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on.
    â€œOh, it’s you,” Nadia said.
    â€œYeah, it’s me.”
    She slipped the chain off, quickly, pulled me in, and shut the door.
    â€œI thought it was my fiancé,” she said.
    â€œManboy’s not here yet?”
    â€œManboy? No, he’s not here yet.”
    â€œHe got on the elevator more than fifteen minutes ago.”
    â€œHe didn’t arrive,” she said. “Oh my Godt.”
    â€œMaybe he got lost. Does he know this was the right apartment after all?”
    â€œI don’t know. I haven’t spoken to him. Oh my Godt.”
    â€œDon’t push the panic button,” I said. “Maybe this is a blessing in disguise. You know, a chance to think about things before you rush into something.”
    â€œYou don’t understand. We must get married.”
    â€œWhy? You’re not pregnant, right? You said you haven’t had sex yet …”
    â€œSwear you won’t tell anyone this,” she said.
    â€œUh-huh.”
    â€œMy people come from a country where marriages are arranged. My parents wanted me to marry someone I do not love. So I had to run away.”
    â€œOh. Okay, but why do you also have to get married to another man? Marriage is a big step …”
    â€œWhy? Don’t be an idiot. Because I’m in love,” she said.
    â€œWhere are your people from?” I asked her.
    â€œPlotzonia,” she said.
    â€œPlotzonia?”
    â€œThat’s what I call it,” she said.
    â€œWhat’s it really called?”
    â€œIt’s better if you don’t know,” she said.
    I pressed her, but she wouldn’t tell me the real name of the place. She said her family had moved back there from America a year or so before. It was apparently a pretty backward place with arranged marriages, lots of hostage-taking, no decent malls, bagels, or discos, and the whole country smelled as if dirty socks were burning all the time. Her parents were very controlling, and while in Plotzonia she spent most of her time in her room watching satellite TV with her cousins and chatting on the Internet. She’d met Tamayo on the Net.
    Then, six months earlier, while on a shopping trip to New York with her “family chaperone,” she’d ditched the chaperone and come to stay here at the Chelsea with Tamayo for a week. It was after that escapade, she said, that her family decided to marry her off sooner rather than later.
    â€œYou understand now?” she said.
    â€œI understand the part about choosing your own life. Getting married, though … You seem awfully young to be getting married, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
    â€œI do mind. What difference does age make, when you’ve met your soul mate?” she said.
    â€œOh yeah, soul mates. I’ve had a couple dozen of those.”
    â€œIf you knew him as I do …,” she said, and went into a paean to her man.
    You’d think this guy was God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost rolled up with Leonardo DiCaprio and Alan Greenspan from the way she talked, the way her eyelashes fluttered, her face glowed, and her breath kept catching in her throat. Clearly, this girl was in the grip of The Madness, that biologically induced hallucination designed to make young people mate, breed, and buy a lot of consumer goods to salve the misery of an early marriage. It was probably no good pointing this out to her. People in the grip of that madness can’t see reason.
    â€œHe’s The One,” she said, in summation, sitting down at the kitchen table.
    â€œDoes he have a job? How will you live? Where will you live?”
    â€œWhy do you need to know so much?” she snapped, and grew suspicious again.
    â€œI don’t. Whatever. It’s your life. Blessings, et cetera. I’m going to take a shower now and then crash if you don’t mind.”
    While I was showering, the phone rang. Nadia must have jumped on it because it