The Girl Friend Experience

N.T Arévalo

Billie rests her face against the soft green cushions of a leased couch, ignoring her phone’s rings. Her clients know not to call this early. She’s a night owl—the only cliché she allows. After an endless series of four to five rings at a time—she knows because she counts, each time thinking they’ll leave a message—Billie unsnaps her body from the couch, squints away from a gray light that brightens as it streams towards her from the hall, and reaches to unfold the phone resting on the floor.

"Who’s this?" A woman’s voice crackles.
Billie frowns. "Who are you?"
"Are you serious?"
It’s the kind of call Billie doesn't get anymore. She has no female friends or female clients, and if there’s another woman on her floor she's yet to show herself. Even Billie’s mother stopped calling, once she’d figured out Billie’s deal. If it’s a long shift, Billie’s brain and voice are too numbed anyway, after spending the day repeating the four words she uses with all of them: How are you, baby? A question that’s neither here nor there to answer herself as her answer’s not the point; it’s her job to be there for their chatter, say only what they need to hear.

“I got your number from an email.”
“What email?”
“An email to my boyfriend.” The caller spits the last word from her mouth like it’s a flavor she’s starting to lose a taste for.

Billie tries on silence.
“Hello?” the caller repeats.
Billie tries to sound wet and doubtful with the sleep she thought she was in but is spoiled by a tone that’s dry, completely incapable of feigning surprise at six A.M. phone calls.
She sighs, readying herself for the inquisition, trying to remember her lines. “Yeah, I’m Rosalie.” It’s a name that makes Billie sound the part, something the clients prefer, better and warmer than what she was born with: the drab, the long, the forbidding princess name of Wilhelmina.

“Well . . . Do you have a few minutes?”

Billie settles onto the arm of the couch. She pulls her long graying hair back from its grip on her neck. Taking a “Why Me?” stance won’t get this shit over with any faster. Her front teeth grind as she moves only her lips. “What’s your name?”

“Helena.”

“Well, Helena, I’m happy to answer any question.” Billie rolls her eyes and lays the phone on the cushion, resting beside it and stringing strands above her head.

Helena’s polite, mimicking respect, hitting all the right notes. “It seems like you have a business, and I’m not any judge of that, sincerely. But I need to understand what’s what, before he starts arguing nothing happened.” She punctuates the request with a laugh that dies from a quick strangulation. Billie hears shoulders slump and feels the weight of a heavy iron request for unconditional empathy thrown over the line.

But Billie doesn’t have to tell this woman shit.

Helena forces her next words from deeper in her gut, like she’s crabbing for a truth that’s yet to come in with the tide. “I’m trying to understand why your number’s in this email. Whether to leave him, you understand?” She huffs, weariness deceiving her. “What the hell is going on.”

“You need my help so you can leave him?”

“Yes.”

“You can’t leave him on your own? On what you think happened?” Billie knows she’s pressing, knows what this woman is going to say, knows what Helena already thinks, and knows that she’s already wrong.

Helena’s quiet long enough for Billie to cross the living room and grab a Coke before stretching back on the couch. The windows down the end of the hall now hold an electric blue— morning will soon replace the night and even the dawn. And Helena jumps back on track, choosing to ignore the truth Billie’s pushing.

“My guess, from what I saw, is that he must have answered an ad.” “What’s your guy’s name?”
“Frank.”
Billie offers the appropriate pause. “Hard to remember.”

Helena’s politeness whittles down another layer. “Just how many do you see?”

Billie coughs to correct her, stop that line of questioning. She wants to go down the yellow brick road, does she? “Okay. I was talking to some Frank guy last week. I keep an ad on Craigslist. Can you get online?”

“Yeah.”

Helena’s exhale, her relief is wet and familiar. She hasn’t slept and Billie sees her: Helena pacing between scraps of paper, digits, websites. Helena with the blinds pulled shut, thinking she’s something to hide. Helena dialing this number, hanging up. Dialing this number, hanging up. The movies that play in her head, full of blanks, her life a sick game of Mad Libs or Gotcha or Monopoly and she’s just found out she’s never, ever supposed to win.

Billie stops sipping the Coke and explains to Helena how to find her. Computer keys echo across the line, soft indentations tip-toeing their way to the end. A yellowed light at last begins to enter Billie’s apartment, streaming toward her end of the couch. For Helena, black blinds obscure the coming day and a screen brings the sun from within.

