This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Epub ISBN: 9781473522725

Version 1.0

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Jonathan Cape

20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

London SW1V 2SA

Jonathan Cape is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

Copyright © Ottessa Moshfegh 2017

Ottessa Moshfegh has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published by Jonathan Cape in 2017

penguin.co.uk/vintage

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

BETTERING MYSELF

MY CLASSROOM WAS on the first floor, next to the nuns’ lounge. I used their bathroom to puke in the mornings. One nun always dusted the toilet seat with talcum powder. Another nun plugged the sink and filled it with water. I never understood the nuns. One was old and the other was young. The young one talked to me sometimes, asked me what I would do for the long weekend, if I’d see my folks over Christmas, and so forth. The old one looked the other way and twisted her robes in her fists when she saw me coming.

My classroom was the school’s old library. It was a messy old library room, with books and magazines splayed out all over the place and a whistling radiator and big fogged-up windows overlooking Sixth Street. I put two student desks together to make up my desk at the front of the room, next to the chalkboard. I kept a down-filled sleeping bag in a cardboard box in the back of the room and covered the sleeping bag with old newspapers. Between classes I took the sleeping bag out, locked the door, and napped until the bell rang. I was usually still drunk from the night before. Sometimes I had a drink at lunch at the Indian restaurant around the corner, just to keep me going—sharp wheat ale in a squat, brown bottle. McSorley’s was there but I didn’t like all that nostalgia. That bar made me roll my eyes. I rarely made my way down to the school cafeteria, but when I did, the principal, Mr. Kishka, would stop me and smile broadly and say, “Here she comes, the vegetarian.” I don’t know why he thought I was a vegetarian. What I took from the cafeteria were prepackaged digits of cheese, chicken nuggets, and greasy dinner rolls.

I had one student, Angelika, who came and ate her lunch with me in my classroom.

“Miss Mooney,” she called me. “I’m having a problem with my mother.”

She was one of two girlfriends I had. We talked and talked. I told her that you couldn’t get fat from being ejaculated into.

“Wrong, Miss Mooney. The stuff makes you thick in the middle. That’s why girls get so thick in the middle. They’re sluts.”

She had a boyfriend she visited in prison every weekend. Each Monday was a new story about his lawyers, how much she loved him, and so forth. She always had the same face on. It was like she already knew all the answers to her questions.

I had another student who drove me crazy. Popliasti. He was a wiry, blond, acned sophomore with a heavy accent. “Miss Mooney,” he’d say, standing up at his desk. “Let me help you with the problem.” He’d take the chalk out of my hand and draw a picture of a cock and balls on the board. This cock and balls became a kind of insignia for the class. It appeared on all their homework, on exams, etched into every desk. I didn’t mind it. It made me laugh. But Popliasti and his incessant interruptions, a few times I lost my cool.

“I cannot teach you if you act like animals!” I screamed.

“We cannot learn if you are crazy like this, screaming, with your hair messy,” said Popliasti, running around the room, flipping books off window ledges. I could have done without him.

But my seniors were all very respectful. I was in charge of preparing them for the SAT. They came to me with legitimate questions about math and vocabulary, which I had a hard time answering. A few times in calculus, I admitted defeat and spent the hour jabbering on about my life.

“Most people have had anal sex,” I told them. “Don’t look so surprised.”

And, “My boyfriend and I don’t use condoms. That’s what happens when you trust somebody.”

Something about that old library room made Principal Kishka keep his distance. I think he knew if he ever set foot in there, he’d be in charge of cleaning it up and getting rid of me. Most of the books were useless mismatched sets of outdated encyclopedias, Ukrainian bibles, Nancy Drew. I even found some girlie magazines under an old map of Soviet Russia folded up in a drawer marked SISTER KOSZINSKA. One good thing I found was an old encyclopedia of worms. It was a coverless, fist-thick volume of brittle paper chipped at the corners. I tried to read it between classes when I couldn’t sleep. I tucked it into the sleeping bag with me, pried open the binding, let my eyes roll over the small, musty print. Each entry was more unbelievable than the last. There were roundworms and horseshoe worms and worms with two heads and worms with teeth like diamonds and worms as large as house cats, worms that sang like crickets or could disguise themselves as small stones or lilies or could stretch their jaws to accommodate a human baby. What is this trash they’re feeding children these days? I thought. I slept and got up and taught algebra and went back into the sleeping bag. I zipped it up over my head. I burrowed deep down and pinched my eyes closed. My head throbbed and my mouth felt like wet paper towels. When the bell rang, I got out and there was Angelika with her brown-bag lunch saying, “Miss Mooney, there’s something in my eye and that’s why I’m crying.”

