Education of a call girl

Sometimes my customers showed me the family snapshots -- attractive wives, Christmas card images of the kids -- and reported a basic happiness that still didn't prevent them from wanting variety. For one customer, the urge to watch a few minutes of porn at lunchtime -- and not the kind of porn geared to couples -- followed by a quick release, was not really consistent with married life. When he spoke about his wife, there was a carnal edge that was missing from some customers' conversations. She was part of his fantasy life, but she lived in the suburbs and he spent his weeknights in a city apartment.

Many were married to attractive, stylish women who ignored them sexually. And sometimes, I am sorry to say, this was totally understandable. Once, when discussing a regular whose beautiful, well-dressed wife didn't have sex with him more than twice a year, my friend Laura shrugged. "Can you blame her? I wouldn't have sex with him either, if I didn't have to." He was not offensive as a john -- being unattractive didn't matter so much when he was paying. But he projected a neurotic dissatisfaction about life that would make any woman want to slap him if she had him in her life for more than a few hours. What kept them together were a grown child who had never grown up, a lifestyle, two houses, and a shared love of French vacations. Benny loved being seen with an elegant, pretty woman of any age as much as he loved complaining about his marriage. Sexually, he was a strange mixture: good at oral sex, hung up on dildos -- the more absurd-looking the better -- always trying to see what he could get away with. His favorite call girls were those who refused to kiss him.

The more you listened to Benny describing his wife -- a woman who occasionally locked the master bedroom area and allowed him to use only the guest areas of the house -- the more you realized what he needed. The key to his wallet and his heart was a hooker who did this sort of thing in bed. If you banished him from the private areas and made him use only the "common areas" of your body, he became a regular and sometimes fell in love, even to the point of offering fur coats, apartments and good watches. If you gave in to his many demands, like an amateur, he would show up again because men will do that. But contrary to what he thought, Benny was not seeking an alternative to his wife. He was seeking a variation on her theme of denial, which led me to think that perhaps Benny was madly in love with her, in his own masochistic way. Benny's marriage would have been frightening to me had it not been so alien.

Some clients refused to discuss home life at all, making me wonder if they were unhappily married, or so happy there was nothing to discuss. The very happy can sometimes run out of gossip. Some felt guilty, but men who routinely pay for sex outside the home don't usually feel guilty about the sex. Men are more sensible than women give them credit for. That doesn't mean they are free of guilt, but they have more emotional intelligence than we like to admit, and they're quite good at taking what they need from a situation without agonizing about sexual morality.

One client, married with children, told me: "I don't feel guilty when things are going well. I feel guilty about doing this when business isn't good." A quick afternoon trick, David ran his own business in the diamond district. If he stayed away from the shop for too long, he was being disloyal to his business. If he spent money on sex when business was slow, he was disloyal to the mother of his kids. I sensed that David was happily married. The economic bond between David and his wife shaped his sessions: He was never the sort to have a prolonged visit. Sex with David was simple, hot, direct -- not languorous and graceful, like my sessions with Claud. Anything that might inspire a higher price was not broached or tried. In this peculiar way he was faithful to his marriage. For married couples, money can be more emotionally charged than fidelity of the flesh. Married people sometimes hide money from each other, lying about what they spend and how they spend it.

When people say there are unseen partners in every bedroom transaction, I have to agree. David's marriage was never absent from our encounters. Benny's wife was a role model. And Claud's fantasy wife -- young, pretty, free -- may have been a projection of himself. Just as a female novelist can re-create an aspect of herself through a male character, so can lots of men create sexual stories about themselves disguised as women.

How, some people ask, can a man who visits prostitutes be happily married? Is this a delusion of the prostitute who is never as objective or experienced as she would like to think? Perhaps, but we have to define what happily married means. Does it mean being in love, which often means that you're sexually obsessed with a romantic partner? I think it means "happy to be returning home" to the marital domicile. The happily married customer does not dawdle at the end of his session. He is just looking for sexual variety, an erotic staple for quite a few men. Without variety, a lot of men would simply go nuts, no matter how deeply they love one woman. Their need might be satisfied by porn, flirtation, looking across the street, or a neatly contained encounter with a prostitute.

"Does it ever keep you awake at night?" That's a question I was once asked about "having sex with other women's husbands." I have, indeed, been kept awake by this question, by the complications and sneaky realities of marriage. It would be too smug and pat to say that I always sleep soundly, oblivious to the feelings we have about sex, fidelity, trust, passionate love. I'm not a card-carrying polyamorist, and I believe in romantic love. Despite all the cheating that goes on, I believe that we might be lucky enough to find our ideal mate. The idea of a man who can monopolize my sexual attention, making my heart skip a beat at all the right moments, is compelling. But the high romantic energy that causes a man or a woman to swoon, to stay focused on one person, is not present in every marriage, even in happy marriages. And not every woman or man requires this sensation in order to be happy.

