On 23rd Street, I pass a dark doorway with red neon accent lights boasting BURLESQUE! FULL NUDE! Something tells me to enter. That this place is where my life here has led me. I pay the doorman, and he lets me through a black-velvet curtain. He sizes me up as I pass him. I still look young, dressed in a leopard-print knee skirt and cropped graphic tee. Inside, there’s a bar running the length of the back wall with low lights glowing beneath shelves of spidery glassware. The room is packed with couples and groups of young professionals. To the right is a stage. I ask the bartender for a rum and coke, and he says, We only serve house cocktails, so I say, Then I’ll have a house cocktail, please, but he passes me a book with a gold cover and inside is a list of “house cocktails” with kitschy names.

      I’ll have a Liza Mint-Tini, I say, and he stirs a thinly green martini with a bright, plastic mint sprig. It tastes like mouthwash, and as I sip, the dim lights go dimmer and a performer with wide curves and pinned-up black hair enters the stage from a curtain on the right wing. The room cheers roughly, and I watch a few men with loosened ties light cigarettes. I wait for someone to tell them they can’t smoke, but attendants bring them plastic ashtrays, so I light one, too.

      The performer snaps her hips to a menacing sax solo, and I blow smoke, imagining myself to be like the men around me—contently awaiting. She unwinds a beaded belt from her full waist, and her dress unfurls. Beneath the silk gown, her lingerie is embossed with sequins the color of pearls. I get the feeling this is not her only job, that by day she is a copywriter or barista. The psychic told me I have some psychic intuition myself but that I don’t know how to harness it. I hope she was being sincere and not just assuming that I believe myself to be spiritually attuned because of the large citrine crystal on my necklace. The performer removes her bralette to reveal two blue-veined breasts.

       A man in his late thirties leans over to me and says, I thought they’d be skinnier. I say, The sign didn’t say Skinny and Nude. He tilts his head. I guess not. His beard has shocks of gray along his chin. Do you perform here? he asks.

      I’m a writer, I say.

      Like Hemingway.

      Something in how he leers makes me think he’s teasing, so I say, I write for a culture magazine, and turn to the stage where the blue-veined woman is hip-thrusting her way offstage.

       The man goes on. I didn’t mean to be facetious. I’m Eric. I work in marketing. 

       I flick my eyes to him. I’m Angelica. A psychic told me I’m going to live ‘til I’m ninety, so I guess I have plenty of time to forgive you.

       Now you’re being facetious.

       I try to read the brand of his watch, which is large and metallic, and I assume is Rolex. On stage, another performer enters to emboldened cheers. She has a commanding calm in her eyes that tells me she’s older than she appears in her pale foundation and pink robe.

       Do you see psychics often? Eric asks.

       I wonder why he is here alone and why he’s attempting to engage me.

       Not often, I say.

       I wanted someone to talk to me, I say.

       Can I buy you a drink? he asks.

       He’s sat back from his initial lean into me, so I decide he’s probably harmless, and say, Yeah, but not this, gesturing to the empty glass before me.

       Eric waves the bartender over in a fashion that tells me he is used to being waited on. He orders two of something called Bump’n’Grind, and two dark coupe glasses are brought to us. I lower my head as if I am accustomed to men ordering for me.

§

       When I started working at the magazine, I had aspirations of penning stories of the People. People who had immigrated here to open shelters, who founded nonprofits, who had overcome grief or disability. I allowed more established writers at the magazine to take me out to coffee or dinner or drinks, impressing me with their underground knowledge of Manhattan, and listening to their advice. Occasionally entertaining brief flings. Everything was motion, unfurling the key to my imminent success. But, slowly then all at once, a shifting began. The coffee-dinner-drink dates became a carousel of the same conversations, same laughs and looking deeply enthralled, and I would return to my studio that had somehow stalled in a half-furnished state. The content I wrote lost the allure of its love-goggled excitement and took on its true form—fluff, written for the unbothered rich. I felt a deep and wretched loneliness creep in. Stopped entertaining empty flings. My circle tightened, noose-like. My coworkers said I was becoming a true New Yorker.

§

       Eric and I chat as the performers cycle through. He makes authoritative comments on their bodies that feel like grasps for ownership. At least I’m telling you my real thoughts. You’re judging them, too. 

       Around one in the morning, I am ready to leave. I tell Eric this, and he says, Okay, let me close out. We leave side by side, a comfortable distance between his broad hands and my waist. Where are we going? he asks. It seems like a multiple-choice question: yours or mine, but I don’t want to go home with Eric, so I say, I’m just walking, and we walk for a while in a not-unpleasant quiet. I wonder if we look like a couple who has been together a long time. So long that we don’t need touch or conversation to feel tethered to one another. I start considering the psychic again.

       I really don’t see psychics often. I went tonight after the subject of an old office fling called to ask me to drinks. I’d straightened from my curl on the short futon in my studio. From the window, I watched the foot traffic slow between the smoke shop and small Italian bar on the street below. He was saying, I heard this Korean bar is having a soft opening tonight. Could be killer.

       I asked, Where is it? absently picking at the futon. Outside was shifting from twilight to dusk, and my loneness suddenly felt heavy and expansive. Flatiron, he said.

       Would you want to go on a walk?

       Walk where?

       I can’t tonight, sorry. I hung up and grabbed my bag. Needing to gain some motion back. I took the 4 train to Manhattan, and it was there I’d seen the psychic in her small, street-facing room, and I thought how badly I wanted someone to look just at me and speak to me about myself and what I am, and what I am going to be. Another body to confirm my existence. Confirm there being things yet to come.

       Eric and I turn down a side street with large brick duplexes. To the left of us, a manicured playground sits unoccupied in the dark. My parents grew up in an area like this, he says, puncturing our mutual silence.

       Did you? I ask.

       No, he says.

       Do you like your life? I ask.

       What’s not to like? he says back. I don’t respond because I can’t come up with anything this rich, gray man might find unsatisfactory. Even I have added to his leisure by escorting him on his Friday night out.

       My train is on the next block, I say.

       Are you going home? he asks. The we-ness of us now fractured.

       Yes, I say.

       I’ll walk you to your stop.

       Are you going home, too? I ask.

       Yes, he says. Doesn’t seem I’ll find whatever I went looking for tonight, and I try to untangle if this is a resentful comment aimed at me, or if it’s simply for himself.

       We walk to the next block, and below, I hear the rush of a subway. The slowing chain of cars clatter together. Is this it? he asks. I nod.

       There is supposed to be a crescendo here. One where we find we have come to love part of one another and make further plans. One where he grabs me and pulls me to a dark alley, and I scream, become a nameless victim of this city of lonely plenty. One where I have a sudden realization—my psychic intuition and blocked energy suddenly in synergy, and I am able to see into the ether, understanding with completion why I have come to be standing on this street with this man. My hesitance swells. As if I’m about to let go of a favorite toy floating in a vast sea.

       I think I am a very lonely person, I say to him.

       Eric looks at me. You probably are.

       It was nice to meet you, I say, beginning to descend the stairs.

       You, too, he says, and I feel kinetic force between us. The psychic intuition I possess but cannot harness. Something about how he sees me for the last time is different than the first. I ride the subway and stare into other faces and my own from the window’s reflection, and when I exit at Beverly, I feel a quiet humming in my head. I wonder if I will really live until I’m ninety.