“Okay,” I said. “Close the door.”

The floor was black and piss-colored checkerboard linoleum. The walls were shiny, cracking, piss-colored walls.

I had a boyfriend who was still in college. He wore the same clothes every single day: a blue pair of Dickies and a paper-thin button-down. The shirt was Western style with opalescent snaps. You could see his chest hair and nipples through it. I didn’t say anything. He had a nice face but fat ankles and a soft, wrinkly neck. “Lots of girls at school want to date me,” he said often. He was studying to be a photographer, which I didn’t take seriously at all. I figured he would work in an office after he graduated, would be grateful to have a real job like that, would feel happy and boastful to be employed, a bank account in his name, a suit in his closet, et cetera, et cetera. He was sweet. One time his mother came to visit from South Carolina. He introduced me as his “friend who lives downtown.” The mother was horrible. A tall blonde with fake boobs.

“What do you use on your face at night?” is what she asked me when the boyfriend went to the toilet.

I was thirty. I had an ex-husband. I got alimony and had decent health insurance through the Archdiocese of New York. My parents, upstate, sent me care packages full of postage stamps and decaffeinated teas. I called my ex-husband when I was drunk and complained about my job, my apartment, the boyfriend, my students, anything that came to mind. He was remarried already, in Chicago. He did something with law. I never understood his job, and he never explained anything to me.

The boyfriend came and went on weekends. Together we drank wine and whiskey, romantic things I liked. He could handle it. He looked the other way, I guess. But he was one of those idiots about cigarettes.

“How can you smoke like that?” he’d say. “Your mouth tastes like Canadian bacon.”

“Ha-ha,” I said from my side of the bed. I went under the sheets. Half my clothes, books, unopened mail, cups, ashtrays, half my life was stuffed between the mattress and the wall.

“Tell me all about your week,” I said to the boyfriend.

“Well, Monday I woke up at eleven thirty a.m.,” he’d start. He could go on all day. He was from Chattanooga. He had a nice, soft voice. It had a nice sound to it, like an old radio. I got up and filled a mug with wine and sat on the bed.

“The line at the grocery store was average,” he was saying.

Later: “But I don’t like Lacan. When people are so incoherent, it means they’re arrogant.”

“Lazy,” I said. “Yeah.”

By the time he was done talking we could go out for dinner. We could get drinks. All I had to do was walk around and sit down and tell him what to order. He took care of me that way. He rarely poked his head into my private life. When he did, I turned into an emotional woman.

“Why don’t you quit your job?” he asked. “You can afford it.”

“Because I love those kids,” I answered. My eyes welled up with tears. “They’re all such beautiful people. I just love them.” I was drunk.

I bought all my beer from the bodega on the corner of East Tenth and First Avenue. The Egyptians who worked there were all very handsome and complimentary. They gave me free candy—individually wrapped Twizzlers, Pop Rocks. They dropped them into the paper bag and winked. I’d buy two or three forties and a pack of cigarettes on my way home from school each afternoon and go to bed and watch Married … with Children and Sally Jessy Raphael on my small black-and-white television, drink and smoke and snooze. When it got dark I’d go out again for more forties and, on occasion, food. Around ten p.m. I’d switch to vodka and would pretend to better myself with a book or some kind of music, as though God were checking up on me.

“All good here,” I pretended to say. “Just bettering myself, as always.”

Or sometimes I went to this one bar on Avenue A. I tried to order drinks that I didn’t like so that I would drink them more slowly. I’d order gin and tonic or gin and soda or a gin martini or Guinness. I’d told the bartender—an old Polish lady—at the beginning, “I don’t like talking while I drink, so I may not talk to you.”

“Okay,” she’d said. “No problem.” She was very respectful.

Every year, the kids had to take a big exam that let the state know just how bad I was at doing my job. The exams were designed for failure. Even I couldn’t pass them.

