“The Black one,” it turns out, has a name. Reinaldo. He offers to take us to señora Lilia’s house to use the phone. He walks with a long gait, arms swinging at his side, periodically wiping his face with a corner of his yellowed tank top and exposing his belly to us. He knows everyone we pass, and they yell greetings to one another. Some people ask him point-blank: Who are they? Why are they here?

I notice a change in Jeanette when El Alemán isn’t with us. She slips more easily into Spanish, seems to swing her hips a little more loosely. She snaps back at the men who catcall with empty, bored faces, throws curses and friendly jabs right back at Reinaldo. I settle, relieved, into the role of participant, no longer the guide.

“But what’s the problem, though?” Reinaldo says to Jeanette.

“Coño, how am I supposed to know? It just doesn’t start.”

“Pssssh,” Reinaldo says through his teeth, gnashing on a cigar.

I feel the buzz of a mosquito at my neck and hope they won’t make a feast of us by the time we leave. We turn right, following Reinaldo, onto a dirt path that runs between two Soviet-era complexes. Laundry swings from window to window, flapping in the dust, and chickens wander in and out of the building’s entryway. I can see a couple faces through the iron bars of the windows.

“Why you wanna go with that viejo anyway?” Reinaldo says in my direction, but still looking at Jeanette. “You take me, I’ll show you a good time. Got my own car and everything.”

Jeanette starts to say something but I cut her off. “You gonna pay for the hotel?”

“Psssh,” Reinaldo says again.

Once, Ronny and I went on vacation, staying at a beach house in Santa María del Mar, a reward from his boss for the best doctors. The house itself was falling apart. All night I heard mice skittering along the walls and huge palmetto bugs flying in and out through holes along the baseboards. The beach, too, was far less appealing than the tourist beaches, which in those days were still off-limits to Cubans like us: murky water, garbage along the shore.

But Santa María del Mar is still my favorite memory of the two of us. Just an hour from home, we were unfamiliar friends again, hand in hand, sleeping naked in bed to escape the heat, the slow ceiling fan whipping my long hair over his chest in a steady, slow rhythm. This is how most relationships must end, I think. Slow and without drama or pandemonium, without reason: just two people who become accessories to the bland survival of the everyday.