I’m standing in the doorway of my apartment, staring at the small screen of my mobile phone. The little black car is moving slowly towards me, almost hesitantly, as if it were aware of the significance of these few minutes that lie between inside and outside, between familiarity and what is about to unfold. If I were to go down the stairs now, I would open the front door at the very moment the taxi pulls up. My gaze sweeps through the room once more. I almost forgot something.
I walk over to my dressing table in the bay window – heavy, made of dark wood – the bottles are neatly arranged side by side, waiting to be used. I reach for my favourite perfume: Poivre Samarcande by Hermès. It is reserved exclusively for escort dates. When I apply it, something happens. The green pepper awakens the senses, clear, almost sharp; the smoky musk settles beneath it, warm, soft, animalistic; the dry cedarwood draws a line through it all, creating structure, calm, poise. I don’t apply the fragrance directly to my skin. I spray it into the air and float through the cloud. A threshold, a transition opens up … I glide into the night and into the unknown.
Into the night
The taxi drives slowly through Zurich city centre. I look out of the window at happy faces – it is evening, for many a time of leisure, of abundance, of celebration.
The moments just before an escort date are indescribable. There is no nervousness, no stage fright, but rather a deepening of the silence and calm, akin to a concentration that spreads warmly throughout the entire body and pulses gently. I become more alert, more attentive, more receptive, and feel the tingling in my stomach.
I think of his messages. Brief. Polite. Discreet. Not a word too many, no false intimacy. I wonder what he’ll be like. Whether his voice will sound deeper than I imagined. Whether he’ll maintain eye contact and whether he can bear the silence between two sentences. He remains a stranger – and therein lies the real invitation: in the open space between expectation and reality. Projection is the most elegant form of desire.
Dark Euphoria
Slowly, it grows quieter and darker, and the lights grow sparse as we reach the outskirts of the city and the taxi begins to climb the first slopes of the Zürichberg. The road winds its way up in sweeping bends, past villas and well-tended gardens – the city’s very own Mulholland Drive, only with better tax rates.
Below us, Zurich begins to glow – a cluster of small, bustling lights that lie like a crescent around the black lake. And further up, standing like screens of midnight black: you cannot see them, but I know them, the tragic beauty of the mountains, the sense of infinity that grips you when you find yourself in their power. Perhaps it is precisely this feeling that washes over me before an escort date: the contact with something universal that lies in the encounter with the unknown. A euphoria, tempered by quiet melancholy.
The glance of desire
The night suddenly seems to grow more luminous, yet it is merely the warmth of the light source that lies before us. We drive towards the Dolder, the elegant Belle Époque grand hotel, whose lights glimmer softly ahead of us. The venerable Alpine castle with its turrets towers over the city; its façade embraces all the fleeting encounters of the past and makes a promise to the future: of glamour, ecstasy, and the luxury of the moment.
As the taxi rolls slowly over the pebbles of the driveway, I see the next few moments clearly and distinctly, almost like a film, before me. Soon the taxi will come to a halt. I will give the driver a warm smile; he, an outsider, yet nonetheless privy to the perfection that surrounds the evening. In a moment, I will glide through the entrance. The click of my Italian leather pumps will be swallowed up by the foyer’s carpet. I will let my eyes wander through the bar – but only briefly. For I will know immediately who he is.
We have never met. We are strangers. And yet we have already promised each other something. It lies in the glance, the desire that connects us across the room. We have made a promise to each other without ever having met:
We believe in the eroticism of the moment.