The other math teacher was a little Filipina who I knew made less money than me for doing the same job and lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Spanish Harlem with three kids and no husband. She had some kind of respiratory disease and a big mole on her nose and wore her blouses buttoned to the throat with ridiculous bows and brooches and lavish plastic pearl necklaces. She was a very devout Catholic. The kids made fun of her for that. They called her the “little Chinese lady.” She was a much better math teacher than me, but she had an unfair advantage. She took all the students who were good at math, all the kids who back in Ukraine had been beaten with sticks and made to learn their multiplication tables, decimal places, exponents, all the tricks of the trade. Whenever anyone talked about Ukraine, I pictured either a stark, gray forest full of howling black wolves or a trashy bar on a highway full of tired male prostitutes.

My students were all horrible at math. I got stuck with the dummies. Popliasti, worst of all, could barely add two and two. There was no way my kids could ever pass that big exam. When the day came to take the test, the Filipina and I looked at each other like, Who are we kidding? I passed out the tests, had them break the seals, showed them how to fill in the bubbles properly with the right pencils, told them, “Try your best,” and then I took the tests home and switched all their answers. No way those dummies would cost me my job.

“Outstanding!” said Mr. Kishka when the results came in. He’d wink and give me the thumbs-up and cross himself and slowly shut the door behind him.

Every year it was the same.

I had this one other girlfriend, Jessica Hornstein, a homely Jewish girl I’d met in college. Her parents were second cousins. She lived with them on Long Island and took the LIRR into the city some nights to go out with me. She showed up in normal jeans and sneakers and opened her backpack and pulled out cocaine and an ensemble suitable for the cheapest prostitute on the Vegas strip. She got her cocaine from some high-school kid in Bethpage. It was horrible. Probably cut with powdered laundry detergent. And Jessica had wigs of all colors and styles: a neon blue bob, a long blond Barbarella-type do, a red perm, a jet black Japanese one. She had one of those colorless, bug-eyed faces. I always felt like Cleopatra next to Opie when I went out with her. “Going clubbing” was always her request, but I couldn’t stand all that. A night under a colored lightbulb over twenty-dollar cocktails, getting hit on by skinny Indian engineers, not dancing, a stamp on the back of my hand I couldn’t scrub off. I felt vandalized.

But Jessica Hornstein knew how to “bump and grind.” Most evenings she bid me adieu on the arm of some no-face corporate type to show him “the time of his life” back at his condo in Murray Hill or wherever those people lived. Occasionally I took one of the Indians up on his offer, stepped into an unmarked cab to Queens, looked through his medicine cabinet, got some head, and took the subway home at six in the morning just in time to shower, call my ex-husband, and make it to school before the second bell. But mostly I left the club early and got myself on a seat in front of my old Polish lady bartender, Jessica Hornstein be damned. I dipped a finger in my beer and rubbed off my mascara. I looked around at the other women at the bar. Makeup made a girl look so desperate, I thought. People were so dishonest with their clothes and personalities. And then I thought, Who cares? Let them do what they want. It’s me I should worry about. Now and then I cried out to my students. I threw my arms in the air. I put my head on my desk. I asked them for help. But what could I expect? They turned around at their desks to talk to one another, put on their headphones, pulled out their books, potato chips, looked out the window, did anything but try to console me.

Oh, okay, there were a few fine times. One day I went to the park and watched a squirrel run up a tree. A cloud flew around in the sky. I sat down on a patch of dry yellow grass and let the sun warm my back. I may have even tried to do a crossword puzzle. Once, I found a twenty-dollar bill in a pair of old jeans. I drank a glass of water. It got to be summer. The days got intolerably long. School let out. The boyfriend graduated and moved back to Tennessee. I bought an air conditioner and paid a kid to carry it down the street and up the stairs to my apartment. Then my ex-husband left a message on my machine: “I’m coming into town,” he said. “Let’s have lunch, or dinner. We can have drinks. Next week. No big deal,” he said. “Talk.”

