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      MY NEMESIS   Also by Charmaine Craig Miss Burma The Good Men    MY NEMESIS A NOVEL CHARMAINE CRAIG  Grove Press New York    Copyright © 2023 by Charmaine Craig Jacket design by Alison Forner  Jacket artwork © Andrea Castro All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected]. This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between these fictional characters and actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. With special thanks to Htet Htet for sharing her story; to Mimi, Catherine, Arthur, and Judy for the sanctuary; and to Andrew, Ellen, and Peter for all their help with this.—C.C. FIRST EDITION Published simultaneously in Canada Printed in the United States of America This book is set in 11 pt. Berling by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH. First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: February 2023 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.  ISBN 978-0-8021-6071-3 eISBN 978-0-8021-6072-0 Grove Press an imprint of Grove Atlantic 154 West 14th Street New York, NY 10011 Distributed by Publishers Group West groveatlantic.com   To Andrew    For there is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving. All of us, today, are dying of this misfortune. —A.C. Here there is sickness, beyond all doubt, the most terrible sickness that has thus far raged in man:—and whoever is still capable of hearing (but one no longer has the ears for it today!—) how in this night of torture and absurdity the cry love resounded, the cry of the most longing delight, of redemption in love, will turn away, seized by an invincible horror . . .  —F.N.   1. WHEN I ACCUSED WAH of being an insult to women—“an insult to womankind” was my unfortunate phrase—we were sitting with our husbands at a fashionable rooftop restaurant in downtown Los Angeles. It was late, I’d made the mistake of starting in on a third martini, and straightaway I could feel the husbands begin to cower, whereas Wah confronted me with a look of hurt, almost to tell me that I’d betrayed some sort of feminine understanding.  “You’ve misunderstood me, Tessa,” she said, and I noticed that she was panting as though I’d shaken her physically. She cast around for help from her husband, Charlie, whose steady gray eyes were moving between us.  “I think not,” I said, before he could save her.  But, of course, she had a point. I’d never been able to read Wah, and I still don’t believe that it was a matter merely of culture or ethnicity. True, as our current ethos would have it, she was a “person of mixed race,” something that might have contributed, beyond her unusual look, to the confusion of her submissive and queenlike demeanor. Though I don’t think even her relatives could have told you if her general mode of quietness was due to a timidity on her part or a righteousness that kept her at a remove from others; I don’t think anyone knew if she tended to smile courteously during conversations with that supple mouth of hers because she was incapable of keeping pace with our ideas or privately counting the ways those ideas were imbecilic. What I’m trying to get at is that I found her to be a tangle of both deference and hostility, if also some beauty, which is why, before the restaurant incident (and my unfortunately phrased accusation), I was sympathetic when Charlie suggested he wanted to leave her. His first letter to me, routed by email through my publisher about nine months prior to all this, was a response to my essay on the question of Camus’s relevance. It’s not often that I allow myself to feel flattered by appreciative words from readers; I think, if you are honest with yourself, you will agree that flattery should be allowed to mean something primarily to the flatterer. But with the first lines of Charlie’s admiring letter, I understood that our minds could keep a certain, rare company. I soon broke my policy of not googling people whose work intrigues me, and after some searching I saw that he was a decently published philosophy professor at a research university near L.A. and, by any contemporary metric, practically invisible online. There was just one photo of him, on his department website: a candid-looking shot of an approachable, disheveled, frankly sexy man of middle age. Understand me: my swift response to his letter wasn’t a matter of loneliness, sexual or otherwise; my husband of seven years, Milton, and I still enjoyed various forms of camaraderie, but when a darkly attractive man from a similar desert of intellectual isolation comes bearing a cup of consolation, one drinks! Because Milton was semiretired by the time Charlie came into our lives, and because the last of our children from previous marriages had long before left our Brooklyn home, Milton and I had come to enjoy a life of resolute drifting between the city and his family farmhouse upstate. It was at the farm, as we called it, that I tended to receive Charlie’s subsequent messages, which—for more reasons than I then understood—I began to share