They can’t survive, the faun-faced men . . .The words were in my mind as I drove down to New York that Sunday afternoon. Inevitably, in the mood gripping me, they seeped into my thoughts about Marco. Was it possible, useful, to look at him, as his old tutor had, through the lens of the faun, that mythic incarnation of a masculine sensuality radically unlike the militaristic “Roman” version that had replaced it, marching down through the generations in its heavy muscled armour all the way to the pornographic ideal of our present era? I thought of Tarquin, that archetypal Roman, with his “rage of lust,” as he forces himself into Lucrece’s bedchamber in Shakespeare’s poem. Was that Marco? Or was he one of the faun-faced men who don’t survive? Perhaps he was both—had been one, had become the other. In any case the question brought in its wake the sense of a hunted, hounded innocence that I found hard to shake off. It struck me that I hadn’t, for one second, believed Marco unreservedly, and that this placed me among those doing the hunting and hounding . . . I remembered my wariness when he first told me about his troubles—that triangulating impulse of mine, which instantly added to the two of us a third figure in the shape of public opinion, wagging its finger and warning me: be careful. I remembered my hesitation in rejoicing with him at his moments of apparent victory; my lukewarm words when I finally did . . . the memories displeased me. I didn’t like the portrait they painted: a study in craven equivocation. Marco himself seemed, by contrast, magnanimity incarnate. I thought of his insistence, from the beginning, that he didn’t expect me or anyone else to take him on trust: “You can’t not have doubts . . .” Even his subdued response the other day, as I’d described my meeting with Julia, seemed, in this new light, a part of that same tact, which itself appeared positively heroic as I considered it now. No hint of reproach for my evident belief that there really must be two sides to the story—no attempt to influence me against Julia’s version of things, or even ascertain whether I found it credible. Only that poignant gratitude for my “support” . . .