No big deal. I’d see about that. I dried out for a few days, did some calisthenics on the floor of my apartment. I borrowed a vacuum from my neighbor, a middle-aged gay with long, acne-scarred dimples, who eyed me like a worried dog. I took a walk to Broadway and spent some of my money on new clothes, high-heeled shoes, silk panties. I had my makeup done and bought whatever products they suggested. I had my hair cut. I got my nails polished. I took myself out to lunch. I ate a salad for the first time in years. I went to the movies. I called my mom. “I’ve never felt better,” I said. “I’m having a great summer. A great summer holiday.” I tidied up my apartment. I filled a vase with bright flowers. Anything good I could think to do I did. I was filled with hope. I bought new sheets and towels. I put on some music. “Bailar,” I said to myself. Look, I’m speaking Spanish. My mind is fixing itself, I thought. Everything is going to be okay.

And then the day came. I went to meet my ex-husband at a fashionable bistro on MacDougal Street where the waitresses wore pretty dresses with white lace–trimmed collars. I got there early and sat at the bar and watched the waitresses move around gingerly with their round, black trays of colored cocktails and small plates of bread and bowls of olives. A short sommelier came in and out like the conductor of an orchestra. The nuts on the bar were flavored with sage. I lit a cigarette and looked at the clock. I was so early. I ordered a drink. A Scotch and soda. “Jesus Christ,” I said. I ordered another drink, just Scotch this time. I lit another cigarette. A girl sat down next to me. We started talking. She was waiting, too. “Men,” she said. “They like to torture us.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said and turned around on my stool.

Then it was eight o’clock and my ex-husband walked in. He spoke to the maître d’ and nodded in my direction and followed a girl to a table by the window and just waved me over. I took my drink.

“Thank you for meeting me,” he said, removing his jacket.

I lit a cigarette and opened the wine list. My ex cleared his throat but said nothing for a while. Then he did his usual hem and haw about the restaurant, how he’d read about the chef in whatever magazine, how the food on the plane was awful, the hotel, how the city had changed, the menu was interesting, the weather here, the weather there, and so on. “You look tired,” he said. “Order whatever you want,” he told me, as though I were his niece, some babysitter character.

“I will, thank you,” I said.

A waitress came over and told us the specials. My ex charmed her. He was always kinder to the waitress than he was to me. “Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. You’re the best. Wow. Wow, wow, wow. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

I made up my mind to order, then pretend to go to the bathroom and walk out. I took off my dangly earrings and put them in my purse. I uncrossed my legs. I looked at him. He didn’t smile or do anything. He just sat there with his elbows on the table. I missed the boyfriend. He’d been so easy. He’d been very respectful.

“And how’s Vivian?” I asked.

“She’s fine. She got a promotion, busy. She’s okay. Sends her regards.”

“I’m sure. Send her my regards, too.”

“I’ll tell her.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“You’re welcome,” he said.

The waitress came back with another drink and took our order. I ordered a bottle of wine. I thought, I’ll stay for the wine. The whiskey was wearing off. The waitress went away and my ex got up to use the men’s room, and when he got back he asked me to stop calling him.

“No, I think I’ll keep calling,” I said.

“I’ll pay you,” he said.

“How much money are we talking?”

He told me.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll take the deal.”

Our food came. We ate in silence. And then I couldn’t eat anymore. I got up. I didn’t say anything. I went home. I went back and forth to the bodega. My bank called. I wrote a letter to the Ukrainian Catholic school.

“Dear Principal Kishka,” I wrote. “Thank you for letting me teach at your school. Please throw away the sleeping bag in the cardboard box in the back of my classroom. I have to resign for personal reasons. Just so you know, I’ve been fudging the state exams. Thanks again. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

There was a church attached to the back of the school—a cathedral with great big mosaics of people holding up a finger as though to say, Be quiet. I thought I’d go in there and leave my letter of resignation with one of the priests. Also, I wanted a little tenderness, I think, and I imagined the priest putting his hand on my head and calling me something like “my dear,” or “my sweet,” or “little one.” I don’t know what I was thinking. “My pet.”

I’d been up on bad cocaine and drinking for days. I’d roped a few men back to my apartment and showed them all my belongings, stretched out flesh-colored tights and proposed we take turns hanging each other. Nobody lasted more than a few hours. The letter to Principal Kishka sat on the bedside table. It was time. I checked my reflection in the bathroom mirror before I left the house. I thought I looked pretty normal. That couldn’t be possible. I put the last of the stuff up my nose. I put on a baseball cap. I put on some more ChapStick.

