We met on OkCupid. He was a handsome, accomplished economics professor, and I was in New York for the shoot of an episode of the final season of “Orange Is the New Black.” For our first date, we decided on Buvette, a cute French bistro in the West Village. He was sitting on a bench outside the restaurant, and I could tell as I walked up that he wasn’t blown away by my beauty. We had dinner, and he told me that he’d read my book, in preparation for our date. I didn’t understand yet that he was from that élite class of European men for whom it’s nothing to read two novels a week, for pleasure and erudition, in addition to going about high-level professional work, raising children, and practicing some intense sport. I was flattered that he’d read my book, a novel about a self-destructive waitress that had helped me land a writing job on “Orange.” And I was surprised when he took my arm outside the restaurant and invited me to go home with him. Although I was willing to go to bed with him, I hadn’t expected him to see me that way. I knew I wasn’t as attractive as he was, and I felt a distasteful conflict between the delusion of taking his interest personally and the humiliation of opting for an orientation of gratitude. I grasped about my interior for whatever dark magic makes a plain woman irresistible to people for other reasons, but I didn’t have it. In any case, I went up to his apartment, which was on an upper floor in a high-rise. His kids were with their mother, in Brooklyn, and I was good enough for a Tuesday night. The Europeans love a novelist.

He had a chiselled body because he was a serious rock climber. His penis was nothing special, his thin lips were not ideal for cunnilingus, but his torso was sculpted like a Polykleitos. I wanted to laugh every time I saw him without his shirt on. He could grab any pole out in the world and make himself perpendicular.

We had sex, and then, at 1 A.M., I went back to the furnished corporate apartment that the show had rented for me in Chelsea. My call time for pickup by the Teamster van that would take me to set was 6:15 A.M. I slept the few hours and was downstairs two minutes late, for which the Teamster driver reprimanded me. I didn’t mind. I loved the grand, intricate machine of production. I loved that two minutes mattered. The days on set were long, and that day I was tired but also relaxed, calm, invigorated. Being tired because you were up late fucking a beautiful man is a kind of deliquescent, acceptable tired, not unenjoyable, nothing like the hard, barren tired of depression or loneliness.

For almost a month, I lived in the apartment in Chelsea, did my preproduction or on-set day with transportation and lunch provided, and at night went out to see a play or hear music or have dinner with friends. Those days were so rich and full. I loved my job, and New York is fantastic on someone else’s dime.

I saw the economist three times while I was in New York for that shoot. Then I went back to Los Angeles and pined for him, wishing that he wanted a real relationship with me. I had started online dating when I’d moved to Los Angeles a year and half earlier, and in all that time I hadn’t found so much as a reliable hookup, much less a boyfriend. My children were seventeen and eighteen; I was only thirty-nine, but I was about to be an empty nester, and “Orange” was ending, so why shouldn’t I consider someone who lived in New York? I knew that a man of his class and background probably wasn’t a realistic possibility, but he kept texting and e-mailing, so I kept responding. I invented a form: an infinite letter. I wrote to him on nice ivory stationery, enclosed in an envelope with a ruby pinstripe. When I got to the end of the first page, I mailed it, even though I was in the middle of a sentence. The next day, I continued the sentence and wrote another page and mailed it. I kept this going for thirty-seven days. Who knows what I said. I fantasized about him constantly. And then I found out that I’d be writing another episode of “Orange,” which meant I’d be going back to New York for a shoot in December. This time, I’d be there for five weeks instead of three, because of the holiday break. I was so excited to see him again. I began to think that maybe it could be the beginning of something real after all.

We saw each other as soon as I got to the city. He fucked me too hard, from behind, and it tweaked my back; I had to see a chiropractor on my lunch break the next day. After work, I met the economist at a climbing gym in Long Island City. He was older than I was but had young kids, and he’d brought them with him. The oldest one was already a good climber, but the economist wanted to rope climb and needed me to belay him, so the children sat next to each other against a pillar and stared at an iPad. I thought it was careless of the economist to bring them on a date, but I didn’t know what the rules were with their mother.

