Correct English for Call Girls

WRITE ON NEW YORK
Everyone needs a great website. Ladies-of-the-night in the Midwood section of Brooklyn are proud of their pages, thanks to an English professor. I shall call him Spencer. He is sixty-something with distinguished brow and short-cropped gray hair. Tenured at a city university, he comes to Brooklyn to teach the classics.

One day, a student approached. With Russian accent, she asked Spencer if he would look at her website, which she depends on to pay tuition. Generous to a fault, unable to say no to anyone who needs a favor, Spencer agreed, and was surprised to find that she was selling not caviar or stacking dolls but love.

In her lewd, semi-nude photos, he barely recognized the open-faced young woman he knew from class, where she recited Ophelia.

“I saying college girl,” she explained, “site got to be college girl.”

And so, Spencer revised the young lady’s website, correcting grammar, softening sex with metaphor. When business improved, she gave him a gift. The young lady gave him some cash, and asked if he would revise the sites of her friends. And then, their friends. They also had friends. There is a world of women from Russia, Hungary and the Ukraine who support each other as they ply the oldest profession, and they don’t know each other from Meetup.

“Is it weird for you to work on a sex site?” I asked him. Spencer was telling me this story as we sat in a dark local bar, which used to have pretzels but is now all liquor.

“Good English is good English,” Spencer replied.

God, I know exactly what he means. Show me bad writing and my pen quivers, and that is not a metaphor. Poor English cries out for rectitude. Like the followers of Moses in the desert, poor English requires law; demands commandment.

“They like to mention they have children,” he goes on, “they like to come off genuine.”

Are they working for pimps? He shakes his head no.

“But how would you know for sure?” I ask, downing another rush of rum.

“I visit them,” he says, “they like to feed me.”

Home-made rye bread and herring, beef stroganoff and piroshki: They pool resources and lay a beautiful table to thank him because they cannot thank him enough. They regale each other with stories of the old country. Ancient feuds are forgotten. Everyone is fighting the same fight.

“Have you partaken?” I inquire, raising a brow.

“No, no I haven’t,” he goes on, “but I am falling in love with one of them.”

I exhale a long woh. Spencer is falling in love with a girl but before I can finish the thought he says, “She’s middle-aged. She was a radio technician in the Ukraine but of course, there’s no job like that here.”
He lifts his Coors. Will they be getting married soon? I wouldn’t be surprised. Spencer loves someone he can take care of and I can just picture her, looking into his eyes and speaking, in halting English, the perfect vows.