It was a Monday morning, the ringing of my cell phone jolted me out of some badly needed sleep. It was Maureen. Jolene had another date for me and I should come by the office that afternoon to get briefed. I wondered when the time would come that they would just give me an address and a name. Instead I always got a briefing -- like I was James Bond going on a special mission. By then I was starting to wonder how they handled the assignation of dates with the other 'contractors' -- male and female.
When I walked into the reception at J&B, Maureen told me my hair looked great and gave me a special look. I leaned close so she'd be able to whisper to me and she did. "I don't know yet when she'll be gone this week. Be patient." Then aloud: "Jolene's on the phone. Have a seat Art. How about a cup of coffee?" Coming back from the break/copy room, she bent over to give me the coffee and I noticed that she'd undone another button on her blouse, thus showing me even more cleavage than before.
"You like what you see?" she asked.
I told her I'd probably like even more the stuff that I couldn't see. We exchanged a few more sexually suggestive innuendos before Maureen noticed Jolene was off the phone and sent me in.
Jolene's compliment was even more gushy than Maureen's. Then typical of her, without catching a breath, she got down to business. "Tonight you're entertaining Effy. From the name and accent she's from Mide. This time, Art, I have no idea what she wants to do. I tried to get some idea but I had trouble understanding her. In the end the only thing that was clear is that you need to meet her in the lobby of the Four Seasons around 8 PM. Wear your khaki slacks and the blue blazer - and naturally shirt and tie. Midens, at least the men, tend to be conservative and formal -- right up to the time that they debase themselves with the lowest forms of debauchery."
I thought it was pretty weird that I might end up on a date with a Mide woman and I let Jolene know I was skeptical. After all, the men in that part of the world tend to keep their women pretty well locked up -- at home and when they're travelling. I also wondered how I'd bring a woman with poor English around to asking for the extra time that brings me the big tips. "And if I make the indecent proposal, what then? Hell you never know, Effy might turn out to be a female vice cop."
Jolene somehow convinced me it'd all work out and pooh-poohed the danger: "Art, you need to stop being so mistrustful. A female vice cop masquerading as an Miden woman? Really now! You need to come back down to earth. The cops here in Baltimore have trouble pretending to be cops."
After the adventures with Audrey during my last date at the Four Seasons, I had to agree with her judgment of the city's finest. In the end I committed to the date just like Jolene knew I would - right from the beginning. My final words of surrender were: "And how do I recognize Effy? I mean there might be more than one of them in a Miden dress."
Jolene gave me the same hard schoolteacher look that she always gave me whenever I got cynical. "Effy has black hair, 5-4, glittery silver necklace and bracelets, rings, blue dress and alligator handbag. She'll look like money is no object and it won't be."
I still had lots of misgivings about this. Hell, depending on where you are in her part of the world, men go to all sorts of extremes to keep their women pure -- cover the hair, cover the face, don't let women use seat belts because the female form is too obvious, don't let them drive, don't let them go shopping alone, etc., etc. And now this Effy, obviously from the Mide or near by, and whose English is pretty shaky, is free enough to engage an escort. Question was, who was scheming and what were they scheming to do?
Only when I walked into the lobby of the Four Seasons did my skepticism vanish. Maybe it was the memory of the afternoon in the Hyatt Regency with Marilyn. Maybe the luxury and energy-laden atmosphere of these luxury hotels somehow makes all the crap in the world go away?
As always Jolene's description was accurate, or at least good enough so that I didn't have any trouble finding Effy. She invited me to have a drink with her in the Wit & Wisdom (a bar/restaurant inside the hotel). Over whiskey's, she first explained that I shouldn't be surprised that she used alcohol. After all what did I think the upper class drank when they partied -- even in her prudish homeland.
It was pretty obvious that she wanted to talk so I let her do just that, interrupting with polite questions to give myself a rest from the effort of paying such close attention. It didn't take me too long to get used to her accent, but the real problem was her syntax. Effy knew lots of English words but she had never lived in an English speaking country before and it seemed that her sentence structure came more or less in a direct translation from her native language -- so yeah, it was tedious and I wondered if we'd ever get around to talking about extra services and the tip it'd take for her to get them.
After telling me a whole lot about life back home, Effy got into how much she liked living in Washington. She claimed that her husband was a big shot in their embassy and that gave her lots of pull to keep servants in line. More important though, as Jolene had predicted, money was definitely no problem.
At one point I interrupted with something like: "So you really like it in D.C.? And how do you like Baltimore?"
That's when she told me that her husband, Wally, was on an official trip to various cities around the country. What followed came in smatters and she sometimes seemed to contradict herself so I had to interrupt pretty often just to get things straight. Her husband, Wally, was in his mid-sixties - around 20 years older than she. From her tone of voice when she talked about Wally and from his age, I gathered that their marriage bed wasn't a very lively place.
I was having a hard time getting the names straight and the relationships. She began talking about her sisters Katy, Amy and Gwen and I asked if they all had the same father or same mother or both. The answer turned out to be both yes and no. Amy and Katy had the same father and mother. Effy and Gwen had the same father but different mothers. The confusion came because in English we don't have different words for sibling sisters and sister wives. Sister wives being women married to the same man. (Just like with any polygamous society, I pity the poor sap who has to draw up a family tree.)