Listening carefully to Glen paid dividends. He mentioned that in class he was always asking his students to pay attention to Kafka’s use of the first person. “The Metamorphosis appears to be written in the third person, but actually it’s the first, apart from the final section, after Gregor-the-insect has died.” He said choosing the right perspective was the biggest factor in a novel’s success. “If The Catcher in the Rye hadn’t been in the first person, it would have failed utterly. If Michel Butor hadn’t written in the second person, his would have been an entirely third-rate work.”

Hongmei noticed a crumb of bread in the corner of his mouth. The first sign of aging was how it took such a long time to eat anything. She responded, “Emails are always in the second person.”

Glen said, “We generally use the third person when we’re talking to ourselves, discussing something. So if someone’s having a long conversation with you online, that’s the same as you speaking to yourself.”

Hongmei thought, Glen’s clever after all, as if she’d just noticed.

After the emails had stopped, the image of the secret talker had grown clearer. Black hair, black eyes, the sort of smile that was always mocking his own romantic tendencies. She would forget him. How many encounters of this sort does a woman have in her life? Everyone’s been through these short-lived infatuations.

3

On the twenty-fifth day after he’d said fine, Hongmei got another email. He said she’d walked into the library looking like a lost child. His guess was that her eyes had been adjusting to the indoor gloom, or else she had been searching for a better place to sit and read. He said she’d stood there, lost, for quite a while. There was an instant when he’d almost surrendered, certain that she’d recognized him, her vague impression from the restaurant suddenly clicking with a face in the library. He’d been about to stand up from his carrel, but she was already moving toward the desks, the tassels on her homemade cloth bag swaying vivaciously. He said that of the five bags he’d seen her carry this was the prettiest.

She was startled. So this man had never left her, not for a single day. He wasn’t as tragic as he’d presented himself, riding off alone like a classical knight. Rather, he was like a ghost, secretly taking part in her life, undetected.