So I booked a room at a midlevel chain and I drove down to the city. The room was standard issue. Thin carpet in a dull dun color that already looked dirty. That always already looked dirty. You can take the girl out of the grad school but you can’t take the grad school out of the—Anyway the carpet looked dirty and that was on purpose, that was so you couldn’t tell if it was. Also polyester bedspread in a floral pattern, hypoallergenic pillows with the tags to prove it, bars of soap no bigger than fun-size chocolates, thimblefuls of body wash and shampoo and conditioner. I dumped the clothes out of my suitcase and changed into a black dress, tighter on me now than it had been when I’d bought it, vulgar on top. I’d been lucky, the Pop-Tart weight had settled in my tits.

The plan was to walk south, toward Union Square, to walk until I found a hotel and a bar stool and someone on the bar stool next to me with a room key and none of the obvious markers for sociopathy. There’s always someone, or so I’d been led to believe: on business or in the doghouse or out on the proverbial prowl. That was the danger of being a woman, or one of them, vulnerability to advances, a danger I’d felt clever about turning, this once, to my advantage. Like I’d invented the art of getting hit on. The hotel bar, the hotel room, this was to avoid the more obvious dangers, those associated with getting into a car, going up to an apartment, following a man to a second location.