Though I’ve never been a romantic, never fantasized about weddings or marriages or having children, I’ve realized I want one man to love me behind everything else. I want his love to be my scenery while I do whatever I want on the stage. I suppose this is what a father is supposed to do, but mine can’t, or I wouldn’t ask him to now. There were moments in my childhood when he managed but ultimately I pushed it away. His love was poor so I thought I’d rather not have it at all. Let the stage be empty until something better fills the background. I guess that’s too much to ask from most people. I’ve been told it’s too hard. What would I be like if I were an easy person to love? Hardly myself: easy to become infatuated with, impossible to partner.

“Do you think you’ll ever turn yourself over to one man?” a  client once asked.
I laughed. “Turn myself over,” I said. “Like he’s a sheriff.”
He told me it was the defining question of his own life, whether he could subvert the unsatisfied aspects of himself, could quiet or erase them in order to please another. He acted as though I might not know he was married, so I played along. Finally he admitted that once during a romantic dinner at a vacation spot, his wife told him, I had a dream that you were paying for sex. And he leaned across the table and said, at least I was buying something worth paying for.
“She doesn’t realize that the ooey-gooey stuff isn’t enough for me,” he said, meaning the emotional intimacy or rather the illusion of it, the platonic massages, the flattery he dispenses so relentlessly. (“You’ve ruined me, you know. I can’t see anyone else anymore, because they’re not you.”) “But, it’s like no, Honey. I need my cock sucked. And I need my cocked sucked like Charlotte sucks my cock.” I smirked. Moments earlier I’d knelt before him and he drew my head back using my hair as a handle, pulling my face perfectly parallel to catch all of his come. “Oh, baby,” he gasped the first time I ever put my mouth on him, eventually yanking me away by the ponytail in his fist to kiss me. “I love the way you take care of me.”

My most generous client is an astoundingly tall man who I first met while I was high, or at least I was at the point where all the symptoms of feeling high bled into the symptoms of having been up for a long time without sleeping or eating. I was in a good mood and probably even more expressive than usual, and when after less than two hours he left the suite he’d reserved for us, I knew not to take it personally. Occasionally they have to be businesslike about sex, practical, either because that’s their dominant mode and it’s too hard to shake or because they’re making an effort to keep the encounter elemental. It’s not that he’s spent more on me than any other person but that he leaves exorbitant amounts given that we won’t be together for very long. It seems all he usually wants to do is go down on me and fill me with his massive fingers.
I saw him again in another city, and then again, and sometimes it doesn’t take much for me to feel attached. Sometimes a tenderness can bloom even more readily without the long dinners and the shows. When I saw him most recently there was something unusually warm in how he treated me. We hugged goodbye for a long breath while the sun was setting. I had the impression that we meant something to each other and it was terrible to be left by myself. I sat on the bed in the robe pouching around me like a deflated gown, my iPod still playing on the room’s stereo system. Expansive loneliness seeped out to fill the corners of the room. I could barely move. I felt sad enough to shatter.
It could be that I’m so good I even trick myself. I thought of how other girls I know sometimes say they can’t stand to think of any part of the man’s genitals touching their own, and they try to keep his strokes shallow so he doesn’t press in past the rim of the condom. That never even occurs to me. I always go for depth. I always touch their faces or at least their necks’ smooth slope to the base of the skull. I lay my head on their chests uninvited.

“I wish we’d met under different circumstances,” one client said recently. “Not because the circumstances under which we met are wrong. But because I’d like to know you personally.” It was preoccupying him. It was all he could talk about while we laid together, how he wanted to be my friend. I didn’t ask him why—I barely spoke at all—but he told me.
“I think you’re special. I think you’re incredibly intelligent. You might even be frighteningly brilliant.”
I laughed. “You have no evidence of that.”
“I know X,” he said. “I know Y.” I just shook my head.
“I’d like to go out to dinner with you and have you talk. Just talk.” He stared into my eyes and I remember his next words exactly. “It would be a blessing to listen to you.”

When we’d met for the first time in a different city, he was describing his day without saying exactly where he’d been, but it was obvious, so I made a casual mention of what the company’s space is known for, and he admitted that was where he’d been.
“They have so much money there,” He said. “Silly money—so much money that they don’t know what to do with it all. And do you know what all of them want?”
I smiled because of course I knew. “More money.”
“More money,” he whispered.
Gradually I’ve come to see how often good people can be behind bad things. Once I saw a client just hours before he was to speak at Pat Robertson’s university. And he was nice. He wrote me an email afterwards calling me an angel, enchanting. It’s so easy to be angry with broad strokes. It’s too easy to hate people because of how they look on paper but then you meet them and they’re not so bad. The truth is not most of us are not trying as hard as we could. And maybe most of us don’t deserve kindness or forgiveness but what other options are there.

