Fantasy
Angela supplemented her work as a photographer by moonlighting as a phone sex operator. She was surprised, when she answered the ad for the job, that the profession still existed. It seemed like a relic, a sexual deviation from a time before the smorgasbord of porn could be accessed by a key stroke and a mouse click. But there were still some who liked their sexual gratification old school. Old men, she knew, but then she was no longer so young herself.
All of her friends had kids and mortgages and 401ks, but Angela had her art. She drove around the country in an old bread delivery van. A queen-size mattress squeezed in the back, so it bunched up at the sides. Took pictures of fading landmarks—hole-in-the-wall bars and Piggly Wigglys and dilapidated Seven Elevens—relics of a time already coming to pass. At night, after she’d uploaded the photos to her laptop, she turned on the sex line and she lay down on the mattress, taking her calls.
She had a few regulars—men who punched in the number five for Misty. Pete liked when she spoke in a small babyish voice and act surprised by his verbal advances. Lance wanted her to take control, order him to suck her tits and take out his cock. But Marty was more innocent. Their first conversation, he started off by telling her about a Rothko exhibit he had been to, and Angela, forgetting the Misty façade, had said “I love Rothko. The way he’s able to exude emotion through pure color. It’s so raw.”
“Ah,” Marty said. “You’re an artist!”
“No, no,” Angela said, affecting her Misty voice again. “I mean I went to a museum once. I saw a painting of a girl spread out on a sofa, her dress falling down her shoulder. Imagine me like that.”
“Don’t do that,” Marty said. “You were real for a moment, I want that.”
Angela hesitated. It was easy for her to be Misty, to perform their fantasies for these men. It kept them separate from her.
“Please,” Marty said. “Let’s just pretend we are meeting in a museum on a date. We are two young people who like art. We walk through the museum, and we have such a good time that I ask you around the corner for coffee. It’s raining outside so I drape my coat over your head to keep your hair from getting wet.”
“I curled it for the date and wore lipstick,” Angela switched the phone to the other ear and settled her head back into her pillow. “I order a latte and you order a coffee with room for cream.”
“You smile at me when I sit down, and we talk about the art at The Met. Have you been to The Met?”
“Yes,” Angela said.
“Good,” Marty said. “What’s your favorite piece there?”
“Untitled Film Still #21.”
“Cindy Sherman,” Marty said. “Let me guess, you’re a photographer.”
“Guilty,” Angela said, and smiled, forgetting herself.
“You’re just out of art school and new to the city. You live in a six-floor walk-up in a two-bedroom with three roommates and you’re working reception at a gallery just barely making rent, but you’re young and your idealistic and you have dreams, and that means more to you than money.”
“And you’re what?” Angela said. “Another starving artist?”
“No, no, I never had the talent. I’m getting my PHD in Art History from Columbia, and I’m incredibly jealous of you—your passion and your ability—and I adore you.”
The next day, Angela felt a new energy surging through her. Every time she pointed her camera lens at a broken-down marquee or a girl standing in an entryway, her spaghetti strap slipping down her shoulder, it was as if she were seeing before her a piece of her soul.
In the evening she logged onto the hotline hoping for another call from Marty. Felt less conviction than usual when she commanded Lance to squeeze her tits.
When she didn’t hear from him in a week, Angela decided Marty’s call had been a one off. Maybe he found a girl he liked better, or maybe calling in had been an experiment and he didn’t feel the need to repeat it. But then he called, late one night when Angela was parked in a campsite in Georgia, sipping from a cheap bottle of Merlot.
“Sorry,” he said. “I meant to call you sooner, but I got caught up working on my dissertation.”
“It’s okay,” Angela said. She was not Misty, but she wasn’t herself. She was a different Angela, someone younger. Someone who still had hope that the work she was doing would make a difference. Someone who was still making easy sacrifices. “How is your dissertation coming along?”
“Great!” he said, and Angela heard the weariness fall away. He sounded almost exuberant, like a twenty-year old. “Warhol invited me down to The Factory to view his pieces for his new exhibit. His films are raw, but I think he is really hitting on something about the cult of celebrity and how it’s infiltrated American life.”
“In the future we’ll all be famous for fifteen minutes,” Angela said.
“Right,” Marty laughed. “That’s what Andy said.”
Angela took another sip of the wine and repositioned herself so that her back was up against the side of the van and her legs stretched out in front of her. She had been imaging them in the late nineties, when she was just graduating from college. For a moment, the rust stain on the ceiling and the wine and her Nikon camera resting on her pillow had felt like a manifestation of her young self’s ambitions, a fantasy she had taken and shaped into a life.