“How long have you been with Chance?”

“Going on three years. Why?”

“You don’t seem the type.”

“Is there a type? I don’t suppose I’m much like Kim. Neither regal nor a milkmaid.” She laughed. “I don’t know which is which, but we’re like the colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady.”

“Sisters under the skin?”

She looked surprised that I’d recognized the quotation. She said, “After I left my husband I was living on the Lower East Side. Do you know Norfolk Street? Between Stanton and Rivington?”

“Not specifically.”

“I knew it very specifically. I lived there and I had these little jobs in the neighborhood. I worked in a Laundromat, I waited tables. I clerked in shops. I would quit the jobs or the jobs would quit me and there was never enough money and I hated where I was living and I was starting to hate my life. I was going to call my husband and ask him to take me back just so he would take care of me. I kept thinking about it. One time I dialed his number but the line was busy.”

And so she’d drifted almost accidentally into selling herself. There was a store owner down the block who kept coming on to her. One day without preplanning it she heard herself say, “Look, if you really want to ball me, would you give me twenty dollars?” He’d been flustered, blurting that he hadn’t known she was a hooker. “I’m not,” she told him, “but I need the money. And I’m supposed to be a pretty good fuck.”

She started turning a few tricks a week. She moved from Norfolk Street to a better block in the same neighborhood, then moved again to Ninth Street just east of Tompkins Square. She didn’t have to work now but there were other hassles to contend with. She was beaten up once, robbed several times. Again she found herself thinking of calling her ex-husband.

Then she met a girl in the neighborhood who worked in a midtown massage parlor. Donna tried out there and liked the security of it. There was a man in front to deal with anyone who tried to cause trouble, and the work itself was mechanical, almost clinical in its detachment. Virtually all her tricks were manual or oral. Her own flesh was uninvaded, and there was no illusion of intimacy beyond the pure fact of physical intimacy.

At first she welcomed this. She saw herself as a sexual technician, a kind of physiotherapist. Then it turned on her.

“The place had Mafia vibes,” she said, “and you could smell death in the drapes and carpets. And it got like a job, I worked regular hours, I took the subway back and forth. It sucked—I love that word—it sucked the poetry right out of me.”