He said he couldn’t be my boyfriend because he needed to focus on his manuscript, but when I pointed out that I was also working on a book and that we might offer one another encouragement, he didn’t seem convinced.

“I just don’t think I can give you the time and attention you’re looking for,” were his exact words.

“I really don’t need much time or attention,” I told him, “just some nights and weekends. You won’t even notice me.” Though I had meant it as a joke, he didn’t laugh, and then it occurred to me how desperate my response had been, and how grim this sort of situation was, and how common.

The country we lived in was responsible for the deaths of many people in an occupied nation bordering the Mediterranean Sea. We read about it in the news or on our phones. When we went to bars and drank or took drugs, we talked about it with grave concern. The book he was writing was about this atrocity. My project, a novel, was about my inability to form reciprocal loving relationships with men. I suppose it was also about my wanting and failing to be a serious artist.

At the start, I sensed that this was what Max was drawn to. The fact that I saw myself as an artist whereas he identified as more of a public-intellectual-slash-activist-slash-reporter-slash-PhD dropout. To form the kind of consensus and likeness needed to nurture a burgeoning romantic relationship, we underplayed our differences. Or at least I did. I read articles I did not want to read. I attended lectures given by economists who spoke very poor English. No one could say I did not try. Come to think of it, he made no effort to conceal who he was and how he differed from me.

Still, I saw us as highly compatible. In my mind, we were two writers who shared a great deal. We differed only in superficial ways. For example, he was older than I was. How much older I didn’t know; he wouldn’t tell me and I quickly learned to stop asking. But he was attractive and charismatic and I found I didn’t care that he wouldn’t integrate me into his life in the way that I desired. He was a person with a vocation more serious than my own and, really, I just wanted to be around him. We continued seeing one another in the vague way that was his preference. I knew that there were other women, but didn’t press things. He seemed increasingly stressed when we met at dives or at my apartment or his. Each time I saw him he had grown thinner and his hair had turned more gray. He told me the political situation was worsening. I asked him which one and he replied:

“Is that a serious question?”

A journalistic assignment was taking him to Los Angeles. Masked officers were profiling people who appeared to be from South or Central America and rounding them up for the purpose of mass deportations. He was to go to California, monitor the crisis and write about why it was happening. He saw me for a movie the night before he left town. I would have preferred dinner. There were many things I hoped to say to him that couldn’t be said in a dark theater. I wanted to give him some pointless ultimatum, knowing I was totally helpless when it came to him and wouldn’t be able to enforce the consequences even if I wanted to. I wished I knew how he had been parented. Maybe if I better understood his childhood, I would be able to figure out a way to manipulate him into loving me. I had expressed that idea to my therapist the previous week, and hearing it reverberate around the room, I thought: My dignity, what happened to it?

After the movie, we got quite drunk and wandered back to his apartment. It was very hot, and my heart ached so acutely that it was like I had taken a bad batch of drugs then hallucinated a planet whose surface and atmosphere were composed entirely out of despair and was condemned to live on it for all time.

Holding on to the railing for balance as we climbed the stairs, it occurred to me that this would be our final night together. I made no demands and when I went home in the morning, I waited for him to call and he didn’t, simple as that. First a week and then a month passed. I spent all my time talking on the phone just so that I didn’t have to dwell in the embarrassing silence.

I called my friend’s mother who worked as a Jungian analyst in Massachusetts, who told me that Max was what they called a puer aeternus, an eternal boy. I called my old film professor who was like a grandfather to me, and he told me that every intelligent woman has at least one abortive relationship with an older man in her life, and that one day, I would look back and hardly remember it. But he isn’t even that old, I cried into the phone.

I called all of my girlfriends and they said that something similar was happening to them too. Only the guy had been a musician or a chef or a staffer on Capitol Hill. At any given moment on Earth, there was a man refusing to return a woman’s calls. If you were quiet, you could hear a lovesick person getting sent to voicemail.

I even called my mother who warned me that no one would buy the cow if they could get the milk for free. Then my agent called me. My novel had sold for what seemed to me an outlandish sum of money. How lucrative the humiliation of young women was, how evergreen. It wasn’t much of a consolation.

