It’s a big deal to meet someone who’s one in a million. You never know what could happen next. Back in the 2000s I got to know a guy named Arthur. He had an interesting occupation, you might even say calling: interviewing, selecting, training, developing motivational programs and payment systems, plus firing people, of course. That’s right, you’re already ahead – Arthur worked in personnel, and yes, if we’re going to be really particular about it, he was a pimp.
In St. Petersburg, especially back in those glory days, there were a great many conferences and seminars. These fabulous events kept a significant number of visitors to the “Venice of the North” in food and liquor. And it would be hard to put into words the inner spiritual joy experienced by women who weren’t prepared to work in brothels, but were eager, in some way, to monetize their excellent genetic assets.
What incredible men these were, coming here from all over the country! 4W Males: well-groomed, well-fed, wealthy and well-read! Sleeping with these types for free wouldn’t raise an eyebrow, and if money was involved it would have to be considered God’s work. An extra plus here was that there was no need to advertise or give out your number. In fact, sometimes you didn’t even have to get into bed with them. You simply played nice at a party, then ended the night with a few pages of Shakespeare or Shaw.
So, Arthur was responsible for a great deal in these contractual arrangements, but for the most part, as I said, it boiled down to finding the right personnel. The routine was as follows: a restaurant was selected and reserved for a few hours, rumors of casting sessions went out on the jungle drums, the women would come along, sit at the tables and sip tea. From the sidelines, it all looked like what passes for glamour in the hinterlands. Arthur would sit down with those fine enough to make it through his visual sieve, chat with them, establish how far the women in question were willing to go, make sure they weren’t psychos, and come to a final decision.
One October there was a major conference going on. A high-powered business woman along with her female assistant came to town. The woman, whose professional specialization was helping kleptocrats invest their hard-stolen cash abroad, was well over forty, while her assistant was barely over twenty. The women arrived early and went for a walk around town. It was the kind of October in St. Petersburg that wasn’t ideal for taking a stroll, so it wasn’t long before they decided they needed to warm up. As they stepped into the restaurant, they were asked: “Are you here for the conference?”
“Yes.”
“For work?”
“Of course, why?”
“Then come in.”
The women exchanged looks, but didn’t pay much attention. Perhaps they were at some special dinner for meeting participants. There then followed an intriguing conversation with Arthur, who happened to be in the same cafe, hard at work.
“Ladies, do you mind if I join you for a heart-to-heart?”
Arthur was extremely good-looking, and turning him down would have been tricky. All the more so since the only people these unsuspecting guests had been having heart-toheart chats with for quite some time now was one another.
“Of course!”
“I’m Arthur.”
“Jane and Anna.”
“Wow. You’d didn’t take long choosing your names – usually all the Janes want to be Angelinas, but you’re not worried about it.”
“Actually, my parents chose it,” laughed Jane, intrigued by all this male attention suddenly coming her way. Arthur was attractive. Off the charts. Or basically, so goodlooking that he was practically irresistible.
“Cool! I rarely meet ladies who use their own names.”
“Where do you meet all these secretive women? We’re not hiding anything from anyone.”
A thought flashed through Arthur’s brain: “You’re definitely not! These Moscow women…”
“We could use a lot more like you! Is this your first time working at a conference?”
“Of course not, I’ve been working all over the world for years, but Anna here, my assistant, is a newby. She needs to catch up on her rest – a conference isn’t like being bent over your desk at the office from morning ‘til night, sweating it out.”
Arthur loved this older woman’s lively sense of humor even though she was slightly outside the age limit that he himself had set. Nevertheless, she looked so much better, and was of such a higher quality than all those he’d seen previously at this beauty and spirit competition that he decided to enlist her anyway. The tag-along assistant, however, wasn’t entirely in keeping with the standard format. Briefly, he even lost his usual armor-plated, suave demeanor, fumbling like a teenager with a complicated bra.
“An assistant? Um… right … so you work … as a pair, sort of?”
“Yes. Anna is always with me. I discovered her at my last job. Going it alone at my age is a bit much, my work friends would all laugh at me. And an extra set of hands when you’ve got all this technical work to do is a blessing, sometimes I just don’t have the strength to see things through to the end.”
Jane was flirting big time. You can never take this oxygen away from a woman. Never. Without it, a woman… no, they don’t die, they simply start breathing in bad air, and a person can get used to anything. Arthur realized that he still had a lot to learn about his profession, especially about seeing things through to the end.
“So, Anna was with you on your last job! That’s… team spirit. If it’s not a secret, can you tell me about that job? Usually, I just get all these hard-luck stories. But you’re upbeat and cheerful and, most importantly, a straight shooter!”
“Come on, in my business you have to be cheerful. People only want to be around happy people. I was the Vice-President of a bank. It was so depressing and boring that I went into, well, consulting. Now I focus on helping government employees resolve their most intimate issues. They don’t trust anybody, but they’ve all known me for a long time. They know they can trust me.”
Arthur had heard a lot in his time, and shocking this lifer wasn’t easy, but career changing on this scale was radical, even by his standards. The Lord and Master of St.Petersburg’s highest paid escorts was open-mouthed in astonishment, like a kid at a David Copperfield show.
