I was an accident, Katerina said, and because both of my parents were still in graduate school, they shipped me to Seoul to live with my grandmother, what were they studying, Antonio said, physics, Katerina said, pausing because their waiter was approaching with an ice bucket for their bottle of Cava, and then or later Katerina didn’t comment on the solemn Arvo Pärt concert they had heard at Disney Hall, which looks like a Marriott hotel inside, incidentally, but she did seem delighted to answer all of Antonio’s questions about her upbringing even though she’d just met him via Your Sugar Arrangements, and perhaps because of the bottle of Cava or the exaggerated height of her heels, or because of her asymmetrical purple hair or her boredom with the admiring stares around her, or because neither Antonio nor Katerina had any expectations of courtship, loveship, marriage, Antonio was delighted, too — it was all so wonderful and forbidden that I wanted nothing more in this world, Bohumil Hrabal writes, and I resolved to save eight hundred and more a week selling hot frankfurters because at last I’d found a beautiful and noble aim — as carefree as Antonio had been when, in an identical so-called upscale setting but in different restaurants, he’d met with Fiona, Akira, Valerie, Charlotte, Yoko, all of them invented names attached to YSA usernames like Little Birdie, Evil Evie, Lolita in Venice, Uzi Kitten, Giggle Girl, and one of them was a student at Columbia whose thesis was about fog and chaos theory, and Melanie played for a Chinese ensemble and wanted an adventure before returning to Stanford, and Hana from UC Riverside wanted someone to take her out to a nice dinner every now and then, and Lulu had metal braces on her teeth and did research on algebraic topology and had always fantasized about being a call girl, and Silvina II, his favorite, whose body was covered in cut marks, lived with her parents in Santa Monica and wanted an occasional allowance for tattoos, and so far most of them had no qualms about sharing their earliest memories with him, which he tries to write down the morning after meeting them — how else will I remember any of them? — I remember riding inside the front basket of my mother’s bicycle on our way to school, Fiona said — I remember my mother unbuckling her baby carrier from her shoulders and putting me down on a chair at the airport, Charlotte said, soon after she’d adopted me, and I became so desperate that I fell to the floor as I tried to reach her — and if his so-called sugar arrangements happen to ask him why he has joined what in public he likes to call our beloved website, he tells them the heroin + internet executive + yacht + black widow backstory, and they both laugh and Antonio toasts to not being dead, and sometimes, in his extra-small studio apartment, also known as The Other Home, which consists of one platform bed without legs and seven bookshelves with hundreds of novels in English and Spanish — have you read them all, Arturo? — no but all of them have bookmarks on the last page I read of them — he has to cover their mouths so as to not wake up his neighbors (Antonio would rather not think about that now — are you embarrassed to think about sex while at your place of employment, Drool? — yes so what? — the selectively prudish database analyst ha ha — shut up—), and if any of his so-called sugar arrangements falls asleep (after doing what Antonio would rather not think about now), as Antonio often does since he has been scheduling two new sugar arrangements per week and still has to wake up early for his database analyst job, he lets them sleep because why would he wake up a beautiful college student and ask her to leave, although if they stay past 4:00 a.m. he’s barely able to sleep, sliding between apparitions of his former wife banging on his front door and the sounds of his wall heater, of his neighbors opening and closing drawers in search of teacups or spoons, of the 6:00 a.m. garbageman dragging recycling bins down the steep flight of stairs underneath his apartment, and if they happen to say what about you, Arturo, what is your earliest memory of childhood, Antonio says (in a cheerful tone that avoids hints of submerged disturbances) unfortunately I don’t remember anything about my childhood, which is true, and of course none of them press him as to why he doesn’t remember anything about his childhood, just as none of them press him about why he can only meet them after 9:30 p.m. during the week, not that he’s going to tell them the truth if they do press him — I have to draw numbers on my daughters’ backs at 8:45 p.m. before bedtime — and sometimes, on his way to meet his so-called sugar arrangements, the driver of the car he has ordered at 9:15 p.m. mistakenly parks in front of the apartment where his daughters have just fallen asleep, three doors down from him, and he has to call the driver and say can you please back up I will explain in a second — ugh — and because he always meets them after 9:30 p.m. he doesn’t have to worry about receiving calls or messages from Ron the Bail Bondsman demanding his money or from his sister’s attorney in Baltimore informing Antonio that his sister has faxed a medical form from an ambulatory community health center in Milwaukee — dear Thomas, his sister wrote, I have followed the court requirement to see a doctor but I can’t go back to Maryland due to lack of appropriate shelter and employment — and Lina from Mills College has been dating older men since high school but joined YSA for a week so she could buy her best friend a bicycle, and Silvina III from UCLA had never been to a nice restaurant before and she was so surprised she was enjoying herself that she said you’re doing such a good job seducing me, Arturo — who will ever want to hear about how much I loved her long bowed legs, Antonio writes, which I will never see again? — when my mother was mad she would use metaphors that made no sense, Anna said, the house is messy like a calendar, she would say — my mother was a set designer for movies, a freshman at the Rhode Island School of Design said, and she would take me with her to the prop stores, did you have a favorite movie set, Antonio said, Elektra in New York because its set had a strange shop that required my mother and I to shop for doll heads though the movie was never finished — high school teachers should be required to draw a diagram of life on the board and explain that one day everyone will age horribly, Antonio said to Katerina, and that in the finite number of years before they become ambulatory carcasses, they should enjoy their bodies without worrying about ridiculous concepts like monogamy and marriage, which were probably invented by ancient carcasses trying to constrain their spirited young wives, and don’t listen to anyone who tells you an excess of sex will result in an excess of punishment because no punishment will come for enjoying yourself if you are careful about concealing your excesses — I like learning, sex, and spending money, Gloria said — and when years later my mother was finally done with her graduate program in physics she came to visit me in Seoul, Katerina said, and I remember thinking who is this pretty lady, pausing because their waiter was approaching with their tray of oysters, although when my mother told me not to eat candy before dinner I rushed to the kitchen and said grandma, Katerina said, grandma, you need to beat up that woman.