On the way to church I stopped at McDonald’s for a Diet Coke. I hadn’t been around people in weeks. There were whole families sitting down together, sipping on straws, sedate, mulling with their fries like broken horses at hay. A homeless person, man or woman I couldn’t tell, had gotten into the trash by the entrance. At least I wasn’t completely alone, I thought. It was hot out. I wanted that Diet Coke. But the lines to order made no sense. Most people were huddled in random patterns, gazing up at the menu boards, eyes glazed over, touching their chins, pointing, nodding.

“Are you in line?” I kept asking them. Nobody would answer me.

Finally I just approached a young black boy in a visor behind the counter. I ordered my Diet Coke.

“What size?” he asked me.

He pulled out four cups in ascending order of size. The largest size stood about a foot high off the counter.

“I’ll take that one,” I said.

This felt like a great occasion. I can’t explain it. I felt immediately endowed with great power. I plunked my straw in and sucked. It was good. It was the best thing I’d ever tasted. I thought of ordering another one, for when I’d finished that one. But that would be exploitive, I thought. Better let this one have its day. Okay, I thought. One at a time. One Diet Coke at a time. Now off to the priest.

The last time I’d been in that church was for some Catholic holiday. I’d sat in the back and done my best to kneel, cross myself, move my mouth at the Latin sayings, and so forth. I had no idea what any of it meant, but it had some effect on me. It was cold in there. My nipples stood on end, my hands were swollen, my back hurt. I must have stunk of alcohol. I watched the students in their uniforms line up for the Eucharist. The ones who genuflected at the altar did it so deeply, wholly, they broke my heart. Most of the liturgy was in Ukrainian. I saw Popliasti play with the padded bar you knelt on, lifting it up and letting it slam down. There were beautiful stained-glass windows, a lot of gold.

But when I got there that day with the letter, the church was locked. I sat down on the damp stone steps and finished my Diet Coke. A shirtless bum walked by.

“Pray for rain,” he said.

“Okay.”

I went to McSorley’s and ate a bowl of pickled onions. I tore the letter up. The sun shone on.

MR. WU

EVERY DAY AT noon Mr. Wu walked through the back alley, past the stinking ravine and the firecracker salesman and the old temple now used as a kind of flophouse for the farmworkers who came in from the country to these outskirts to sell at the market, and down past the rows of little stores that were mostly barbershops and brothels and pharmacies and little clothing stores and cigarette shops, and found a seat at the little family restaurant, under the great, hard-whipping fan sticky with dust from the road, and ordered dishes of pork and potato and whatever fresh vegetable was on display, and sat and watched cartoons and smoked while the food cooked, and the dogs walked by, and the dust rose and fell behind the small trucks and bikes and scooters.

He was in love with the woman at the video-game arcade. She was about his age, in her midforties, and had a daughter in high school. He knew her both from the arcade and from around the neighborhood, as she and her daughter lived just a few doors down from him in an apartment with her sister and her sister’s retarded son. The woman ignored Mr. Wu when they passed each other on the busy road. But when he ran into her in the narrow pathways of the market, she’d smile politely and ask after his health. “Never better” was the answer he always mumbled. He knew his breath was bad, and because her eyes wandered away so quickly, he knew she had no interest in him.

Mr. Wu dared not visit the local prostitutes. He took a bus into the city and spent the extra money for that bit of privacy. Besides, he thought, it’s better not to know where these girls come from, who else they are working on, and so forth. He was bashful about sex and insisted on getting underneath the sheets to take off his clothes. During the act he kept his hands placed lightly on the girl’s shoulders and averted his eyes but did not close them. He had learned somewhere that closing your eyes meant that you were in love. He imagined closing his eyes with the woman from the arcade. He wondered if she had the same kind of body as these prostitutes: soft, scentless, and wan. He thought it was quite standard to hate himself a little after visiting a prostitute, so he was never startled when the thought came to him: I am disgusting. On the bus home, he ate an ice cream and looked out the window and thought of his woman at the arcade and of what she might be doing at just that moment, and his heart hurt.