When it was my turn to climb, I tried a few easy routes. (I had never climbed before.) When I looked at the economist down below, he wasn’t watching, because what I was doing was boring. I was almost to the top of the wall on one ascent when something popped in my left hip. The pain was intense. I fell off the wall and felt nauseated, dangling in the air in my rope harness. When I got to the ground, I could still walk, so I didn’t say anything to him about it. I was embarrassed that I’d hurt myself without doing anything hard. The next day, my hip ached, as it would for months; long after I stopped seeing the economist, I learned I had a torn labrum that would never heal on its own. But that winter I continued to exercise a lot, hoping to become thin and muscular enough for him to fall in love with me.

The economist told me that he wouldn’t have his kids for Christmas and asked if I wanted to go somewhere warm. He suggested Cuba, and I enthusiastically planned the whole trip at the last minute, finding a place in the mountains where we could climb. Our time together before this trip had been structured simply: We’d have dinner after I got out of work, and then we’d have sex and go to sleep, and one of us would leave in the morning. Or we’d meet for an activity, like the climbing gym. He wasn’t great at paying attention to me when we had downtime; while we were waiting in the airport, he typed on his laptop or read, and on the plane he watched “Crazy Rich Asians” and worked, as if we had been married for years. As we waited for our connection, he called his credit-card company and yelled at a customer-service agent. After the economist got off the phone, he was riled up and asked me: if you were a man married to a woman, would it be worse if she left you for a woman or for a man? I said I thought it would be worse if she left you for a man. If she left you for a woman, at least it was a different sort of failure. Maybe you could choose not to take it personally.

We spent two nights in Havana, and I gave him Elena Ferrante’s “The Days of Abandonment” as a Christmas present. He made a little clucking sound because he hadn’t brought a gift for me. (The next morning, he bought me some cheap earrings at a street market.) He read the book on the balcony of our Airbnb, the sounds of rumba and son cubano coming from the bar beneath us. He fell into the story and said how good it was. I made stovetop coffee and took a picture of him out there, his nice legs up on the railing, the faded patina of the city in the background; I suppose I wanted proof that he had been there with me.

The next day, we set out to walk around Havana using a map made for me by a journalist who was writing a book about Cuba. As the economist and I strolled along a seawall esplanade, he said that he wanted more children. He said, It’s not a real family unless you have children. In the airport, I had tried to overlook his yelling at the customer-service agent on the phone, but now I realized that I didn’t need to care, because maybe he wasn’t considering me at all and he was letting me know. He was aware that my tubes were tied, which I had told him to assure him that I couldn’t get pregnant. Because he always wore a condom anyway, I’d assumed that he was seeing other people, or that he’d assumed I was. I felt like an idiot to think that he would have considered me for the position of girlfriend. I should have known he wouldn’t from the first moment, from the way he’d looked at me from the bench outside Buvette.

But in the cab on the way from Havana to Viñales he waxed emotional—for him—about how easy it was to talk to me. Maybe he meant it as compensation for the rejection. If not, I pitied him, for thinking that our stiff connection felt like some fresh intimacy, when I was merely offering him a bespoke experience of attentive softness. If he looked at me, I smiled. I was curious about his life and his opinions and feelings. I thought ahead and did what I could to smooth the way. I stayed in a merry register and found small things to joke about. Of course he was having a good time. He transitioned to talking about his dating life. He had his laptop out because he’d been working during the cab ride, and he opened his dating spreadsheet to see how many people he’d had sex with so that he could compare his percentage with mine: he’d slept with eighteen of the seventy-four women he’d met through apps. At the time, my percentage was about the same, and we wondered whether this was higher than average. As we acknowledged that we both had strong sex drives, I felt myself coming down with something; my throat felt sore when I swallowed, and I was very tired. The sun was setting, bruising the sky as we drove into the picturesque, green village at the foot of the Sierra de los Órganos mountains. We went up to the roof of a hotel for dinner, and he FaceTimed his kids to say merry Christmas. They were with their mother, so he made sure that I wasn’t in the shot, and he didn’t say anything to give the impression that he was travelling with someone. When we got back to New York, he would post pictures of Cuba to his Instagram, some of which were my pictures of Cuba and none of which I appeared in. The next December, he would post photos of a different tropical place, again with no companion visible, and when I saw them I assumed that he was there with someone out of frame, someone with whom he didn’t want to advertise his connection, the same way he hadn’t wanted anyone to know about me.

