Been There, Done That (5 page)

And this is when he started to listen. “How much do college call girls make these days?”

Deirdre plopped herself down in a chair and waited for a moment before finally asking, “Do you want to hear about it?”

He did.

The call girl operation was a longstanding Mercer College business, Deirdre said. Very entrepreneurial: student-founded, student-operated, student-owned. It was an open secret, winked at by the faculty and snickered at by non-participating students, who nevertheless were awed by the wicked glamour. No one knew exactly how big an operation it was; most guessed that there were ten or fifteen women on the roster.

Engrossed in the story, I was vaguely titillated, as if reading a tabloid headline while waiting to buy groceries. Then I remembered that Tim was not telling me this for my entertainment. “I don’t see how—what good would I be on this story?” It was too much to hope that he’d ask me to write a feature on bordello décor.

“You’ve got the contacts.”

I felt myself backtracking, trying to undo my bragging. “Just the dean of admissions. And he’s easy to reach—listed in the college directory. I just did one interview. We’re not close.”

“And you’ve got this whole education thing working,” he said. “You understand the system.”

“I don’t, though.” I was speaking fast now, in a desperate bid to convey my incompetence. “I understand blind children taking their dogs to school, I understand replacing soda machines with juice dispensers. And anyway, I don’t see how relevant all this is to education. This thing, it sounds like something you’d read in the
National Enquirer.
”

“These days, all the big news starts at the
National Enquirer
—the stuff everyone’s too squeamish to print until it shows up in the grocery store checkout line. Besides, it’s not like this story is without precedent. Don’t you remember, back in the eighties, that big scandal about Ivy League prostitution? It was on the front page of the
New York Times
.”

Tim has had a subscription to the
Times
since he was in the sixth grade.

“The eighties?” I took a swig of my water. “If it wasn’t in
Tiger Beat
magazine, I’d have missed it.”

“Well, it was big, mainstream, national news.” He leaned forward. “And it’s happening again.”

“I don’t think I’m the right person for the job,” I said.

He put his elbows on the table, leaned forward, closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. I recognized this gesture. It had always made me feel inadequate. He leaned back, opened his eyes. “You’re perfectly positioned,” he said. “You’ve got the title, you’re affiliated with this”—he searched for an adjective that wouldn’t annoy me—“non-threatening publication. People will be relaxed around you. Anyone you talk to will assume you’re only going to say positive things about them because that’s all
Salad
ever does.”

He’d gone as far as he could on the Internet, he said, spending hours searching under “call girls,” “prostitution,” and “Mercer College.” He was now on the e-mail lists of at least thirty porn sites, but he’d gotten no closer to breaking the story. “Deirdre says they keep it under wraps—it’s all word of mouth.”

He outlined his proposal: together, we would “blow this thing open.” The story, under the byline, “Tim McAllister (with Kathy Hopkins,
Salad
magazine),” would break on-line in
New Nation
, and follow in print a day later in
Salad
. Any reprint or syndication fees would be split seventy-five/twenty-five in favor of
New Nation
. “I’ll run it by my publisher,” I said, wishing I could pitch a story on dorm decorating instead. (“Move over, plastic milk crates!”) “He might not like it.”

five

“I love it,” Richard said. “I LOVE IT.”

“Is it really us, though?” I asked desperately. “We’ve got to keep our identity consistent.”

“Sex in higher education.” He walked to his window, looked out at the traffic, strode back to his desk. He was too excited to keep still. “This will get
Salad
the recognition we’ve been looking for. This will sell magazines. This will sell ad space!”

Sheila backed Richard up, of course. “Don’t be afraid of a challenge, Kathy.” She squeezed my arm in a show of sisterly support. This was what Sheila did every time she wanted to be convincing: she touched you and she inserted your name into conversation. “Kathy,” she continued. “You’ve got to be willing to stretch sometimes, Kathy.”

“It’s not my ability I’m questioning,” I hissed, suddenly wondering if I should have gone to law school like most of the other English majors I knew. “It’s the magazine’s reputation.” Actually,
Salad
didn’t have much of a reputation, good or bad, which was its real problem.

Only Jennifer was on my side. “Call girls? At college? That’s, like, so
Inside Edition
.” Jennifer, clad in a turquoise spandex mini dress and silver spike heels, was looking a bit like a professional herself today.

I tried every defensive tactic I could come up with. The advertisers might be put off by a story that revolved around illicit sex, I said. “Then why do advertisers pay so much to advertise in
People
?” Richard roared. “In
Cosmo
? In
U.S. News and World Report,
for Chrissakes? Because sex sells!”

I defended some of the important stories I had in the pipeline and expressed my concern that they might be neglected. “Nobody gives a rat’s fuck about Shakespeare in the elementary schools!” he yelled. “What kind of a jackass really thinks a bunch of ten-year-olds are going to like
Hamlet
?”

“Richard, honey,” Sheila murmured, rubbing his thigh. “You’re a passionate man, and I love that about you, but think if this is the kind of language you really want to be using, Richard.”

I couldn’t talk my way out of it. It was settled: I was to make the coed call girls story my top priority, spending as much time in Western Massachusetts as needed. Richard’s main concern revolved around Tim, whom I’d described as “an old friend from college,” and the collaboration with his on-line publication. Richard said, “We don’t want to get lost in this deal, leave all the credit to
New Nation
.”

