“Let’s go,” Zeke said. I followed him out, grabbing my jacket from the coat check booth. Rounds’s doorman, chummy with me by then, glanced at Zeke’s unsightly appearance. He raised an eyebrow, perhaps flabbergasted I’d chosen someone so ugly. I didn’t care. The money was more important. Besides, I liked his name.

Our taxi took us to a midtown hotel. Lights from the street’s various theater marquees made everything pulsate. Doormen, desk staff, and room service were decked out in two-piece black suits. They looked like snooty penguins, their eyes on Zeke and me as we stepped into the lobby. I put my nose in the air and boarded the elevator.

The hotel’s rooms were small, warm, meticulously designed. An oversize reproduction hung from the wall above the bed, a detail from a Flemish painting I recalled studying during a high school art class. In it, a blurry milkmaid hovered over her pitcher. A window’s ghostly sunbeam caught the glint of her jewels, the white of the milk. The picture made me want to cry or, better yet, leave.

Zeke saw me staring. “Vermeer,” he said. “Well, sort of.” He reached out, unbuttoned my shirt’s top button.

In seconds I was naked, more myself than I’d been when dolled up in the silly dress clothes. But Zeke hadn’t removed a stitch. He fell on the bed, rested his head on the pillow, and sighed. “I suppose it’s my turn.”

I watched as he undressed. His clothes were a few sizes too big; their bulk on the floor made me want to giggle. But there was nothing funny about Zeke’s body. I searched for a description. “Skinny” and “slim” missed the mark. “Emaciated” was better. His knees were square bulbs, floating in his legs. His ribs made me recollect a section of abandoned railroad I’d once seen pushing from the cracked earth after the Cottonwood River’s flood waters had receded.

But worse than the knees and the ribs was Zeke’s skin. It seemed as white as the milk in the Vermeer pitcher. Purplish brown lesions scattered across his stomach and chest, angry blemishes that looked ready to burst. More marks disfigured his shoulder, an ankle, his knee’s knobby vicinity. He was a compressed landscape, a relief map.

“I hope these don’t disturb you,” Zeke said. “They keep popping up in the most unexpected places. Don’t worry, this is the safest encounter you’ll ever have, I assure you that.” He turned over, presenting me with his boxy ass, more outlines of ribs, his hard backbone. He spoke into the pillow. “Just rub my back for a while. I need”-I thought he would say “you,” which would have horrified me-“this.” I couldn’t see his face, but he seemed on the verge of tears. If he cries, I thought, I will sprint home. He patted the bed. “Make me happy, if only for a while. You’ll get your cash.”

I sat on his ass and placed my palms on his back. I wasn’t hard, and my dick drooped against his ass crack. My thumb touched another lesion, this one just a small purple blotch. It appeared as harmless as a mole. I have to make him happy, I thought. It was my duty. I was locked here, in this new place where KS no longer meant the abbreviation for Kansas, but something altogether different. I pressed my thumb into the lesion, wondering if it hurt. I began to massage his back, and as I did, his head relaxed into the pillow. It appeared artificial, something I could untwist and remove and hurl across the room like a basketball. Above me, the milkmaid continued in her frozen moment of pouring the milk for someone she loved. It was a beautiful day. Her cheeks were flushed, her mouth curved into a smile that displayed her joy in performing such a pure task. I watched her face and pushed harder, kneading the flesh beneath my hands.

Zeke grunted softly. On a simple black table beside us, his wallet was stuffed full with credit cards and cash, the edges of bills clearly visible in the lamplight.

Afterward, I needed to be with Wendy; it was time to come clean about hustling. The cab driver passed a corner grocery. “Stop here,” I yelled. I bought Wendy a bundle of flowers: roses, carnations, and other varieties I’d only glimpsed in encyclopedias or a foreign film I watched once during a particularly spectacular acid trip. I walked the remainder of the way to the small coffee shop and café where she worked.

South American Blend sat two avenues and five streets from our apartment. With the sudden cold weather onslaught, the store’s business had begun picking up, and Wendy had volunteered to work overtime. She had been staying past midnight, serving desserts, cappuccinos, and hot chocolates to pretentious people who occupied entire tables to “read” French literature or books about philosophical bullshit. When I stepped inside, I smelled the swirl of French roast, Irish mocha, hazelnut cream. The smell, infinitely more exotic than Mom’s instant Maxwell House, still reminded me of her somehow.

Wendy greeted me at the counter, stirring a tea strainer through a teapot’s steaming water. I held out the flowers, and she put her hand to her mouth. “For me? You shouldn’t have.”

After she’d placed them in a bowl, I leaned over the counter, my mouth to her ear. “Please say you’ve got a minute,” I whispered. “We have to talk.”

Wendy’s boss had left for the night, and the customers looked sated for the time being. She followed me to the table nearest the counter and pushed me into a chair. “What did you do now?” Her tone of voice hadn’t changed since she’d lectured me years ago, when I’d first started hustling in Carey Park.

My mouth opened twice, but nothing came out. On the third try, I said, “I’ve been at Rounds. It’s a hustler bar on the Upper East. I’ve been hustling.”

Wendy’s expression looked like a special effect. Anger registered somewhere within it. She checked the counter, saw no customers, turned back to me. “Do you think I haven’t figured out what you’ve been doing? Where you’ve been at night, dressed like a goddamn teenage executive, or where you’ve been getting money for beer? It’s been part of you for years, did you think I’d believe you’d stop now? Especially now, in a city where you can make thousands doing it? No, I’m not that stupid, whether you think so or not.”

“I don’t think you’re stupid.”

“Maybe not, but I’m beginning to think you are.” She paused, took a breath, looked me in the eye. “Do I want to hear this? Okay, fire away.”

I started to pretend I’d been hurt by her comment; decided it was no use. “I’ve been making money,” I said, “and things have been cool, actually. Nothing unsafe at all, nothing that could bother me. You always said during the Carey Park stuff that whenever something bothered me, I should stop.”

Wendy swabbed her thumb over the table’s semicircular coffee stain. “And tonight something’s bothered you.”

I told her the whole story. I described the cab ride, the hotel, the room, his body, his skin. “After the massage, all I did was stand at the side of the room, jerking off. That’s what he wanted. There it was, this surreal mixture of the hotel’s decor and this guy’s obvious disease. He just sprawled out on the bed, watching me, jerking off until he came.” I refrained from detailing the dainty pattern of white come/purple blotches on Zeke’s chest.

Wendy’s foot touched mine. “You just jerked off. That’s all?”

“That’s all.” Her foot moved away, then came back and stayed. I could tell she wanted to touch and soothe me with her hand-a typical sympathetic Wendy Peterson gesture in this situation-but her overriding anger only allowed me the comfort of her foot. “You’re mad at me,” I said.

“Maybe. You just have to be so, so careful,” Wendy said. “You have to know that things are different for you now. This isn’t Kansas.” I’d heard that line so many times, but never from her.

The blue trapezoid shapes on the table’s Formica surface resembled ugly, swollen purplish brown blotches. I wanted to say something more. I could tell Wendy about Brian, but that seemed too complicated, beyond any explanation my confused state could offer. “For the first time in my life,” I told her, “I’m bothered by it. Sex. After tonight, everything just feels fucked up.”