She forced a smile. He didn’t respond, but she knew he wanted her. She could feel it. What to do? What to say? She wanted to be the mango so he could suck her down to the seed.

“That looks good,” she said. Maybe they would screw if she aroused him. “Would you like to share it?”

He looked at her, looked away, then stretched the mango toward her. She nibbled the tip and licked it carefully, glossed it with her saliva, then, working like a boa constrictor, pulled for a second into her mouth the fruit and his trembling fingers.

A whale began to surface through his deep blue jeans. A voice said, “Suck it.” A strange voice, little more than a murmur. Then he gathered it was his and leaned away from her. Licking nectar off her chin, she stared at him. He tried to glare, but couldn’t—couldn’t even speak.

“Kiss me.”

The words were hers. He tried to resist. Thought he had, until his tongue was a honey stick in hot tea. Soon he was melting into memory … into their first kiss ten years ago in Cuba.

She was standing on a street corner in Old Havana, a map in her hand, using her own brand of filleted Spanish to explain to a group of curious onlookers that the Yanquis didn’t hate them, that the Yanquis in fact pitied them and really hated the French, who they found repugnant and smug. She didn’t know how to say “smug” in Spanish.

“Apuesto,” he said from the back, “pulcro.” Their eyes met.

“Excuse me,” she said, as the crowd trailed away, “do you speak English?”

“No,” he replied. “Do you?” She was wearing a lavender dress and sandals. He was wearing an Exodus T-shirt and Red Army boots. He liked her voice. She spoke with a flourish, as if her words were meant to be drawn in calligraphy.

They drifted into a walk, cruised the cobblestoned streets, brushed against each other as they passed under arbors of billowing clothes. She took photographs of the crumbling houses … posed on the hoods of vintage cars. It was her first visit to Cuba, she told him. She was forty, and taught English and Near Eastern studies at Columbia. Her father was Jamaican, her mother from Iran. She’d been raised outside Toronto.

They had lunch in a paladar. Over gallina vieja and yellow rice she learned that he’d been living in Cuba for three years, had gone there to study with the famous muralist Francisco Irtubbe after receiving a fine art degree at Yale. He was twenty-four and Jamaican, and his favorite uncle, I-nelik, had toured and recorded with The Wailers.

She asked if he was a communist and he told her no. Said he was a socialist. Then they began to talk about art and she said there wasn’t any money in murals. Money isn’t all, he replied. What is? she asked. Love, he said … all you need is love. She said that was a crock of shit. He liked her directness. It was hard to find that in women his own age.