In years I was an adult woman—twenty-five years, seven months. But so slender, lean-hipped, with small breasts and a flat belly, at a little distance you might have mistaken me for an adolescent boy, in T-shirt and jeans.

Not unlike the Modigliani nudes on the living room wall. So it had occurred to me.

Just the girl. Not the other.

Indeed I was smelling of my body. For I’d been working very hard. Determined to do a good job for Orlando Metti, to earn the generous tips he gave. To please the man, to avoid a look of displeasure, disappointment in his face.

Should I take a shower?—would that please him? I would clean up after myself, if I did.

The idea was thrilling. I could hardly breathe, considering. But had not Dr. Metti invited me to take a shower in his apartment? Smiling at me, enjoying my discomfort. Taking care to call me by my name—Violet. To prove he hadn’t forgotten my name.

How many girls, women whose names the man had forgotten. Shaken off like something on a gleaming leather shoe.

Quickly then, before I could change my mind, I stripped off my clothes—T-shirt, flannel shirt, jeans, underwear. Gray woolen socks. Rare for me to glance at myself in the mirror for I did not like to be reminded of who I was but I saw now that my small hard breasts had oddly large, soft-looking nipples, a pale brown, like freckles. There was a shadow at my belly, a kind of cleft. A swath of downy pubic hair. The pallor of my skin suggested illness or malnutrition but it was the winter pallor of the Irish, the Kerrigans.

In a bathroom drawer I found a shower cap, saw with interest that there were several blond hairs stuck to it, which I shook out. One of Metti’s women.

How many, I could not guess. Perhaps two or three. Or more. I had not once encountered any woman in the apartment, leaving or arriving. Yet there’d been the evidence of soiled sheets. Mucus stains, lipstick stains. Though I stripped the king-sized bed in Metti’s bedroom as quickly as I could, not wanting to see anything, half-shutting my eyes that I would be spared seeing anything, yet it was my sense that yes, Metti’s bed was often slept-in by more than one person, and for all that I knew, Metti had changed the bedsheets himself during the week, or one of the women had changed the bedsheets replacing soiled sheets with clean sheets out of a sense of delicacy, decorum.

Languorously I stood beneath Metti’s elegant nickel-plated showerhead, slowly I soaped my body, and let hot water stream down my torso, belly, legs. Even before I shut off the shower, and rubbed myself dry in an enormous soft towel, I began to feel sleepy.