All this I learned from Marco at my weekly visits to his house and, increasingly, over the phone. He’d begun calling me frequently. Though I wasn’t his closest friend by any means, I believe I was still the only one he confided in on this particular subject. My knowing Julia and some of the other people involved was obviously a part of it, but he was worried about gossip, and my not knowing anyone in his professional circle was probably just as important.

I don’t think he talked about it much with Hanan either. He’d told me she and Alicia had listened sympathetically when he explained the situation after Julia’s phone message, but I got the feeling he wasn’t entirely confident in her loyalty. I assumed she must be weighing her options. On the one hand, she’d just moved in with Marco—taken the plunge with their relationship—and reversing course would have been complicated at the very least. Also, she was having visa problems, to which the simplest solution would have been marrying Marco, who’d acquired U.S. citizenship himself through his first marriage, and I imagine she wasn’t ready to give up on that prospect just yet. On the other hand, there was everything her instincts as a rational woman of the world must have been telling her: that if things went badly for Marco, she could find herself encumbered with a piece of irrevocably damaged human goods that she’d have to be constantly explaining and apologizing for, and dragging around with her like an invalid with some highly noxious disease.

It’s possible, of course, that her air of disengagement was just a more emphatic version of what I’d sensed earlier: an essential remoteness from the culture of New York—in this instance its anxious, obsessive interest in the subject of sexual conduct. It’s also possible my perspective on her was shaped by factors that had nothing to do with her at all. Earlier that year, for example, I’d seen the documentary about Anthony Weiner. I didn’t make any connection at the time, but as I write now it seems likely I was seeing Hanan through the lens of Weiner’s wife Huma ­Abedin. There were physical resemblances: similar black hair and large dark eyes; similar pale-olive complexion set off by bright red lipstick. Gestural similarities, too, particularly a certain way of taking up position in a doorway or far corner of a room, arms crossed, gazing at their partner with a look expressive of both tenderness and cool appraisal. (No doubt, by the same token, I was also viewing Marco partly through the lens of Weiner himself; at the very least, Weiner’s drama must have added a tint of its particular farcical goatishness to the general murk of errant masculinity shadowing Marco’s own.)