My husband Don and I had been married for almost 10 years when our relationship and our lives were changed irrevocably.
We married young — I was only 18 and Don was 19 when we tied the knot. We were very much in love — more with the idea of being in love than each other, in hindsight. But the first few years were great.
We both had good jobs that paid well and we weren’t in a great rush to have kids so we had a lot of disposable income. We travelled overseas — often spending months at a time in France and Italy as well as South East Asia and other exotic places. We surprised each other with gifts on a regular basis and we enjoyed all the spontaneity that life had to offer us.
That was until our luck started to run out. It began with Don losing his job. He always swore blind to me that it was due to the company falling on hard times, but I was told later that it was linked to a sexual harassment allegation against Don that the company wanted to quash as quickly as possible. Either way, it meant that our comfortable joint income was slashed.
We still managed on my salary but it times were a lot tighter. Don didn’t seem too eager to get another job and this caused tension between us. The stress got so bad that what started out as a couple of drinks with the girls on a Friday night to ‘vent’ became a full-blown drinking problem and I also lost my job.
I was at my wits’ end. One night, while in a teary mess, I called my best friend Sandra and went over to her place. I stayed the night and awoke to find her kissing a man goodbye at the front door. When I said that I didn’t know she was seeing someone, she laughed at me.
“That wasn’t a date,” she explained. “That was a client. I had him booked before you showed up so I couldn’t cancel on him.”
I wasn’t as shocked as curious. And my reaction surprised me more than finding out that one of my good friends was an escort girl.
“How much do you make a week?” I asked.
“I can make anything up to $5000 without really working too hard,” she replied in an off-handed way.
I soon realised that I envied this independent and fairly wealthy woman that I had hardly known at all over the years we’d been friends.
Before I knew it, I was swept up in a world of money and prestige that far outweighed anything I’d known before. I had my drinking under control and I felt better than ever.
Sandra was a great guide into the world of the escort and she was good enough to pass on some of her more approachable clients to me until I got used to things and built a client base of my own. I was surprised (after muddling through my first couple of appointments fairly clumsily) how matter-of-fact it all became.
I was earning twice what Don and I had made combined and I felt no real guilt about it. My clients were faithful and respectful gentlemen, not the grimy perverts that I imagined when I’d thought of call girls before I discovered Sandra’s secret.
Some of my clients just wanted to cuddle and talk for an hour or more and I really felt as though I was helping people in some small way. I worked out of hotel rooms and, with some of my more trusted clientele, out of their own homes.
I was given expensive jewellery at Christmas or sometimes for no reason at all and I was often taken to the best Sydney restaurants and events that only the very wealthy ever experience.
I told Don that I had landed a business consulting job working mainly with entrepreneurial types which is why I was on call day and night to cater to their every whim. He had no complaints as he no longer needed to even pretend to look for work.
New clients would only become aware of me via word of mouth. My business card was only to be passed on to trusted colleagues of my existing client base. Even then, my card said “Conveyancer” on it. The potential client would then email me at an address that I had set up for clients only, using terms such as: “I would like to make an appointment to discuss the sale of my property” and we would go from there.
One night, I received an email from my first new client in some time. I wasn’t really looking for any new business but he sounded sweet and polite and I thought, “Why not?” I was to meet him at a well-known hotel overlooking Hyde Park.
He had given me the room number, and I always dress to fit into the places I’m sent to, so I just glided right through the foyer and up to the room.
When I knocked on the door this particular night, I heard the man inside shout, “Won’t be a sec”. My stomach lurched.
I ran back around to the lifts and carefully peeked around the corner to see the man I’d married 10 years before appear at the door!
He looked this way and that for the escort girl he’d ordered — the one who just happened to be me on this night.
I wondered how many others there’d been and the cynical voice in the back of my head laughed at the fact that I’d funded my husband’s infidelity with my own.
Neither of us has confronted the other about that night. Whether Don ever found out that he had contacted his own wife for a clandestine meeting I don’t know. I’m still working, though somewhat less these days. Don has since moved out and, funnily enough, he’s working as a conveyancer!
Names in this story have been changed.
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