Then there was her blouse. He thought that had been excellent too, its threads changing color with the light. Your handiwork? he asked, so rude, so imaginative.

Next he wanted to discuss her husband. A clever-looking man, he said, and full of energy. A little old, certainly, but not bad on the whole, very suited to her. On the whole, in everyone’s eyes. Apart from him—he could see past the whole.

Here we go, she thought. Sowing dissent.

But none of that mattered, right? he went on. His tone was a little dictatorial but also a little poetic, even affectionate. What woman would put up with this, sentiment hidden beneath a layer of meanness?

The important thing, he said, was that Hongmei was completely closed off from her husband—sorry, this was where he had to talk about her “soul.” He wanted her forgiveness for using such a corny term, and he assured her he wasn’t the sort of guy who tossed around words like that. It wasn’t just her husband she was closed off from; her soul was also shut off from its surroundings.

I’m not trying to make trouble between you, he added, definitely not.

That’s exactly what you’re doing, she thought.

Her husband was a man who liked to joke—you could tell that at a glance—but he wrongly believed that as long as he could make his wife laugh, everything was all right. When her husband had delivered a punch line, this man had watched as Hongmei threw back her head and guffawed, but he could tell she had been distracted. The husband had chortled so hard his face had turned bright red, but as for her, she had shot an accusatory sideways look at him, to show she’d been mildly offended by his harmless dirty joke, just like every middle-class wife of the intelligentsia, just like every helpless woman from a good American family, deriving a flash of pleasure from the heavy-handed, inescapable smuttiness of men while pretending to admonish them.

He knew she had been faking. He said he’d never met a woman so good at pretending as Hongmei. As far as her husband was concerned, she was a secret talker, every breath, bite, and laugh part of the enigma. That’s why this man was so fascinated by her. Then he abruptly changed the subject, as though he was suddenly aware of how strange, how creepy Hongmei might find him, assuring her that it was both coincidence and inevitability that had led him to her email address, and she shouldn’t be alarmed.