Now, with this strange young man touching her, lighting fires inside her, she remembered the five years as though they had been moments—the only happy moments in her life . . .

She had been working a cocktail bar called The Cat’s Pajamas in New York, in company with three other professionals. What were their names? Sally, the big girl with the light tan skin and slanting eyes who palmed herself off as Spanish and got away with it. Jewel, an old Negress, very dark and very stupid, but acclaimed because of her special abilities. And Irene. And it was getting late that night, and business had been slow.

The memory came into sharp focus; she lived it more clearly than she was living these moments now. And she could hear the voices of the Negro women more clearly than Adam Cramer’s . . .

“I don’t know,” Jewel said, “but it’s probably the weather. I dropped into Hardy’s and you know how it is there all the time, but there was only the regulars. And they were watching TV.”

“You shouldn’t ought to go there,” Irene said. The brown fur matched her skin perfectly. “It’s bad for all of us.”

Jewel laughed. She was the independent one, the smart one. A few bottles of blonde hair dye and some make-up had lifted her from the eight-dollar class to the twenty-five-dollar class, but she had little pride. Hardy’s had been her hang-out for six years. It was a rough Harlem joint, but, as she put it, there were a lot of nice men came there. It almost seemed that she missed the free-wheeling, above-board atmosphere there, where a prostitute was a prostitute and everyone knew it and there was no monkey business, like at the Cat, of pretending you were something else.

Sally giggled. Despite her flashy modern dress, she had an air of the ’twenties about her, a fragile, little-girl appearance. This, combined with the sultry Latin quality, made her the most popular of the four. All men were “Daddy” to Sally, all tricks “nice times,” and she always lowered her eyes when she mentioned money. “We could go to a movie and come back,” she said.

“We’ve been to a movie,” Irene said.

“Well, I’m getting tired. Aren’t you, Vy?”

Vy nodded. She didn’t actually like any of these women, but working alone was unbearable. It gave you too much time to think. For a while, after the last job fell through, she had been able to persuade herself that she was nothing more than an up-to-date, twentieth-century person, living and loving free. But when the money ran out and she began accepting “gifts,” she faced it squarely. If you’re going to take money, then you’re a professional, and you might as well work like one. It’s all you know how to do, anyway. You can’t type or take dictation, and you’re not pretty enough—in the light—to get by without it.