Read Some Girls: My Life in a Harem for Free Online Page B

initiation. She gathered me into a corner and chatted conspiratorially.
    “Where are your clothes?”
    I had worn a green crushed-velvet cap-sleeved minidress, which I estimated to be the classiest thing I owned, along with fishnets and a pair of two-inch pumps my parents had bought me years before to wear to temple. They were the only heels I owned that didn’t have a platform the height of the OED. I still carried my black overcoat over my arm.
    “I’m wearing them.”
    “Really? That’s all you have?”
    Taylor marched me to the closet and pulled out three neatly pressed suits, the skirts short but tasteful, the jackets tailored. I guessed it was the business attire of the ice skaters.
    “You never want to look like a hooker when you’re walking through a hotel lobby. Suit or dress, sexy but conservative, three-inch heels, thigh-high stockings, expensive underwear.”
    I owned none of these things.
    “But you’re not horrible,” she said. “I’ve seen worse.”
    At this point Diane had ended her call and beckoned to me from the office. Diane’s first glance at me contained a whole conversation. She was no Candice Bergen. Pugnacious and brusque, she baldly assessed me like the merchandise I was destined to become. After asking me a few initial questions, she fired off a description of me to the phone girl with the plaid headband, whom she introduced as Ellie. Ellie wrote down Diane’s dictation on an index card.
    “Hair: auburn. Eyes: hazel. Thirty-six, twenty-four, thirty . . . nine. Might as well play up the big ass. Eighteen-year-old, curvaceous theater student with a face like . . . Winona Ryder. What will you do?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Will you do nurse fantasy?”
    “Um, yeah.”
    With each answer, Ellie checked a box on her card.
    “Dominatrix?”
    “Sure.”
    “Girl on girl?”
    “Yes.”
    “Maid?”
    “I don’t have to actually clean, right?”
    To Ellie, she said, “That’s a yes.”
    “Private dance?”
    Diane turned to Ellie and talked over my final answer, saying, “Will do whatever.”
    Ellie nodded and checked a final box. Was there a box for whatever?
    “Will do whatever” was pretty much accurate. In the peep shows and strip clubs I’d worked at, I had done more unseemly deeds for money before I turned eighteen than most women would ever contemplate in their whole lives. What was one more? But escort work was different, wasn’t it? A tiny misgiving fluttered somewhere under my occipital bone. Call it whatever euphemism you chose; this was fucking for money we were talking about, right? I had been the embodiment of confidence until I stood in the middle of that room in my trashy dress while Ellie checked the “whatever” box. I was flooded by a cascade of anxieties. What if I got a disease? What if it was disgusting? What if I got raped? Got killed? What if this next step would create a fissure in the landscape of my heart that could never be repaired?
    “You bring your ID and passport?”
    I had been told that my interview would require two forms of ID. I handed them over.
    Luckily, I had obtained a passport as a gift to myself for my eighteenth birthday a few months earlier. I had been ensnared by tales of Paris in the twenties and it was my dearest hope to get my ass there at all costs. I knew the Paris of seventy years before was long gone. Nevertheless, the call of that city resonated in my bones. The name alone could send me into hours of happy daydreams. I wanted to drop down right in the center of Paris, where I would drink wine and write poetry and let Paris infuse my soul with continental urbanity and sophistication. I had hoped to hand my passport to a customs official at Charles De Gaulle International Airport. Instead I was handing it to Diane at the Crown Club, but it was a mere stopover, I told myself, a brief detour.
    Diane gave me the same shtick about my clothing that Taylor had and I vowed to go get myself some class as soon as I could afford to.