I had a convoluted dream involving a man who was supposed to be my father but who wasn’t my father. He was getting a divorce and I said, “I’m sorry,” and I meant it; I felt personally responsible for his sadness. There was a car crash in a rocky desert and my not-aunt and possibly my real mother were there. One was injured and childlike and I took her hand. At our feet a long path wound down to a valley full of people at picnic tables alongside a massive home. “Torment,” one of the women said. “Torme?” the other asked, as though that were the name of a place. “You want to go to Torme?” But I understood where she wanted to go and we started down together the path together. As we approached, I was suddenly suffused with the most complete love I’ve ever felt in my life. A melody much like “The Very Thought of You” was playing slowly, languorously. Time moved like molasses. I knew the people we approached were not all my friends. Some of them didn’t know me, some of them didn’t like me, but this overwhelming love existed anyway. I woke up and my eyes were full of tears. I don’t know how it could have ended any other way.

“I am experiencing regret,” he texted me. And he called, but I didn’t answer. He sent me an email. (“What was it? I went home and I had everything ready and I really wanted to be with you.”) It occurred to me that maybe he knew who I was—I mean he knew about this site. He had that way about him, a writer’s way: sincere, awkward, caught up in his own scattered brain. I wanted the year to be over. I agreed to meet him again and it was horrible. The restaurant was crowded, which was a surprise.
“Do you have the envelope?” I asked him, when I started to sense the rapid slide downhill. I never have to ask that.
“It’s a bank envelope,” he said.
“Ok, well, you can still slide it over to me.” Not giving a fuck. Angry. I have an anger in me. It’s rare that I let it come out around clients.
“It’s XXXX dollars,” he said. I just kept looking at him. “Do you want it?”
I flashed my eyes at him. Who cared. Let him see my greed. “Yes.”
“Then are you going to come back with me?” He whisper-hissed, leaning towards me.
“No,” I said. “Not today.”
“But maybe later?”
“I’ll think about it…” Meaning no.
We’d been together for ten minutes and he said he was going to leave. I said he should do whatever makes him comfortable. He said I wasn’t being open to him. We fought about what had gone wrong, misunderstanding each other.
Finally I couldn’t help it, I started thinking about the table of tourists next to us, and how obvious our conversation was, how obvious our arrangement. I started smiling and he thought it was for something he’d said.
“That’s the first smile you’ve ever given me,” he said.
“That’s not true,” I said. “I was really trying yesterday.”
“You’re a hard woman,” he said. “A hard fucking woman. I won’t lie. It’s kind of hot.” We started smiling at each other, laughing a little at ourselves.
“I’ll give you XXXX to come back to my place right now for one hour,” he said.

And his house was just like it would be, of course—wood paneling, an old family home. His family’s old home. Great cold spaces because no one but him had been inside for some time. Full of emptiness. It felt almost abandoned, like a mausoleum holding the bedroom of a friend from my adolescence.
I took off my underwear and tights in the bathroom and stood before him on the rust colored carpet. We kissed. I got wet. I usually get wet with a first time. But this was very wet. He felt me with his fingers and laid me down on his bed. I clung to him. “I don’t want to come,” he said. “Don’t,” I said, clinging like a barnacle, like a monkey to its mother. I didn’t want either of us to come. I wanted it to last and last. He repositioned me with pillows underneath. He pressed my face flat to the side with his palm full on my cheek. He wrapped his arms completely around me while I lay on my stomach, saying things I didn’t hear into my hair. It was so good. Luminous. Inexplicable. One thick gold smear. His stomach was firm with give, full but lean. I noticed his body when he got up to adjust the floor heater. Unintentional. Just right. At one point he’d tried to distract himself, to stall by talking to me while inside me. “When was the last time you cried?” was one of his questions.
I didn’t want to admit it had been the day before, so I said, “recently.”

We saw each other the following week. It was much like it had been before but not as good. That’s predictable. It’s too hard to recreate a very good first time on the second time though it might be better than the first by the fourth or fifth. Still, I was incredibly wet and I still wanted it to last, and when he came I wanted him to fuck me a second time—I’d never come with him, I was saving it like it was a battery that needed to be charged more, and I’d been so close many times—but he didn’t, maybe to try to prove some point about what he wanted me there for. I said something about the ladies hanging on his wall. They were funny rectangular pieces of porcelain with ghostly women painted on them, each about the size of a TV remote. He told me about all the time he’d spent writing in that corner, and how he remembered the light in the room, and some of the songs he listened to, and those ladies. The first time we were together he accidentally put the ancient clock radio on a station I soon realized was Christian rock. “What’s your favorite Elton John song?” he asked me in his car.

