Banks

Watch Banks at a doorway and you learn most of what matters: coat off before the small talk, eyes already on the light, the Jordaan's bridges her commute.

There is a kind of woman who treats the night as the serious part of the day, and Banks is one of them. She crosses the Jordaan's bridges to her bookings on foot when the distance allows, arrives with the cold still on her coat and her hands already warm, and takes possession of an hour the way some women take possession of a room, quietly, completely, without appearing to try. Her oil work runs deep and unhurried, her nuru is genuinely schooled, and her French surfaces mid-session like something surfacing in a canal: briefly, beautifully, gone again. English holds the rest. Book her late; she is at her best when the city has stopped pretending.

Banks decides which bookings she takes and may decline any of them; she sets the limits for what a session includes, says what they are, and may end a visit at any point, as the terms set out.