It was half past one on a Tuesday afternoon, and I was already on my way to being drunk. I’d been circulating around this room for a few hours now, buying drinks, inviting confidences, like the tipsy hostess of a dour, exclusively male cocktail party. These three men, I thought, could be ranked in order of hostility. The first found my presence an imposition, and wished I would go. His friend, who had just come back from the bar with four Southern Comforts and lemonade, apparently taking the Welsh boy at his word when he told him to “get anything,” didn’t care either way. And the Welsh boy, who was, as far as I could tell, the dominant force at the table, wanted me to stay.

The nature of this work was making me see what it must be like for them. Going up to groups, identifying the most receptive, inveigling your way in, uncaring of what the majority wants. Girls are taught to respond to the subtlest social cues, to beat a retreat at the first hint of furrowed brow or crossed arms; boys to develop a benign tone-deafness for the very same signals. They learn to brazen it out and keep talking, like a salesman on a doorstep sensing a soft no. In order to do work like this—to latch on to strangers and coax conversation from them—I had to become a hybrid of sorts. The unthreatening looks of a woman. The impervious core of a man.