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Book Mansion was overwhelming. China’s largest bookstore occupied 172,000 square feet and carried 230,000 titles. Bestsellers included Chinese titles such as I Was an American Police Officer; I’m Only Raising You for 18 Years; Chinese-Style Divorce; and Harvard Girl, a memoir that revealed the parenting style that made her stand out from her Chinese classmates and gain acceptance to the school. That book was in its sixty-third printing.

Downstairs, Monica’s Story lay between Bill and Hillary Clinton’s autobiographies. A boxed set about Göring rubbed shoulders with What’s Behind Jewish Excellence? Translated American titles ranged from the predictable – The Da Vinci Code, The Atkins Diet—to the surprising—Henry Rollins’s Get in the Van, and a Woody Allen collection whose Chinese title promised MENSA Whores. An entire floor held English-learning materials. Love English taught pickup lines and pillow talk, including cultural hints such as “‘I’m bored’ really means ‘Do you want to have sex?’”

After some time my husband reached over to hold my hand, which reminded me that at least there was this, at least we still had hands that remembered how to love each other, two bone-and-flesh flaps that hadn't complicated their simple love by speaking or thinking or being disappointed or having memories. They just held and were held and that is all. Oh, to be a hand.

The car veered, a tree loomed, and we were garlanded in glass, and a branch insinuated itself into Mini’s ribs and encircled her heart, and Ronnie sprang forth and broke against the tree, and in the backseat Caroline was marveling at how her brain became unmoored and seesawed forward into the jagged coastline of the front of her skull and back again, until she was no longer herself, and it was all so mortifying that we could have just died, and we did, we did die, we watched every second of it happen until we realized that we were back on the road, driving, and all of the preceding was just a little movie that Mom had played inside of our heads.

What you type and submit appears to you attributed to You. What he replies and enters comes from Partner. There is, as it turns out, a lot to say while watching Partner look at you watching. He is, to begin with, in a room of some kind, particular, contingent, “real.” With art and clocks and books and pillows and cigarettes and mail and daylight, or lamplight, with a bed or desk or basement sofa, with doors you can ask him to open, bags he may or may not empty, of content you may deduce about. The bottoms of his socks are dirty. You give it to him that his socks are dirty, that his door is ajar, that his grin is telling. “Partner: Are you for real?”

Gary was a big boy, ugly and pale, with a nose like a peeled potato. I’m not just saying that because my ex-wife slept with him once. We all slept around. She slept with Larry, too, but I don’t have anything bad to say about Larry. I myself almost slept with Larry, he was irresistible, a beautiful man. Gary and Larry—these names have been changed to protect the innocent, but not mine: I am guilty.

There were times when the girls knew where the man was in the orchard, and times they did not. These times they trod slowly and carefully, not that they thought he would harm them—not really—but it had become a kind of game. You might turn the corner into an orchard row and find him there, walking toward you or away, or maybe you saw his legs, his trunk, obscured in leaves.