Andrew Greer

Like someone who has just learned a foreign language and can use only the present tense and only the second person. Only now, only you.

phrase he does not want to say and yet, somehow, by the cruel checkmate logic of conversation, is compelled to say:

“Thank you.”

I feel like I just understood how to be young.”

“Yes! It’s like the last day in a foreign country. You finally figure out where to get coffee, and drinks, and a good steak. And then you have to leave. And you won’t ever be back.”

By his forties, all he has managed to grow is a gentle sense of himself, akin to the transparent carapace of a soft-shelled crab.

How can so many things become a bore by middle age—philosophy, radicalism, and other fast foods—but heartbreak keeps its sting? Perhaps because he finds fresh sources for it.

Life was not hard; you shouldered it bravely, knowing all the time that if you sent the signal, help would arrive.

Less smiles warily and touches his beard. “I…I thought I needed a change.”

Lewis holds him at a distance to study him. “It’s sexy. Let’s get you into some air-conditioning. There’s a heat wave on, and even these Marrakech nights have been hell. Sorry your flight was delayed; what a nightmare to wait a whole day! Did you manage to fall in love with fourteen hours in Paris?”

Less is startled and says he called up Alexander. He talks about the party and Alex not showing up. He doesn’t mention Javier.

Lewis turns to him and asks, “Do you want to talk about Freddy? Or do you not want to talk about Freddy?”

“Not talk.”

His friend nods. Lewis, whom he met for the first time on that long road trip after college, who offered his cheap apartment on Valencia Street, above the communist bookstore, who introduced him to acid and electronic music. Handsome Lewis Delacroix, who seemed so adult, so assured; he was thirty. A generation apart back then; now they are essentially contemporaries. And yet Lewis has always seemed so much steadier; with the same boyfriend for twenty years, he is the very model of love’s success. And glamorous: this trip, for instance, is exactly the kind of luxury that afforded Lewis’s fascinating stories. It is a birthday trip—not for Arthur Less. For some woman named Zohra, who is also turning fifty, and whom Less has never met.

“I’d say let’s get some sleep,” Lewis says as they find a taxi, “but nobody at the hotel is asleep