When it came to his thought process, his intentions, and his feelings for me, Roger was probably the most communicative, proactive, direct man I’d ever met. He was also my client — one of the best, in both senses of the word. We spent a lot of time together, meaning he hired me often, and he was reliable to the point of predictability: respectful, undemanding, and trustworthy.
Though Roger was assiduously honest with me, he didn’t extend the same courtesy to his wife. I wondered about her, as I wondered about most clients’ spouses, with lazy yet broad curiosity. Did the wives permit their husbands’ infidelity while feigning ignorance? Were they relieved to be free from the imposition of sex? At home, did the spouses speak to each other lovingly, touch each other casually? Were they physically affectionate, or was all skin-to-skin contact gone?
Bed death was the excuse offered by clients who felt obligated to explain why they were in a committed relationship and also naked with me, and to their credit it was normally presented with resignation but not accusation or enmity. “We don’t have sex anymore” held both parties responsible — or neither, as if they were just adapting to a circumstantial change, like they’d sold their sailboat or their outdoor cat had gone missing. If there really had been years of little to no erotic intimacy, surely the wives could figure out how the husbands coped. Maybe the wives coped by using adultery, too.
Sometimes hysterectomies were cited, or chronic illness, or resistance to a specific, obsessive predilection. If a client had an easily indulged fetish, like foot worship, I’d encourage him to explain to his wife how important it was to him, so she’d have a proper opportunity to join in. But the strength of the shame meant that any whiff of “no” tended to linger for years, and the guy was usually so afraid of treating it with the seriousness it deserved, he’d make the request sound like a short-lived whim. If she laughed it off or made a face or asked him why they would do that with each other, he’d never mention it again. That misunderstanding impeded the creation of new intimacy and pushed them apart. Couples don’t have to share everything with each other, but this, to me, was an unnecessary loss.
Then again, no matter how innocuous I thought the fetish was and no matter how effectively a husband conveyed his investment in it, the wife’s refusal could be absolute. One client whose wife had cheated on him (with his friend!) developed a cuckold fantasy that she wouldn’t go along with no matter how many times he asked. He didn’t want her to start sleeping with someone else again; he just wanted her to pretend that she was while they fucked and to tell him how inferior he was in comparison. I remember this man for a lot of reasons, the main one being that he was young and attractive and his dick was big, which made it difficult to belittle with a straight face. But that was alright, because looking at his erection and laughing fit the scene. His response to her betrayal seemed like a dream to me: he stayed with her and turned it into a source of pleasure. What more could this woman want?
It delighted me to glimpse people’s shadowed spots, the hidden recesses rarely visited even by themselves. I didn’t understand why any wife would want to stay out. Didn’t marrying the man indicate a willingness, if not a desire, to know him completely by sharing these sorts of private proclivities? But the implication of sharing is different when it’s someone you’re bound to. For me, a divulgence was simply interesting or fun, but for some wives, perhaps, it happened within a context of long-standing imbalance or failure. If they felt neglected or put upon or rejected in their own ways, those sides of their husbands may have been irritating, disconcerting, disappointing, or they may have not had the energy to care. I think I handled my privileged information with respect. But it didn’t mean much to me because, usually, neither did the man.
I wondered about the wives, but I wondered about the husbands, too. Some of them had plenty of sex at home, I knew, regardless of what they may have told me, because it was obviously not always the truth. And some had gorgeous wives, young and vibrant wives, at least from what I could see in the images that came up when I googled the man’s name during screening, the process of verifying their identity and, hopefully, my safety. (Unsolicited, they might show me pictures during our appointment, not only of their wives but of their kids, in-laws, pets, and homes. Because I’m nosy, I loved it.) One man said his wife was a former model; another bragged that his wife never ate carbs. Yet another showed me a picture of his wife in lingerie to illustrate her fitness. They knew how attractive their partners were and how much time their wives spent alone while they themselves were away for work (and “for work”). Yet they didn’t worry about being on the other end of the cheating. I suspect their complacency came from knowing they had the money, and that their wives were unlikely to forfeit their lifestyles and incite the gossipy local scandal a divorce would cause. The husbands may also have assumed their wives were too busy with the kids.