“And …how long have you been …. resolving intimate issues for government employees?”
“Two years, and you know what? It’s like getting a blast of fresh air! The only downside is sometimes I have to be a psychologist. Most of the time you can figure out what’s wrong in five minutes … But all the talking about it can take an hour. It’s always about how miserable their lives are, their wives, their children, their mistresses, and what they should do with all of them. Soon I’ll have to start charging for the therapy.”
Arthur had never thought about a prostitute as being a breath of fresh air, but he was quickly realizing that he needed to take a whole new look at this entire transactional experience. He even felt a revised sense of self-respect. He was giving people air, after all. Fresh air.
“Fresh Air. You’ve put it so poetically … And how’s Anna dealt with these changes?”
Jane kept barreling ahead. Full steam.
“She’s dealt with them well, right, Anna?”
Anna nodded. Jane was so clearly in her element and commanding the handsome Arthur’s attention, that this retiring flower didn’t dare try and give her any competition. She simply smiled. Her boss, however, was just getting started.
“So many new people, up-to-date techniques, she’ll be invaluable, I could even marry her off. She’s already had two proposals, but the age difference wasn’t right – they were rich, but not old enough, they might be around too long.”
Jane chuckled loudly.
“Although, at this rate, I’ll need a new husband too…”
The cheerfulness abated somewhat.
“Really, why?”
“My husband doesn’t really like my new line of work. Especially because I’m earning more than him again. To be honest, we’re separated, the relationship’s gone ice cold.”
There was sadness in her voice. Jane didn’t want a divorce. The fear of loneliness and the familiarity. It was too common, expected almost. Jane hadn’t been able to talk to anyone about this, and now, here was this fetching stranger, a man, she liked him, felt comfortable, and it came flooding out. In the same way that you can sometimes talk about your innermost feelings to someone you just met. Arthur heard the loneliness, but decided to return to it later. At that moment he was more astonished by the extent of her husband’s awareness.
“He ‘doesn’t really like it’?” asked Arthur, thrown off by her spouse’s impressive restraint. “Well, he said that basically I have the right, but often I stay out late, and can’t come home. Plus, he thinks my clients are all crooks. He knows a couple of them, so sometimes we all go out to dinner together.”
In the David Copperfield show, little Arthur had just experienced Uncle David turning into John Snow during the last season of Game of Thrones, cutting all the spectators’ heads off, belching fire and dancing “Hava Nagila” in front of Daenerys. He struggled to ask a question:
“And what did you say?”
“Well, a husband can remove a woman from the workforce with the double multiplier.”
“What? The multi… what?”
Anna, who had become like a sister and best friend to Jane in all her exploits, already had heard all of this, so of course, she was bored. However, she was somewhat surprised by the unexpected frankness from her generally reserved boss. But, still she smiled. She adored the double multiplier theory. If and when she got married, it would only be to a man who could fully embrace this equation.
“Well, it’s when the husband is prepared to pay his wife double what she can make herself. Then, he has the right to lock her up in the house with kitchen duty. I honestly put it to him. He can’t. So, I work. Well, I work as best I can. But he couldn’t stand the money I was bringing in. You know, I even think that, because of that, he stopped, um … anyway, that’s not important, sorry.”
Jane realized that she was saying too much. Her husband really had stopped sleeping with her. This major development had exactly coincided with the uptick in her prosperity. The first time she informed him of a large-scale increase in her income, he pointedly turned her down, bluntly putting her off with: “I don’t want to.” She thought she detected a trace of some inner satisfaction at the sight of her eyes welling up at this insult, the eyes of a mature woman who had become well-off at such an inopportune time. Her husband was taking revenge. And then a young, otherwise unremarkable mistress appeared. Jane wouldn’t play the same game because of her principles. She got offers, of course, but … eventually her husband said that he wanted to live on his own, but he was in no hurry to get divorced. He just kept on taking his revenge.
“Basically, he couldn’t stand my work, even though I told him about everything honestly. Anyway, sorry, you like cheerful people. I remember.”
Anna listened and drew her own conclusions: “my future husband won’t know anything about my finances, and anyway, you should only have a career that’s within the bounds of common sense (and the same goes for your appearance). Each mouse in its mousehole. Safer that way.”
Meanwhile, Arthur was carefully analyzing what he’d had to drink that morning, studying every detail of his cigarette pack and giving his coffee an intense investigative sniff, before accepting that he simply couldn’t understand what the world was coming to. He retreated to the safer realm of enterprise:
“All right, let’s get down to business. If I’ve understood correctly, you’re ready to work full time at the conference, not just stand around at the parties, although obviously that’s not really your preferred option.”
“To business … right, then … Totally flat out, all the main clients are here, two hours hard at it, and then they bring you all the money. I work with what’s really precious, I know their weak points, the things they wouldn’t even tell their wives.”
“Listen, don’t take this the wrong way, but are you sure you need to take Anna with you? You’re like an S-Class Mercedes, perfectly waxed and polished, but she’s … forgive me for being frank … not really got the right look. No offence, but her hands, her hair, she’s just kind of… plain. Not everyone here knows you, it’s a new crowd. Maybe you can manage on your own? Jane, what do you think?”
