Call Girl Confidential Read Online Free

the gentleman’s room; sometimes they even leave a key card for you in a magazine in the lobby. But they were renovating the Parker Méridien, and I had to meet this stranger outside on the sidewalk so he could escort me into the hotel as if we were a couple.
    I shivered in the freezing January evening, and as the clock ticked past our appointed hour, I started to get anxious. Had he seen me, changed his mind, and turned on his heel? Maybe I wasn’t tall enough, or perhaps he preferred brunettes. I called Lucy and wondered if I had mixed something up. She told me to wait while she called the client to see what the problem was. It seemed an eternity and I called Lucy again. “Where is this guy?” I asked in exasperation. She confirmed the time andplace and instructed me to continue to wait and I was not to leave. I was miserable. I was literally standing out on the street, waiting for a john. Is this what I had reduced myself to? At that moment, I did feel like a $20 corner hooker. I felt like running home, but I was already out cab fare and would have to spend more going home, and that was money I could not afford. I was that broke.
    Finally, a tall man in his forties approached and said, “Ashley?” (That was the name I’d decided to use.) He apologized profusely, as he had been waiting on the Fifty-Sixth Street side of the hotel. Being from out of town, he didn’t know that West Fifty-Seventh Street is one of New York City’s main thoroughfares, with Carnegie Hall just steps away. He seemed pleasant enough, but I was still overcome with the feeling of despair that had overtaken me. But I knew he would sense it, so I willed myself to snap out of it.
    I tried not to call attention to myself as he led me through the Parker Méridien lobby and I clickety-clacked across the hotel’s marble floors in white-and-gold four-inch stilettos. They were still in my closet from my nightclub days, and they matched a tight white dress I had that looked good with my hair. I was all white and virginal, but underneath I had on a thong and lace push-up corset. What kind of job dictates your underwear? The job I was about to begin.
    The elevator went up with a whoosh and I tottered down the thickly carpeted hallway with him to Room 3606. My heart was doing a drumroll in my chest.
    He unlocked the door and held it open for me. “Well, come in . . .” he said. It was the first time I was able to get a good look at him. He looked fine. He helped me off with my coat. He wasmaking me feel at ease—more of a gentleman than I had expected. He had a big smile, so I guess he liked what he saw. That was a relief. He had a deep voice, and he was wearing charcoal-gray trousers, a French-cuffed shirt, and a fleur-de-lis-patterned tie, a bit loosened. “I’m Stephen,” he said. “And did I get it right? Ashley? A beautiful name, befitting a beautiful lady.”
    Ashley was to be my nom de guerre. From that moment on, until the time I walked out his door, I was the persona Ashley. Rebecca no longer existed. I had to push everything about the real me aside and lock it away in my purse. Who I was, all the things about me that would identify me—the things I really cared about, things I liked—were hidden. I morphed into the woman I thought he wanted. It would become my modus operandi with every client: I had different names and different personalities. It was more for my sake than theirs. If it was all pretend, then it was easier to emerge from afterward. At the time I thought it was more to hide who I was from them so I could keep my identity unknown, but later I would realize that it was most definitely for me. I could not have done this job if I even minutely felt it was the real me. I would “flip the switch.” You will hear me say that from time to time, because later I literally had to keep track of how many switches I was flipping at once. But for now, it was