Eros and Thanatos

Men like him give me a lot of secret pleasure.

The shy knocked-about types, the henpecked husbands, the religious hypocrites, the thinly mustached slim waisted adolescents, the wistful wine-wasted writers, the nervous first-timers - the kind that respond clumsily to my deft maneuvers, that feel absolute gratification at whatever little odds and ends I condescendingly bestow on them - they are my favorite clients. I always liked a bit of the upper hand, and  a lot of independence, and never much cared for challenges (taming wild stallions is hard work) - which is why I chose this line of business in the first place.

He was short and stockily built, and tried to act assertive - but I recognize my men from the way they undress : the fingers that linger an extra second on the shirt buttons, the subtle wrinkle of anxiety that passes over the forehead before they reveal their form to me with the air of sad inevitability of being subject to examination in an army bootcamp.  He was young, muscular, but of a nervous disposition that pointed to a sheltered life which had not seen much action, an unawareness of his own physical strength, his eyes had a certain look of earnestness that I liked - and did I say they were deep and chestnut brown, liquid, almost like the tame horses of my childhood?  Such men are easy to please.

Men like to talk to us after the act is performed. There is probably something soothing in relating all your troubles to a stranger with whom a sudden physical bond has been established.  They can say things that will never matter again, that will have no consequences in their lives , that they will not be judged on:  nakedness and neurotransmitters conspire to create this neonatal naivete in them.  I have had Catholic priests sworn to celibacy tell me in tears how they have seen The Virgin's innocence in me. Hardboiled businessmen have betrayed a few secrets of their trade and offered me free stock market tips. Immigrants who missed the families they had left behind, enquired after mine. Some try to compensate for the guilt of cheating on a woman by being nice to the woman they have bought. Some just need an audience.  And I need the stories, compulsively. And I need to tell them my stories - ones that are so old that I've forgotten where I got them from - or what part of them was entirely my own invention. This is what I love most about my job - this dwelling in a twilight zone of the imagination and memories of a thousand men.

He was very quiet. There were the predictable clumsy responses, the very familiar attempts to enact the fantasies of the most blaise pornography that such men usually resort to,  and me almost falling in love with the light and shade playing out on his glistening olive skin.  Afterwards, coiled up in foetal position, he told me a thing or two about his conservative upbringing, his early lack of faith in most things, his falling back on religion after being knocked about in a foreign culture, his struggles with celibacy and the lack of women in his life, his anger at the world in general. He said the day after would be a very important one in his life, he would begin some important work that would take up most of his time and attention - this was his last chance to see what being with a woman was like. His brown eyes still had that earnest look when he got up, dressed and left - with a somewhat morose and distant air.

I did not ask too many questions. Usually I did not need to. He did not know - in fact no one knows- that I get clairvoyant on my clients often times.  Every time I am with a customer that I liked, I dream of them the same night.  And the dream shows me exactly what is going to happen to them the very next day. I like to believe that my years of knowing the stories of so many people's lives has given me this special ability. This is how my job made me feel special and empowered - and I continued with what had begun as youthful adventurism, though I had all the money I wanted. 

This is why I make it a point to sleep as soon as the interesting ones leave. I have seen a man fighting his wife after she found out about his visit, I have seen an old man die a contented death after having gifted himself a night of passion with me, but mostly I have seen people leading entirely mundane lives for a day -but all stories interest me. Many a times I have laughed out in these dreams - the men going back and telling inflated stories of their machismo and my technique to their buddies over drinks, a few nervous types that go get tested for diseases the very next day, the ones that jerk off to thoughts of me, the ones that find the wife insufferable after the sweet-talking whore, the ones who hum happy tunes as they go about their boring jobs. Well mostly it's like that.  But with him, it was very different. In this dream, I saw a huge jetplane, him  wild-eyed on the pilot's seat, crash into a tower in a big city  - the tower collapsed and many people died. I tried to tip off the police but they didn't believe me : it's not always that whores with hearts of gold are allowed to save the world.