Calling Out (9 page)

“That's why the streets are so wide here,” I say, pointing
to the church, “so the oxcarts carrying the granite to build
the steeples could turn around.”

“Did Ralf tell you that?”

I laugh.

“It really does look like Disneyland,” she says.

One of the horse-drawn tour carriages pulls out into
our lane and I slam on the brakes, acutely sensitive to
keeping everything in control in my current state.

“We should do that some time before Christmas,”
Ember says, pointing to the carriage. “Just you and me.
It'll be sad and fun.”

“And cold,” I say.

“Maybe when it gets all snowy.”

“Yeah,” I say, “okay.”

Little America is a sprawling hotel complex that gives
off an air of middle-class suburbia despite its location
downtown. There are small patches of lawn around the
faux colonial buildings. Mormons like to stay here when
they come to pay tribute to the founding fathers. We send
a lot of girls here.

After a few turns around the parking lot, we find
number 206, one of the apartmentlike low brick units far
from the cheery main reception. Ember turns off the radio.

“My lipstick okay?” she asks, rubbing her nose.

I nod.

“Let's get this party started,” she says as she opens the
door.

In the shadowy light, Ember is small, fluttery, and fast,
like an erratic bird heading straight for a window it can't
see.Up the outside stairs, she makes her way along the corridor and stops in front of 206. Without hesitation, she
thrusts her hip out and knocks with rapid-fire certainty.

When she slips inside the room, I ungrip the steering
wheel. I pick at my dry cuticles and look to the hotel room
door again and again. In a messy pile down by her floor
mat are the papers Ember has amassed in the process of
officially becoming an escort. On the top, with a footprint
bisecting it, is the city ordinance list.

O
RDINANCE
5.61.040 D
EFINITIONS

“Escort” means any person who, for pecuniary
compensation, dates, socializes, visits, consorts
with or accompanies or offers to date, consort,
socialize, visit, or accompany another or others to
or about social affairs, entertainment, or places of
amusement, or within any place or public or private resort or any business or commercial establishment or any private quarters.

O
RDINANCE
5.61.085A

A licensed outcall employee may appear in a state
of nudity before a customer or patron providing
a written contract for such appearance was
entered into between the customer or patron and
the employee and signed at least twenty-four
hours before the scheduled nude appearance.

Even Mohammed is willing to let us slide on the
second one. His lawyer has advised us that stapling a backdated “Nudity Notice” to a client sheet will do the job.

Ember has drawn daisies and irises down the margin of Mohammed's “Escort Training
Manuel.”

6. You should dress appropriately to maximize your
income. It is suggested that if you smoke, you should
wash your hands and chew gum before the appointment. Remember, too, that clients may not appreciate
foul language.
 

I click off the overhead light; I'm on edge about
Ember and by extension uncertain about what I am
doing. A middle-aged man in a Russian fur hat stops on
the sidewalk in front of my windshield. Although it is
dark and I am still, he notices my eyes reflecting the lamplight. We hold a gaze and something of a leer jags at one
corner of his mouth until his plump wife scampers up
beside him and they walk off toward the dining room.

“Fuck you,” I say, once he's safely gone. My voice
sounds foreign and meek in the close car.

I put the radio on continual scan and let the song
snippets and half-words of ads and DJs alight on my brain
and then dissipate. With a half hour to go I leave the toasty
haven of the car for the pay phone at the end of the lot.

“Hello?”

“Did I tell you Ford was staying with me?”

McCallister has always been a little jealous of Ford—
the way he stepped outside urban life to forge his own sort
of macho path, his hairline, the fact that he knew me first.
He's afraid I think Ford is cooler than he is.

“Really. For how long?”

“For a few more weeks. His girlfriend is here too,” I
can feel his relief at the mention of her. “I'm waiting for
her in a hotel parking lot. She's on her first escort date.”

“Jesus,” McCallister says. “Is it one of those fleabag
places?”

“No. It's mostly Mormon.”

