Into the cell phone she says, “I’m en route.” She says, “I can take the three o’clock, but only for a half-hour.” She says good-bye and hangs up.

 

 She touches your hand with a soft, smooth glove and says you look good. She asks what you’re doing lately.

 

 Oh, the same old same-old, you tell her. Manipulating feet. You’ve built a good list of repeat clients.

 

 Lentil chews her bottom lip, looking at you, and she says, “So—you’re still into reflexology?”

 

 And you say, yeah. You don’t see how you’ll ever retire, but it pays the bills.

 

 She looks at you as the cab goes a whole city block, not saying a word. Then she asks if you’re free for the next hour. She asks if you’d like to make some money, tax-free, doing a four-handed foot manipulation for her next client. All you’d have to do is one foot.

 

 You’ve never done reflexology with a partner, you tell her.

 

 “One hour,” she says, “and we get two thousand dollars.”

 

 You ask, Is this legal?

 

 And Lentil says, “Two thousand, each.”

 

 You ask, Just for a foot massage?

 

 “Another thing,” she says. “Don’t call me Lentil.” She says, “When we get there, my name is Angelique.”

 

 Don’t laugh, but this is real. The dark side of reflexology. Of course we knew some aspect of it. We knew by working the plantar surface of the big toe you could make someone constipated. By working the ankle around the top of the foot, you could give them diarrhea. By working the inside surface of the heel, you could make someone impotent or give them a migraine headache. But none of this would make you money, so why bother?

 

 The cab pulls up to a carved pile of stone, the embassy of some Middle Eastern oil economy. A uniformed guard opens the door, and Lentil gets out. You get out. Inside the lobby, another guard wands you with a metal detector, looking for guns, knives, whatever. Another guard makes a phone call from a desk topped with a smooth slab of white stone. Another guard looks inside Lentil’s purse, pushing aside the paper money to find nothing but her cell phone.

 

 The doors to an elevator open, and another guard waves you both inside. Lentil says, “Just do what I do.” She says, “This is the easiest money you’ll ever make.”

 

 Don’t laugh, but in school you’d hear the rumors. About how a good reflexologist might be lured away to the dark side. To work just certain pleasure centers on the sole of the foot. To give what people only whispered about. What giggling people would call “foot jobs.”

 

 The elevator opens onto a long corridor that leads to only one set of double doors. The walls are polished white stone. The floor, stone. The double doors are frosted glass and open to a room where a man sits at a white desk. He and Lentil kiss each other on the cheek.

 

 The man behind the desk, he looks at you, but talks only to Lentil. He calls her Angelique. Behind him, another set of double doors open into a bedroom. The man waves the two of you to go through, but he stays behind, locking the doors. He locks you inside.

 

 Inside the bedroom, a man lies facedown on a huge round bed with white silk sheets. He wears silk pajamas, shiny blue silk, and his bare feet hang off one edge of the bed. Angelique tugs off one of her gloves. She takes off the other glove, and you both kneel in the deep carpet and each take a foot.

 

 Instead of a face, all you can see is his grease-combed black hair, his big ears fuzzed with tufts of black hair. The rest of his head has sunk into the white silk pillow.

 

 Don’t laugh, but those rumors are true. By pressing where Angelique pressed, by working the genital reflex zone on the plantar side of the heel, she had the man moaning, facedown in his pillow. Before your hands are even tired, the man is bellowing, soaked in sweat, the blue silk pasted to his back and legs. When he’s silent, when you can’t tell if he’s even breathing, Angelique whispers it’s time to go.

 

 The man at the desk gives you each two thousand dollars, cash.

 

 Outside, on the street, a guard flags a cab for Angelique.

 

 Getting into the back seat, Angelique hands you a business card. It’s the phone number for a holistic-healing clinic. Under the number, handwritten, it says: “Ask for Lenny.”

 

 The soft leather glove of her hand, the roses of her perfume, the sound of her voice, it all says, “Call me.”

 

 People have a lot of reasons they get into giving foot jobs. The idea that you can give your family a better life. You can give your mom and dad a little comfort and security. A car, maybe. A condo on the beach in Florida.

 

 The day you gave your folks the keys to that condo, that was the happiest day of your life. That day they cried and admitted they never thought their baby would ever make a living just rubbing people’s stinky feet. That’s a day you’ll pay for for the rest of your life.

 

 Don’t laugh, but it’s not illegal. You’re doing a simple foot manipulation. Nothing sexual happens except your client has an orgasm that leaves them too weak to walk for the next couple days. Men or women, it doesn’t matter. You work the right spot on their feet, and they come hard as a seizure. So hard there’s a smell when they lose control of their bowels. So hard most clients can only look at you, drool running out one corner of their mouth, and motion with a trembling finger for you to take the stack of hundred-dollar bills on the dresser or the coffee table.

 

 Lenny calls from the clinic, and you get on a chartered jet to London. The clinic calls, and you fly to Hong Kong. The clinic is just Lenny, a guy with a Russian accent who lives in a suite in the Park Hampton Hotel, and who you give half your income to. It’s Lenny’s accent on the phone, telling you what flight to catch, what hotel room or private island where the next client’s waiting.

 

 Don’t laugh, but the downside is, you never have time to go shopping. The money just piles up. Your uniform is a fur coat. To fit into this new world, you get good gold and platinum jewelry. You keep a head of perfect, glossy hair. Sitting in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, you might see a few kids you went to reflexology college with, now wearing Armani suits, Chanel cocktail dresses. Kids who used to be vegan bicycle-commuters, now you see them climbing in and out of limousines. You see them eating alone at small tables in hotel dining rooms. Drinking cocktails at the bar in private airports, waiting for the next chartered jet.

 

 What used to be idealistic dreamers, now lured into professional footwork.

 

 These hippie dreadlocked earth mothers and goateed skaterpunks, you hear them on the telephone giving sell orders to their stockbrokers. Stashing money in offshore accounts and Swiss safety-deposit boxes. Haggling over uncut diamonds and Krugerrands.

 

 Boys named Trout and Pony, Lizard and Oyster, now they’re all called Dirk. Girls named Buttercup are all called Dominique.

 

 This flood of people doing footwork, it brings the price down. Soon enough, instead of software billionaires and oil sheikhs, you’re loitering in a hotel bar, wearing your last year’s Prada and turning foot tricks for twenty bucks a pop. You’re slipping under tables to manipulate the feet of conventioneers sitting at restaurant back booths. You’re bursting out of big fake birthday cakes to do the feet of whole football teams, bachelor parties, just to keep up the payments on your parents’ retirement home.