The Apartment in San Miguel del Allende

The apartment in San Miguel del Allende cost him very little, 250 dollars a month, and I can’t decide if this is a bargain or not. On the one hand, it comes with two concrete terraces. One in front, off the kitchen, with a cluttered view of San Miguel’s center—a gold church and a white church, and guitar music dripping in from the bars. The other terrace, outside his bedroom, faces a pink church, Gaudi-inspired, “pseudo-Gothic” a tourist called it. He calls it La Parroquia. It lights up coral at night, the stars tossed across it.

I stand on the terrace contemplating the pink church, the night sky, the Mexico half-moon, when he comes up behind me and places his hands on my waist. He moves his arms around my chest and holds me tighter and tighter. He breathes beside my face but does not kiss me. He holds me like a drowning man.

Why the apartment might only be worth 250 dollars a month: the size. In New York or San Francisco or London or a place famous for no space, this place would be 2,000 a month, easy, if not 3,000—a central location and terraces, real terraces you can stand on. There is a table on one of them—a four-person table. Forget it, 4,000. But here in San Miguel, it is small, here in San Miguel, other expatriates have marble mansions.

There is just a bedroom, a kitchen, and a narrow hallway in between the two. The hallway with bookcases and a grey sofa that you have to step on and over to get to the other side. One bathroom off his bedroom, with a black iron door, oddly formal. The size of a closet, the toilet, sink, and shower all rubbing each other. His cat curled up in the sink, black and white fur, the cat purring, the sink dripping on him, the only cat I’ve ever seen that liked to get wet.

He’s kissing me now, mouth, his fingers tighten at my neck, I stare at the halo of stars around the church, his tongue tastes like cigarette. His hands in my hair. He’s waiting for me to kiss him back, to meet his urgency; he holds me like a drowning man.

He is thirty-nine, a terrifying age; he cannot say “I’m thirty-nine” without me thinking “forty.” He’s lived in Rome, Madrid, Granada, the South of France and Paris, San Francisco, Brooklyn, London, Frankfurt, New Orleans, Berlin, Bangkok, Seoul, Mexico City, and now in San Miguel del Allende, alone, with two spectacular terraces as consolation. A forty-year-old, thirty-nine-year-old, man, adrift.

Earlier he said, “I think I won’t have children, I think it’s too late.” I couldn’t take this sadness in. I had a long life road ahead of me and I saw children in it. On every train and bus, I took an image with me, tangible as a photograph:

A long glass window in a skyscraper apartment, a New York view, lights off in a chrome kitchen. There is a child, the child is asleep.

And he comes home. I don’t see his face but I see his body, a lean man in a suit, he is loosening his collar from work. I leap into his arms, we kiss against the floor-to-ceiling window. He goes to the office, I am here, protected by the chrome kitchen, stainless steel knives, objects, expensive things. I like his wealth, it is my wealth now. Perhaps we adopt a Chinese girl or we pay a surrogate in India. Our child. Perhaps we don’t play roles and we both wear suits and take our child to Central Park. I wait in the kitchen. Our child sleeps in another room.

I see a girl, a girl who will not mind two fathers. She will like two fathers, she will not think any warmth is lacking. A small Chinese girl with black eyes. She will not look like...