Summary

Section 2 begins eight years after Popkey’s narrator has heard the story of the mousy girl’s rape. It is 2010 in San Francisco, and she is visiting a Swedish artist’s video exhibition with a friend who has just ended an engagement. Both are highly educated, progressive, feminist young women. As they wander through the Swedish woman’s art exhibit, their conversation vacillates between the art and its meaning and their personal lives.

The art is modern, technologically advanced, and often unsettling. They learn that several years before the exhibit, the Swedish video artist had divorced her husband—her second husband. At this point, the narrator is herself in the process of her own divorce; we are not privy to the reason or nature of the split, but she is unphased and significantly more callous in her narration than she had been in...