He lived alone in the tallest house in the neighborhood. The downstairs neighbors were a young couple with a big, fat baby and a pet sow. The husband made a living collecting bribes for a local councilman. The woman had one flaccid hand that reminded Mr. Wu of a large prawn. He shuddered and gagged whenever he saw it. He felt sorry for the child, held and fed by that twisted, thin, limp, and red-skinned tentacle. The woman from the arcade had small, gentle, bronze-colored hands. Strong and muscled, not bony and not fat. Just right, he thought. Perfect hands. He went to the arcade at least once a day and stayed for three to four hours at a time, usually in the late evenings. Sometimes he went in the mornings, too, when it was free of children. Days he did not go, he felt sick to his stomach, and his heart growled like a trapped animal, brooding and useless. So he went as often as he could.

The arcade was not really an arcade. It was a room full of computers with games loaded onto them and access to the Internet. He bought a daily pass from the woman. He handed her a large bill so that she would have to make change and he could stand there longer, watching her count the money, feeling her near to him across the counter.

“How are you today, Mr. Wu?” she said. She said this every day.

He mumbled something unintelligible. He never knew what to say around her. Everything he wanted to say was “You are beautiful” and “I’m in love with you.” There was, in his mind, nothing else for him to say.

“Thank you,” he said instead, taking his change and the little card with his log-in information on it.

“Enjoy,” said the woman.

He walked to the computer with the best view of her. He peered out from over the monitor all evening, watching her greet the teenage boys, take their money, hand them their cards. When there were no customers, she played games on her cell phone. She likes games, he thought. That’s wonderful, so light of heart, so free. He loved the stiff, thick shiftiness of her hair, which she most often wore down and boxy at her shoulders. Her face was tan and shiny, with big cheeks and a small, round nose. Her eyes were small and clear and bright. She wore lipstick and blue eye shadow. Every day she was more beautiful, he thought. He watched her look in her compact. He wondered what she thought when she looked in the mirror, if she knew her own beauty.

One day he got an idea. He would ask for her phone number so that they could be texting pals. He got the idea from a conversation he’d overheard at his lunch spot. Two men were talking about an article they’d read about technology and dating. He thought it was a risk to ask for her number and knew that asking straight out would give him away. He did not want her to know that he was in love with her. He wanted to divulge that information slowly, in increments, step by step as he wooed her into his arms. Or better yet, he would keep his love for her a secret their entire lives and allow her to think it was she who had seduced him. She the one hopelessly in love, so lucky to have him. He imagined himself across from her at the dinner table, years later. She gazes at him with almost nauseating devotion. He eats his rice straight backed, unconcerned, secretly enraged with happiness.

He decided he could not do it. Asking for the woman’s cell-phone number was like asking for her hand in marriage. He knew he would be rejected. He went to the arcade and stood in line and paid for his time and smelled her hair and watched her count the money and his heart ached. Her phone was lying on the counter. If only he could snatch it for a moment, he thought. But there was no chance. He took his seat behind the computer and pined. He watched her work. He watched her use her phone. On his way out he saw what he couldn’t believe he had missed before. The arcade had a flyer with a coupon for one free hour of playtime between midnight and six a.m. on weekdays. The arcade phone number was on it. He took a flyer. He would call the number later. If the woman didn’t answer, he’d know it wasn’t her cell-phone number. But he could pretend to be a policeman, or some higher-up statesperson demanding to speak to the arcade manager. He could say she was in violation of a code, and that he’d need to speak to her immediately. He could call when he knew she wasn’t there. He had a plan. He practiced over and over again what to say.

“This is Lieutenant Liu. Give me the manager.”

“Give me the manager’s direct number.”

But the next morning he went to the arcade and stood in line and paid for his time and watched her fiddle with her earring and make change and his heart nearly broke in half. He was impatient. He went and sat behind a computer in the far corner and called the number on the flyer.

“Wei?” answered the woman.

She had answered on her cell phone.

He nearly jumped for joy. He had her, he felt, in arm’s reach.

“Wei?” he heard again. She was behind the counter, scribbling on a pad, phone to her ear, undisturbed. He waited a few more seconds, then hung up. He quickly e-mailed his brother, who was a military man in Suizhou. He wrote that he’d met the most amazing woman in the world, and that he’d probably make her his wife within a year. Then he wrote, “She is old, and not very pretty.” He wrote that because he knew that it was bad luck to boast.

