He muttered some vague response, thanking me again for my support, and we said good-bye. The conversation left me feeling uneasy and dimly at fault. The whole situation seemed to have reached a point where it gave a duplicitous cast to everything that entered its orbit. I didn’t want to think about it. I turned on the radio. The election coverage was in full spate. There’d been fresh allegations about the Republican candidate’s treatment of women, this time on the set of his TV show. It was impossible, of course, not to relate this to Marco’s drama. He must have been thinking about it himself, given his interest in all the stories of sexual malfeasance floating around in the press. The candidate’s spokeswoman came on: these outlandish, unsubstantiated, and totally false claims . . . I thought of the formula I’d adopted for Julia’s account of what had happened in their hotel room: that useful word “tainted”. . . I was aware of something suspiciously convenient about it. I could see, a little too clearly now, how it allowed me to preserve my friendship with Marco without having to struggle with my conscience. I don’t claim to have a particularly fine conscience. “Well trained,” perhaps, in Julia’s acid phrase, but not especially active. I don’t dream at night about human betterment (mostly I dream about getting my hair back). But I’d have trouble accepting the hospitality of a man I believed to have committed rape. Easier to believe Julia’s story was “tainted,” or at least to suspend judgment, and she’d handed me an excuse for doing just that.

Three or four days passed—warm and dry—with the asters straggling a dusty blue along ditches, goldenrod turning ochre on patches of open ground. Caitlin was in talks with our old editor about the possibility of another travel book, this time in Northern Spain. I had work of my own to catch up on. We’d go our separate ways in the morning, reconvening on the terrace at mealtimes. I made a point of cooking things we never had when the children were around. Tempeh, whole wheat pasta, broccoli rabe—minor consolations of the empty nest.