A mutual friend set them up in New York, and over email they agreed to have dinner the following night. He asked if they could meet on the later side, since he would be boxing in the afternoon. Where did he box? she asked; she was curious to see this. In fact, she had never seen anyone box, not even on TV, since brutality and blood made her queasy. He wrote that she wouldn’t want to meet him after he sparred, that it was the kind of gym where no one showered, but that if he liked her after tomorrow, he would take her to the gym and they would fight; until then it would remain a secret gym. “Nobody knows me there, or what I do or what I think or what I want,” he wrote. She read his email three times, then replied that he ought to be careful, that she was deadly. She didn’t know exactly why she wrote that. Maybe because of the arrogance in his phrasing, the indirect challenge of it: If I still like you. Because of the sense of pride it tripped loose in her, even if she knew he was writing in a language not his own, without the nuance he had in German, and because she wanted him to know that she was someone who had—who had always had—a certain power over men. Or because she wished to imply that whatever was explosive in him was also explosive in her, that there might be a parity there, and maybe more than a parity: that the scales of explosiveness, of a form of strength, might even tip in her favor. Which may or may not have been grandstanding.

“My ribs have a tendency to break,” he wrote back. “Please be careful when destroying me.” In other words, he knew exactly what to do with her. Caught her and spun her around and drew her close; knew how to work her, knew just what a mix of strength and vulnerability in a man can do to certain women, of which she was apparently one. As it was, after this brief exchange she knew that she would take him home to bed.