The Escort

Monologue by Charlie Price

Music:

Kodaly: Sonata for Solo Cello, Mv. II

Content Warning:

Strong sex references

Transcript

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The Escort

MALE VOICE: I wrote this story several years ago. I am a woman and the “I” in this story is also a woman. The woman in the story is not me. Not in any literal sense. The woman in the story is an escort, she works for an escort agency. She has sex with men, and occasionally couples, for money. Ninety pounds for a forty-five minute outcall. I have never done any of these things. This story is being read aloud by a friend of mine because I am shy. I am shy about being confused with this woman, about one first person being mistaken for another. Hearing a woman’s words in a man’s voice may be an unusual experience for you. Many of you listening may have never had such an experience before. In a different context, it could complicate matters. In this case, I think it simplifies things. It’s certainly a great help to me. And, what’s more, in a strange way, I actually think that the voice of my writing is male. When I listen to it, it’s a man’s voice I hear, uttering the words. A cello, rather than a violin. Alright. That’s the preamble complete. Now, the story, the heart of the matter:

The date and time aren’t important. It was towards the end of the year and, as you would expect, it was evening. It was quite deep into the evening, I think. At any rate, I think if I hadn’t arrived early to this particular appointment, I wouldn’t have had quite the experience that I did.

The address was in a dull, tranquil, pleasant sort of neighbourhood. I found it without difficulty. I didn’t park in the driveway because he’d advised me against it. I parked on the street, where space allowed, and phoned the client. He picked up and I spoke to him, telling him that I was about twenty minutes early. I asked him if he wanted me to wait until the time we’d agreed or if he was happy for me to come in right away, twenty or so minutes early as I was. Lateness is unwise in this line of work. Punctuality is desired and desirable; to a lesser extent, earliness too. Lateness can agitate a man who’s preparing to perform sexually. You can suddenly find yourself part of a situation that’s unpleasant when it really never needed to be. People can be impatient and rude in a way that’s wholly unnecessary but, in any case, it’s a risk that isn’t worth taking. So I always play it very safe, I always arrive early. Plus, me and my girlfriend, Harriet, were going to party later that night and this guy was my last client. So, I was probably a little eager to finish work for the day.

Anyway, he spoke in quite a friendly way. He sounded quite posh to me, a little bit stiff. He didn’t sound like someone who was very good at talking to women. He sounded anxious and he was readily apologetic when he didn’t need to be. This charmed me, in a way, in a way it was…encouraging. He seemed quite circumspect.   

By the same token, I did feel a little bit worried about the situation I was potentially walking into. Oh, there was no menace, no menace at all. No ick, no fear. It was simply that he didn’t sound terribly confident, like it had taken him a lot of courage and resolve to book me, and I got the feeling that the experience was going to be a bit emotionally overwhelming for him.

Obviously, there’s pity involved in these sort of encounters, there’s compassion, there’s a genuine desire to help the person achieve whatever it is they want. But it can be quite draining as well. A client who’s nasty or misogynistic or bullying or callous is plainly the worst sort of client there is. But a client who’s inexperienced, timid, extra nervous…that has a cost as well. Some sex workers are really suited to playing that sort of role, something more therapeutic. Me, I’m just your boing, bog-standard shag. I like to get it over with reasonably quickly, without incident. The ideal client for me is clean, quite polite, fairly efficient, semi-attractive, and not overly nervous or emotional. Naturally, I suspected that this particular encounter wasn’t going to be that.

Anyway, whatever the specifics, I had a job to do. He said that he didn’t like the idea of me sitting in the car for twenty minutes. I’m not quite ready, he said, but come in- it’s no problem. He sounded like quite a sweet person. Youngish, not too young. I tend not to visit clients under the age of twenty-two, twenty-three. I find a certain kind of male youthfulness a real turn-off, I mean to such an extent that I can’t actually do my job properly. It’s a personal thing. I’ve nothing against young men, they’re normally very well behaved. It’s just horses for courses, to each their own. I mean, Harriet, for example, really loves younger men. The younger the better. She’s drawn to that man-boy thing, fresh-facedness. I am not. I prefer men to have a few lines, a bit of wear and tear. Deep eyes.

He’d asked me not to dress too sexily. When we first spoke and this topic came up, there was a moment when I could hear that he was about to say “…like a whore. Please don’t come dressed like a whore.” But he didn’t say it. The long pause he took produced a different, couther form of words. I find that sweet. I like men who choose their words carefully around women. Circumspection. There’s something ugly about men who act and speak without a filter. Why should we be the ones who have to absorb that sort of thing, who have to receive uncensored thoughts, unfiltered sentiments? Anyway, I was faithful, as far as possible to my client’s wishes, as I always am. In terms of garments and shoe-wear, I tried to present myself as, simply, a woman. A woman with some awareness of her attractiveness, of her womanly beauty, but for whom sex was almost an afterthought. I had tried to dress as though I were going out for a pleasurable evening, an evening within which sexual intercourse was possible but not certain. I walked down the path, the path that led up the doorway of the client’s address. There were owls hooting. Then, I thought it was a single owl. Now, I realise that it was two. A call and response between the male and the female. Brambles nipped my legs, through my tights. My footsteps were loud on the gravel. I looked for a doorbell. There wasn’t one. But the door was already open before I’d had the chance to knock, or flap the letterbox. 

