My skincare regimen is more extensive than I’m proud of. I’d recently learned it was important to let each product “fully” absorb before applying the next, and while I did not spend forty-five minutes each night sitting in the bathroom awaiting transcendence, the layering approach I couldn’t unlearn did give me plenty of time to consider my options. After a swipe of special water supposedly popular in France, I thought, I won’t do it. After I cleansed a second time, with cleanser, per the recommendation of Korea, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t. After I used a dropper designed to look scientific to apply serum to my nose to decrease redness and “purify,” I thought, Great social revolutions are impossible without feminine ferment. After a pat of stinging, very expensive foam, the effects of which I was not convinced, I thought, Ha, that’s funny. By the stroke of moisturizer I was dewy and resolved: I had nothing to lose but my chains.

I dozed and woke suddenly, dozed and woke suddenly, until the familiar font said it was 03:12 and I was tapping out his passcode as if in a trance. Bedroom door: I closed it slowly to avoid creaking and did not let it click. Hunched forward on the couch, elbows on knees, the glow of it around me, I noted that it had opened to the home screen, so I should make sure to return to the home screen before going back to bed. At first there was too much information to take anything in; I felt frantic, like I had just entered a Walmart with the whimsical idea that I might get some socks, maybe a magazine, maybe a new kind of frozen burrito, and instead was confronted by the overwhelming vagueness of my desires. I looked to my bedroom door and trusted I would hear the bed creak if he left it. I was so nervous that, though I do not believe there is such a thing as bad people, with the exception of the water-polo player I once showered with in college and a handful of celebrities, I felt a strain, the sense that I must be a bad person, to be willing to feel so awful in order to commit the pretty minor offense I was committing. I suppose my definition of “bad person” might be more self-centered than others’, though, really, worrying about being a bad person is entirely self-centered regardless. Good people do not think in such categorical terms.

[...] I tapped the messages tab and saw it was open to his conversation with me, trying to arrange a time and place to meet. Since we both had iPhones, like everyone else, to send texts we used the app that comes with the phone, iMessage, in which the phone owner’s text bubbles are bright blue and the correspondent’s are light gray. Seeing our conversation in reverse, the one in which I remembered participating hours before, was jarring. The flair I’d thought I’d infused into my punctuation choices was gone; I was only identifiable because I knew the facts of the exchange, that I too had suggested to Felix that we meet at eight thirty at the dark bar with the fireplace so I would have time to get a slice of pizza beforehand. My name at the top of the message history did not seem like my name; it was as if I were only one of hundreds of people that another person might virtually engage with at any given time, and whatever I’d said or not said was no different from what anyone else would have.

[...] When it was my turn I looked him in the blurry eyes over the top of my glasses—I am tall but not as tall—and offered a closemouthed smile that I hoped conveyed my skepticism about the experience we were about to undertake together, wagering that he probably hated his job and if he didn’t then it wouldn’t matter if I had expressed skepticism because I would abandon my interest in him and move on to someone who also believed organized pub crawls were but one of innumerable humiliating excesses of desperate post-globalized economies. He gave a closemouthed smile back, not perfunctory but not innuendo either, and because I returned just then to an upsetting experience from college in which I used my twenty seconds at the front of a line to try to banter with a renowned author while he signed my copy of his novel, I retreated without attempting any little comments. [...]

You had to hand it to her. You really did. I was shut out of the conversation, both physically and in that I had no idea what exhibition she was talking about. Having by that point only nodded along to tedious study-abroad stories, I looked like a hanger-on. The back three-quarters of her head had the same uniformly beige quality as her face, plus a tattoo of a treble clef behind her ear, pierced several times, but impressed by her savvy I reassessed the blandness as confident, unconcerned, maybe even elevated, indicative of something like the humility of an excellent classical pianist trying to make ends meet in the gig economy, and myself as perhaps a little Polonophobic. I took a moment to reflect on my biases and then, though Felix had already begun to speak, put one of my long elegant hands out in a sort of questioning gesture over Kasia’s shoulder and asked, “What exhibition?”

