I didn’t laugh. Neither did she. But I smiled. She did, too, softly, sadly, perhaps.

“Can I stay with you?” she asked. When I didn’t answer right away, she said, “Tonight…just…I don’t want to be alone…just for a bit.”

I said, “Of course.”

She leaned into me. Like a girl. A child. Maybe like a woman. I put my arm around her. Reflex. Because that’s where it fits when someone—a child or a woman—leans against you. I had a beautiful, young woman pressing her body against my side, molded there as bodies do in important moments. She aches just like a woman, but this one doesn’t break like a little girl. I knew I had feelings. I let them exist. Not so much in me as suspended in space around me, as if I were a cartoon character and I put my feelings into thought bubbles. So there they were, contained and restrained inside their lines, one up against the ceiling of the cab—she constantly surprises me, the surprises delight me—one bumping up against my window—this is very like having feelings—another over in that space that she’d left empty—I like her here beside me—when she leans into me.

—

We got to Brooklyn. We found my car.

“Do you have a license?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said.

I was tired. “You drive,” I said, and handed her the keys.

I watched for a little bit. She drove well enough. I told her not to listen to the talking map in her phone. Just go straight up Flatbush to the Manhattan Bridge. That would take her right onto Canal Street. Go straight to the West Side Drive, up to the George Washington Bridge, then Palisades Parkway to Exit 9W, not Route 9W, to the thruway, to Exit 19.

It being after three in the morning, the traffic was light going over the Manhattan Bridge, allowing mental space for rumination. “I don’t want to be a whore anymore,” she said. “I don’t have a problem with it. About how I think of myself. But so many other people do and you can’t wear a condom against aspersion. Do people disapprove of what you do?”

“Sure,” I said.

“But not like that,” she said.

I made a noncommittal noise.

“Then there’s the age thing. It’s one thing to be a young courtesan, it’s another to be an old whore. That’s a reality that I recognize. In what you do, is there ageism? I don’t think so, and if there is, it’s not like that. You see what I mean, don’t you? I think I should make a change. I think I would like to do what you do.”

It seemed nice that someone thought well of what I did.