Henry Thigpin meets Pony at St. Anthony’s Fair. They recount their histories to one another: she, a model who came back from a lost love in Bogotá, he, the son of a fertilizer seller from upstate New York. She runs off after their first encounter, and he’s distracted and deserted until she returns, at random, bearing a red balloon. Henry falls quickly in love with her, delighting in her whimsy and her love of oddities. She moves in and listens earnestly to Henry’s roommate Mike teaching Buddhism, brings home yellow roses, lights candles at dinner. The two buy Henry a fish tank for his birthday, with a mussel they name Ecclesiastes. Pony stiffens whenever Henry asks where she’s been, why she seems so close to Mike, and especially when he says he wants to marry her. When Henry decides to skulk in their yard before coming in one night, he sees Pony, naked, attempting to seduce Mike. Mike yells that she’s crazy for hurting Henry, she yells that Henry suffocates her. Her black volatility endures, swinging between delight and self-hatred; Henry’s love endures too. Henry asks Mike to move out so he can be alone with Pony, still intending to marry her. When Pony realizes what he’s done, she takes off in the night, writing him from Paris to confess that she loved him and yet hated him, too, for letting her dominate him without punishment. Henry reads the letter and cries, throws it in the river, and resolves to move to the countryside, where no one knows him.