Fleeing heartbreak and boredom in Manhattan, Jane quits her job, drives west, and lands in Salt Lake City, where she takes a job answering phones at a Mormon-endorsed escort agency. As Jane struggles to find companionship and purpose in her new surroundings, she mothers the escorts and flirts with callers. But the pull of mystery and danger is too great. Boundaries begin to blur, and Jane inches toward a place that would have once been unthinkable: she becomes an escort. Shifting between self-doubt and confidence, uncertainty and adrenaline, Jane descends into the lonely world of sexual commerce and discovers—through her "bad" behavior—a new sense of self. "I recognize these dreamers and fallen angels from the books of Joan Didion and Hubert Selby and Denis Johnson, and here they spring to life in an unexpected place—the Great Salt Lake, the onetime American Holy Land that still draws wayward pilgrims... In her own rush toward oblivion, our clearheaded heroine navigates among them without pity, but with a grace that ultimately make this a story not of loss, or sin, but of redemption."
-Mark Sundeen, author of Car Camping and The Making of Toro
"[A] writer to watch."
-Kirkus Reviews
"Sexy [and] provocative."
-Publishers Weekly
"A sexy, confident, totally winning debut... [Meadows] is a shining talent."
-Darin Strauss, author of Chang and Eng and The Real McCoy Rae Meadows is a graduate of Stanford University and the MFA program at the University of Utah. Her short stories have appeared in Mississippi Review, Flyway, 580 Split, and Fine Print. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Calling Out is her first novel. chapter 1
It's the taxidermist. I can tell by my caller ID. His picture, which he once gave to one of the girls, is taped to the wall above my phone, between a photocopy of our business license and the list of descriptions that Mohammed has written to help sell the girls: "classy, mature, enthusiastic, efervessent, exotic, curvie"—whatever adjective might get a caller going.
The taxidermist lives down in Nephi, a town named for the righteous, fair-skinned leader of an ancient Hebrew tribe who, the Book of Mormon claims, brought his followers to America by boat in 600 B.C. But this modern Nephi doesn't offer much more than windy, lonely scrub hills. It's the sticks, even for Utah.
The taxidermist pays a $300 travel fee for a girl to drive three hours there and three hours back. That's on top of the $120 per hour he pays for the time she spends with him, not including a usually good-sized tip.
In the photograph, his hands are on his hips and his feet are apart, as if he's just quelled an uprising. He's wearing a long denim coat with epaulettes and leather lapels. His hair hangs just past his shoulders, frizzed and bleached yellow with dark roots and lifted up and away from his face by a breeze. He's thirtyish, with a gut, and I can picture him in the cab of his pickup with the rigid legs of a stuffed deer sticking up behind him. The hunter. The craftsman. Sure of his manly role in the world. The photo was posted as a joke but its continued display is evidence of his mascotlike status among us.
His name is Ephraim and sending him an escort is a lengthy process. He claims he doesn't like anyone who's available, he gets surly about the last girl he saw, he haggles over the travel fee. But Ephraim in Nephi doesn't have a wealth of romantic options, so eventually he'll say okay, and sigh, as if he's doing everyone a favor by letting a girl come to him. He treats all of us—the phone girls, the escorts, probably even the woman at the drive-through window—as if we conspire against him.
The escorts complain that he trumpets his skill as a taxidermist, that he reeks of formaldehyde, that he reminds every girl she is lucky to have been chosen. But after paying out to the house and tipping the booker, the girl takes home about $