The second time, when he was driving me to the metro, he said something to me and there was a pause, and I asked him about his truck.
“You don’t have to talk,” he said. ” I like your silences.”

I saw someone else later that night, someone very nice, with whom I have much in common. He was candid and engaging. I think he almost cried for a moment, but it’s hard to tell with men. I think their faces slip towards tears sometimes without them even realizing. I laughed at dinner when a snap pea fell from my chopsticks before it could reach my mouth.
“I’m not watching you eat,” he said, interrupting himself.
“That’s too bad,” I said. “Because I’m making it interesting.”
Later he told me he wanted to make sure I enjoyed myself, that that was more important than anything else and I knew it was true, for him. I felt so guilty then about this cruel thought I’d had about his wife. When googling him I’d learned something personal about her, something very personal that she’d made very public and I thought, “no wonder he wants to see prostitutes” and that was so heartless. Maybe it was true, but still so mean. There’s no reason to lay a relationship bare like that, even in your own head, especially not based on skeletal knowledge, especially not when it’s about people you don’t love. I felt ashamed.
It seemed to me he’d had too much to drink. The sex wasn’t very good, and I thought about texting the writer and telling him I wanted to come over. It felt unfinished between us—the moment, the sex, something. And I knew he would let me come over after midnight, not because I have some power over him but because we have power over each other or rather there’s a power acting on both of us that we can be spun up in. I’m not trying to deny responsibility. I’m actually more careful with someone when I can tell it could be out of our control. If you’ve felt it before, you know. There’s no right word. It’s a link that required no forging. It’s like finding a worn path in woods no one has walked. It can only be uncovered. It is already there.
And the un-ended quality was what defined it. So I didn’t send him a message.

Someone wrote me an email a long time ago that I remembered recently while trying to catch up on responses. I didn’t read it again because it was nasty, but from what I remember he accused me of contributing to or exploiting the “sex addiction” of my clients. I was bothered in two ways. Firstly, by its sheer wrongness. On behalf of my clients, who are not addicts, I was offended. I kept thinking of one of my regulars who ejaculated against the side of a bed while going down on me for the first time. I thought about the man who’d not had sex for years. Does it make you an addict to want to have sex once a month? Once a week? Some of them are single, and some tell me they can’t see me once they start dating someone. Many of these men are married and their wives refused their advances until now they don’t even try, which is sad.
Sometimes I’m doing the wives a favor—trust me. I don’t often write about those because I don’t want to think about it, because there’s nothing worth lingering on. I don’t write about the man who doesn’t even think that lips are for kissing, who only holds his lips out of the way so his terrible tongue can move against mine like a fish dying on a dock. I don’t need to tell you that after he came in my mouth I couldn’t stop gagging, coughing in the bathroom with the water running, trying to hide my dry heaves. None of my usual tricks—I don’t breathe through my nose because it makes the smell worse, I try not to think about it at all, to steer my mind completely away from the semen and my own throat—worked. I dragged a wash cloth over my tongue like that would help. And then we said goodbye and he went back to his human rights work. You can’t make this stuff up, or at least I couldn’t.

Secondly, I have a problem with meanness, smugness, lots of things that most of us are re-occuringly guilty of, and I don’t appreciate having them forced upon me by someone I don’t know. If they know me, I can forgive them. Even in high school I said that if a man were ever to hit me, I would probably have had it coming. I’m always testing men in my personal life, baring my teeth. I’m always giving them a taste of the worst of me. With men more so than women, I hide nothing.
I should be better at not thinking about these random aggressions from strangers. But if I ask someone to stop putting their outwardly directed failings in my face and they won’t, I become irate. I know I wrote this guy back and told him that he was wrong, that his assumption disgusted me, that it was an ugly thing to assault someone else with. The “thing” being his own ignorance and small-minded ideas, his delusion in presuming to tell a stranger about her life and the lives of people she knows, people whom, given his own deficit of compassion, he can only conjure up in the crudest, most demeaning terms. He runs a site about meditation, of course. And of course he wrote back in spite of my explicitly asking him not to. Lots of men have behaved this way towards me, me as Nightmarebrunette. I don’t know if it’s because it’s the internet or because I’m a whore or both.

