Klaus

Klaus is a 73-year-old client at Le Manège whose encounter with Lorna lays bare the distance between a customer’s fantasies of intimacy and a sex worker’s practical limits. After Lorna tells him she has had a child, he treats that disclosure as evidence of a special insight into her womanhood; he also claims that Gita, whom he identifies by her real name, Julia, might have wanted him to father her child. His confident interpretations make him less a perceptive confidant than a client who mistakes politeness and work for desire.

Identity and Place at Le Manège

Klaus appears in Lorna’s account as an older, familiar client. She has not seen him for some time, and the encounter is her only booking of the day, after two weeks without work and with bills to pay. She initially hopes to dispatch him quickly, but he begins talking in the men’s salon about how good it is to see her again and how he had wondered where she had gone. His return brings not welcome intimacy but a long, difficult appointment she cannot easily refuse when work has been scarce.

Klaus’s presence also belongs to the book’s wider portrait of prostitution as managed labor. At Le Manège, a client’s allotted time is recorded and supervised, while workers face long periods of waiting and uncertain earnings. Lorna watches the clock as Klaus talks, eventually finding that he has consumed nearly the entire hour, apart from the time she needs to shower. His capacity to turn a paid appointment into a monologue is therefore not just a personal irritation: it occupies the working time for which she has been waiting.

The Visit with Lorna

Lorna tells Klaus that she has had a child, a fact she says comes out before she has time to think. He responds by claiming that he knew as soon as he saw her: to him, she now seems like another kind of woman, a “real woman” rather than a child. His remark recasts motherhood as something he can read from her appearance, even though the disclosure is hers to make and does not authorize his interpretation of her life.

He then brings up Gita, who stopped seeing him after several meetings and did not want further contact. The Hausdame conveyed her refusal. Klaus returned under another name, but Gita still did not resume seeing him, and he eventually went elsewhere. Rather than accept that she did not want him, he presents their connection as having become too emotionally involved. He also tells Lorna that Gita is really called Julia and asks her not to tell anyone, though Lorna’s narration makes clear that this supposed secret is no revelation to her.

Klaus goes further, saying that he could have made Gita pregnant. He interprets her wishes as a desire to be impregnated, then applies the same reproductive fantasy to Lorna, describing her past self as receptive to being impregnated. He treats her having confided something about her father and having swallowed his semen as evidence for this account. Lorna hears his talk as an attempt to turn moments within paid encounters into proof of an imagined wish for conception. The episode shows how he converts signs of trust or compliance into a story that confirms his own importance.

Conflict, Boundaries, and Significance

Klaus’s claims about motherhood extend into a broader pronouncement that men lose interest in sex workers once they become mothers. Lorna rejects the assertion and resents the way he uses it to tell her that age and motherhood will diminish her appeal. She counters that men who insist on very young women may be attracted to their inexperience, and that older women have no need to satisfy such clients’ preferences. The exchange shifts the encounter from his fantasy of being desired as a potential father to Lorna’s defense of her own judgment and worth.

When Klaus asks to book another hour, Lorna refuses, telling him she is already booked until the following week. Her decision follows a day without other clients and a financially difficult period, so it is not presented as indifference to work. Rather, she chooses not to prolong an encounter that has become invasive and demeaning. She can briefly feel pity for Klaus: his wife is seriously ill and has not wanted sex for ten years, and Lorna understands that he may feel himself fading. But that recognition does not oblige her to absorb his amateur analysis of her motives or his claims about her future.

Klaus’s role is concentrated in Lorna’s recollection, where his language of fertility exposes a central tension in the work: clients may mistake paid attention, sexual service, or professional courtesy for personal consent and emotional attachment. Lorna’s account does not deny his loneliness, but holds it beside her own pressures, including caring for a baby and needing to earn money. The boundary she sets at the end makes that contrast concrete: sympathy can coexist with refusal, and a client’s desire for intimacy does not give him authority over a worker’s story about herself.