ONE OF my clients was the first to suggest I’d make a good venture capitalist, or stockbroker, or commodities trader. Guts and smarts. He was right—I liked giving orders, being in charge. He ended up writing one of my school recommendations, called himself my mentor. We laughed about that, after I paddled him until he was bruised, when he was dressed and we could toggle back to our real personalities, or as close to them as we dared. Emily is a fine young woman, ambitious, wise, and driven. I am confident of her success in Rowan University’s business program. To me, he said: Get a job you can put on your résumé. Somewhere you can get a leg up.

That’s how I ended up at the spa. The poetic justice wasn’t lost on me, a place that sold women on sanitization, body-hair removal, slathering themselves in chemicals as a way to “restore the body’s natural pH levels.” All that guilt-tinged bullshit promoted as self-love. But it was the only option in town, and one of the few upscale places where I didn’t need to have completed my undergraduate degree. For a while, it did make me feel like I was a part of something, building something. Clipping the name tag to the lapel of my jacket, pacing the marble floors in the heels I had worn to walk along a lawyer’s spine. I had moved on from meeting men in hotel rooms with my bag of whips and floggers, elbow-length gloves and garters with their fussy little clips. I was surprised by how much I missed the presence of someone else’s ecstasy, facilitating it, controlling it. Giving that up felt like a loss. Not to mention the cash.

Months passed. Two more casinos shut down, and another crop of slot parlors popped up in Queens and the Poconos. The possibility that I would get a bonus was close to nil. I was already enrolled in school, queasy at the loans I’d taken out for my tuition, books, my first laptop. Not to mention rent, car payment, gas. I got a UTI and for all of its blather about wellness, the spa didn’t give me health insurance. The prescription alone cost $175.

I told myself I would only meet one man a month—just enough to keep me afloat. I tried to get in touch with my former clients, but after the downturn, the wealthy men I had catered to from the Main Line, from Westchester, had taken their vices elsewhere. I couldn’t blame them.

I started picking up dates at random. Called myself Delilah. My nod to Pastor Roy and his stupid milk crate sermons. To my mother and her avid, searching eyes. My father and brothers for their passive, dumb faces, and the way they pretended not to hear how my mother interrogated me—or worse, looked at me like I deserved it.