While he spoke to his kids from the roof, I corresponded with a local man whom I had hired to be our climbing guide the next day. The economist had been lightly scornful of this, because he didn’t think he’d need a guide. So I let it be for me, because I wanted it. But by the time we got to our accommodation, which was near the mountains’ limestone cliffs, I had a fever; I tried to hold it together while we took a shower. As he washed his hair, I asked him what he cared about most in life, and he said, Success. The water was only lukewarm, and my body ached all over. And you? he asked. Love, I said, shivering, observing the loathsome gender normativity of our concerns. I got out of the shower and went straight to bed. I spent the night in a liminal state, unable to sleep because of the fever and the pain in my body and my throat but too sick to do anything else. I became concerned in the night, in my delirium, that he wouldn’t climb as planned. I needed to wake up to tell him to climb without me. I must have fallen asleep, and my fretting turned out to be for nought, because when I awoke it was morning and he was gone. I barely noticed the passing of the day in that room, because I was asleep and either feverishly hot or freezing. At some point, he came back. He’d had a fantastic day climbing, and the guide had been a great help. The guide had understood his skill level and showed him routes that were hard for him, but possible. The economist thanked me for everything. I was still very sick, but I had woken up right before his return, and he was energized; he wanted to go out for a drink. It didn’t sound good at all, the idea of moving, but I walked slowly down the road with him and drank one sip of a rum drink in a hut.

Then we rushed back to New York so that he could see his kids before he had to pop overseas to advise a prime minister about some banking measures. I was flat-out sick for a week and couldn’t leave my apartment. By the time New Year’s Eve came, I was feeling better, but I still had a percussive chest cough. I went to Chelsea Market to buy live lobsters so that the economist could make dinner for me and two of his friends, a married couple, at his place. The husband was an important activist-entrepreneur, and I hadn’t met any of the economist’s friends yet, so I wanted to make a good impression, even though everything already felt moot because of what he’d said in Cuba. I didn’t want to say that I was too sick to come, as if there were some possibility that attending the New Year’s Eve dinner and meeting the economist’s friends could keep me in the running. The important activist-entrepreneur had a beautiful wife and a one-year-old baby. He and the economist talked to each other, the beautiful wife tended the baby, and all I did was cough. I coughed throughout the lobster dinner, and everyone politely ignored it. I tried not to cough in the direction of the baby. The economist drank a bottle of champagne on his own, and, after the couple and their baby left, we had sex on his living-room couch. He was very drunk, barely conscious, and for the first time he didn’t use a condom. I wondered if I was wrong about his rejection of me, if in fact it was the opposite and we were progressing to a new stage because we’d spent New Year’s Eve together with his friends, and because we’d had unprotected sex. I didn’t ask him. He was in a compromised state. It didn’t occur to me to say that we shouldn’t have sex, because he was the man, but now it seems like I should have stopped him. He fucked me and I coughed the whole time, and then he staggered down the hall to bed. I felt like he didn’t even know I was there. I couldn’t stop coughing, so I let myself out and went back to my apartment at 2 A.M.

Later that week, in his kitchen in the high-rise, the economist told me that he wasn’t as attracted to me as he needed to be, because of mimetic desire. He said that if he was going to be sent to a deserted island and had to choose between me and someone gorgeous, of course he would choose me, because I would be more interesting to talk to forever, and he could still have sex with me, too. But in the real world, surrounded by other people who’d be looking at him with me, he knew that he would feel ashamed of me because he could have been with a more beautiful woman. I didn’t point out to him that someone gorgeous might also be interesting to talk to. I didn’t say that it hurt my feelings to hear him say that I wasn’t someone gorgeous. I assumed that we were being rational, and that it was the truth.

But that hadn’t been his way of breaking up with me. I returned to Los Angeles, and we continued to e-mail, text, and talk on the phone; I wasn’t sure why, but I didn’t ask for a conversation about what we were doing. I could have said, Hey, what are we doing? But men usually hate that question. They hate that question because answering it means that they might lose control of the narrative, by entering into some collaborative defining of it. As long as the relationship remains formally undefined, they can extract whatever they want from it; a definition imposes limitations and expectations. My passivity was my way of tacitly endorsing his way. I suspected that if I said, I want a real relationship, and if you don’t want that we should move on, he would say that he didn’t want it. If he wanted it, I figured I would already know. In my experience, when a man is crazy about a woman, he makes sure she knows it. So why didn’t I move on? Because of the sunk-cost fallacy—it would mean I had wasted my time with him.

