Write your fantasy,
make it real.

Thirty-eight, partner at an accounting firm, husband a surgeon who is home two nights a week. Every Wednesday at seven the math tutor comes; at nine the lesson ends, the boy is collected, and two people are left in the apartment. She laid it out flat: the lessons go on, the money stays at the original rate, and you can stop any time you want. Nine months, twenty-one thousand six hundred, not a cent more. The day the account was settled in full was the day she threw the deadbolt.

Five years married, and my husband cannot even change a bulb; the wiring in this apartment breaks down twice a month. The man who comes to fix it is his card partner, the electrician from the next entryway, forty-five, hands full of calluses. The third time the breaker went, I was the one who pulled it, and I went downstairs in nothing but a nightdress and knocked on his door. After that the times, the rooms, even the day my husband was home, were all picked by me.

Jiang Yue is thirty-three, six years a full-time wife, and does not say three hundred words in a day. At the Mid-Autumn dinner, in the half hour her husband is downstairs buying drink, she walks over and straddles her husband’s old boss, points at the wedding photo on the wall and says: look at that and fuck me. After that, she picks which day of the week she goes to his building. She sets the time.

Zheng Wan, thirty-four, a bank branch manager. Her husband drinks with clients till the small hours and comes home only to sleep. She goes alone to the foot spa across from the Wanda mall, and Xiao Liu, the twenty-six-year-old technician crouching at her feet, asks: “Sis, want to extend?” She extends. From her feet to her calves, from her calves to the tops of her thighs inside her stockings, from the private room downstairs to the soundproofed suite on the second floor. She starts going every week, then three times a week, and then she brings her husband along.

Luo Ya, a thirty-two-year-old history teacher, is married to a tax clerk so by-the-book he’s by-the-book in bed too. A bad back walks her into a blind-massage shop, where the male masseur Old Sun is blind, his hands unerring. One line—“I can’t see, you can take it off”—presses her, step by step, onto that pink massage table. Extra time, requesting him by name, the lights blazing over the mirror—she sinks deeper and deeper, until the glint in the gap of the door curtain.

Feng Chuchu, thirty-three, regional manager at a multinational, skirt suit and black stockings, sees her university-lecturer husband fewer than sixty days a year. Her flight is delayed three hours, and the masseur in the VIP lounge says: Your flight has been delayed. I can help you relax. Fifteen minutes on the neck and shoulders is free; a private room is two ninety-eight. She says: Full body. When the boarding call sounds, she is on her knees on the massage table, stockings torn open, and she does not stop.