I don’t want to go into specifics about appearances. I never do anyone’s appearance the justice it deserves with words alone. He was fine. Where attractiveness was concerned, he was fine. No more, no less. He was very clean and very polite. He had on a scent which was quite pleasant.   

What, then, made this such a memorable encounter?

Well, for starters, it was the ironing board. He was wearing a black collared shirt and it was the shirt he had just been ironing. It was without a single wrinkle and still warm to the touch. Something about this very small detail has stayed with me ever since. It had to do with seeing behind the scenes. I had always thought of myself as the performer. I realised then that the clients, not all but some, actually put quite a lot of effort into the short time we spend together. 

He put away the ironing board. Collapsing it was quite an awkward procedure. There was an obvious struggle but he soon got the better of it and carried it off to a storage cupboard. The iron was resting on what he eventually informed me was a Hammond organ, the base facing towards the wall. Other than that the place was immaculate. Turkish carpet, some nice prints on the off-white wall.

He offered me a drink and I accepted, though I knew I would only take tiny sips. But- before any further progression of proceedings- I made sure that the business was taken care of. 

We each had red wine and talked for a bit, very generally. I could tell he was really nervous and already aroused. The effort to conceal all this was not lost on me, and it gave to his manner a mild insanity.  

The conversation dried up unexpectedly. It was awkward and he immediately looked very panicked.

So, I put down my glass of wine and I began soothing him. Not because I felt especially inclined to do so but because, strategically, it made sense to take off of him some of the pressure he was clearly feeling, pressure to be aimable and, in his own mind, un-johnish I suppose. Thank god he didn’t say something like “I’m not the sort of man who does this.” As a sex worker, it’s always an irritating thing to hear. If you do it once then you’re the sort of man who “does this”, every client I’ve ever had is the sort of man who “does this”. And that’s fine. There’s just something really galling about a client acting like he’s a unique or special case. Invariably he has a lot more in common with many of my other clients than he realises.

At any rate, I touched his knee and I leaned in. He wasn’t at all responsive, he was clueless and corpse-like, I had to work quite hard to break down his defences and coax any kind of a reaction out of him. I kissed him on the cheeks and then lightly on the mouth. Some general foreplay followed. I unbuttoned his shirt, ran my hands down his chest. I could see his erection under his trousers, it was poking determinedly up, pressing its point into the lining. But he was still just sitting there. His penis was rock solid and he was trembling a great deal. His heart was going like mad. I began to really notice his heart, its beating, its going. In a way, his heartbeat was all the assurance I needed that my efforts were appreciated. He was acting lifelessly but, of course, he was absolutely full of life and I had all the confirmation of this I needed, feeling and listening to the throb of that tiny thunder.

“Can you talk to me?” he said.

“Sure. What do you want me to say?”

He looked perplexed when I said that. There was a desperation in his eyes, a look as if to say: Isn’t it obvious? 

And, in truth, it was.

Clearly it was words he wanted more than touch. And I gave him the kindest, the tenderest, the most caressive words I could. It’s okay, it’s alright, don’t be nervous, you’re doing great, you’re okay, it’s alright.

That was what he wanted, I think. All he wanted. Someone to tell him that “it”- whatever “it” was- was going to be alright.

He was breathing heavily. In his own mind, in his own masturbatory vision of what the encounter was going to be, he was ready to fuck me, he was desperately horny and needed release and that was only going to come of a frantic, carnal effort. I did briefly fear that that was what was going to happen. That the stillness was a prelude, a preamble, to abrupt sexual fervour. But, for whatever reason, he just didn’t have it in him to do that to me. I stood up and began to dance, nothing more than a very unimaginative, very unprovocative striptease. 

And then, utterly without warning, he took out his erect penis, masturbated with considerable but very brief fury, and came. It took all of ten, twelve seconds. There was a lot of semen and he cried out in a way that obviously wasn’t performed so it probably felt pretty good. He seemed a bit shocked by the volume, as though he had never ejaculated  that much in his life. It was messy and a bit…sordid. There was nothing sexy about it. I didn’t quite know what to do. Certainly I didn’t feel particularly included and there was quite a bit of time left. He allowed himself a few moments to catch his breath. He flushed red. His breathlessness subsided. He asked me if I would get a roll of loo-roll from the kitchen. I obliged, pulling my dress back up. I brought it to him and he thanked me. He wiped all his semen up, mopped it all up.

Just then, really suddenly, I heard fast footsteps descending the stairs. My client had only just put away his penis when a younger male entered the room. He didn’t enter calmly, he ran into the door, pushing it open, and then stood in the centre of the living room, panting, staring.

He seemed quite interested in me but, in general, quite cross. I greeted him, rather awkwardly. He didn’t say anything. His mouth was a little lopsided. He was freckled, a bit ugly really.    

