God's Callgirl (46 page)

I didn’t know what to do so I reached for a towel to cover up his exposed distress. I laid one hand gently on his forehead, and when he opened his eyes I saw an inexpressible sadness. What I read in a single glance was that he was infinitely more lonely now, after his indulgence, than before. That his spilling of sexual energy had proven to him how empty life was without love, without real intimacy.

I helped Phil sit up. Silently he wrapped the towel around his waist and made his way to the shower.

Something of Phil’s feelings found a corresponding reverberation in me, and I did nothing to stop it. Whatever Phil had been looking for, and had received from me, was not the answer for him. The greatest pleasure in the world seemed to have produced the greatest emptiness. I felt disturbed. A small crack had appeared in the pristine Chinese vase that was my icon.

Still, I told myself, not all of my clients were like Phil, coming to me with unrealistic expectations. But surely, said another voice, many of my clients were substituting sensual massage for a real relationship. If that was so, then what they had with me was a false relationship.

A
false
relationship! Was it true that the men who came to me equated sex with love, even with nurturing? If so, the more skilled I became at providing sexual services, the stronger I reinforced their illusion! I wanted to be a real person in a real relationship while I did my work. In my lucid moments, I knew that my fantasy of the Chinese nun wasn’t real. Oh, it was all so confusing!

A terrible thought—too terrible to look at for long—hissed into my unwilling ears:
You might be making your clients’ alienation worse. You might be intensifying their inability to have real intimacy and underpinning their lack of self-confidence…
Like Eve, I heard the snake in the garden, but unlike Eve I wasn’t able to distinguish where the voice came from. I knew, however, that the choice between good and evil beckoned. If only I could distinguish between the two.

After Phil left that afternoon, life would never be exactly the same again. More than anything, I now wanted to be real. To learn to be real, so my reasoning went, I needed to define more exactly what was good and what was bad. Having thrown out my Christian God at the end of 1969, I had failed to replace him with any other sort of God. I felt now that I was missing something in the depth of me, a longing that wasn’t being fulfilled by my work. There must be some kind of wisdom out there that surpassed what the Catholic Church had to offer; I just hadn’t come across it yet. I wanted an
ultimate
truth, something that could command my entire devotion.

Not that I had neglected the search entirely. With Hal, I had become interested in metaphysics and had begun to study Madame Blavatsky’s huge tomes of esoteric knowledge from the Theosophical Society. Now I accepted an invitation from June—a woman I had met in a bookshop—to go and live in the country with her for a while. I was profoundly grateful for a break from life in the emotional fast lane. The rent would be low for the makeshift cottage a little distance from the main house (where she lived), which functioned as a country post office, sandwich shop and a petrol station. I expected to be there for about six months, and had my furniture stored.

I also used my time there to recover from having some varicose veins removed. I had put up with the pain and
disfigurement in my legs for long enough, and looked up a specialist with a good reputation. He made me stand on a chair, hitch up my dress and turn around slowly while he scrutinised the possibilities. ‘Hmm, worth doing,’ he concluded, but warned me that it wouldn’t be easy. ‘The pain will be bad for at least two months while your blood vessels adjust to new pathways.’

‘I’ll be delighted to massage away the pain in your legs,’ June said in her sweet, light voice; she was a healer and a generous woman.

Victoria and I enjoyed our new surroundings. Victoria found a friend in June’s daughter and loved learning to ride the neighbour’s horses. We both enjoyed living with the sound of chickens, turkeys, geese and guinea fowl. As soon as my legs allowed it, I rode a bicycle around the magnificent summer-dry countryside, breathing in the smell of hay and of trees giving up their eucalyptus oil to the heat.

As soon as I was well enough, I helped June in the sandwich shop and around the yard. I enjoyed having a girlfriend, and June enjoyed my company, especially since she had become estranged from her husband, Sam. A quiet, practical and rather handsome man, Sam had had enough of being asked to become the ‘new age’ husband his wife expected him to be and had removed himself to another part of their property, where he had started to build a new house. Whenever he came around—which was inevitable on account of their shared workload—and sat down for a cup of coffee, she started on him, presenting the truths that should matter to him, her personal convictions, her new religion. She always began gently, then became more and more insistent, finally shouting after him as he left.