“They must have beds as wide as football fields.”
“Funny,” I say.

“Maria's meeting me in a couple of minutes. Dinner
with her parents.”

“Lucky you,” I say.

“What did you want, anyway?” he asks. “You never
call me.”

“I don't know. I was bored, I guess. Did you know it's
illegal for an escort to spank a client if he is in his underwear, but if he's nude, it's legal?”

I hear a woman's voice.

“Well, thanks for calling,” McCallister says in a business tone.

I sigh and call him an asshole, but only after I've hung
up.

Back inside the car, I turn the heat to high, lean my
seat back and feel my skin warm down to my toes. I had
told myself that my contact with McCallister wasn't
holding me back as long as I was never the one who
called. In my disappointment with my weakness, I tear at
a hangnail with my teeth until I taste blood.

From the back window of the car, the moon hangs large
and yellow. I try to believe that I am floating in the present
but my mind tumbles and spins, bumping up against the
fear of what I am supposed to do next. I have been in Utah
for a half year. I no longer have the excuse that I'm still getting settled. The little money I came with is gone. Part of me
wants to be in room 206 with Ember. Surely there wouldn't
be much else to think about than the task at hand.

“It wasn't that big a deal,” Ember says. “Really. I don't
get what all the fuss is about. I just made a hundred dollars for an hour.”

A piece of Ember's hair is caught on her lip and she
swats it away as if it were a dogged fly. She punches in the
lighter on the dashboard and digs around her purse.

“Here,” I say, handing her a cigarette.

“Thanks,” she says. She lights it, closes her eyes, and
takes a deep drag. “Much better.”

I go first to McDonald's to get Ember a caramel
sundae, then on to Premier, where I wait in the car while
she settles up. I'm jittery. I smoke without really wanting
to. I tune the radio to
Car Talk
on NPR; I yearn for such a
simple sequence of cause, effect, solution.

Ember is back a minute later with an impishness
restored to her smile.

“So, Jane,” she says, counting out her money.

“Yeah?”

“What do you want to know?”

I turn the car out of the alley onto Second South.

“Tell me everything,” I say.

I drive west out of downtown, over the train tracks,
and out past the airport where the lights become sparse
along the south edge of the Great Salt Lake. We can smell
it even in the cold with the windows up, even though we
can't see it. The snow-topped Wasatch Mountains to the
east have a lunar glow. I turn in at Saltair; its washed-out,
primary-colored onion domes are dream shapes against
the clear night sky. This used to be a place where Mormons would come for family fun, “the Coney Island of the
West.” Thousands danced in the pavilion. There was even
a roller coaster. Now it houses a gift shop selling saltwater
taffy and salt licks in the shape of Utah, and outdated
arcade games, and occasionally it hosts the concert of a
has-been performer. But in winter it's sealed up, its windows covered with padlocked boards. I park with the
headlights on the choppy lake water that laps at the saltencrusted rocky shore. The forceful wind gently rocks the
car. I turn off the engine and wait for Ember to talk.

“He had a vague resemblance to Tom Hanks,” Ember
says. “If Tom Hanks were short and puffy and bald on the
top. He shook my hand and said, ‘Shena?' I laughed when
he said it, and then I felt bad because he blushed.”

I have the anticipatory pang in my stomach, like the
moment after ingesting a drug or stepping into a pair of
expensive shoes. Ember leans her seat back and puts her
feet against the glove compartment.

“He had a fan of twenties already on the table next to
the bed, which he knew to give me at the beginning. It's hard
to tell if he calls escorts a lot. He wasn't relaxed but he wasn't
unfamiliar with it all, if that makes any sense. ‘So Tony,' I
said, ‘why don't you make yourself comfortable?' Like they
say in the movies. He sat on the edge of the bed, took off his
shoes, then looked at me to make the next move.”
“Did you talk to him?”

