“I may have someone for you to see. You’ll like him, but he doesn’t want to see you until ten, is that okay with you?”
“Sure.” I certainly could stay occupied until then; I was going to spend some time on the Internet. Because of the turn the afternoon’s discussion had taken, I needed to look into a few things that hadn’t originally been on the syllabus.
Those were still early days, when I thought that I could get up from correcting exams and leave on a call. I didn’t understand, yet, that there needed to be a little transition time between the two.
“Great. You don’t have to call him.” I raised my eyebrows. That was a pleasant surprise. No sales job required. “He’s at Bella Donna on Hanover Street, in the North End.”
“Peach,” I said slowly, “that’s a restaurant.”
“Oh, I know. He’s the owner. Just go to the bar and say you’re there to see Stefano. Be there at ten, and give me a call after you get there.”
“Okay.” I had actually eaten there before, with the boyfriend who had preceded Peter the Rat Bastard. The restaurant was hard to forget. Northern Italian cooking, sauces that made you swear off Dolmio forever. The chef could do things with mushrooms that would make God himself jealous; he had a five-mushroom soup that I would be willing to live on for the rest of my life. This was going to be interesting.
The challenge, as I saw it, was parking. I could take the train of course, but it would take over an hour to get there from Allston. On the other hand, the North End is notorious for having no parking spaces available, anytime, anywhere. So I went early and cruised around halfheartedly before settling for an exorbitantly expensive parking lot and walking up the hill to Hanover Street.
Part of Bella Donna was a small bar, a place frequented mostly by locals, men of a certain age, the pals and cronies of the owner. I went in and hesitated, a nice girl a little out of her league, until the bartender approached me with a wide smile. “I’m here to see Stefano,” I told him, cursing myself for not having gotten the man’s last name from Peach. It would have sounded a little less awkward, I thought.
If I wanted to be discreet, however, Stefano obviously didn’t particularly care. As soon as I asked for him, there was a ripple of winks, nudges, and nods all around the bar. They all knew what I was there for.
The client himself, emerging from a back room, was not unattractive. He was dark-haired with the beginnings of a belly overlapping his belt, white teeth, and very hairy fingers. Well, you can’t have everything.
He kissed my hand, which was really nice of him under the circumstances, and offered me a cocktail. We sipped wine and made polite conversation about the weather, the cronies hanging on every word as though waiting for the punch line from a joke. I said that I had once visited Italy. He said something in Italian that had the cronies gasping for breath through their laughter.
We sipped some more, and then Stefano said something long and graceful to the men sitting around the bar, and slid me off my stool. He led me downstairs, where, next to the wine cellar, it turned out that he had a room that was – how can I best say this? – outfitted for his needs.
He explained the situation to me: no embarrassment there. Sometimes these needs involved women; sometimes they involved a special card game or two. People stayed there from time to time. The room also served as his own home away from home on the occasions his wife Giannetta got fed up with him and kicked him out of the house, occasions that appeared to occur with some frequency.
In any case, it held a table and chairs, a sofa and two or three armchairs, and a small single bed in a corner.
He locked the door carefully behind us, and we sat on the narrow bed and made out for a few minutes. It was fun. The stale air and his eager hands reminded me of summer camps in years gone by. I had a vague memory of a boat house filled with old detritus from beach days, half-inflated rubber swimming-rings, abandoned badminton racquets, and two passionate teenagers finding temporary refuge there in the stillness of a hot summer evening. His lips were rough, and I was again an adolescent kissing a teen-aged boy, a boy unsure of his own needs, unsure of his own power, unsure of what was expected of him.
Stefano pulled away at length, and gestured for me to stand up. “Take off your clothes,” he urged. As I started, slipping my jacket off my shoulders, taking off the silk shirt, he unbuckled his belt, unzipped his fly, and pulled out his cock.
By the time I got through the layers to the new camisole, he was already – so to speak – there. Orgasm attained. Tissues employed.
Later, I learned that this was in fact the sum of Stefano’s sexuality, though at the time I was a little disconcerted. This was supposed to be work, after all, wasn’t it? I hadn’t really done a whole lot. I wasn’t even naked.
I saw Stefano quite a lot after that, and the scenario never changed. It was always a toss-up as to which of us would finish first, whether I would get my clothes off or whether Stefano would have an orgasm. We never made it as far as actual physical contact. It was not expected.
He did, however, have a reputation to maintain, and his friends in the bar knew that he was downstairs with a lady. So I got dressed while he washed up at the small sink in the opposite corner of the room, and then, magically exactly on time, there was a discreet tap on the door and one of the dishwashers (never a waiter) from the restaurant arrived with a tray of food and wine.
We sat at the table and drank Chianti or chilled Valpolicella and ate veal scaloppini. Or some sort of marvelous seafood stew. Or (after I requested it) that incredible five-mushroom soup. We spoke, sometimes; often we did not.
After the requisite time had passed – it wasn’t the full hour – he stood up, kissed one of my hands as he slipped the money into the other, and back upstairs we went.
Waiting for me at the bar was a shopping bag filled with take-out cartons of delicacies. He gave me this gift with a flourish, the bar broke into applause, and that was that.
I heard, later, that if the girl seeing Stefano had a driver, he’d find out where the unfortunate person was waiting and either invite him or her in for a dinner on the house, or send still more of his incredible take-out to the car. He was generous, and open, and kind.
That night, after seeing Stefano, I called Peach once I got home. “Does he ever actually have sex with anybody?”
“Don’t think he can,” she said, cheerfully. “What did you have for dinner?”
I giggled in spite of myself. “Veal. It was incredible.”
“Thought you’d like him. Do you want anything else tonight?”
It was eleven-thirty, and I had On Death and Dying at eleven in the morning. “I don’t think so, Peach, but I’ll work tomorrow night.”
“Okay, you got it, honey. Sleep tight.”
I did. I had enough dinners to last me for the next two nights, a sixty-dollar tip, and I hadn’t even taken off all my clothes. This, I thought as I slipped between my sheets with Scuzzy kneading the pillow beside me, is easy. Nothing to it. Amazing that more women don’t do it. I’m carrying it off without a problem.
Well, anybody can be wrong.
In the end, I took a few nights off after that. Stefano had been fun, most of my calls had been okay, but the experience with the guy in Back Bay had shaken me up more than I liked to admit.
So instead of working I sat in my apartment, sipped red wine, and wondered if I hadn’t made a mistake, after all. Maybe the world of prostitution was, in fact, as terrible as it had been portrayed in movies, in books. Maybe it would end up making me feel bad about myself. Maybe I needed to decide if the Stefanos made up for the Barrys.
What