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.