you did a threesome with a man and a woman.’ Well, I’ve got real stories I could have told, but am I supposed to take something that actually happened and share it with this jerkoff? The hell with that. So I made something up, and of course all three people were hot and gorgeous and perfectly synchronized sexually, and everybody came like the Fourth of July. As opposed to real life where people have bad breath and skin blemishes, and the women are faking it and the man can’t get a hard-on.” She shook her head, disgusted. “Forget it,” she said. “It’s good I saved my money, because it turns out I’m unemployable. I can’t even make it as a telephone whore.”
“Well?” she said. “What did you think?”
“Of Glenn and Lisa? They’re fine. I wish them well.”
“And you don’t care if we never see them again.”
“That’s a little harsh, but I’ll admit I don’t see us spending all our free time with them. There wasn’t a whole lot of chemistry operating this evening.”
“I wonder why. The age difference? We’re not that much older.”
“She’s pretty young,” I said, “but I don’t think that’s it. I think it’s a lack of anything much in common. You go to class with her and I live a block from them, but aside from that—”
“I know,” she said. “Not much common ground, and I probably could have predicted that going in. But I found her very likable, so I thought it was worth a try.”
“Well, you were right,” I said, “and I can see why you liked her. I liked her myself.”
“But not him.”
“Not especially, no.”
“Any idea why?”
I thought about it. “No,” I said. “Not really. I could point to things about him that I found irritating, but the fact of the matter is that I’d already made up my mind to dislike him. I took one look at him and knew he was somebody I wasn’t going to like.”
“He’s not a bad-looking man.”
“Hardly,” I said. “He’s handsome. Maybe that’s it, maybe I sensed that you’d find him attractive and that’s what put my back up.”
“Oh, I didn’t think he was attractive.”
“You didn’t?”
“I thought he was good-looking,” she said, “the way male models are good-looking, except not as pouty as they all seem to be these days. But I’m not attracted to pretty boys. I like grumpy old bears.”
“Thank God for that.”
“Maybe you didn’t like him because you were hot for her.”
“I already knew I didn’t like him before I even looked at her.”
“Oh.”
“And why would I be hot for her?”
“She’s pretty.”
“In a fragile, china-doll way. A fragile, pregnant, china-doll way.”
“I thought men went crazy for pregnant women.”
“Well, think again.”
“What did you do when Anita was pregnant?”
“Worked a lot of overtime,” I said. “Put a lot of bad guys in jail.”
“Same as when she wasn’t pregnant.”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“Maybe it was cop instinct,” she said. “Maybe that’s why you didn’t like him.”
“You know,” I said, “I think you just hit it. But it doesn’t make sense.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s a promising young attorney with a pregnant wife and an upscale condo. He’s got a firm handshake and a winning smile. Why would I peg him as a wrong guy?”
“You tell me.”
“I don’t know. I sensed something, but I couldn’t tell you what it was. Except that I had the sense he was listening awfully hard, as though he wanted to hear more than I wanted to tell him. The conversation dragged tonight, but it would have sailed along just fine if I’d told some detective stories.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Maybe because he was so hot to hear them.”
“Like phone sex,” she suggested. “He had the phone in one hand and his dick in the other.”
“Something like that.”
“No wonder you wanted to hang up. God, do you remember what a disaster that turned out to be? For a week afterward I wouldn’t say a word in bed.”
“I know. You wouldn’t even moan.”
“Well, I tried not to,” she said, “but sometimes I had no choice.”
In a Nazi accent I said, “Ve haff vays of making you come.”
“Is that a fact?”
“I suppose ze Fräulein demands proof.”
“I suppose I do.”
And a while later she said, “Well, I wouldn’t call it the best evening we ever spent, but it certainly had a nice finish, didn’t it? I think you’re probably right, I think there’s something sly about him, but so what? We’ll never have to see them again.”
But of course I did have to see them again.
A week or ten days after our first meeting I walked out of my hotel one evening and got halfway to Ninth Avenue when I heard my name called. I looked around and saw Glenn Holtzmann. He was wearing a suit and tie and carrying a briefcase.