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 he’d quickly canceled his subscription. Really it was the principle of the thing. If there were men Mark’s age driving around in a ratty van, having sex with women, with complete strangers, and paying them a dollar for the pleasure—even if the women were their friends, or aspiring porn stars, or were being paid a lot more than a dollar—still, even then, what was Mark doing in the library? “I have spent,” he had said the other day to Celeste, “most of my life in libraries.” This was not quite true: he had spent most of his life in hockey rinks and gyms. And the time he spent in libraries these days was mainly spent looking at naked people on the Internet. But he’d not spent—this was the point—a single minute on the Buck Fuck Bus. Now he watched the wasted hours drift away, all those hours he had spent with Sasha, those warm gentle hours, gone forever with their marriage’s collapse. Mark was like those stunned post-Soviet Russians during the draconian free market reforms, watching their ten-thousand-ruble lifetime savings, still active in their memories, turn overnight into fifty dollars. The Devaluation, it was called. And it hurt.

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 creep. He bought girls drinks, as if he could afford to buy drinks; he asked them to dance, as if he knew how to dance; and then, alone, he stumbled home, or stumbled to his car, in which case he and the car stumbled home together.

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 movies from the early 1980s, so anonymous, so casually everyone’s favorite movies, that a desolation spread over Mark. He was drunk. S., from Ithaca, took him to her capacious sunny first-floor 2-BR, with wood everything and perfect place settings and fifteen books, total, on the shelf. D., who lived in a strange housing complex, with a little fake pond, somewhere between Ithaca and Syracuse, occupied a third-floor apartment with worn brown carpeting and toddler noisemakers for—what? a little girl? She hadn’t mentioned that to Mark at the bar.

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 wry jokes and wrote intelligent books. After the Bolsheviks took power, they were scattered to Berlin, Paris, New York—also to the camps.

This was not encouraging. He was going to the gym.

“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 the ceiling. Was he prepared to do this? What if in a couple of weeks he was no longer prepared? It might take more than a couple of weeks to get out of this. It might take a couple of months. But if he knew that now, shouldn’t he stop? Shouldn’t he let them both off the hook right away? At the same time, Mark had not been with a woman in many months. What would Lenin have done? Lenin would have called Mark’s hesitation a social-democratic scruple. It’s pretty clear what Lenin would have done. And so Mark did it, too.

“OK,” said Mark. “Let’s do it. That’s what I want.”

Leslie was as surprised as he was to hear him say this.