He fumbled with the rubber, a Day-Glo grape color it was. Then he put himself inside me. Before he could get off one stroke, he came. It was over. At first, I was flattered: ‘Am I that hot?’ I asked myself.
“Now you know,” he said as we lay there in some kind of parody of the intimate aftermath. “I’m a premature ejaculator. I tried for years with women, but they won’t put up with it.”
I was being taken over to the far side where women are “other,” initiated into the genderless center, the neutral world of men.
Maitland needed to explain his affliction, perhaps especially because I was new, in other words, full of compassion. Or is it that ladies of the evening are, as legend would have it, full of compassion? Anyway, by now I wasn’t really listening to what he was so earnestly whispering to me. My heart had started pounding too loudly once it was over. Somewhere in there, though, I did hear him say, “Finally, after my last girlfriend left me, I got too lonely to stand it. That’s when I hit on this solution.”
He turned on his side and propped his narrow head on one bony hand like a monk, an anhedonist monk, no longer seeking the things of this earth, and he looked right at me with his mechanically bright eyes. I didn’t ask him why he never tried to fix it. What for? Anyway, maybe he had. That he still needed and wanted this, that he was willing to pay a stranger for the brief contact, for the nudity, for the humble semblance of heterosexuality, touched me. So I kissed him. He didn’t respond. As I pulled away, I caught in those open eyes the look of absolute resignation you would expect to see on a dying man’s face.
The tall doorman was down on one knee, feeding a doggie candy to a bouncy, fluffy Lhasa apso straining at the end of its leash. When the man saw me approach, he jumped up and fairly ran to the big glass door to open it for me. Once again, he tipped his hat. This time, I thought I detected a slight exaggeration of style, an obsequiousness that bordered on a leer.
But who could tell? I had been surrounded by doormen and elevator men, servants in uniform, all my life, and their ways, their devotion to duty, their strange enthusiasm for the job, remained inscrutable to me. I continued down the avenue, August in New York, the air close and intime the way I like it, the doormen, all dressed in summer-weight gray or sky-blue uniforms, nodding as I passed, a few of whom I recognized. They stood outside in the twinkling night like familiar trees, landmarks from my childhood.
Of course, not all servants are so proudly humble. Maids are traditionally begrudging. Governesses temper their affection with a no-nonsense approach. Chauffeurs act like union men who have been hijacked off the assembly line, or mercenaries between wars. Cooks lord it over everybody else. Laundresses, usually the only black member of an all-white cast, at least at my grandparents’ house, slink in and out the back door like noiseless visitations.
And what pose does the whore assume? Lazy. That’s the trick. It aroused me just thinking about it. I remembered the joke my Edwardian grandfather used to tell in mixed company, and in front of me, about the man who goes into a whorehouse. He picks a woman out of the crowd, and she takes him upstairs to her room. Over the bed hangs a Vassar diploma.
“Is that yours?” he asks.
“Yup,” she says.
“But I don’t get it. What would a girl like you be doing in a place like this?”
“Just lucky I guess.”
Once outside, I felt giddy with relief, dissolute and free. I turned left and headed east to Corinne’s house, a large one-bedroom corner apartment overlooking the East River. Corinne was about fifteen years my senior, and although she had renamed herself after a French heroine in an old Charles Boyer movie, she was really a slightly overripe Irish American woman. I knew her from the bar scene. We both fooled around with Michael McClaren, the pied piper of women, sometimes separately and sometimes together. She was tall, auburn haired, and luscious in a damp way that suggested perversion. Like so many whores I would meet, she didn’t get into it only for the money. If you asked her she’d say it was the money, but Corinne belonged to the not-so-rare breed that did it just as much for the sake of pleasure. Corinne dedicated herself to pleasure. She believed in it in the same way Republicans believe in free enterprise. In her spare time, she screwed professional athletes: big-name stars on football teams, basketball teams, and the occasional good-natured baseball player, too. Corinne was a jock groupie.
When she opened her door, she was dragging a telephone cord behind her, the receiver tucked in her ear. She raised her forefinger as if to say, “One minute,” and then returned to the sofa, draped over with swatches of satin, where she plopped herself down in her flowing caftan and continued to speak.
“Is that how you want it, honey, long and slow? You want me to tell you what I’m going to do? Yes? First I’m going to run my tongue up and down, up and down that big, hard shaft. Then I’m going to put it in my mouth one inch at a time until the head of your great, big cock is rubbing up against the back of my throat...You want to hear more? I’m going to suck it, sweetheart, suck it and suck it. Oh so good...”
But her voice betrayed no enthusiasm. Instead, she barely modulated her tone, speaking in measured cadences, in the dead-level affectless calm of an overseas telephone operator.
I sat down in one of the satin-covered easy chairs, its material slipping and sliding around underneath me like unruly morning-after bedsheets, and waited for Corinne to finish priming her john. “Yes, darling, I’m dying for it, yes, yes, all wet, oh, I’m so wet. Till tomorrow at six o’clock. Don’t keep me waiting. That’s a good boy.”
I wanted to ask her why he gets turned on by her monotone voice, by the detachment that makes clear everything she says is a lie? Does he like surrendering his power? Or is it the shame and humiliation of being reminded she’s in control? But I wasn’t about to draw attention to my stupidity. Instead, I decided to ignore the whole thing. Business, that’s all it is.
“Thanks, Corinne, the trick was a cinch, just like you promised.” I handed the madam one of my hundred-dollar bills. She made change. Her cut was eighty.
“I told you. I wouldn’t steer you wrong, honey.” She came over to where I had perched myself at the edge of her slippery chair and slapped me hard across the back. “Congratulations. You are initiated. You are officially a ho. Now we’ve got to drink a toast to your new professional standing.”
After she had poured us both full snifters of Grand Marnier, Corinne took me by the arm and pulled me up, directing me to a spot in front of her large picture window. Below us, the East River ran, and to the north and south, the bridges outlined in bright lights seemed to celebrate the city itself, as if every day were a festival.
Once again, the propinquity of it all struck me as ironic, as wonderful and strange. I was separated from my childhood by time but not by space. A life so remote from any I could have imagined was, nevertheless, happening to me on the same ground where I had been raised. “What a small-town girl I am,” I thought. Here I was, about to drink to my initiation into the priestesshood of the socially damned, looking out on the same view of the same sparkling river I had been staring at when, ten years ago, I had my first drink: champagne at the former senator Foley’s townhouse on Sutton Place. My grandparents always brought their family along to the traditional New Year’s Eve party. I was just thirteen, and I was wearing my first pair of stockings, a Christmas present from my mother. I had hitched them on with a big, lumpy garter belt, and the stockings bagged at the knees, but I felt beautiful and grown-up, as if I had crossed some invisible line into adulthood.
It was nearly midnight. The senator himself, then very old but still with the wicked twinkle in his faded blue eyes powerful men never seem to lose, had grabbed an extra glass off the passing tray and handed it to me as we stood together on his marble balcony, rejoicing in the bitter wind that charged up from the river. After I polished off the first drink in one gulp, which amused my corrupter, I immediately went indoors and searched through the crowd for more. Outside on the balcony again, delicate glass in hand, I found myself alone. I hung backward over the low wall, my face turned up to the pale glimmer of stars, their neglected presence a dim reflection