June confided to me that Sam was impotent. On the few occasions they’d had sex these last few months, he hadn’t
been able to get it up, no matter what they did to arouse him. ‘You can have him, Carla!’ she taunted repeatedly, after each tirade of complaints.

So four months into my stay, I finally did, and managed to prove to my friend that her husband wasn’t impotent at all. I found him to be sweet and spicy, like hot mulled wine.

Human nature being what it is, June’s friendship turned to rage. She screamed like a banshee and gave me a week’s notice to move out of my tiny cottage near the stream. But I shall always remember her for the kindness she showed me while my legs were so sore. I would never have dreamt of seducing Sam—and he would not have dreamt of being seduced—if she hadn’t thrown the gauntlet at our feet.

I RENTED YET
another house, this time in South Fremantle, right on the beach. It was a nuisance to not have my own house. I must have rented a dozen different places over the years; some I had to leave within weeks, even days, due to inquisitive and intolerant neighbours. It just wouldn’t do to have an old lady peering from behind her curtains whenever someone went in and out of my home! I learned the hard way that flats were no good; even attached houses were risky. I was also just not secretive enough. When I moved into my South Fremantle three-storeyed, strata-titled villa by the sea, together with Doreen, an artist girlfriend, and her actress daughter, Lara, I allowed the neighbour to help me bring the massage table down to the basement room. I wasn’t to know that he slept right on the other side of the adjoining wall, away from his wife’s upstairs bedroom! I wasn’t all that busy with massage then, as I had enrolled as a student of psychology at Murdoch University. I just wanted to do enough work to keep us going financially.

It was mere days before the frustrated old man began his crusade to have me banished by the local council, after his malicious efforts with the owner—who was supportive of me—had come to zero. He called all the neighbours together to discuss ‘the activities going on at No 4’. I was refused an opportunity to attend, although I wrote a congenial message to all the tenants of the row of attached houses reminding them that I was the only real authority on the activities. Not one person bothered to reply. My neighbours on the other side were a group of young people who partied a lot and often pissed over the railing of the front balcony, but that was not deemed a problem by the other tenants—not compared to the supposed evils that were being enacted inside my villa! The meeting resulted in a formal complaint being sent to Fremantle Council, which promptly ordered me to stop my work on the premises or face legal action.

I had to accept that morality often breeds prejudice, and that there is no man more moralistic than a frustrated old Baptist who prefers wet dreams and self-righteousness to a relief massage. We wrote all our neighbours a cheerful goodbye note and Doreen regaled the neighbourhood with Puccini’s
Oh, My Beloved Father,
her favourite piece, at top volume, ‘To show them we’re educated artists, for God’s sake. We’re an
asset
to this community, not a nuisance!’

Doreen, her daughter and I parted company, and I moved to Subiaco. In my first week there I had a visit from the Vice Squad, courtesy of the letters sent them by my previous neighbours. They phoned first, the Chief of the Vice Squad posing as a customer responding to my advertisement. They were decent chaps, although unconcerned at the hot and cold sweats they provoked when I opened my door to their uniforms. After they had stuck their heads inside my massage
room, where my certificate was hanging on the wall, they smiled their goodbyes. On the way out, the Chief said, ‘Oh, by the way, we’d like you to come along and register as a sole operator, so we know who you are and don’t have to bother you any more.’

So, that’s what I did. In that dingy office full of indifferent-looking keepers of the law, my photo was taken for their records. ‘If ever you leave the game, let us know and we will remove all your details,’ said the young Vice Squad officer as I was leaving. If only I could really believe that! Since I wasn’t breaking the law, there would be no criminal record, they kept reassuring me, but the whole affair brought my Chinese nun ideal down to a common denominator of
vice,
and that appalled me. I felt like the ‘necessary evil’ people refer to when they don’t want to condemn my trade, but end up doing so anyway with those words. God’s Callgirl was someone they would never appreciate—how could they? My silent tears ran into another crack in my beautiful vase…

Back home, I looked in the mirror and noticed a change in my expression. My face had taken on a determined, cold and serious look, without the golden light I had often imagined I saw around my reflection. I looked every bit of my forty-five years just then. I was shocked and, looking deeper into myself, found that I was disturbed on a number of fronts. I had no other profession to fall back on (except teaching, which didn’t suit me). My use-by date was coming up—in the sex industry, you have to have the goods or you’re dead wood. My hands were becoming slowly but surely ruined from being coated in oil so often, even if it was almond oil, and the muscles and veins that were beginning to stand out reminded me of my father’s strong hands.