“It links to my site. You want to go there.”

Billie imagines Helena’s eyes squeezing to hold onto the last moments when she can pretend, be safe in a womb of darkness. The mouse swerves and taps. The damp choking sweat of adrenaline is sent over the phone and rises to grip Billie. Her own heart picks up the pace and it’s boom-boom- BOOM in her lips, her ears, nostrils, pussy, throat. She sets her Coke on the carpet to stroke her chest. Down, down, she whispers in her mind so Helena can’t hear her. The silence is too familiar, thick and growing dry. It suspends time until the mind of the website visitor’s clicked, twining every corner in her brain into one straight line of explanation—all those hours, what he said, what he meant. What she didn’t do, didn’t see. Billie knows that tears no longer have a place but that shock will sink into Helena, reside in a well inside her until its transformed every reflex and even her line of vision. As Billie’s chest subsides, Helena’s own heart picks up the pound. The tremors from her leg shake the laptop.

“What’s GFE?” Helena asks, quiet as if she still has time to flee before the answer arrives.

Billie’s found that girls, women, wives, mothers, daughters never put it together. They just don’t think like a man quite enough sometimes. They just don’t think for themselves.

“Girl. Friend. Experience.”
“Girlfriend experience? What does that mean? Why would they want that?”
Billie sips at her Coke. She could tell Helena, fast track her education. It had taken Billie long

enough to understand it herself.
The first time she’d had to confess to Chad how she found the receipt, left under the keyboard. He’d called phone lines, one after the other. Their bills mounted and she understood why—when she called the lines, listened to the invitations. Billie worked two jobs to pay those bills while Chad worked part-time, claiming he never got responses from the applications he sent in. So that left between the lines was a plea she’d tried to ignore: all the man needed was to feel wanted.

“It’s only to hear their messages, that’s it babe!” –and how could she ever argue that it constituted an irreparable sin?

Whenever she worked up the nerve to split, he cried the one-sided case until it filled the room and took over the air between them. Don’t leave me. This doesn’t mean anything. I love you. You’re sexy, you’re all I ever wanted—and he’d show her, be better, the best ever, and Billie acquiesced as lovers always do. She was lost in the boyfriend experience of unconditional love that unleashed itself, drowning all that ever was so that they were the only ones left on their new ark. And somehow the sex got better. He grew more honest, more vulnerable, but it was Billie who convinced herself that their relationship had grown to a healthier plain. That you could expect nothing more of a man. She grew wiser in her assessment and glare at the world, more removed. She learned what he claimed he liked and how he liked to hear it, do it, feel it. She thought herself sophisticated, not at all tainted. Even if the thought stuck in her throat and kept digging at her mind, the simple word: look. Look.

Then came the child, one after the other, until they had three and his hours at the computer were mostly in the late evenings and she was too busy to notice anything else. It had been years and years. She thought it was done. But while she’d gotten better at moving on, he’d gotten better at deceit. That last time, Billie kept her head above water and her mind clear with something rare–facts. But facts are penniless replacements for sons of bitches. They left her with no man, plenty of bills and children, and too much knowledge on the one thing, the quickest thing, she knew to make it all back.

The Girlfriend Experience, GFE, was Chad’s favorite. Over time, she’d come across some of his conquests, his purchases, where he’d tasted the love. He had her mimic the long, engaged sessions. The order of foreplay, fellatio and deep French kisses. The anticipation of needs— emotional needs—so he didn’t feel so alone. Billie wondered just how inept she was before, the thought paining and shaming her. She’d gained an uncanny education and knew just how to make it special, to get the clients back for more. She knew how to market herself. The facts on advertised pages—what all the girls and guys were selling out there, between the lines—and the secret wishes of a man were no longer withheld from her. Her eyes were no longer closed. Gone was her mother’s voice in her ear—“What are you doing? WHAT are you doing?”—on those last messages. Billie had changed her number. The only version of herself that remained were her children and she would raise them wiser. She would raise them to be nobody’s fool.

Anyway, she can tell that she has a fact checker on her hands and Billie doesn’t have the time to be Helena’s teacher. Open your own fucking eyes, bitch.

“Just look it up sometime. I’m going to have to go.” As she says it, Billie feels guilt tighten its noose and lift its mirror to the Helena she once was.