[...] Do these kinds of getting-to-know-you details even matter? I didn’t think to wonder at the time. The creative New Yorker scoffs at them, his performance against the cocktail-party question “So what do you do?” lasting at least three times as long as a normal response would. Don’t ask me what I do; ask me who I am! the New Yorker cries, hoping to make it big as soon as possible so that he can forget about such arbitrary distinctions. [...]

But there was no path; he was deep in an impenetrable throng of Antipodeans, apparently regaling. He made a swinging motion like he was telling a baseball story. I decided I could embark on a fact-finding mission until the final inning and hit my head on the overhang above the steps on my way out the door. I emerged embarrassed—Why is hitting your head on unaccommodating structures always embarrassing? Surely an architect somewhere is the one who should be embarrassed—and annoyed. Hi, I said. Can’t you smoke inside here? Kasia said yes “but not quietly.” I laughed and then realized I’d gotten myself into a textbook-awkward situation by not coming out with a conversational game plan. She had smoking to focus on; I was just standing there. I could have asked her for a cigarette but since she rolled her own the request was more burdensome than whether could I merely deplete her supply; there was no hope of me rolling one myself. I regretted leaving the Brazilians behind. I dug through my purse for something to do. Lip gloss, technically “butter,” which one has to apply with one’s fingers and so must subsequently wipe off on available (ideally dark-colored) fabric. I took out my phone and tapped around, pretending it worked, reading old promotional emails as if they were important updates from everyone I knew. Kasia was looking diagonally away from me and exhaling as if coming to terms with a huge problem in her life. Suddenly, or maybe it just seemed sudden because I was in a fabricated trance about my cell phone, she was looking at me and asking where I was from.

[...] I remember asking what his paintings were like and him evading by saying that he was, ha ha, taking a leaf out of David Lynch’s book and refusing to explain his work to other people. I said I wasn’t asking for an explanation, just information. Like: Are they oil or acrylic? Large or small? Abstract or figurative? Bad or good? At the last he laughed and said, They’re OK. This I appreciated, a lot, because he didn’t say it in a falsely modest way, or in a powerfully bemused way, the way a celebrated artist who knows you haven’t heard of him and thinks that’s precious might say his paintings are OK; he said it as if it were sadly true. Why would I want to fall in love with an admittedly OK painter? Well, I spent a lot of time with unadmittedly OK writers, and around them self-awareness seemed like the only personality trait that could not be learned, no matter how much it could be mimicked.

[...] I was on my period, information I provided as a courtesy, and he said, breathily, that he didn’t care, as if that would make him seem especially sensually in thrall about the female body and not like every man I’d ever slept with before. That I could see through things like this, things that many men, mostly unbeknownst to each other, do, made me think I might understand him, that I might have the upper hand. And since he’d performed so well over the course of the night, withholding at some moments to suggest he might not be as interested as I suspected he was, showing off at some moments to demonstrate that he possessed all the good qualities (smarts, worldliness, humor, etc.), I caught myself tallying the score, wondering which of us was going to come away the more eager and therefore less attractive, forgetting I suppose that we lived in different countries and that truly smart, worldly, funny people have one-night stands in foreign cities without imagining who would “win” in their hypothetical relationship.[...]

[...] I’m not saying he was possessive—he was the opposite, almost too laissez-faire, rarely expressing anger or frustration or any other negative emotion about me saying I was having drinks with an ex-boyfriend or spending time with someone he disliked—but rather that I interpret boyfriends’ silences and noncommittals as masculine efforts to conceal themselves and the fact that they are feeling more than they say. I try to assume everyone is working with an inventory of emotions identical to mine, and since I couldn’t help taking it as a tiny betrayal when I heard about a boyfriend’s plans made without me, particularly if he brought up said plans nonchalantly several days after making them, as if having plans were not important, as if our two lives were not an intricately woven tapestry but merely two lines sometimes intersecting, I imagined men suffered the same pinpricks of disappointment when I did the same. This was delusional, I knew, particularly because I obviously liked to maintain my own independence and should theoretically be able to rationalize another person’s desire to do so. Nevertheless I preferred to think of everyone I’d ever loved or gone out with as existing in a constant state of devotional pining for me, sexually and spiritually, ideally not even leaving the house except to pick up necessities, and I assumed they liked to think of me the same way.