I thought about the clients I’d been attracting lately, like Ben, a little man who looked exactly like a gnome. It wasn’t
exactly work of the Goddess to be pulling on his reluctant pecker. His wrinkly body reminded me of a woollen garment that had been boiled hard, his mouth didn’t quite close around his protruding teeth, and his ears were large, pointed and stood way out from his head. Ben did the rounds, not popular anywhere for long, and he understood and accepted that. More insistent than a cat, he was not put off for long with refusals, however rude.

Ben had a peculiarly annoying habit of twirling my nipples while he sat on the side of the massage table, legs dangling, lips smacking, as I worked his penis. Worked is the word—he had a hard time coming! That’s all Ben wanted: no massage, no sex; just, apart from his exhausting relief, a brief kiss. He offered that puckered mouth and closed his eyes, waiting to touch skin so he could kiss it. How did I square this with the spiritual aspect of my work? Where was the energy exchange? Had I fallen into doing it just for the money?

That was a trap that could be hurtful in itself. ‘I’ll be back in the shake of a wombat’s tail,’ one new client said after his massage, explaining that his wallet was in the car. Do wombats have tails? Instinctively I went to the doorway, even though I wasn’t exactly dressed for the casual eye of a neighbour or passer-by. As I watched, he hurriedly manoeuvred his car out of my driveway, bold as brass, and disappeared. The misery I suffered was agony—it wasn’t just money I had lost, it was my dignity. This had never happened before! A larger crack threatened to undermine the integrity of my Chinese vase.

Thoughts I had never entertained before found their way into my mind and made an unwanted impact. I was forced to face the fact that I had absolutely no control over my clients’ motivation, and many of them had formed hardened attitudes from contact with other masseuses and prostitutes.
I particularly despaired of the silent, self-absorbed types, who couldn’t distinguish between a divinely inspired caress and an indifferent slap on the buttocks.

I had to admit that most of my clients didn’t fit my image of the travelling merchants on the Chinese vases! The men were simply themselves: they came for reasons they might or might not have been aware of, and they didn’t often share them with me. The ideal I had adopted was one-sided. I could respect and give, but I couldn’t count on real respect from every man that came into my room.

Something inside me changed with this realisation, and there was no going back. The pure enjoyment I used to know was no longer there. What I really began to detest was being touched up when I didn’t want to be. To my chagrin and horror, this was happening more and more. A hand would wander from the guy lying prone on my table. He couldn’t see my face so couldn’t gauge whether I meant it when I brushed his hand aside. After a brief moment of acquiescence, the hand would slide up my leg again. He just wanted to feel up a fanny while being massaged, didn’t ask permission and, worse, wouldn’t take no for an answer. I kept squirming away from wandering hands as I massaged body after body. With clients I knew well, I usually wore nothing at all under a rather short skirt, but now I started wearing knickers under longer skirts to make it more difficult for invasive fingers. Never trousers—I should be able to be feminine and attractive in my massage room and still get respect!

It was a rude shock for me to discover that I only liked my clients when I believed they were playing my game. But in reality, I had been playing by myself! When I stopped playing ball, by refusing a request, spoken or unspoken, they’d sulk, disregard my wishes or just plain stay away. The strangest thing was that, up to now, they had actually been
playing along very nicely. These ‘travelling merchants’ in need of female energy
did
go away feeling balanced and ecstatic. The only thing was, they didn’t need a nun to do it! They just needed a straightforward whore, who never said ‘enough’ before their time was up and whose feelings didn’t require their respect. After all, if she accepted their money she was at their service.