The ones who were most emphatic about how much they loved their wives were usually the worst when it came to misrepresentation in other matters. They claimed they only wanted to see one prostitute regularly, but in fact they hired new women wherever they went. They’d say, “I hardly ever do this,” then use me as a reference for a string of other girls in close succession. And they’d say they wanted a true emotional connection while they armored themselves with ego and disinterest. I can’t say how much these men did or didn’t love anyone in their lives, but the way they described themselves had little correlation with the choices they made. The dissonance highlighted that what love meant to them might not be what it meant to their spouses or to me. “Relationships are hard,” I said insipidly to one of these clients as he opined about his cheating, when I couldn’t think of what else he wanted to hear. “No, I don’t think so,” he replied.
The best men would talk about their spouses with warm nonchalance, like I was any other service professional, someone who cut their hair or a personal trainer. They’d come to terms with what they were doing and why they were doing it, so it wasn’t a threatening, forbidden topic. They could just relax and speak about this important person as the conversation warranted, without defensiveness. Even from men I found awful, I don’t remember any “my wife is a bitch” rants, probably because clients didn’t want to spend their time with me thinking about their wives. One San Francisco regular of mine complained that his wife didn’t give him enough blowjobs, but that sort of juvenile self-pity was rare — and his wife was a woman fifteen years his senior whom he married because she was extremely rich. If clients said anything about their partners that could be construed as negative, it mostly pertained to the dissolution of intimacy, and was regretful and sad.
My allegiance was forever shifting between the two, the husband and his invisible wife. Sometimes a tender, mild-mannered client who was especially talented in bed would say his wife denied him and I’d feel so bad for him and so unhappy with her, angry that she was wasting him and hurting his feelings. Throw the fish back if you’re not going to eat it. More often, on my back, I’d think about how well I understood the wife, how her position was the only conceivable position; if I could have outsourced or refused this onerous chore, I would have. You may want to think this was a matter of personal preference, and a different woman would have been overjoyed to fuck the man in question. But I think some guys would be fobbed off on someone else until they died.
Whether or not a wife sounded likable, I knew I usually had more in common with her than with him. Any person can be cheated on at any time, though it feels like a uniquely humiliating and female position to be put in. But the clients, almost all of them, made a strong case for the impossibility of male fidelity. More than that, my identification with the wife was based on my assumption that she and I both hated having sex with him or listening to him bloviate, yet we relied on him for money. And this key commonality rendered us enemies or at least rivals. I didn’t see it as a strictly her versus me struggle, and it wasn’t that I wanted any wife left destitute, but her presence limited his freedom, and he couldn’t hire me if he didn’t have time to himself. Family trips in particular took the husbands and therefore their money away from me. I felt put out by those.
Roger clearly respected his wife a great deal — he may have used those words, as that was how he spoke, in phrases like “a great deal” — but it seemed to me that their relationship was characterized by coldness. He wasn’t allowed to refer to her as his wife, for instance, because she found the word “wife” demeaning and wanted him to use “spouse” instead. He planned an elaborate and expensive birthday party for her when she hit a milestone age, but when he reached one of his own, the celebration she arranged was cursory and uninspired. Though he petitioned for it, they’d not had sex in many years, and based on what he valued in our dates, she didn’t care to hear about his job or his thoughts on a myriad of other topics. It sounded as if she didn’t like him at all.
Given the scant reports I had to go on, my version of her was brittle and humorless, more shrewish and emasculating than any other wife in the pantheon of projections that formed in my head. But Roger was complicit. He could have afforded a divorce, but he didn’t divorce her, which meant the situation suited him to some extent. He was not a demonstrative man. He didn’t cultivate an environment of warmth and play. Plus, he’d married her in the first place, and he was perceptive enough to know what he was getting at the time. His description of their premarriage relationship wasn’t dissimilar from how it was now, so there was no idyllic time he hoped to return to. In the memories he shared with me, an idyllic time had never existed.
I learned of a few occasions when wives found out about me — or rather, found out about their husbands. (It was often not the man’s first time hiring a woman nor his first time getting caught doing it.) I hated for that to happen. Not only did it mean the cessation or severe curtailing of our dates but the ordeal was so messy and volatile: precisely the sort of situation I hated in all contexts, but particularly at work. I didn’t dwell on the potential repercussions for me beyond a loss of income, but I knew the reverberations could get nasty. One of my escort friends got roped into divorce proceedings and even had to appear in court.
There were many reasons for me to treasure and protect my status as a secret, and I did. I thought I never wanted to be found out. But then “never” changed. One day, everything changed.
Copyright © 2024 by Charlotte Shane. From the forthcoming book An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work, by Charlotte Shane, to be published by Simon & Schuster, LLC. Printed by permission.
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