I almost started crying in a bookstore a few days after the second time I saw the writer. It was such a beautiful day, the most perfect weather, and there were lots of people mingling around the shelves. Books move me, just the feeling of them in my hands. I was thinking of how I could never stand to have a job that wouldn’t allow browsing in a bookstore on a weekday afternoon with nowhere to go and no one to answer to. I have a really good life and I’m so bad at being happy.
All I can think to say about 2011 was that I made more money than I probably ever thought I would make, double what I made the year before. I’m not sure I feel richer but I do feel older.

I don’t know how he expected me to respond but I had the distinct impression he was saying it primarily to elicit a reaction. He told me the same thing earlier too, when he wasn’t inside of me. The elegant way to deflect these lines is to turn them into a compliment for the giver rather than a put down of yourself.

“Oh, I find that hard to believe,” I’d said then. “I’m sure you’ve been with lots of attractive women.” Thinking to myself, with rude pleasure, that I was referring to other women he’d paid.

“I don’t think you understand how attractive you are,” he replied, like he was really on to something, like he’d stumbled upon a secret I wanted to keep hidden. All of this made me lose respect for him—that he was underestimating me enough to think I would enjoy or be flattered by this game. So it was strange later when he said, “You keep your intellect in a cage because otherwise it would scare away men like me. Thank you. Thank you for humoring me.”

But he had his cute moments. “If you ever feel like something isn’t working out right just tell me, ‘baby, you left me hanging,’ and I’ll say ‘baby, I’ll take care of it! Tell me what I need to do!’” He was talking about money. He wanted to know if I’d been with someone else earlier that morning and was hoping yes. More and more the men I meet savor my sluttishness.

I knew he wanted something to make him feel dirty, so I told him the truth, about laying in bed for an hour and fantasizing about a man I hadn’t seen in years while I got very wet, and I saved that wetness for him because our date was only a few hours away.

“What happened?” he asked. “Why don’t you see each other anymore?”

“He begged me not to reply to his emails. So I didn’t. He wrote me a few times and I never wrote back. He told me whenever we corresponded he couldn’t function—” I stopped myself. It sounded too dramatic. “He couldn’t think about anything else except us being together, and he was supposed to be married soon.”

“Because you’re haunting,” my client said immediately. “You know that, right? He was haunted by you. You’re hard to forget. I bet that happens a lot.”

“It’s happened like that one other time,” I admitted, though there’s nothing to be proud about. I don’t remember if I told the client that I’d also emailed this second man that morning too, and the second man replied almost instantly. He explicitly said he was afraid to see me again. He wanted, and still wants, to lay down his life for me. Not his breathing, heart-beating life—I mean everything he’s built around himself. Should I make it more ugly? He wants to lay down his family for me. I told him two things. One, I would not do the same for him. And two, if he needed to give it up, if he needed to get out of a bad marriage, I would be his excuse. But if he was happy, I didn’t want to interfere with that.

“Thank you for giving me the best fuck of my life,” the client said. We were doing it over and over again. Sex somersaults—in various positions so he could get the best views in the wall mirror. Me on my knees and tilting my pussy so he could see it while I went down on him. I suggested he come on my face, which is safer to do if it’s their second or third time. He wouldn’t quit. “My god, you’re so beautiful. Look at you.” Pulling my hair back from my face and looking rapturously. Working so hard to convince at least one of us. That night I’d get back into my bed and stare at my reflection in the wall mirror while I ate, watching my face as I chewed. It felt like having a staring contest with another person, but a curious one rather than an angry one. And there was no winner.

“I remember this from last time,” he said while I was on top, half curled up on him like a child. I didn’t. He asked me to put my head on his chest to recreate it. Then I got my feet under me and sat up, riding him in a squat. Before he left he said, “You’re looking into a fogged mirror. You might sometimes think ‘oh I look skinny, I look cute’—you have no idea. And my job is to wipe it”—he made a motion like swiping glass with his sleeve—”clean.”

I scrawled it down afterwards. Seeing words on paper helps me decide if they mean anything. It still feels hollow. “No one appreciates you like me,” he said, and that made me a little angry. He has no idea the competition he’s up again. He doesn’t know this is something other men say and he doesn’t know how things men say run together like rivulets in melting ice. “Do I make you feel ravished?” he asked, when he was inside me again, from behind. Whose benefit all this is for—that’s usually transparent.

