The waiter came and poured their wine. When he was gone, she took the German Boxer’s hand and guided it to the same rib on her body, which jutted out at the same angle, and had been that way for as long as she could remember. “How is that possible?” he asked in surprise. “You must have broken yours too.” But as far as she knew, she had never broken any ribs. The ribs, it seemed to her, went all the way back to the beginning, and were trying to say something amid their generational confusion about what it was to be a man and what it was to be a woman, and if these things could be said to be equal, or different but equal, or no.

3

Her bed, which was queen-size, was too small for the German Boxer, and so he had to curl up in it like a child. The light from a Himalayan salt lamp cast his torso in a warm, pinkish hue. They spoke about: his growing up on a farm near the North Sea and how, when his family went to other people’s houses for dinner, they always brought flowers picked from the fields, how this had instilled in him a sense that all flowers should look as if they had been stolen; the books they liked; whether it was strange to be a German man in bed with a Jewish woman whose grandparents were Holocaust survivors; her sister; his brother; the fact that she never wanted to get married again; the fact that nowadays it was often older women with much younger men, men who wanted to have children that the women, like her, had already had; the problem with monogamy; the problems without monogamy; his belief that boxing was not about violence but about discipline, physical discipline and the discipline of facing his fears.