Evidently, Max had made it to California. I read his essay about the ICE raids and it made me miss him and feel afraid that the doom with which he described the country was not an expression of his gloomy personality, but was an objective account of a world descending into chaos. I tried to ask anyone who might know anything if they had seen Max back in New York. Finally, I ran into a mutual friend, a brooding and lecherous but ultimately harmless man in his forties who had written a book about the CIA and loved to gossip. “You haven’t heard?” he asked me.

“Obviously not,” I said. I was growing increasingly impatient with people who knew what Max had been up to and enjoyed lording it over me. It had all begun to feel very conspiratorial. Whenever I saw two or more people speaking, I thought they were talking about Max and how he was avoiding me. 

The man turned his cell phone around and there was Max, so beautiful, on a large ship, bathed in sunlight, surrounded by banners and flags in the colors red, black, white, and green. He wore a shirt emblazoned with a familiar political slogan about the right to return. There was a camera around his neck, and his beard had grown so long that he almost looked wise, like a white-haired sage on a pilgrimage, not the man I remembered going on benders and having raucous sex with.

“I can’t believe he got famous before I did,” the man said, putting his phone back in his pocket. “He was always so lazy.”

Max had sailed to the dangerous and besieged coastal city that he was writing a book about. Along with dozens of other journalists, influencers, academics, activists, and medical workers, he had taken this precarious weeks-long journey without telling me or properly saying goodbye. He had decided that if during this trip he died or was disappeared, he didn’t care if we ever spoke again. That was sobering. That really put things into relief.

“Where did you read about that?” I asked the man. He explained that Max had been sending nightly dispatches to tens of thousands of subscribers through his newsletter, which was behind a paywall. For a small fee, perfect strangers were permitted insights into his life that he withheld from me.

I left the party, went home, and paid to subscribe. I sat in the dark reading about the conditions on board, about the risk of being attacked by the occupying army, about why he had gone, about the fact that he saw it as a command of his faith to go, about how music and social media and various group chats had been a balm during these restless nights, about the fact that the serenity he felt had allowed him to quit smoking, about how this and similar struggles were more important to him than making a living, than falling in love or starting a family, were more important even than his own life. I spent hours this way, staring at my bright screen, and though I found the entries very difficult to read, I could not stop.

Then I discovered that people could leave comments under the essays, so I went back and reread each one and all of the responses. There were all these sycophantic women wishing him well, saying that they were praying for him and that he was in their thoughts. That’s what women said when they wanted to sleep with you, I thought. And he must have wanted to sleep with at least some of them if he wasn’t already sleeping with the women on the ship.

Everyone thought he was brave, but he wasn’t brave. He loved faraway people and embodied lofty ideals, but when it came to the ordinary difficulty of interpersonal relationships, he didn’t measure up. Really, he was just another womanizer. Did the women in his comments know that? I worked myself into a blind rage, muttering to myself, alone in the middle of the night. Who does he think he is? I heard myself shout. I was crazy. He had driven me mad and there were no fewer than five hundred comments telling him how noble he was. Max, noble? You had to laugh at that. Otherwise, you would cry. Or at least I would. When I heard the birds sing and saw that it was morning, I shut my blackout curtains and continued zooming in on a picture of him, looking for women in the background.

“Everyone thought he was brave, but he wasn’t brave. He loved faraway people and embodied lofty ideals, but when it came to the ordinary difficulty of interpersonal relationships, he didn’t measure up. Really, he was just another womanizer. Did the women in his comments know that?”

I imagined that when this stunt was all over, Max would return to the United States and get some kind of hero’s welcome. His book was almost certain to win prizes. But there was nothing heroic about what he had done. It was easy to act out in the name of lofty principles and feel sympathy for people thousands of miles away, but it took real determination to love and commit to another person. If there were awards for compassion and decency and monogamy and fidelity, I would have won them all. But such awards did not exist.

I typed up an account of the events that had transpired between Max and me, then hit post. An instant later, I saw it appear under his most recent update, and I felt relieved and even proud of my courage. The note began, Dear Max, and once I’d said all I needed to say, it ended, I hope you die, you coward.