Over Christmas my father, the rabid conservative, laughed about being approached by prostitutes in Vegas and declared it should be legal. I love him but not in the way I’ve ever loved anyone else and it’s so cluttered up I don’t know what to do with it. I want us to be able to spend time with each other but I don’t want to have to talk about the past or excavate our anger. He made me come upstairs and he played a song for me on his guitar and asked if I remembered being a child and laughing when I first heard the line about the fire engine being a clean machine. Of course I remembered. It’s the first thing I think of when I think of us, though he played it on the piano then. I’d never been confronted with someone’s love like that, never had an offering that naked. There was no way to respond, no plug for connecting with each other in any way more than an uncomfortable smile and “yeah, I remember.” We’re not supposed to be so explicit in this family. We don’t cry in front of each other. We don’t touch.

My mother almost confronted me over the phone. She told me I should just tell everyone I’m not a sex worker, just like that: “I am not a sex worker.” We unintentionally screamed at each other a little before it escalated into a hang up and I contemplated what it would be like to be severed from my family. I thought I could deal with it. I guess I could, everyone survives things that seem impossible. Now that I’m raw from a visit home I can see how armored I would have been by my work in order to think that, how deeply burrowed.

I don’t know if everyone else ricochets like this.  I’ve always had it in me, though, that complete coldness. If people demand too much, I’ll get rid of them. One of my friends mentioned that she felt she couldn’t defend taking the money of married men. Usually it seems to me an action that needs no defending. I realized I primarily only experience guilt if I’ve impacted another in a way in which I have no stake. I mean if I stood up someone for lunch because I confused the date, I would feel terrible. But if I bailed out last minute for lunch because there was something else I wanted to do, I would feel nothing. And if my lunch date became angry with me I would come back at them ten times angrier, thinking, I sent you a text a half hour before, how much more do you want from me?

I still dream about it, no matter how much I’m getting. I let my mind at night tell me when I might be horny since it’s hardly a feeling that comes over me anymore. But I know something is happening if I dream about almost coming. I know some sunken part of me still wants it. A lost anchor shifting in the sand.
“I barely had any sex last week,” I said to my boyfriend, weeks ago. “I had what, three partners? I was practically celibate.” So I had dreams about a heavy man with a fat cock fucking me and coming inside me without a condom. I tried to scramble off of it while he was still ejaculating. I didn’t stop him sooner because I’d been close to coming myself. I dreamed about a thin man stroking his long cock on a bed crowded with women and I knew his perfect erection was for me.

“Do you ever start having feelings for any of your clients?” He asked me. “Have you ever had to stop seeing someone?”
He was frustrated by my answers, partly because I was being a little obtuse, partly because he wasn’t asking me what he really wanted to know. I don’t think many people are sadder than the American men who start seeing prostitutes in their thirties. They often have erectile problems. They seem completely baffled by the circumstances of their life and the world at large. Usually they’re good people but only in the easy ways—that goes for most of us, I guess. They seem ineffectual in every way. They read political blogs and have impotent political opinions they hide from all their colleagues. They make money in jobs they don’t care about, doing work they outright despise, married to women they don’t talk to. No judgment. It just isn’t sexy.
That’s how I see it in my meaner moments, anyway, and if it’s mean, it might not be true. One of my most frequent dates has a gruffness about him when we’re in public. It may be nerves but it comes out towards me oppressively, with a touch of disrespect. Once I found myself thinking something cruel about the way he walked as I followed him down the hall to his room. “Be nice to him,” I admonished myself. “You’ve had sex with this man.”

He thinks about everything with the same intensity that I do, but with a different mind. I like that about him. “I want to be your best client,” he used to tell me. Then finally, he told me he already was. I probably laughed at that. (Once he recalled asking me if I were comfortable while going down on him. And according to him I said, “oh yes, this is very sustainable.” “I did not!” I shouted, laughing, appalled. “I did not say that!” “You did.” He said. “I thought it was wonderful.”)
“I’ll tell you why I’m your best client,” he went on. “Because I don’t want you to be anyone other than who you are. I’m sure most people you meet want you to be different. But I don’t desire or hope or expect for anything more from you than what you are It’s all a gift. The way you reveal yourself and the way you don’t reveal yourself. It’s all a gift.”
He says things like this often. I lose track of them. I hold them, I let them go. I keep them in a pocket with loose seams. All the things I’ve forgotten over the past few months, all the moments I didn’t want to write down or maybe didn’t want to remember.
Once, when I was with a couple, I tied the man’s condom in a knot after sliding it off of him and he seemed impressed. “I can do that,” his partner said with a hint of anger. “You’ve never seen anyone do that before?”