I didn’t care about any of that, of course. “What about the stories I’m working on? I can’t just abandon them.” I was feeling very defensive on the bard’s behalf.

“Jennifer can help with the filler pieces,” Richard said, brushing the air.

“But I need her as my sec—” I caught myself just in time. “As my assistant.”

“She’s still your assistant,” Richard said. “She’ll do both.”

“She’s up to the challenge,” Sheila chimed in.

Jennifer looked up from her nails, which appeared to have been decorated with glitter glue. “This is
so
going to cut into my novel,” she muttered.

I called Tim to give him the good news. “I knew you wouldn’t pass this up,” he said. And I wondered, yet again, if he knew me at all.

Once I’d thought Tim knew me better than anyone else on the planet. After we met for the second time, in the lecture hall, he offered to buy me a cup of coffee, and I said yes even though I hadn’t started drinking coffee yet. I said yes because he was sophisticated enough to “need a shot of caffeine.” He drank his coffee black, which I found impossibly worldly.

I don’t remember everything we talked about in the snack bar that day, but I remember how he looked at me, like there was no one else in the room. I’d had a couple of boyfriends in high school, gone to formal dances, made out in the back seat of a few station wagons. But no one had ever looked at me like that before. For years, he looked at me like that. Then, gradually, he didn’t. Since Tim left, there have been days when I’ve wondered if anyone will ever look at me like that again.

For now, at least, Tim and I had something in common, a shared goal. My first task was to “feel out” my contacts. I spent maybe three minutes thinking of the best way of approaching the dean. “Oh! I forgot to ask in my interview the other day—do you have hookers at your school?” I headed to the library instead.

I love any excuse to leave the office, and a visit to the Boston Public Library, which just manages to be too far from the office to walk to, meant a trip on the T. To prepare for the journey, I popped into an Au Bon Pain for a croissant and an iced coffee. One must keep up one’s strength. Then, because I’d need something to read while on public transportation, I bought a decorating magazine entitled,
Windows and Walls,
both of which I happen to have in my apartment.

At the library, I tried the computers first, but most of the information I sought was labeled “restricted”—meaning, I guess, that if you want to look at porn, you have to be a librarian. Instead, I hit the stacks. My first valuable piece of retail material:
Mayflower Madam
, by Sidney Biddle Barrows. I settled into a comfy chair and smirked at the thought that I was getting paid for this. Most people who make the kind of money that I do have to spend their days flipping burgers or punching cash registers. Thirty pages into the book, I was convinced I had chosen the wrong profession. As told by Barrows, prostitution was even better than being a lawyer, which, after all, involved endless briefs and gray suits with skirts that fell below the knee. Forty pages in, I realized that call girls had to do more than wear fabulous clothes and answer to a name like Camille. They actually had to have sex with the old farts.

The library was pleasant: noise and temperature-controlled. Maybe I should have been a librarian.

I leafed through some other books and clicked through some unrestricted on-line articles. By the end of the day, I was an expert on all the things they don’t teach you about in college: sexual role-playing, garter belts, and vaginal condoms. I developed a new appreciation for law-abiding madams who paid taxes. I discovered that most masseuses really aren’t hookers and that dominatrixes rarely have sex with their clients. Finally, I confirmed what I’d always suspected: that everyone was having sex more than I was.

How I was supposed to apply all of this to Mercer College, I hadn’t a clue. On Monday, I’d “poke around” at the campus. I didn’t really know what that entailed, since my interviews had always been “soft,” engaged with willing participants who often approved my final draft before it went to print.

Meanwhile, I had a weekend to endure.

six

It could have been worse. I could have been eating Häagen-Dazs from a carton and watching cartoons when Dennis showed up at my door on Saturday morning. I use the term “morning” loosely. It was just past noon. And I was asleep.

I don’t know why I even answered the door. A single woman living alone should know better. He could have been a rapist. Or a Mormon.

At least I was decent, clad in the bathrobe my mother had given me when I was in college and she thought I was still a virgin. High-necked, flowered and frilly, it would arouse any man whose first sexual fantasies had revolved around Laura Ingalls.

“Oh God. I should have called to confirm.” Attired in an apricot polo shirt and white Bermuda shorts, he looked crisp and clean, like he’d risen with the sun and energized himself with yoga and a supplement-laden smoothie. “I just—I thought we had plans . . .”

I do not wake easily, especially after a mere twelve hours of shut-eye. “Uh,” I said. “Nuh. S’okay. Jus’ napping.” I am one of those inflexible types who hates it when someone shows up without calling first, even when I’m awake and my apartment is clean. As it was, I had an empty bottle of wine on my coffee table (it had started half empty, but how was he to know?) and Oreo crumbs all over the floor. Against my better instincts, I had spent Friday night planted in front of the television, watching
Dirty Dancing
and
An Officer and a Gentleman
on cable. I hated myself for being such a girl—and a sloppy one at that. My kitchen counter, which overlooks the living room, hadn’t been cleared in weeks, and it was buried under catalogues, candy wrappers and overdue bills. Had I been a “look on the bright side” sort, I would have appreciated this encounter in the hope that Dennis would lose interest in me, an obvious pig. Instead, I saw myself through his eyes and was repulsed.