PARK RANGER: Lance Williamson with client Christina Old on an off-hours bike ride in Central Park.   (Photo: Scott Jones)

“My clients always say: ‘Why can’t my boyfriends be more like you?’ ” says Williamson. But boyfriends are rarely like these guys. And that may be part of Morand’s and Williamson’s success. It’s also part of what really annoys the women who do the jobs they do.

Few of the women in the same line of work as Morand can or would use their beauty and charm to boost business among clients of the opposite sex. Those tactics don’t say “love” to male clients; they say “sex.” And most female trainers, massage therapists, and instructors say they keep transactions as professional as possible as a safety precaution, a way to ward off unwanted advances or worse. As a result, they network less and get fewer fringe benefits.

“The thing that really pisses me off is that because I am a young, single woman, I have to really play that down,” says 28-year-old massage therapist Daniella Caplan, who wears oversize T-shirts to work to avoid giving the wrong impression. “I have to be extra-professional.” Unlike the guys, Caplan has turned down countless fringe benefits—U.S. Open tickets, Knicks tickets, invitations to fancy dinners. In almost all of those cases, she suspected, the invite wasn’t a reward for a good massage; it was a come-on. She’s scaled back going to see clients in the Hamptons “because there is always a professional boundary,” and has turned clients away because she suspected they wanted a lot more than a massage. “It’s a very, very sensitive thing,” she says. Morand is aware of this male-female discrepancy, although he is reluctant to talk about it. His clients say they often felt snubbed by the female instructors at his former Pilates studio, whose client bases tended to be about a third of his.

“It’s a huge issue. I have this good thing going on because I’m a straight guy. There aren’t that many straight men teaching Pilates. But I can’t not be myself. I can’t hold in my natural spontaneity.”

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If platonic male-female relationships get murky in real life—even when we’re going Dutch and no one’s writing anyone a check—aren’t they likely to get really confusing for these guys? The fashion executives, attorneys, and Wall Street hot shots they service are used to getting what they want. So wouldn’t some of them decide that what they want is to sleep with caring, sharing, well-toned Ed? And since they’ve been footing the bills, aren’t some of them prone to feel entitled? For gay men like Williamson, it’s less of an issue. For others, fending off unwanted advances—delicately—is practically part of the job description.

“My demeanor in the class for the first few classes is businesslike,” says Morand. “A very sober version of what they get later. If I started out fun, it might show that I am more available as a person.” He’s aware of his allure; he likens the in-class dynamic to the animal kingdom, with his female clients “shaking their feathers” at him: “I guess they want to know I find them attractive.” Some want more: This year alone, an estimated half-dozen women have asked him out after class. When he’s not interested, he treads lightly. When he is interested, he goes on the date. “Once a year, maybe once every ten months,” he says, and only if there is a lot of chemistry between them. It gets weird, he insists, only if they stop dating, the client keeps coming to the class, and “we haven’t established what happened.”

During his seven years as a Pilates instructor, he says, three women have abruptly stopped taking his class and started calling him obsessively. One was picking up the phone and dialing his number two or three times a day: “She just wanted the personal. And it didn’t exist.” At one point, she left a message on his machine saying, “I’m going to wait here by the phone until you call me.” Another student, a thirtysomething documentary filmmaker, began sending Morand “devilishly flirtatious e-mails.”

What Morand decided to do in all four cases was nothing. He didn’t respond to the advances. And his pursuers eventually gave up.

Dan Connolly, a 33-year-old boxing coach at New York Sports Club, wasn’t so lucky. He went on a date with a student in one of his classes. When he decided not to ask her out again, she went on the offensive. He says she spread rumors about his sexuality and alleged abusive personality, stalked him, continued to take his class, then used the time in class to harass him. He says it wasn’t until he eventually threatened to contact his cousin, a New York City cop, that she backed off.

“The problem is, you’re in a gray area,” he says. “If a student wants to make a bad situation for you, she can.”

As their businesses have grown, both Williamson and Morand concede, they have found less and less time for their “real friends”—the people who don’t pay them. Morand, who is currently single and spends up to sixteen hours a day doing Pilates-related work, says that sometimes he wonders whether all this giving is wreaking havoc on his social life. How much emotional space, really, does he have left at the end of the day for friends or a girlfriend? “It’s the same intimacy. It’s communicating and sharing,” he muses after the Haru dinner, trudging through Times Square on his way to the Hell’s Kitchen apartment he shares with two roommates.

“When I get home after a day of classes, I can’t talk for an hour,” he admits.

As for Williamson, he says that two years ago, when his friends complained that they didn’t see him enough, he told them: “I’m having more fun getting paid to socialize. Make an appointment, and we’ll talk.”

Now, he makes big X’s on his calendar to block off time for his friends.