Shortly after I returned to Los Angeles, a foundation called to say that I had won a literary award of fifty thousand dollars. I hadn’t applied for it, and I didn’t know I had been nominated. I couldn’t believe it. The economist was one of the first people I told. He was happy for me, and I asked him to be one of my guests at the awards ceremony, which would take place two months later, in New York. I asked if I could come visit him before then. He said yes, though not as enthusiastically as I would have liked. We can work smthg out, he wrote. Those seemed like words for solving a problem, not planning a romantic getaway. I asked my best friend to come stay with my seventeen-year-old—my older child was finishing high school in Texas, with his dad—and used the airline miles I had accumulated by flying business class, courtesy of Lionsgate and Netflix, to buy one coach fare. I ordered clothes from Rent the Runway because he had already seen me in the best of my wardrobe. I put the designer clothes in a garment bag, so that they wouldn’t get wrinkled, and took a carry-on as well, even though I’d be gone only from Friday to Monday. We were going to his house upstate for the first time, and there’d be snow on the ground, so I needed to bring snow boots, which wouldn’t fit in the garment bag. I also needed my climbing shoes, running shoes, and shoes to go with my new outfits. I flew on a red-eye and arrived at his apartment building in the morning, after he’d gone to work. He’d left keys at the front desk for me so that I could take a nap while he taught. I woke up to him sitting there on the edge of the bed. Good morning, sunshine, he said, in his pronounced, exquisite accent. We had sex, and then we drove out of the city to his house upstate.

The house was beautiful but not ostentatious. It was situated on a lovely, small piece of land, with a pool and a garden for the summer and a wood stove for the winter. He split logs with an axe like a real man while I looked around inside. The Christmas tree was still up, even though it was February. There wasn’t much furniture. The economist and his wife had owned the house for a while; it seemed like she must have taken some things and he hadn’t replaced them. He built a fire, opened a bottle of wine, and cooked dinner for us. He admired my well-made, stylish wool pants. They were hot pink and hit just above my ankle with an oversized cuff and a strong pleat. He liked my sweater, too; it was made in Italy, a checkered pattern of stormy-sea blue and chestnut brown. I didn’t tell him that my clothes were leased. The pants were three hundred and sixty-eight dollars retail, and the sweater was around eight hundred, but I had paid only the ninety-nine-dollar monthly rental fee for those two pieces and two others. I felt sexier and smarter and more feminine in those clothes, like I was worth more. I also suspected they were creating an illusion. I would have to give back the clothes, just as I would have to give back the man.

After dinner, we watched “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” on a TV in a cluttered playroom. I could tell that he was enchanted by the film, but I found the story disturbing rather than romantic. Instead of feeling wistful, or sympathetic, I felt annoyed by the thesis statements that people’s lives don’t line up and time moves on.

The day before I left, for some reason he e-mailed me a draft of his divorce settlement, which had come through to him a few days earlier. He provided no context relevant to our relationship; he was upset about how much his wife was getting in the divorce. I could have lived for years on the six-figure amount he had to pay to buy out her share of the house upstate, their cars, and his bank accounts.

A couple of days after I returned to Los Angeles, on Valentine’s Day, I sent the economist a long e-mail, its subject: a kind of valentine. I think the holiday is consumerist and heterosexist and silly; nonetheless, my e-mail was three thousand four hundred and twenty-six words long. His reply was almost a haiku:

I am at a loss, again
You write so well
You are so fucking smart
But I need to go and talk to the president of the NY Fed.

I was back in New York two weeks later, for “Orange” series-wrap events. Production flew the writers—all eleven of us—to New York to be on set for the last day of shooting, and to attend a big party at Rice & Gold, on Bowery. Everyone was invited to the party: every actor, every below-the-line crew member, every producer who had worked on the show during its seven-season run. But the production team treated the writers like royalty, flying us business class and putting us up at the Benjamin, an upscale boutique hotel in a midtown landmark building. Our showrunner, Jenji Kohan, made sure that her writers were regarded with maximum dignity. On a lot of shows, the writer of the episode is allowed to be on set only as a kind of courtesy. But Jenji made sure that the directors and crew knew the writer on set spoke for her. We were given a say in every step of preproduction (locations, costumes, casting, production design) and post (editing, score, music, special effects). We had created the episodes with our minds, and if we weren’t involved in bringing them to life it wouldn’t be what we had imagined. I caught one of the last waves of the good life as a writer during TV’s most recent golden age, before streaming wars, the pandemic, strikes, and mergers stripped the industry of jobs. Often, you don’t know which were the peak experiences until they’re long past, but with “Orange” I knew, from the first day to the last, that it was one of the best things that had ever happened to me.

