Mack Reynolds - Equality - In the Year 2000

His uncle laughed again. “I gave Ten Eyck a check and told him to send the girl away for a few months. If they had come to me sooner, she could have had an abortion, but it’s too late for that now. See here, my boy, you’re getting to the age where you’re going to have to watch out for these things. Every woman you run into is going to have her eye on the West fortune. To be safe, why don’t you let me set up a little flat or house in Kingston for you? I’ll check with Polly Adler down in the city and we’ll arrange for a nice experienced girl to take it over. You can visit her when you, ah, have the urge.”

Julian experienced a great inner relief, but he said, “No thanks, Uncle Albert.”

“Suit yourself, but don’t worry about Ten Eyck. I warned him that if he took this to court, I’d hire the best lawyers in the state to defend you. And that when the case fell through, I’d prosecute both him and his daughter.”

It was the first time his family’s money had been ruthlessly utilized to protect him from his actions.

He realized that Edith had opened her eyes and was watching him with an expression compounded of sleepiness, warmth, satisfaction, affection… and possibly a bit of humor.

He said, wiping his dream thoughts of Peggy Ten Eyck from his mind, “Good morning, Edie.”

“Good morning, darling. Did I make you happy?”

He took in her beauty. During past sexual experiences he had most often dreaded seeing his bed companion in the harshness of morning light; makeup smeared, hair a mop, breath heavy with the tobacco and alcohol of the night before, the animal smell of used sex and dried sweat. It didn’t apply to Edith Leete. She had never worn cosmestics in her life, her hair was short cut, she neither smoked nor drank beyond a bit of wine or beer with meals. And now that he thought about it, after their last bout with Eros, she had gone into the bath and showered. He was disgusted with himself for not having done the same.

Now she was fresh and beautiful.

He nodded and said, “Yes. Yes, Edie.”

“All right, then. Breakfast. Last one up is a rotten egg!” She threw back the single sheet that covered them and began to swing her excellent legs over the side of the bed.

He said, “Wait just a minute.”

She looked at him and raised her eyebrows mockingly. “What? After all that? Are you a satyr?”

He shook his head this time. “No. It’s not that. I just wanted to look at you, and perhaps… tell you I love you.”

Her eyes had narrowed very slightly and there was something possibly sad behind them. But her words came out in a laugh. “You are—what was your old term?— corny,” she told him.

He protested, “I’m not that old. Between that word and the time I went into hibernation there was ‘square,’ ‘not with it,’ ‘not hep,’ and various others I can’t think of right now. But, okay, breakfast it is.”

They took turns in the bath and when he returned to the bedroom she had already garbed herself in the dungarees she almost always affected, and had dialed a complete new outfit for him except for shoes. He found it difficult to get used to the modern custom of wearing clothes a single time and then disposing of them to be recycled. He had been told that less labor was involved in such a system than washing, drying, ironing, replacing buttons, mending tears and holes. The textile industry was one of the most highly automated in the nation.

They headed for the kitchen. On the way, Edith said, “Jule, tell me about prostitutes.”

“What?”

“About prostitutes. Whores.”

As they sat down at the kitchenette table, he asked, “What’s this fascination you women have with the subject? Your mother asked me about it just the other day.”

“A double order of ham and eggs, lots of toast, butter, marmalade? A liter of coffee?”

“I could use it,” he agreed emphatically.

After she dialed, she said, “From this perspective in time, it’s almost impossible to understand it, though, of course, as a student of anthropology I realize that since history began, prostitution existed in most parts of the world. But why did they do it?”

“For money,” he said, his voice laconical.

“How much money did they get?”

He rubbed his forehead thoughtfully. “I suppose it depended on the country, how attractive they were, how young. I’ve heard of prices ranging from twenty-five cents to five hundred dollars.”

“Twenty-five cents!”

“Women in India, aged, half-starved, undoubtedly diseased.”

“And five hundred dollars?”

The food had arrived. After she served it, he said, “In places such as New York, Hollywood, Paris, and London, they had ultra-swank call girls. Very high-class office, usually under the guise of a model agency or some such. You had to be properly introduced, properly identified, and all the rest of it. For anywhere from two hundred dollars up you could have a girl for the evening who was very presentable, well educated, a good conversationalist, and supremely attractive. The five-hundred-dollar ones were usually recognizable TV or movie starlets, who even gave you a bit of prestige when seen with them in the top nightspots or restaurants. Few people knew, of course, that they augmented their incomes by putting out for their arranged dates at an agreed-upon price.”

“They must have hated it.”

“To the contrary, some of them loved it. I recall once being invited on a yachting cruise with five other upper-class chaps in roughly my own age group. There were eight girls aboard, all of them available at any time. The party lasted a week. The best of food, the best of booze, and, frankly, the best of girls. They were all college students, by the way, making a bit of extra cash during the summer. Believe me, if there were any of them that didn’t love the job, they didn’t show it. As I recall, the yacht owner gave them a thousand dollars apiece at the end of the cruise. On top of that, some of the rest of us tipped their favorites.”

She shook her head in disbelief, even as she ate.

“But basically, how degrading.”

He shrugged. “There were male prostitutes too. Handsome young physical specimens whom older women, usually, would go for—either for one-night stands, indefinite arrangements, or sometimes marriage.”

She shook her head again. “I can’t imagine such a code of sexual morality.”

He had to laugh at that. “Well, it’s a little difficult for me to comprehend some aspects of yours.”

“I read that a good many of these women were lesbians; that they came to hate men so much that they turned to women for their real sexual release.”

“Evidently some were. I think more were bisexual. There was quite a book on it just before I went under. The Happy Hooker . The author was a top-paid prostitute and madam who liked both men and women. Are there more lesbians now, since you’ve let down the legal barriers against homosexuals so far as consenting adults are concerned?”

“Oh, no. I would think considerably less. It turned out that in many cases it was largely psychological—not completely, of course—and most of it disappeared among both men and women when legal restraints were removed and sex education improved. I tried it once.”