Don't laugh, but one day you see a girl you went to massage school with. This girl, she's your same age. You both wore beads together. You two braided dried sage and burned it to cleanse your energy field. The two of you were tie-dyed and barefoot and young enough to feel noble while you rubbed the feet of dirty homeless people who came into the school's free practice clinic.
That was years and years ago.
You, you're still poor. Your hair has started to break off at the scalp. From poor diet or gravity, people think you're frowning even when you're not.
This girl you went to school with, you see her coming out of a posh midtown hotel, the doorman holding the door open as she sweeps out swinging furs and wearing high heels that no reflexologist would ever strap her feet inside.
While the doorman is flagging her a cab, you go close enough to say, “Lentil?”
The woman turns, and it's her. Real diamonds sparkle at her throat. Her long hair shines, thick, heaving in waves of red and brown. The air around her smells soft as roses and lilac. Her fur coat. Her hands in leather gloves, the leather smooth and pale and nicer than the skin on your own face. The woman turns and lifts her sunglasses to rest on the crown of her hair. She looks at you and says, “Do I know you?”
You went to school together. When you were young—younger.
The doorman holds the cab's door open.
And the woman says, of course she remembers. She looks at a wristwatch, blinding bright with diamonds in the afternoon sun, and says in twenty minutes she needs to be across town. She asks, can you ride along?
The two of you get into the back of the cab, and the woman hands the doorman a twenty-dollar bill. He touches his cap, and says it's always such a pleasure to see her.
The woman tells the cabdriver the next address, some place a little farther uptown, and the cab swings into traffic.
Don't laugh, but this woman—Lentil, your old friend—she loops one fur-coat arm out of the handle of her purse, she snaps the purse open, and inside is stuffed nothing but cash money. Layers of fifty- and hundred-dollar bills. With a gloved hand, she digs into these and finds a cell phone.
To you, she says, “This won't take a minute.”
Next to her, your Indian-printed cotton wrap skirt, your flip-flop sandals and brass-bell necklace don't look chic and ethnic anymore. The kohl around your eyes and the faded henna designs on the back of your hands, they make you look like you never take a bath. Next to her diamond-stud earrings, your favorite dangling silver earrings could be thrift-store Christmas-tree ornaments.
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