“Did you actually meet last week?”

Billie knows the tone, the quickening of pace and dead center questions. The plie to kick off the final dance. She laughs, as if she’s in some other conversation, as if she can’t see the red cracks across Helena’s eyes. “The secret’s that they never go through with it. Men don’t do half of what they—“

“Did he show?”

“Look,” Billie begins, licking her lip, pulling her hair back. She steps away from the borrowed couch. “A lot of guys call. They even try to set dates to meet. Which is what I remember your Frank doing—“

“But did he show?” Helena’s mind and gut are on the same team, and together press. They’re finding their steam. They’re seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. If they press on, if they work together.

Billie can’t answer quickly enough and in missing her step, Helena steams on, “Because it says here you were confirmed to meet last Friday. And I was out of town. I called and the line was busy. All night. And now this email and he clearly – “

Billie interrupts, firm and fast. “No. I’ve never met him. He didn’t show.”
“Really?” Helena laughs. “Woman to woman. REALLY?”
“He didn’t show,” Billie repeats. She remembers hearing a broken record once herself, that it calmed her, and she offers Helena that record. She walks to the sole window at the end of the hall, where the sun is taking over the landscape. Her kids race past her to the living room. She lifts the mouthpiece away from her jaw and cries. Not because it’s too late for Helena—because it’s not. But because innocence is so damned close that Billie’s choking on it.

Helena sighs and waits, but Billie has no other words for her; words will do no good. So Helena replaces steam with a raw, braking truth. Her shoulders drag forward in exhaustion and defeat haunts her voice.

“You didn’t have to answer my questions. I appreciate it.”

There’s a sigh, a relief and a long quiet as Helena returns to the way women are supposed to sound. It’s a sharp change to Billie who’s been away from these voices, from her own voice, for so long. But it’s definite and it’s female and Billie wishes it wasn’t true. It’s a voice in want of no thing, grateful, and in the tone of perpetual apology.

The tremors halt when Helena’s screen saver ignites, traveling through star fields of the universe, the daylight of no matter.

“No problem,” Billie says, finally. She smiles on the other end, ready to ease out of the dance. “I understand,” she adds, taking on the fidelity of a sympathetic tone that all the women beg for and expect. She grabs a towel to wipe her face.

“I’m so embarrassed to have called.”
Billie hears a chair swivel, one she imagines Helena picked out, even owns.
“Don’t! You’ve a right to know what’s going on. I know men make that tricky.”
She hopes the words are fiercer than a hug, giving Helena a reprieve so at least she can get some sleep. Because Helena’s already made a decision, the one they all come to—that it was her own fault, that it’s always the woman’s fault—and Billie’s already made hers: I won’t leave this one with any doubt.

Helena laughs, “Are they all liars in the end?” Her stomach jumps at the question and she holds it against the dark womb she sits in. Steady, steady—please. Please, Rosalie, Helena mouths into the phone

There’s not a beat missed in the reply: “No! And you got a good one. Clearly, he didn’t want to. Why would he? Guys do that, you know? You’re out of town, he’s bored or lonely, messing around online . . . but nothing ever happens. All they want is . . . you.”

Helena’s chair stops its swivel. Her breath stops coming across the line. And Billie’s got to let her heart crack, just this once, let a woman in, let what’s left of herself out.

“Honey? You okay?”

Helena’s gut settles. She needs a friend more than she needs sleep or a sun on its swift way, burning through her blinds, and it’s going to be Billie, Rosalie, a stranger’s voice that finally delivers salvation.

“Okay. I’m okay.”
Billie stands warm in the light. “Yeah.”

They rest on the phone, joining the quiet of morning. Cars in lots below ignite, go, one by one. Pipes in neighboring apartments flood with the rush of water channeled and used. If they weren’t already, they’re now both in the same state: firmly shaken from sleep, arriving at the respite that is a new day.

“Thanks. Truly.” Helena nods, a yawn coming over her.
”Anytime,” Billie says, her voice, at last, soothing.
She places her Coke, unfinished, in the sink. She turns to look at her children, playing in the center of the room, toys strewn across every corner of the carpet. The sun arrives in full over the borrowed couch, the pay-as-you-go phone, over every toy and every inch of her family. While Billie remembers just how much Frank had liked the kids.