“I asked him things like ‘Are you from Salt Lake?' and
he said no but I could tell he was lying. Probably married.
‘What do you do?' Software salesman. He wasn't exactly
effusive but he was totally polite. He asked my permission
for everything. I made all my actions very slow and deliberate to eat up as much time as possible. Scarf
unwrapped. Coat off. I sat next to him on the bed and
leaned over him to find an R&B station on the clock
radio. I helped him unbutton his shirt. He liked that.”

“Were all the lights on?”

“At that point I made a production out of slow
dancing around the room, letting my hair down, turning
off some of the lights, shaking my ass for him, taking off
my shoes, putting my foot up on the table to take off my
stockings one leg at a time. I felt his eyes on me always but
I liked it. It wasn't that icky. He seemed harmless.”

“Was he naked yet?”

“No. Down to boxers. But not touching himself or
anything. He asked me how old I was, how long I'd been
an escort.”

“What'd you say?”

“Twenty-three. One week.”

“He must have been psyched.”

“He pulled back the bedspread and leaned against the
pillows. I made a lot of eye contact. After I pulled my shirt
over my head I tossed it at him. I tried to make two minutes go by before the skirt came off but time is so damn
slow when you want it to go fast.”

“What did you do when commercials came on the
radio?”

“I asked him what he wanted me to do.”

“And?”

“‘Just keep doing what you're doing, baby' he said,
‘Show me your ass.' He said that a lot. So I was down to
bra and undies and I danced like the girls did at American
Bush. Lots of leaning over in various directions, grinding,
moving my hands all over. Then he asked if I was cold,
which I was, so he said I should join him on the bed.”

“Weren't you scared?”

“I mean, yeah, kind of. I gave him sort of a lap
dance—he had the covers pulled up—and let him touch
me some. He was gentle. His hands were warm and
smooth.”

“Bra on or off?”

“On. But I let him take it off.”

Ember is making lines of white powder on a Johnny
Cash CD case.

“I think the key is going to be pity,” she says. “I felt
sorry for this guy.”

“Did you kiss him?”

“Yeah, but no tongue. He smelled like Old Spice. Like
my dad. We rolled around the bed, both with underwear
on.”

“Did he try stuff?”

“Not really. He rubbed his boner against my leg but
that was okay. He licked my boobs. He kept saying, ‘Shena,
you're so pretty.' But he didn't ask for a blow job or sex or
anything.”

“How much time was left?”

“There were about five minutes before the call so I
pulled away and got fully naked. I lay on my back and
showed him my cootch. He jacked off, then he whimpered
like a little boy.”

There is so much distance in Ember's retelling, I feel
like I'm watching from the back row of the balcony section. I can't get at it, whatever it is.

She snorts cocaine with one of her newly acquired
bills.

“Wow, I'm a cliché,” she says. She laughs as she wipes
the powder from her nostril.

“So then what?” I ask.

“Kendra called. He didn't want to extend. I got
dressed, he thanked me, kissed me on the cheek, and gave
me fifty bucks extra.”

Headlights, one of them dim, approach in the
rearview. A beat-up van drives into the parking lot, but
when it sees our car, it drives back out onto the frontage
road.

“Maybe we should go see what Ford is up to,” Ember
says.

“What are you going to tell him?”

“Just about nothing,” she says.

On the way to town, I stop at AM/PM for more cigarettes and then the drive-through at Arctic Circle.

“Do you have any siblings?” Ember asks, between
fries.

“A sister. She's older. We're not that close. She's a real
estate agent and lives outside of Chicago with her lawyer
husband. She thinks I'm having some sort of third-life
crisis. Which I may well be.”

By the time I was ten and my sister was fifteen, she
had moved on from me, and my clamoring for her attention only made her retreat more. She has always yearned
for structure—even as a child she made a diagram of her
wedding—and she planned her life accordingly. I, on the
other hand, wanted something or someone to lead me in
the other direction. I would say we are amicably estranged,
confused by each other but not willing to make the effort
to get past it. I called her when McCallister and I broke up,
but she said she never could understand why I had liked
him in the first place.