A meaty pause. Anna blushed. Jane took the criticism personally, even though she realized it was justified. However hard she tried to get her assistant to pay some attention to her appearance, it all came down to laziness and excessive flattery from clients. She gave Anna money, then gift cards to beauty salons, then memberships to exclusive gyms. Anna somehow got her looks up to where she could get past the velvet rope but she wasn’t ever going to be accepted in the VIP section.
“Really, it’s true, Anna, we could turn you into a babe in a month, just look at, well … take a look at your boss. Faultless. How old are you, Jane? 37-38?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Jane felt warm inside, but she wasn’t going to give her protégé up without a fight. “But damn, it’s nice that he was off by seven whole years! And he hasn’t even seen me naked… True, nobody does these days … sigh…”
Arthur continued.
“I get it – money, time, the gym, ten grand for a new set of tits, but this is business, and you have to play by the rules. So, no Anna. But I’ll take you on, I’ve got three or four guys that are perfect for you, we’ll split everything evenly.”
Jane didn’t like aggressive business partners, but just in case she decided not to end the deal right this second.
“Listen, I don’t know who these clients you’ve got for me are, I have my own list, but it doesn’t make any difference – Anna’s going to be with me the whole time, I don’t even understand why it’s any of your business. And fifty percent? – you’ve got balls. For a good client, I’m willing to pay ten percent on the first payment. Okay – 20 percent, but then he’s mine. And this totally depends on who we’re talking about. We’ve known each other for all of half an hour…”
Anna felt ashamed at having laughed with her girlfriends about her boss and her connubial unhappiness. But Anna couldn’t forgive Jane for her beauty or for her success. Arthur, on the other hand, was overcome with admiration. “What amazing women we have here in Russia!”
“All right, I rarely make an exception, but you can have seventy percent. You can keep Anna if you want, but trust me, she’s going to ruin everything. But, you’re right, not my business - your problem. I take the money from the clients in advance, otherwise you’ll never get it from them. Oh, and remember – this is St. Pete, no Moscow prices here, the visitors spend all their money on museums and spiritual development. They pinch their pennies when it comes to pleasures of the flesh. Well, you probably know all that.”
Arthur shut down his inner miser, got back in touch with his genuine admiration for Jane, and made an offer.
“Three grand maximum for the night, even for someone as hot as you.” Anna’s already red face turned purple, and she decided not to put her tea cup back down, as she was afraid she might disturb the silence hanging in the air. She just froze, with the porcelain rim against her lips.
There was good reason why Jane had once been a Vice-President of a bank. She was quick-witted and rarely blushed. The pause was brief. Her voice was now fashioned out of high tensile titanium.
“Am I right in thinking that you think we’re prostitutes?”
There was also good reason why Arthur was in his job. He could finally relax, the world hadn’t gone mad. The pause was brief. His voice was now fashioned in bright red neon.
“Am I right in thinking, that I’m entirely wrong in my thinking?”
“Do we look like whores?
The question mixed indignation with curiosity.
“Everyone does, if they come to a casting session for prostitutes. Take a look around. Don’t you notice anything? Do you think St. Petersburg has run out of men? By the way, your assistant didn’t make the cut. But you did. Best of the season. I don’t know if you find that flattering or not.” Jane wanted to slap Arthur’s face, but she stopped short of the physical act and examined the situation from another angle. This is perhaps the sole skill in life that only comes with age.
“Anna, wait for me outside.”
Arthur had never seen a person dissolve away in a split second before. He even began to suspect that teleportation was actually possible. Jane had an ability to strip a conversation down to the nuts and bolts. She asked a question. Somehow, in the space of that one question, she found room for sorrow, excitement, anguish, astonishment and hope.
“Listen, do you really think that I … that, well, someone would pay three thousand … to … well … because I think that I’ll be ready to pay for it myself soon, if I’m being honest. My husband’s fucking some mouse of a girl, and I can’t do it with my clients, I don’t go to clubs…”
“Not three – five. I was screwing you out of the extra two. You’re absolutely worth it! I wouldn’t mind … we could offset the costs, so we wouldn’t have to pass the three thousand back and forth, if you’re saying you’re ready to pay. To be honest, I was sitting here thinking how to talk you into giving me a test drive, but I realized you’d never let that fly. Here’s my number. I’m better than your husband’s mouse, that’s for sure. Call me any time.”
Jane lost another five years, gazed out into nothing, very much aware of who she was looking at. She’d won, and in leaving, she didn’t leave any bridges burned.
“Offset the costs? No commission?”
“None.”
A month later she got divorced. Six months later, she got married.
Jane didn’t have sex with Arthur the handsome pimp. She sent a photograph from the marriage bureau, with an inscription, “Thank you, Arthur.”
As Arthur looked at the photo, something inside him cracked, something fundamental, something that made him a man. Uncle David had shown him the magic, then flown away forever and he hadn’t taken little Arthur with him.
He started looking for someone like her, but they are one in a million.