These male servants valued discretion to such an extent that, I was sure, all knowledge of the foul goings-on of their tenants would die with them. I was high on a few Dexamyls, ups, and so, a captive of my own inflamed imagination, I began to entertain a wild thought. As I rode up in the elevator, I made the sudden discovery there was an ongoing conspiracy of men, older than the Masons, older than religion, that closes around the whore, hides and even honors her.
As I considered this, I stared at four doors in the dimly lit corridor and wondered which one was marked “D.” I found a mirror on the wall and ran my fingers through my short hair. I took out my compact and powdered my nose. I sucked in my cheeks and pursed my pink lips and posed in front of the mirror to remind myself I was pretty. Unfortunately, as soon as I stopped looking, I forgot again. Meanwhile, I kept thinking about how I was about to step outside of society into the unknown.
Suddenly I remembered Lillian Maurice. While I was still in grade school, my libertine mother, Maggie, and I invented Lillian Maurice, who lived in the most extreme luxury. Whenever we passed a store on Madison Avenue that struck us as particularly grand, such as a lingerie shop featuring feathered silk negligees, we would say, “Almost good enough for Lillian Maurice.” Our exalted character lived in a social vacuum without a husband or children, exactly as a kept woman would. Apart from the roguish example of Lillian Maurice, I didn’t have much to go on. I was beginning to warm to the theory that a lot of men really don’t like getting it for nothing. They want to pay for it one way or the other. But I was afraid I might find it difficult to sell that which, up until now, I’d always been so eager to part with for nothing.
The john’s sumptuous apartment was a standout even for me, who had spent a lot of time growing up around my grandparents and their rich friends on Fifth Avenue. The decor could hardly have been called understated—too much oak paneling and Wrenaissance mahogany for that—but the living room was elegant, furnished sparingly with good Georgian pieces. The surface of the high-top desk, open to reveal nothing but a Montblanc pen resting on a blank sheet of linen stationery, seemed to be suffocating under a thick coat of wax, as if it had been too frequently polished by a maid with nothing else left to do. Two green-and-white-striped silk upholstered chairs stood on either side of the fireplace, and a luxurious sofa covered in the same material had been situated equidistant between them. I thought I spied an original Beardsley to the left of the (original) mantelpiece. The apartment was sensual and guarded at once, a masculine confection of a home, perfumed with a lingering trace of sweet Maduro cigar smoke and cognac.
He had greeted me at the front door in evening slippers and a floor-length paisley silk dressing gown thrown over trousers and shirt, the studs removed, his sleeves hanging loose. His wrists were too delicate, I thought. He offered me a drink, which I accepted, of course, scotch on the rocks. We sank first into his ripe sofa, side by side, like old friends. He was a gaunt man with high cheekbones, and his eyes flashed with a forced intensity when he spoke. I reassured myself he wasn’t scary looking; in spite of the backdrop, in spite of me and why I was there, I told myself he just looked spiritual, ascetic even. I took him to be about fifteen to twenty years older than I was.
He said with his perfect diction that he liked my hair, “Very gamine.”
It was short, the Jean Seberg look, a novelty in those days, left over from my recent submersion in a sect of radical feminists. Just about a week before, I had decided to forsake that calling for this one.
I was trying not to smile too much, because I knew I had the warm, spontaneous grin of an ingenuous fool. I had a young, expressive face, the kind that registers every wisp of emotion like a sunny day at the seashore that passes instantly into shadow each time the smallest cloud approaches, and I was afraid my face would betray me now. I tried to act cool, but acting cool is difficult to do when you’re not. After a few more light stabs at small talk, I couldn’t bear it any longer. I blurted out that this was my first time, my first professional engagement. I felt compelled to confess because no one had told me what to do. Corinne, the madam whose job it should have been, had only said, “This trick is a cinch—the perfect introduction—nothing to it. You’ll see.”
But what was expected of me? Surely I was there to provide something that ordinary nice girls wouldn’t, or couldn’t, at the very least an attitude: friendly, chirpy, distant. Instead, I sat frozen in the depths of his sofa like a timid virgin. I needed to be guided through it. I apologized. I was apologizing for my freshness and innocence in the same way I now feel obliged to apologize to men for my experience.
Naturally, Maitland, the worldly john, beamed. He actually flushed pink with delight and maybe also with a soupçon of delicious shame. He did exactly as I had hoped, leading me by the hand through the living room and down the hall to his dark bedroom. More polished wood in here, and tapestry throw pillows, too.
He tossed the pillows on a straight-backed chair and lay back on his bed underneath the white silk canopy. Then he pulled me on top of him and flipped me over and kissed me. Oh, I knew that was wrong. Whores aren’t supposed to kiss. I wriggled out from under him and he laughed.
“Good instincts,” he said. “I suppose you want your money now, too.”
Corinne’s only explicit instruction had been to always, always get the money up front. That was the single commandment of hooking then. Maitland handed me two one-hundred-dollar bills. I stuck the money in my little black brocade evening purse, which was also left over from my childhood days of privilege.
Immediately, I felt suffused with glowing calm. Money was power; it freed me. I was free of the man, of men. I could take him or leave him, or anyone now. I was in control. This stranger had just paid me two hundred dollars in advance for doing practically nothing. The idea excited me. I stood there offering my high little breasts that were poking against the scratchy crepe. In my mind, I had become the object of unacknowledged worship.
‘No wonder they go out and work for us,’ I thought.
Not that I was even subliminally interested in finding a breadwinner. This was 1971, remember, and the nuclear-family scam had just recently been exposed. A housewife was merely a whore who was selling instead of renting herself, so the pundits had declared. I took this popular notion to heart. I decided I would rather make my way freely and directly. I wanted to get paid up front and be up front, as in the currently popular expression “be up front with me.” Be honest.
Anyway, I was never trained in my fancy dilettantes’ college to do anything, nor could I remember any discussions at home about how I might eventually make my own way. Oh, I heard a lot of vague, impractical talk about how I should “amount to something,” and it is true that there was no shortage of career women around my mother’s house, even back in the fifties, but collectively, the usually divorced career women served as a cautionary tale. It made a lasting impression when they got tight and cried like little children who were being punished. I remember watching transfixed from my secret vantage point behind the living room door as the black dirt of their mascara ran down their faces. They were extremely unhappy because they were without men. They looked everywhere for men. That was not going to happen to me.
Once I put down my little purse, suddenly, like an actor onstage who hears herself speaking the lines, I knew what to do. I slipped out of my dress, letting it fall to the floor. I stood naked except for my bikini underpants. I imagined that I towered over him, my john, who was lying back on the bed watching me with amusement. With the casual authority of a distracted mother engaged in her mindless routine, I opened his dressing gown, unbuttoned his shirt, tugged off his slippers, and unzipped his fly. After he yanked off his pants, he reached for me and pushed me back on the bed. There I pretended to surrender my power. He was wearing a touch of cologne, a restrained scent of sandalwood mixed with a pungent male smell like sea spray that I had not noticed before, until, on top of me, his pores opened.
It was not unpleasant under there, canopied by his clean, spare