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“Do you want to be a couple?” she said.

“OK,” said Mark. He sort of mumbled it.

“You’re going to love me? And tell me you love me? And go on weekend trips to Skaneateles?”

Mark had often gone to Skaneateles with Sasha. Did Leslie know this? He rolled over and lay on his back, looking at th…

As Mark ate Celeste’s much more filling sandwich, he wondered that this attractive young woman could be interested in him. But then Sasha was also attractive. Mark just needed a pep talk. He considered the Mensheviks. They were wonderful people. Deeply schooled, thoughtful, chary, ironic, they told…

Nonetheless, for all the good it did him, he managed to secure some dates. J., one of his three New York dates (the only one that did not end with him sleeping in the 4Runner), lived in a tiny studio on 80th and Amsterdam, the nicest neighborhood in the city, decorated with posters of Al Pacino mov…

So in the second year of Mark’s mourning he endured humiliations. He went to bars. He tried to talk to women. It was horrible. He was almost thirty years old! In a college town like Syracuse, they had a name for people like Mark, and it wasn’t “graduate student in the department of history.” It was…

The Buck Fuck Bus disturbed Mark’s equilibrium. It wasn’t that he wanted to operate his own porn site, exactly; he was fairly certain that was not why he’d let Sasha go. And the anonymity of the filmed and very graphic sex did not appeal to him—it was the only site to which he ever subscribed, and …