“It’s great to meet you,” he said as he handed me the drink. He raised his glass and I raised mine. I liked the way he smiled. There were things about him, even in the first half-hour, that I felt I understood. The humor, the small attempts at irony, the shrugging of the shoulders were all self-deprecating, ways of protecting himself from the world.

I talked about Argentina and told him about seeing Menem for the first time, although I did not tell him that Susan was there. He listened as though everything I said were new to him and some of it astonishing. He smiled in a dry, amused sort of way. He said that soon he was going to start traveling in Argentina; some of it, he said, reminded him of parts of the United States where he had grown up, his family had moved around a good deal, his father had worked for Heinz.

I asked him where he lived; he was careful to emphasize that his apartment was no big deal, that he would have liked something different but he had to placate the security people. I enjoyed watching him, he was smart, and sometimes when he said something interesting or intelligent, or used a funny turn of phrase, he bunched his face up as though he had been caught doing something wrong. When he asked me about being English, I tried to be precise—to tell the truth. I said that one side of me, the English side maybe, was a way of hiding from the other side, which was Argentinian, so that I never had to be a single fully formed person, I could always switch and improvise. I had never said this before, or even thought about it like this, and I suppose I could say it easily to him because I believed that he would understand it; I imagined that he too must have learned strategies. There were other things I could say that I knew he would understand, like how working with Americans had made me feel American, that I knew how to fit into other people’s agendas. I could feel that he was like that too, but I said nothing about it because I did not want to say too much.

I presumed as the dinner came to an end that we were going to spend the night together. When he went to the toilet I thought about it: maybe it was something he did not want to do. But just say he did? Afterward, then, what would happen? Would I leave him once I had an orgasm and walk back home? Or would I stay the night? Would I see him again? What were the rules? Meeting someone like this was new to me.