It’s only through working that I’ve met the sort who like to check in. They’ll ask “are you okay?” right in the middle. Usually, confused, I will return the question to them. Once when this happened, when I asked a man how he was doing, he said, “I’m an old man on top of a young woman, with good intentions,” and rolled to the side. I’ve been carrying that one for a while.

It was our first date and he invented a reason to know my real name. “Let’s let it be a surprise,” I said, knowing he was wrong about the scenario and that it wouldn’t come up. I think that hurt him but it couldn’t be helped. “You make me feel like I’m home,” he said as he lay sprawled out after. He reached for my hand. “It’s not a quality that can be taught.”
Which is not the same as a quality that can’t be learned.

Weeks before, I took some sniffs of something that hurt and for a time the night was wonderful. A man I’d known but not known for years met me in a bar, and then later we went to my hotel room and he laid his head in my lap while I stroked his hair in a trance on the bed. Later, after my girl friend left us, he asked if he could masturbate and he came quickly while I touched him. There may have been some unspoken pact that neither of us would write about it. Or maybe he forgot it even happened.
I am still capable of feeling used. I am still capable of having a sexual experience that makes me feel like my entire life has been a mean joke.

The date went pretty wrong with one father client, a man I’d seen several times before and remembered fondly. It started out so promising. “You’re a witch!” he cried early on in our reunion. He’d repeat it again now and then, ducking his head afterwards like a boy hiding from something that embarrasses him. It crumpled later and I wanted to blame him but it might have been all my fault. I felt like a statue with a human being buried inside. Everything was muffled: the sadness, the anger. I just tried to hold still.
Before I left, I stood in the Sunday light of his hotel room, holding the image of his son.
“You wouldn’t stand a chance with him,” he said meanly, like that would hurt me.

“How did you decide on your name?” He asked, so I told him of how I think it subconsciously reminded me of soap, how it seemed clean and almost stark, how I wanted something a little sober, a little heavy. “I knew I didn’t want an ‘ee’ name, like Tiffany,” I said.
“Those names are cheap,” he affirmed, and it was the first time I’d ever thought him harsh. From his first line of description about the book he’d chosen as a gift, I knew who’d written it and that I already owned it, but I had to wait. I had to suppress the desire to say so. I wouldn’t know how to teach that, the skill of the right amount of restraint. You’re supposed to show them you’re smart but probably not smarter than them. You want to surprise and impress but you can’t do it at their own ego’s expense. You’re a supplement. You’re not the star.
“You’re almost intimidatingly good-looking,” one man told me after we shared our first kiss. “No,” I said, laughing. But I thought about it later and maybe. The trappings matter so much: right hair cut, color, style; right make-up (the lighter the better; it’s less strange in the morning) the right shoes, the right dress, the eye contact. I look in the mirror and I see me, working, which is separate than myself. Their desire makes me a different person. I think it’s not so hard to shape myself that way. I intuit what they like to see and try to create the conditions for them to see it. He only said “almost.”

Summer is predictably slow for everyone in this business but this month was not slow for me. I feel more singular now than I remember feeling ever before, strong but hollow. When I get upset about something in my “real” life, I comfort myself but thinking, “I don’t need this. I have that.” And when something upsets me in my sex life—not just sex that I sell, because sex that I sell is the only sex I have anymore—I think, “I can stop this whenever I want to. I never have to do it again.” So one life is the back-up but I haven’t yet decided which.

Before I went to sleep I scribbled “obliterated” in my notebook. I had been fantasizing of a release from being present during sex, or at least a particular type of present—present enough to get going, like a top, and then present enough to disappear. Lately I’ve not been drawn away and out of myself, I’ve chosen to leave. Or it happens automatically and not through compulsion. They are different.
I leafed through men in my mind, the ones I’d had the best sex with. Some of them I’d never come with. I like that better; I like just writhing for hours. They all have so much in common: A lean, broad body. A certain sweetness. A hefty cock. A wife. I thought of emailing each one of them, suggesting we meet—for free if they were clients, in secret if they weren’t. But I didn’t. All four of them had expressed fear, not that they would characterize it as such, but I don’t know what else to call it. It was a fear of infatuation, fear of the mindless passion that is instructive as any drug addiction as to how little any other part of your life matters.

