“If so, then I’d have to be the worst womanizer around.” He laughs, pressing his hand into the dip of my back. “I mean, think about it, would I take you to New York? Would I invite you to Buenos Aires, where sex is plentiful? Would I tell you that I want to have a baby with you?”

I don’t know. Would he? And why, when we’re already sleeping together? Why bother with all the extra gestures?

After the reading I go backstage to congratulate him, and he is holding roses. “Who gave you those?” I ask. He seems uncomfortable, and he turns to greet someone without answering me. I try not to overspeculate. I assume the roses are normal protocol for all readers. “I need to go to the hotel to change,” he says, “but how about we meet for dinner? Maybe that place with the martinis you’ve been talking about?”

We get drunk that night at the restaurant. He turns to the table next to ours and asks, “Isn’t my girlfriend cute?” I tell him to do his François Mitterrand imitation—“Oui, j’ai un enfant naturel, et alors?” I laugh and he does it again. By the time we leave I’m so drunk that I can barely walk, so he carries me home on his back. We stay in bed until late the next day, getting up only to eat and pee.

At around five in the afternoon, we decide to go for a walk along the river that runs alongside campus. “I keep wondering what I’m doing with my life,” he says. “What my purpose is. I guess it’s to write, but that’s hard to accept when I haven’t published a book in years.”

“You’re also a father,” I remind him. “Someone’s life depends on you.”

We stop to share a cigarette under a tree. We talk about our imagined life together in Argentina. “Would you be interested in teaching?” he asks. “Because I could get you a job lecturing at the American university. You could take the spring and try it. Try living with me?”

“Maybe,” I say. “Too bad I’ve been studying French all these years.” He smiles, then leans forward and kisses me. After a while he stands and helps me up off of the ground. As we continue walking, we sing. Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez. It’s getting dark and the university crew rows by. “What are you thinking about right now?” he asks.

“The little red lights on the boats,” I answer.

“Me too!” he says. “They’re like clown noses, Matisse red, alarming but familiar.”

“I never come back this way,” I tell him.

“Good to know. Then I can bring my other girlfriend here.”

I nudge him playfully, and he takes my hand. “Would you think I was a jerk if I went back to my room tonight, to write?”