Summary

David returns to the main narrative, his affair with Consuela, which he says lasted a year and a half. Carolyn never found out about her, and eventually, when Consuela invited him to her graduation party at her parent’s house and he did not go, she ended their relationship. He was bereft for three years, but George and his piano lessons helped him recover. David assumes the real reason Consuela broke up with him was because she came to her senses—realized the limits of their dynamic—and not that he simply failed to attend a party, even though the party itself (with younger Cuban men around and the judgmental gaze of her parents hovering in the air) would only emphasize that point.

He even begins to wonder whether it was in fact he who ended the relationship by sabotaging it, that he...