So many of the men I meet send their daughters or their sons or their wives to rehab. I had no idea. I spent one hot afternoon with an impressively attractive new client who gestured for me to join him on the bed for one moment more. “I have a question for you,” he said, and then he paused. I sensed something awkward about to happen—was he going to ask for a discount? After telling me about his cars and his summer homes? But instead he spoke of his having come on me.
“Did you think I wanted to do that?” he asked.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Was it distracting?”
“No, it’s just…”
“I understand,” I said. “It’s a little contrived.”
“It’s not that,” he said.
There was something he wanted to explain but we were both failing the other. Finally he said, “too Catholic,” with his fingertips turned towards his own chest like he were indicating the lapels of a suit.

A different client and I laughed over dinner about the time he accidentally bought a six figure blazer. He is often villainized in the media and it pains me. I think, sincerely, “if you could only know him like I do.” No one understands how this world works.

From around his cigar, an American man spoke to me.
“I don’t know Arabic,” I said and his inscrutable sunglassed face stared back. He lost interest immediately, almost robotically, like he’d mentally deleted a file.
A different American demanded to know where I was from with false joviality, laying back in his chair with his expansive, soft torso on display. I hated him from the first moment I heard his voice, no matter how hard he tried to spark a conversation. He reminded me too much of a certain client. So I held the hand of who I’d come with and kept asking if he wanted any food, although I only could summon the wait staff to get it. It was scandal if we tried to fetch our own soda from the refrigerator, in this home we’d slept in the night before. I felt angry at everyone and intimidated by the handsome men at the far table. Only one other woman was in attendance, heavy-set and at least twenty years older than I. It was too hot outside of the shade.
“How are you feeling?” the bodyguard asked from his spot in what had become the guard’s alcove, making a move to stand when I came inside.
“Fine, I’m fine.”
“I can come back and get you in the morning,” he offered.
“We’ll see,” I said. “I think he’s better. Did you eat?” I doubted he was allowed.
When we left, I saw security scattered around the gleaming cars and SUVS downstairs, some with coiled wire laying by their necks and down their collars, and a strange air of eagerness and anxiousness in the daylight. I can imagine the feeling: you want something to happen because your entire being is prepared for it happen, and yet for something to happen would be hell.
When our car pulled out, Mr. X smacked the back like it were the ass of a woman. He crossed the street to escort someone else to their ride, and we waved.

“You see, we are not in Hezbollah land now,” Mr. X said proudly the afternoon before as a gold girl in a silver bikini strutted past our table, twice. I tried not to eye her ass but it was very hard. Comparing, always comparing. The pool DJ played Latin pop and young people stumbled out of the water and onto the terrace where they all knew Mr.X—”everyone knows Mr. X,” we were told and shown many times—and the women, with their beautiful hair ruined by chlorine and sun, smiled with self-satisfaction when introduced to us as though they were holding court. The radio promised them “90 seconds to orgasm” in the latest In Style magazine and posters by the highway offered maternity lingerie. “Fuck me, I’m famous” read fliers handed out near the airport door.

In international thrillers, in action movies, at least as I remember from the few I’ve watched recently and those I saw growing up, there’s always a scene where the “bad guys” relax with their wives or mistresses or larger harems of female entertainment, useless bodyguards nearby, as “the good guys” spy on them and coordinate their attack. (They used those phrases there, “bad guys” and “good guys,” unironically: “We have to support Mr. X, because he is a good guy.”) I had this thought a year ago, maybe longer, while I was reading an article in Harpers about oil barons or arms dealers or some type of shady cash lenders who met two nameless Russian beauties at a cafe where they (the men) were interviewed by the journalist. It was a thought for the ciphers, for those story-less female bodies that end up in proximity to dangerous power because of how they look, and whose eventual loss is less than a causality, the equivalence of destroyed furniture or perhaps a wrecked Porsche. Of course they don’t always die, but they never have futures. I know I am not like those women. Perversely, there is a shame in not being like them, in being almost poised to play the part but not endowed with whatever sad gifts make it fully possible.

“You want to go?” The driver asked as we stood with a self-appointed tour guide jabbing his narrow cane, stuttering about Aphrodite from under his ragged baseball cap. I smiled with gratitude and nodded. The murals nearby were a collage beyond my comprehension: the Seal of Solomon, un-launched missiles, a man who was probably an ayatollah. I’d been told “you should be well-covered.” Yet some women wandered momentarily alone here, head bare, and even asked me to take their picture as they posed against the backdrop. (“Do you like your driver?” Mr. X asked. Craftiness crept over him when we answered in the affirmative. “He’s a bodyguard. Former military.” “But he’s so gentle,” I said, remembering how aware and kind he’d been at the ruins. It was not the right thing to say.)