He left the arcade and made his way down the back alley, past the ravine, toward the restaurant where he would have a special lunch that day. Everything looked so beautiful. The sun, the sky, the dry brown brittle roads. A red banner announcing the opening of a new grocery store lit his heart on fire as he crossed the little footbridge. He bought a pack of the most expensive cigarettes. He bought a can of orange soda and a small bottle of baijiu. At the old temple flophouse he dropped to his knees and said a prayer of thanks for the woman’s cell-phone number.

Now that he had the woman’s cell-phone number, he would send her a text. But he didn’t know how to start off the exchange. “Who’s this?” he considered texting. “I just found your number saved in my phone. But I don’t know who you are.”

But that was no way to begin the romance of his life. He racked his brain for a good opener.

“I’ve seen you at the arcade.”

“I see you around and think you’re beautiful.”

“I think you’re beautiful and would like to get to know you better.”

“I find you attractive.”

“I like watching you count money.”

“You have nice hair and nice hands,” he thought of texting.

None of these were good openers. He decided to wait until the perfect line struck him, rather than to rush into a sloppy exchange that might trip him up. More than anything in the world, perhaps more than winning her heart, he did not want to appear awkward.

“I will go to the brothel,” said Wu to himself and went out and walked to the bus and waited.

Now, he knew full well that any normal man in his position would simply ask her out to dinner. But that seemed to him to be the worst possible tactic to employ. If he gave her an opportunity to reject him, he was sure she’d take it. “You have seen my face,” he considered texting.

His downstairs neighbor was also waiting for the bus.

“Brother Wu,” he called to him. “What’s your direction?”

“I am going into town to speak with some higher-ups,” lied Wu. “We are working on hiring a cleaning crew for Hu Long Road. It will take some real convincing to allocate more funds for this project. It is not my job, but someone has to speak up.”

“You’re an asset to our community,” said the neighbor. He looked despondent. His wife’s prawn claw must be getting him down, Wu thought, at once sympathetic and cruel.

“How is the wife, the baby?” he asked.

“The baby is sick. My wife cannot nurse, and the baby food we give it makes it shit water. I’ve done something to anger the gods,” said the neighbor. He held up his hands, palms up to the sky. Wu hadn’t been around this sort of superstitious type for a while. He’d forgotten they existed. His own prayer earlier that morning had not really been one of gratitude, but like a child’s birthday wish. He’d wished to one day hold the woman naked in his arms and lay her across a moonlit bed.

“Where are you headed?” Wu asked his neighbor.

“To the doctor,” he said. “To buy more medicine.”

Wu had run out of things to say. He looked at his phone, as though already expecting a reply from the woman at the arcade. He still hadn’t thought of what to text her. He thought, Maybe the neighbor knows.

“Tell me, neighbor,” he began. “How did you get your wife to marry you?”

“We sat beside each other in grade school,” the neighbor said simply. “We lived nearby, and our mothers played mahjongg at night, so we played together, we were friends. We were friends first. And then the rest,” he said. “She has a sick hand, you know.” He looked at Wu out of the corners of his eyes.

“I hadn’t noticed,” lied Wu.

“It made her desperate, I think, to settle for any man.”

This gave Wu an idea.

He turned to the neighbor. “I wish you both the best, and your little boy,” he said.

“The child is a girl,” said the neighbor.

But Wu was not listening. He was thinking of the woman at the arcade.

He thought hard on the bus and performed distractedly with the little prostitute. To stave off his shame, afterward he took himself to a Western restaurant for dinner, ordered steak, a fresh cabbage salad, a glass of red wine.

He took a taxi home.

He knew what to text the woman at the arcade. He would text, “How does it feel to be a middle-aged divorcée living with your retarded nephew and working in a computer café? Is it everything you ever dreamed?”

He took a long time to type all the letters in pinyin and to select the right characters in the phone. He read it over and over again until the taxi stopped in front of his door. He pressed Send and paid the driver.

He went to the arcade. The woman was not there. He paid for his time and got a computer in the corner, out of sight of anyone else, and sat and played video games, pausing to check his phone every minute or two, until the sun came up.

As he walked home, he stopped in the courtyard of the old PLA camp to watch a group of high schoolers practice their sword postures. They looked very elegant and upright in their pea green uniforms, he thought. A bird warbled somewhere in a flowering tree. He walked beneath a curved cement archway and through the badminton courts and out through the tall wrought-iron gates and up the road to the morning market under the bridge and bought a bowl of hot dry noodles and brought it home to his apartment and ate it by the open window.