The evening before the wrap party, I walked over to the gallery district and wandered into an Alice Neel exhibition at David Zwirner. I had never heard of her, and I was transfixed; her arresting paintings captured something about being a woman. She also wrote, from an emo place I related to:

He said I have to go away
The only week that we could even be together
One week out of a racing life
I guess he couldn’t have liked me much
Perhaps I was too easy
Maybe I should have pretended more
Or maybe my dress wasn’t pretty enough . . .

I felt every word. Her pain inspired me because she was so compromised for a man, and yet it didn’t seem to diminish her genius. Her art found its way, and it wasn’t worth less because she had wanted a man that much. I often felt that because my mind seemed to be a space for thoughts about men rather than about my work, or any other subject, I was a failure as an intellect, and if there was a way to defy that nature I had not yet found it. Alice wrote, Art doesn’t care if you’re a man or a woman. One thing you have to have is talent, and you have to work like mad.

I loved her painting “Pregnant Julie and Algis”; Julie and Algis are reclining on a bed, and Algis is in his work clothes. He could have come from a board meeting or drinks with the boss, but Julie is naked, wearing nothing, wearing her pregnancy, with her red pubic hair and her pink breasts on display. In 1967, the painting was radically feminist, an elegant and cutting commentary. Alice had her first baby in Cuba, with her husband, the painter Carlos Enríquez Gómez. The baby, whose name was Santillana, died of diphtheria before her first birthday. In New York, Alice had a second daughter with Carlos, Isabetta, whom he kidnapped and took back to Cuba after he broke things off with Alice. Isabetta, who was raised by Carlos’s wealthy family and hardly knew her mother, died by suicide at fifty-three. Alice had two more children by two other men. I think of myself as a disaster because I’ve been divorced twice and I’ve been made pregnant five times by two or three different men, but if you do good work it doesn’t matter. Or it still matters, but at least you’ve salvaged something from the wreck. I sent the economist a picture of Alice’s poem, and he said only, Hmmm I’m fried. Going to sleep now.

The economist was my date to the series-wrap party. I wore my second ex-mother-in-law’s nineteen-twenties silk dress, which was beautiful and very tight. I had gotten eyelash extensions of a subtle length and a blowout, and I was wearing costume jewelry and makeup. I looked more glam than perhaps I ever had in my life. He was wearing mostly his body; he had on a black T-shirt and a sport coat over it, with dark jeans, and he looked great. He held a little sign that read FLAWLESS when we took pictures at the photo booth. After the party, he posted a shot of us on his Instagram for the first time, with one of his dry captions: Season finale party. When I saw it on his feed, I was surprised, and I thought, That is going to disappear. He hadn’t asked me to be his girlfriend, so I knew that he posted it for his own ego and not to show people that we were together, even though you can see his arm is around my waist. Three weeks later, he had taken it down. A couple of days after he posted it, someone who had seen the picture and identified me sent me a message about him through Instagram. They used the expression Girl code. They included a screenshot of what appeared to be someone’s correspondence with him, in which he said, But I don’t think I will fall in love and that’s what you and I are looking for.

After the wrap party, I went back to Los Angeles. The awards ceremony would take place in New York a couple of weeks later, and the economist said that he wanted to throw a party for me at his apartment. I was happy about that and invited everyone I knew in New York. When we began making plans for the party and the week I’d be in town, he suggested we go upstate again. But a few days later he said that he wouldn’t be able to accompany me to the ceremony after all. Then he said, I know you’re not religious but have you considered the possibility that you might be a Christ-like character? Shortly after that exchange, I asked about going upstate, and he said, You and I are not going to fall in love and that’s what you and I are looking for. I was chilled, briefly, by his use of a line so like the one he’d used with the Girl code person, but then I thought about how I’ve used the same exit lines many times myself. Maybe it’s inevitable, rather than creepy.

