Education of a call girl

What I learned about marriage while working as a Manhattan prostitute.

By Tracy Quan

Nov 7, 2003 | Prostitution seemed the least likely way to learn about marriage and an ideal profession for a jaded child of divorce, like me. When I entered the sex trade, I was still a teenager -- not the sort who dreams about floating down the aisle in white lace. My fantasies were about having my own apartment, a launching pad for the multiple affairs I was planning in my head.

Like so many wannabe brides who have the white dress picked out (and a subscription to Bride's) before they have a clue whom they'll wed, I aspired to a lifestyle of carefree sex with theoretical men and, just like those women, I daydreamed about decorating. I was halfway there -- living with a boyfriend, yearning for my own place -- when I began turning tricks.

I had no idea what to expect from my first customer but I was shocked when he proposed marriage: "Tracy" -- or whatever I was calling myself that night -- "will you marry me?" I abruptly told him: "No! I can't marry you!" We were very much at cross-purposes. He wanted to know if that meant I was engaged. I simply didn't believe in marriage and I was under the age of consent, something he didn't know. For me, thoughts of marriage led to bureaucracy -- How old must you be to sign the paperwork? -- or ideology: Was marriage the foundation of capitalism? As bad for you as processed flour?

Or perhaps I was just not ready to have any respect for the custom because my parents' marriage ended before I was 8. I wasn't disillusioned so much as unimpressed with the institution of marriage.

For that customer, marriage was a romantic impulse, a solution for loneliness. But perhaps he was already married -- a possibility that never occurred to me that night. I assumed he was proposing because he was emotionally unstable, but perhaps he was proposing because he was far more stable than he appeared to be -- only pretending to be the lovestruck, lonesome bachelor. Though I was lying about a number of things, I took what he said at face value -- the mark of a newbie in the game of sexual intrigue.

Later, as a pro, I discovered that marriage works in mysterious ways. People sometimes ask whether I'm more jaded now than when I entered the sex trade. Most of my customers were married, and how can you even trust the concept of marriage when you witness these cracks in the armor, the daily infidelities? After many years of being what madams call a "good listener" and a self-interested observer, I came to respect an institution I do not entirely trust. As a hooker, I learned to see men as commodities. A smart hooker also learns to respect another woman's turf, and wives are seen by many as the ultimate owners of these men.

There is a basic respect for marriage that resonates in the world of prostitution. Marriage is not for amateurs, especially when divorce is so easy to obtain. Married people who cheat often find that their most unfaithful efforts render them "faithful" in eerie, unexpected ways -- sexual cheating rarely sets you free; it can turn the cheater into a prisoner of the supposedly betrayed spouse.

Or a prisoner of one's own fantasies. A number of married clients led fantasy lives, pretending to be free in some cases, or pretending to be married to younger women when in fact they were married to formidable mother figures.

One client, a tender sensualist of 60 living part time in the South of France, spun a convincing tale about his beautiful, childlike wife and her trysts with tennis instructors. So alluring were Claud's bedtime stories that he had a number of call girls believing the hype! We -- seasoned professionals -- imagined that he did not really watch her getting it on with the tennis coach, but we believed she was a second wife in her 30s, with slim hips and soft skin. We liked to think we were complementing their sexy cosmopolitan marriage, and it was easy to get a little turned on by his banter.

Each one of us had some older American clients who embodied the stereotype: overweight, inattentive to their looks, content with a quick blow job, passive suburban American husbands. Their sexless marriages were based on the sharing of property, children in college, and other mundane facts. Claud, however, was well-groomed, vain, somewhat trim, a delightful conversationalist and not bad looking. He made you feel sexy because he was sexy. Other clients made you feel sexy like a porn star or a pin-up model in the presence of a naive fan. These lackluster husbands, though kindhearted and decent (they wouldn't abandon their wives or cheat a prostitute) -- had the sex lives and marriages they deserved. They used money to buy what other men might obtain with their looks, personality or conversation. They were complacent about their bodies. Claud was different. He deserved to live with a delicate, pretty girl and could afford to -- or so I thought.

When another call girl ran into Claud at a Broadway musical, she was taken aback. "I saw Claud at the theater with his wife! She looks like his mother!" Laura told me. I was dubious: "Are you sure it's not his mother? Maybe his wife was in France..."

Laura insisted: "He was acting totally like a husband. She's his wife. And she was covered in Bulgari jewelry."

For some reason, we were both a little disappointed. We had wanted to believe Claud's fantasy of lighthearted matrimony. So did he, for a few hours in the afternoon, but he accepted the reality of a serious, conventional marriage. Every feature of his fantasy wife -- litheness, girlish charm, a naughty niceness -- was the opposite of his real wife, according to Laura (whose description was unflattering). How ironic that our storytelling customer might be a hard-eyed realist while we, the supposedly cynical operators, wanted to believe an American fantasy about European marriage. It was a Jamesian moment, to say the least.

At this point I began realizing that a number of my clients had married into money -- if not into cash, then property or connections or other things that made life manageable. The midcentury archetype of a man ruling the roost with his superior earning power, having extra sex partners he can pay for, while his wife stays in the suburbs becoming more maternal and sexually virtuous by the hour, was looking more like a simple middle-class fantasy. Real marriage was more bizarre than that.

Not every client was like Claud. As a beginner in the sex trade, I saw married couples for an escort service. I felt very much like a peeping Tom when I got into bed with a couple. Husbands are more deferential, less presumptuous in these threesomes; when they are not, there's probably trouble brewing. Most hookers would like to be on their way out the door before that kind of tension begins. A part of me admired these wives for doing something I would never have the courage to do: Three-way sex was normal in my job but never happened in my love life. Yet these couples were either so secure or so bored that they made a habit of inviting another woman into bed. One wife became positively petulant with her husband. "Oh, not now!" she sighed, as if they were on a long car trip, arguing about directions. But she was warm and friendly toward me, insisting that I tuck the money "someplace safe" as I was leaving. I was about half her age and still so new that I never felt confident about my ability to satisfy a woman's body. These couples were a minority, a side trip for me, and never the main part of my business. But I felt that I saw quite a lot on those occasions.

Next Page: Many were married to women who ignored them sexually

• View blog reactions