What was surprising was the way my client didn’t react with any sort of embarrassment or shame. He got up quite calmly and placed a hand on the back of the one who had just run downstairs. Though I couldn’t understand what was being said, I could make out murmurs of consolation and assurance in the voice of my client as they climbed the stairs together.

I waited downstairs, not knowing quite what to do. The owl continued to hoot, forlornly haunting the still night. It was just the male though. Even then, before I knew that the twit-twoo is a call and response between owls of both sexes, I intuited a kind of isolation, a kind of fruitlessness. I had some more wine I think. It wasn’t terribly good. He had drunk his own glass of wine with immense satisfaction, as though he were an appreciative connoisseur and the wine excellent and expensive. It was just your bog-standard, affordable Jacob’s Creek, the stuff sold in most Co-ops.

The client reappeared. He apologised for the disturbance. He said that his brother had sensed there was somebody else in the house and had got very agitated. He added, with a strange smile, that, with regard to our session, he’d not gone about it very well. He said that he felt like he’d made a mess of things and that he’d like to be alone and it was probably best if I went.

I agreed and made ready to leave. I asked him about the Hammond organ. I asked him if his brother was alright. He said that he was. I had more questions beyond that but I didn’t ask them. It was self-evident that the brother was quite severely disabled and my client had been his rather overwrought carer. It was moving, the small scene of interaction between them that I had witnessed. They were at ease with one another, they shared a language. His way of being with his brother was the way I had tried to be with him. Maybe he was the more skilled in this case. Even the way my client had reacted, calmly, with no hecticness or mortification when the brother appeared was…meaningful. He’d arranged the whole thing knowing that there would most likely be some kind of interruption. He wasn’t ashamed. His brother had his needs and he had his own. 

I wasn’t planning to do this- indeed it surprises me even now. But, at the last possible moment, I gave him back all the money, all ninety pounds of it. He was surprised and quite moved but he wouldn’t accept it. He was surprisingly forceful in his refusal. It was mine, I had earned it. Clearly, he thought that what I’d had to endure was fairly disgusting. And even though our time together was only brief, ninety pounds was perfectly appropriate remuneration for my trouble. 

There was something condescending in my being charitable. I wince even now, I…I regret it. It was an emasculating, humiliating thing to do, to discriminate, to treat him differently. I had felt urged, by something quite profound in me, to return the money. My heart ached and to accept nothing for my slight services remedied this ache a little. But in my head, I always knew it wasn’t the right approach.  

Honestly, it was a little disgusting, what had occurred, as it always is. It is always a little disgusting. But, as well as that, I witnessed other things in that house that were the furthest thing from disgusting. I hardly need to tell you that. You don’t need much convincing. It’s clear from my report. But I always get a lump in my throat when I recall it. Not the scene as a whole, but little snapshots. The ironing board. The black shirt, smooth and hot to the touch. The Hammond organ. The owls. The brambles. The glass of inexpensive wine. The brother. The stairs. That beating heart. They all have a way of being unbearable, of being beautiful in spite of everything.         

It was only a few minutes past our scheduled start, it was as though I had created time. I got to my car and, for a moment, I felt a mood of self-destruction pervade me, a hunger for some sort of depravity. But that soon subsided. I had created time that didn’t exist. I had to be circumspect. I had to use it for the right purpose. So, I called Harriet and called off our plans. I said I was sick and that she should go ahead without me. She was audibly disappointed and it wasn’t that I didn’t care that I was lying to her and letting her down, it was just that I had other things on my mind, so many other things, and I really needed to be alone that night.

I sat on my bed and thought about all sorts of things. 

You see, I did feel robbed. Never mind the absence of love, if we’d fucked, if there’d been coitus- whatever it is I do, it’s not fucking, that has to involve some kind of mutual passion- masturbation in the vagina. If something like that had happened, something a bit more symbiotic in its own unbeautiful way, I’d have felt better about the whole encounter. What had happened in this case- though not exceptionally rare- left me feeling naked and ashamed and exposed. And troubled. It has a way of drawing attention away from things that are more important, sexual intercourse. It has a way of distracting us from profound hurts. In that encounter, all that was there was inadequacy and discomfort and embarrassment. There was some satiation, in miniature, for him. But for me, as far as my role goes, I was unable to bring anything of substance to that house, to the person who had asked me to come, to the encounter we had set up together for our different purposes. Being a sex worker, it was sex that I came with, and apart from the money there is a faith that sex is good, that it’s good to put it about and get paid for doing so. Detached, transactional, loveless sex. But it’s still sex, it’s sex all the same, in all its slipperiness and biology and glib excitement and surface enthusiasm and earnest fun. I’ve never been ashamed of sex being the thing I trade in.

But the truth is that it probably does- and has done- more for me than it has for other people, for the sort of person who purchases what I sell.

I remember not feeling very good about myself for quite a while, feeling, temporarily, that I’d much rather sell something else, something better, something more helpful. 

But then again: maybe it’s enough just knowing that I have a conscience about it, that there are so many people of conscience in this world, people of such considerable conscience. So so many people. So many worried, anxious, overwhelmed, gentle people.

SILENCE

And there’s nothing more we’d like to say.