He said that he still wanted to throw the party for me, and I thought it would be embarrassing to cancel it, so I accepted. He wanted to print some of my writing and tape it on a wall in his apartment for the occasion, which made me cringe, but I selected and prepared the broadsides for him. I felt unattractive and masculine and sad at the party, even though I was wearing a pretty floor-length dress from Rent the Runway and I had won fifty thousand dollars. I had planned to stay with him, but when he said that we weren’t going to fall in love I got a hotel room. I had flown my kids to New York to attend the events with me, but, because I thought I was going to be staying with the economist after the ceremony, I had booked them their own room in a different hotel, and I couldn’t book a second room there or cancel the reservation. Obviously, I should have found a way to stay with my kids—I should have slept on the floor in their room, or they in mine. I should have wished the economist well, or not, and told all my friends that the party was reconvening elsewhere, anywhere else, any place people can meet in that city.

I went back to Los Angeles and tried to forget about him. A month later, in April, he e-mailed me:

I am not sure if I should write to you now. Every time I thought about writing to you I thought it would be selfish. The truth is that I miss you. I knew I would, that is not exactly a surprise. I did not know how much. Some of the peaceful strength I felt when I was with you is gone because it was coming from you. I suppose it is often this way. I don’t know for sure.

My book is coming along well. . . . Spring is finally coming here and the garden upstate is beginning to bloom.

I didn’t reply. I didn’t want to think about the garden blooming upstate. I didn’t want to make it easier for him. In May, he wished me a happy Mother’s Day, then asked if he could call me. Maybe he was having second thoughts, or maybe he was lonely, but by then I was falling in love with a scientist. I was so excited about him that I couldn’t sleep, because if I slept I wouldn’t be awake to feel it. But the scientist had already told me that there was no way we could have a real relationship, because he was leaving Los Angeles, so I wondered if I should at least talk to the economist. Maybe the economist would say that he didn’t care about having more kids and that I should come to New York. Maybe I would learn to climb with him, and hike in the Alps with him, and pick the small strawberries that grew in the summer garden at the house upstate. But I ignored him. I wasn’t going to risk being rejected again, and I didn’t want anything to disrupt the tenderness I felt for the scientist. And yet the scientist had also said that he wanted a family; he had said, We’re at different places in our lives. I wished someone would say, You’re so much better than a baby.

In July, 2020, the economist texted me several messages to tell me that a friend of his had killed himself, and:

I was selfish When we were together. I thought I could tell you everything that was in my mind unfiltered. Unfiltered even the things that could be hurtful to you. I’m sorry.

I know you don’t want to hear form me. I understand you think of me as time wasted on a selfish dude.

But maybe just maybe you’ll read these texts. And you will hear that at least I think you are a wonderful person. . . .

I didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t want to reopen the channel. It seemed the economist hadn’t found someone new, if I was the person he turned to in his grief or shock. I looked at his Instagram and saw that he’d posted a picture of a metal bowl of tomatoes and cucumbers from the garden, the same day he’d texted me about the suicide. I imagined him looking down into the bowl as he took the picture, and feeling alone with the beauty of his life, and the sadness of his friend’s death. I imagined him looking at the tomatoes and thinking, Is anyone ever going to share this with me? I scanned the rest of his posts and saw the same grid of the good life as before—outdoor adventures upstate, food from the garden, skiing, climbing, vacations in Europe, his kids. I didn’t reply to his messages. In December, a woman appeared next to him, smiling in the snow.

After I had moved to a different country to try to be with the love of my life, and had failed utterly, and had come back, I checked the economist’s feed one night and discovered that he had gotten married to the woman from the snow, in an outdoor wedding at the house upstate. She was very beautiful. From her LinkedIn profile, I could scroll through her professional achievements, and I could see that she even spoke his native language fluently. His mimetic-desire metric had been satisfied. Weeks after they got married, he e-mailed me on Thanksgiving to say, Wherever you are, whatever you do, I hope you are happy. I tried to imagine what had compelled him to write to me from the cocoon of fresh marital bliss. All I could come up with was the possibility that he felt so wholly content that he couldn’t believe it, and his domestic euphoria had turned a corner, pulling at superstition and evoking some kind of winner’s guilt he needed to ward off by sending me that message. Or was he hoping I would say, Nice to hear from you, how are you? so that he could tell me he’d remarried? I thought about replying to his I hope you are happy with I’m not. But I didn’t.

Three months later, she was snorkelling in the Caribbean with him, a mermaid with a baby bump. When the child was born, I thought how pleased the economist must be, because now his new family was real. ♦

This is drawn from “A Life in Men.”