She sat alone on a Wednesday night wearing a sheer nightie that revealed hints of her nipples and traces of her thighs below the hem but did little to hide the slump in her shoulders or the stiffness of her knees. She was looking at a chat window and a live feed of a man who called himself Greg and claimed to be thirty. It may have been the poor quality of his cam but she thought she could see a lot of gray hair around his temples and loose skin under his jowls, and believed him closer to forty.
She was thankful when they preferred for her to lay back and not have to face the cam. Sometimes, that was enough, but seldom were they that passive. They often asked her to switch to several poses and insert the dildo in multiple places, whatever they had seen in the video clips that they had become bored enough with to pay for a live performance. She did as they asked and made the appropriate faces when she had to face the cam, writhed her body in such a way to make it seem like ecstasy. Sometimes the men who had cams fixed it on their crotches and she derived some giddy joy from that, despite it being part of the job, and sometimes all she could see was their faces. They never smiled.
“Are you French? Do you live in France?” asked one man.
She did not keep track of the number of times she received specific messages but she was certain that the most frequent was, “How are you baby?” So, she decided that her stage name would be Baby.
Baby smiled very well for someone who had performed for such a long time. She kept her skin tight around the sinews and bones and her face was always made-up in lipstick and powder and kohl, her eyelashes flared out of her hazel-tinted eyes. Some still paid her directly but most found her through other places, other websites. They thought she was “interesting” and “hot.” She thinks it was only the old men who used the word “exotic” because only old men think a tan is exotic. She couldn’t tell the age of some beyond the age they gave her in chat because they did not use cams.
“Do you do parties? Can we meet? I bet you would make a lot more money if you did parties,” typed another.
She never met any of her clients for public shows because although she was keen to the potential for increased revenue she was fearful of the types of people who attended such events. She was not high-class by any means and had long ago given up the notion of being so, and as such could probably never get invited to the types of events where she would just be another girl for a crowd of rich, indifferent men. Her fear of admirers surpassed her need to expand her clientele. She remained Baby, behind the cam.
They wanted a friend, a pretend lover, someone to read them and know them and love them in some small way, for a little while, for $2.00 a minute. They were of many ages, some baby-faced and sold old enough to be grandfathers. Some were polite, or seemed polite, telling her she was pretty and asking questions when she lied about being a college student or working her way through dental school.
“Are doing well in your classes?”
“You must be dedicated to school.”
“I’m glad I can help you with your school payments.”
But sometimes it was just a chance for a man to tell her she was too hot, too amazing to waste time in school. She could be a model or an actress or Baby girl to someone’s sugar daddy. She didn’t want to be any of those, she just wanted to perform and earn a living. She just wanted to treat them like lovers in some far away land and show them what they were missing.
Her mother wanted to know why she did not leave to a new place and find a job. Her mother knew what she did for a living and her father was dead, but he would not have approved. Baby and her mother would probably have lied to him.
“I like it here.” And she did, she liked the city. It made her feel small, but she never felt small back home and she liked it. Back home she felt like nothing.
Baby was walking to the train once and thought she noticed a man staring at her. She looked in his direction and he looked away, but then she turned and continued and she felt horrible, sick to her stomach. She felt like stabbing the man with the knife she kept in her bag.
She laughed out loud frequently and always asked “how do you want me?” when they chatted for too long. Some liked to do that, prolong the show, show interest in her as a person, but she could never figure out why. She once asked a male friend who knew about her profession.
“I don’t know. Probably lonely.”
“Yes, but why do they just chat and chat and chat? They are paying for a show and just wasting their time.”
“No, that’s what they’re getting. They’re buying your time.”
Baby thought about that and said, “I’m not a whore.”
Her friend shrugged.
“I know you’re not, but I know you. They don’t.”
Baby sighed out through her nose and smiled apologetically. She did not like to discuss her work but sometimes she could not help herself. So very few people understood what it meant to perform for men.
Baby once dreamed of being a dancer. Perhaps in a musical or in Las Vegas, where pretty girls with long legs could get a job doing beautiful things, like dancing. She wanted to live in the towers, at the very top, where she could wake up on a blanket of fur and look out across the city and the desert and the mountains, like a princess surveying her kingdom. She spoke of this to no one because she knew that she would someday run away from her life of boredom, of beers and sad boys who would not grow up until they got someone pregnant. She refused to be the girl who would make a boy grow up.
Greg typed, “You look so hot baby. How old are you?”
She remained slumped but smiled and typed, “23. Why do you want me?”
“Because you’re so gorgeous, so beautiful,” he typed, and she shook her head slightly.
“So sweet but I meant how do you want me?” and she included a smiley face to acknowledge her mistake. He told her and she kneeled in front of the cam, smiled wide and stretched one hand back onto the bed, baring her soul with the other.