“How did you meet?” A mutual friend had asked, after one of their early dates, at a West Village bar where we were gathered for drinks the last time I’d seen him.

“I was out with Rex, and she was walking down the street with her boyfriend.”

“And that didn’t deter you?”

“Survival of the fittest, my friend. I knew I was going to marry her.”

“You could not possibly have known that.”

“Of course I could. Let me show you a picture.”

The invitation announced it as the end of an era, which seemed a lucky enough thing for everyone except his future wife. He had organized his life until then unapologetically around self-indulgence, beginning soon after graduation. By the time everyone else had begun to buy houses and settle down, he had bought an Italian sports car with the money he made at his job in a bank.

Around the same time he had also volunteered for a program that helped train aid animals. Rex was a chocolate Labrador Retriever he was helping prepare for life as a seeing-eye dog, but for reasons that were less than admirable. Weekends he would cruise around with the dog in the passenger seat of the sports car, picking up women. “Oh, what a beautiful dog you have.” “Isn’t he? Unfortunately he doesn’t really belong to me. I’m only helping raise him for the Sisters of Mercy. As soon as you get attached, they’re gone, and you’re heartbroken every time. Rex is going to a blind eight-year-old in South America next week. I hardly know what I’ll do.” It was nausea-inducing to behold, but impressive for its sheer shamelessness. The only reason we were still friends was our shared history, and the fact that there were so few single men among those we knew.

“Why are you with her, if you do not respect her?” I asked, after hearing more about his new girlfriend than anyone who was not her lover should know.

“Weren’t you listening?” He flashed the picture again. “She has an Ivy League degree and screws like a porn star.”

“You are a callow man leading a superficial life,” I said.

He had been loyal enough, though, to invite me along with a group of our mutual friends to Rio for a final blowout. Whatever else, I was impressed by his optimism and resolve to follow after his instinct. As a general rule I tried to avoid weddings I did not think would survive and declined the invitation.

When I closed the message I realized I was the last bachelor among our friends. I thought about Devi again, and the other women from my past, worrying whether I should have simply chosen someone before thirty, because the heart is only brave early in life. Perhaps I was too coarsened by experience, and my desire to find someone was doomed.

I wasted the rest of the morning flâneuring through cyberspace, growing depressed as I scrolled through pictures of the past staring out from social media pages filled with spouses who might have been me; children who might have been my mine; all the victories, vicissitudes, and compromises of normal life. I decided, by the time I logged off, it was better to regret the past as I remembered it than google up the dead. The past was beyond reach.

I left the apartment, certain again in my decision trusting irrationally that love would somehow find me. But to help it along I also swore off the seductions of the Internet, where desire was reduced to the shallow present, in which you could not smell the perfume in the nest of a potential lover’s neck, or scent the summer of your first love, or catch a whiff of your future children.

I was still preoccupied with this as I stopped by the deli for my morning coffee, where Mr. Lee broke my reverie as I waited at the counter to pay.

“Harper,” he said, pulling me back from the forest of my thoughts, “why you lonely man?”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s Friday. Where Ms. Devi?”

“We broke up,” I told him.

“Why on Thursday I always see you with date, but every other morning always shop for one, breakfast for one, coffee for one. Why you don’t find good lady?” He leaned over the counter, lowering his voice and tapping the plastic-covered pressboard conspiratorially. “Make love. Make family. Make good life. Happy man.”

“It’s difficult,” I said.

“Difficult when you think. Easy when you do.” He made an inappropriate gesture, beaming with avuncular mischief.

He usually sat stoically behind his station, watching the customers come and go, and I did not know he even knew my name, let alone kept tabs on me or had a sense of humor. I thought to ask how it concerned him, but when I realized he saw my agitation that day, and meant it kindly, I took it as another sign, and waved goodbye with genuine goodwill and feigned happiness.

It was near noon, and I had other problems to worry about, as I went to the post office to pick up a package from Davidson, the director of the film I was writing, or had been writing until Davidson had a breakdown and disappeared to recover. He had only communicated sporadically the past three months, leaving the project and my days uncertain.

Despite whatever financial anxiety it provoked — if I stumbled making my way in the world there was no one but myself to fall back on — I stuck by him, because he had given me an opportunity when I had no experience, except a script I had written which was never made. I was thankful for the chance, and when you have worked with someone in that way you share a bond beyond gratitude, even with the rats who exploit goodwill in others, as well as the ordinary half-rats whose honor runs exactly as deep as self-interest.

Davidson was not a rat. He had talent, but he was also changeable and capricious in a manner that made him unknowable even before his breakdown. When I asked, during our first meeting to discuss the new project, why he had given me the job, he stared at the bare white walls of his office and replied enigmatically, “After I left film school I went into the desert to discover the kinds of movies I wanted to make. For a month all I did was stare into the sand,” he motioned to the blank walls, “until I could no longer remember anything I had seen before the sand.”

I had no earthly idea what he meant.

“When I had rid myself of everything I had been taught, unlearned every way of seeing not my own, banished every inauthentic way of being, and burned away every single idea that did not rise from my own self, I began to construct a master canon, frame by frame. Whatever rose up from my gut after that belonged to me, and I would serve it. Everything I have done since came from that reel I made in the desert.”

I thought I got it. “Where do I fit in?”

“When we met I asked my gut, ‘Boss, what do you make of this character?’ And my gut replied, ‘Boss, give the guy a shot.’”

Which is to say, I should not have been surprised he had gone off the grid and no one knew where he was. But the uncertainty was enervating. The only advantage of the situation had been to allow me to structure my days as I chose.

To keep sane as I waited to see what would happen to the project, I simply kept working. Usually in a café in the East Village, or the Rose Room at the library, or, when the weather was fair, the garden of the Goethe Society, in an old mansion uptown.

At the post office that day I was relieved to find a thick packet, which obviously contained a manuscript, and I thought the last version of the script had finally been approved. I headed uptown to the Rose Room to read.

On the way to the train, one of the shopgirls smiled at me as she raised the metal gate on her boutique. Her smile buoyed my spirits, but I reminded myself how much time could be wasted chasing phantoms and ghosts. Still it made me feel less miserable after the bust-up with Devi.

At the library I found a seat and settled in with my laptop before opening the envelope, which was postmarked Paris, instead of Rome as the last one had been. I did not make much of it until I saw the note inside, telling me he wanted to scratch the project.