If the marriage is based on children, the desire to be a good parent can trump the desire for romance. There is a big difference between being in love with each other and being good together as parents. A friend once told me that, while her parents were rather damaging to her, they were very much in love. They had an affectionate, vital marriage that did not end until one partner's death. Yet their children were deprived of affection.

In some cases, the buildup to a marriage proposal can be exquisite, erotically charged, because there is a hint of the unknown. And then the actual marriage, with its shared goals, known routines, can make two people feel more like siblings than lovers. (This is especially an issue when husband and wife look like they could be related.)

Indeed, some men marry women from their own ethnic or religious group while viewing exotic women purely as sex partners. As a New York prostitute with an Asian appearance, I sometimes attracted these men. Customers who go for exotic prostitutes are often stereotyped as racist exploiters or insensitive tourists, but sex cannot always be about partnership, familiarity, comfort and home. In fact, this kind of sex can provoke a need for "exotic" sex with a stranger. Marriage can start to look and feel like fraternal incest which, I believe, is the sexual opposite of courtship. Marriage, after all, is about family even when children aren't part of the deal.

George, a regular customer for many years, had a WASPish manner but came from a mixture of European Catholic ancestors: his preference for brown, black, Latin American and Asian prostitutes was extreme, I thought. I was happy to have him as a customer, but I secretly wondered what caused this old-fashioned quirk. I found him not so much exploitive as evasive. He was avoiding sex with women who felt too familiar and he was the only boy in a family of older sisters. It's not so much that the exotic woman is providing exotic sex as we are sometimes led to believe -- it's more likely that the client finds "normal" sex exotic with the foreign partner. "Foreign" women didn't seem like siblings to George, and sex with an exotic prostitute meant he was out there in the world, independent.

But let's not idealize a man like George. He thought interracial marriage "a bad idea" even though his favorite call girls were all descendants of interracial parents. He was, in many ways, an establishment stereotype, living in a fictional world while having sex in the real world.

In a very idealized, enlightened universe, conservative husbands wouldn't believe that having commercial sex with a prostitute from a different ethnic group was a form of fidelity. But many people do live this way, and the lure of the exotic plays an important role in the sex trade. Marriage is often about creating a dynasty or a household with somebody who looks like you, talks like you, and believes what you believe. Or it's about enlarging a community. Many of my clients were Hasidic and Orthodox Jews whose lifestyle was so rarefied that almost any number of women could seem exotic, alien, foreign. There are many stereotypes about Orthodox and Hasidic customers circulating in New York. For example, the notion that they have casual sex exclusively with black prostitutes. The infamous New Yorker cover by Art Spiegelman, depicting an Orthodox man and a black woman, touched a nerve by reminding us of this. The kissing did not quite ring true, but their proximity said a lot.

In the hidden moments of the day, on the way home from work, men of all races and religions are having sex with women they wouldn't meet in their official lives. In the case of my Hasidic and Orthodox clients, I felt that almost any woman who was unsuitable for marriage was able to pass for exotic.

Some liberal visionaries would say that marrying the person who doesn't look like you is the more progressive path. But people who marry outside the obvious "tribe" can be pulled together by class, profession, lifestyle, politics, education and by subtler forms of tribalism, causing more of that sibling intimacy between husband and wife that causes men to seek the outsider as a paid sex partner. Contrary to stereotype, traditional conservatives are not the only men who need alternatives to family life and married sex. If they were, the sex industry would have withered away by now.

And what about the married woman? Why are we talking about men's predictable double standards and their peccadilloes, yet again? As it happens, there is an entire subculture of married women who secretly work in the sex trade, like undercover agents or sexual "moles" (as Cold War double agents were called). "Belle de Jour" is alive and well and living in every major city of the world. But that's another story, to be explored at a future time.

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We want to make you a part of this series. What is the state of your union? Did you find the one and never look back, or has finding lasting love been a marathon of trial and error? Did you have a fairy-tale wedding only to watch things crumble once the reception was over, or have you glided along in marital bliss since Day One? We want to hear your stories of joy, romance, heartbreak and pain. After all, partnership, as we all know, is a complex concoction of all of those things. (Please remember: Any writing submitted becomes the property of Salon if we publish it. We reserve the right to edit submissions and cannot reply to every writer. Interested contributors should send their stories to marriage@salon.com.)

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