He was awakened by his phone that afternoon. It was a text from the woman.

“Actually, I am a very sad person. I am very lonely and troubled. Who are you?”

He couldn’t believe his attack had produced such a vulnerable, honest reply.

“I am an admirer,” he wrote back. “I think you are beautiful.”

And then he sent another text: “I am in love with you.”

He lay back down and waited for her to text him back. He waited twenty minutes. Then he couldn’t wait anymore.

“When I said I was in love with you, I meant I admire you very much. I’d like to get to know you better. But I’m not sure that you’ll be attracted to me.”

Still, that wasn’t good enough.

“I don’t know what type of man you like. What type do you like?” Now he had made a big mistake. He had said too much. He felt he had ruined everything. He knew he had just ruined his entire life.

“I like a man who isn’t afraid to try new things,” she wrote back.

He did not want to ruin what he had left. He thought carefully of how to reply. But she sent another text.

“Let’s meet,” she wrote. “I want to see what you look like.”

“When?” he wrote back. “I am free anytime.”

“Tonight,” she wrote. “Meet me at the back gate by the market at midnight. I will wear a rose in my hair.”

The man’s heart stopped for a moment and then started back up again very slowly. He lay back down and caressed himself beneath the sheet. He had not caressed himself in a long time, he realized. He thought of their meeting, her face, the rose, the striped shadows from the iron gate falling across her bosom in the moonlight. He would watch her for a few moments before emerging from the shadows. He would be a long dark figure, he thought. He would be smoking a cigarette. No, that might disgust her. He would keep his hands in his pockets, his chin down. He thought of the American movie Casablanca. He would be like in Casablanca. He would touch her face lightly with the back of his hand. She would blush and turn her face away, but then she would look up at him again, into his eyes. They would fall in love, and he would kiss her. Not a long kiss on the mouth, but small kisses on the cheeks and neck and forehead. Mr. Wu thought long kisses on the mouth were disgusting. When they happened in movies, he averted his eyes. The thought kept him from caressing himself any further. He read all her texts again. It was only two o’clock. He dressed and went to the arcade.

The woman at the arcade looked worried and unkempt. Her hair was tied in a ponytail and she wore a stained trench coat over her dress. He tried not to pay attention to her disarray. Once she was his, he could dress her any way he liked.

“How are you, Mr. Wu?” she asked. She barely looked up from her wad of bills.

“How are you?” he replied searchingly. He put his arm up on the counter, tried to smile. She turned and yelled to one of her employees in the back room, counted out his change, and handed him his card.

“Enjoy,” she said gruffly and picked up her phone.

He took a computer directly in front of the counter so that if he sat to the side of it and crossed his legs as though he were reading articles online and smoking, he could look at her out of the corner of his eye. He watched her take out her compact and pat down her hair. She took down her ponytail and tried to comb it out with her fingers. It only made her hair look worse. She tied it back up again and drew down the corners of her eyes. She seemed to clean out some gunk from her eyes. Mr. Wu gagged a little and stubbed out his cigarette. He looked at the time. It was three thirty. She powdered her face, and as he watched he noticed that her powdering was a little heavy-handed, that she was powdering a little too quickly, with too much gusto. He thought she looked the wrong color. He thought she looked very strange. Now she took out some rouge and spread it on her wide cheeks. That’s not so bad, he thought. But then she licked her fingers and wiped some of the rouge off. He thought of all the money and cards she’d handled with those fingers. He thought, Would I kiss those fingers? He thought of the fingers of the prostitute from the day before and wondered where they’d been, how much money they’d handled, and what sticky knobs of doors they’d pulled on. Then the woman put on some blue eye shadow and red lipstick. Wu could not help having the thought that the woman looked like a prostitute. She looks worse than a prostitute, he thought. She looks like a madam. He wondered if he still loved her. He took out his phone and reread all her texts again.

“I am very lonely and troubled. Who are you?”

She sounded desperate, he thought.

He had made a grievous mistake, he thought.

He logged off his computer, got up, walked to the counter, and handed her his card.

“Thank you,” she said. He felt sick.