Before midnight the three of us were almost alone. “We’re full,” we protested as more and more food arrived, “Just taste it,” Mr. X said. (“You’re indulgent,” he would tell my guy when I went to the restroom to wash my hands, referring to the meat and cheese I snuck from his plates to feed the scrawny cat. When Mr. X caught me doing it, I asked, “Am I embarrassing you?” Even though we had the huge, open-air space to ourselves, with only a few staff members nearby. With people like that, carriage and etiquette aren’t about being seen. It’s the principle.)
It was the happiest I was for the entire trip, there in the fuzzy dark with the quiet and the hungry cat, staccato lights on the slopes. Mr. X insisted on bringing several of his own sweaters for me in case I got cold there on the mountain. “This one’s blue,” he said in a nod to what I was already wearing.
During our last dinner, he said, “You look very elegant tonight, my madam.”
In many ways, it was an unforgettable country.

I love the limbo of airports when I’m there alone. It feels like a safe space, my private place. Once in Chicago, at 5am, the entire terminal was full of Navy, and from states away my best friend texted me that her husband was being sent back to war.

The photographer was the one who flirted. I’d never met him before until he took my pictures, and they were not very good so he promised me a second set and I actually got wet while he shot me the first time, which is such a cliche. I’d only worked with women or friends before, so I wasn’t used to someone murmuring “god, that’s sexy,” when I piked my ass in the air for the camera.
I hadn’t expected him to be attractive. There was something almost doggish about the lines around his mouth and somehow this slight resemblance to a pit bull worked with his gentleness. He dressed well. I trusted two things: 1) that he flattered most women shamelessly and 2) he still usually meant what he said. The second time was at his home and I don’t think he kissed me then though he did the first. We sat side by side as his kitchen table.
“When was the last time you had a boyfriend?” He asked.
And I said, “I don’t know how to answer that,” which was both honest and not honest, the only way I know how to be.
He emailed me later about the two of us going to see “Sleep No More” and I experienced a desire I didn’t think I would allow myself to satisfy, and it felt so sweet and so cruel. For a brief time, he felt like my secret, like a portrait in a heart locket against the bones of my chest. He was something to daydream on. I came more than once imagining him treating me meanly, in a way I doubt he ever would. I didn’t tell him my real name.

I finally decided I had to do something with my money. At my first bank, the man asked, “what are you saving this for, a house or…?” and I felt my body coil back a little as I snapped, “It’s just money I don’t need to spend right now.” Unnecessarily angry at the mindset that money is meant to be spent, because of course it is but I somehow think of accruing as a value in itself. Gold for the gates of Heaven.
At the second bank, the woman beamed at me. “Good girl,” she kept saying. “Good girl. Keep saving.” She thought I was so responsible.

I met the celebrity and he barely touched me but had me swelling wet. Isn’t that always the way. He came so quickly. We hardly talked. He asked, “was it like you thought it’d be?” I frowned, I paused. I opened my mouth to speak before I spoke. “Yes,” I said, disappointing him. He smelled strongly of his own frightened sweat.

I said, “It feels like I keep being rewarded for making the wrong choices.” Wrong meaning easy. But if it happens so naturally, why do I object? A canceled flight becomes a cheaper flight becomes being paid more generously than I anticipated. It’s somehow ominous. The better I am at making money, the more I make and the less it matters. Then the better I become. It can’t stop. The more time I spend shaping my body, the less I am inside my body. I can’t talk or teach about it anymore. I don’t even want to be there. I stop talking to the people who care. The first fox I saw in a year was dead in daylight at the edge of the road. In the dreams there’s always the car without brakes. I never die but that’s the punishment: I have to keep driving.

He told me about what happened, or rather what was happening. He cried. I positioned myself so I couldn’t watch him and stroked his torso. I waited and let the noise be background while I focused on how my skin passed over his. Somehow the idea entered me to make a transfer, to offer him all the goodness I feel for him, to lift away all his pain. I wanted to give the most tender blowjob any human being has given another one. I thought I would tell him this way, with my mouth.

It was a misunderstanding. I tried as best as I could and managed nothing. He did not recognize my intentions. He finally said he didn’t think it would happen another time and I was sure then that he saw me only working to get him hard so I could get him off, get him out. I realized whatever happens to me when I see him would stay unspoken and unsayable and wanting him to understand was selfish. He showered and I felt cramped, like my body had no place in that room. Finally I apologized as he was putting on his shoes. I said, “I’m really sorry if anything I did made you feel worse.” He seemed surprised, assured me that wasn’t so. Or maybe I only remember it that way to placate myself. I thought something big was going to happen between us. I thought I would be writing about a different moment.