So I drove home through the evening traffic. I found a note stuck to my door with a pin: I’m alone, rich, and attractive. How about a Western? Claudia. I read it twice, then put it in my pocket and phoned the laundry to get my shirts sent over. I did everything with enormous calm. First of all, I switched on the record player, and undressed, then I unearthed a dark suit I’d ordered in a moment of grandeur from the Count of Sant’Elia’s tailor and laid the pants under the mattress. In the bathroom, I turned on all the faucets because I liked to hear the water running, and lay down in the bathtub to think. When I heard the doorbell ring—my shirts had arrived—I got out of the bath and wrapped myself in a red robe Serena had forgotten to take with her to Mexico. I went to the door, checked they’d sewed the buttons on my shirts, paid, and retrieved my pants from under the mattress. They were perfect. Then I brushed the jacket and the shoes, with different brushes, and dressed with all the care of a bullfighter.

The Diaconos were late arriving, and we walked into the theater just as a girl onstage was invoking her lost youth. It was a totally fucked-up production of Three Sisters made fascinating by the desperate attempts of the director and cast to ruin the play and the play’s wonderful, ironic resistance. It was such a close-run thing that in the intermission everyone rushed to the bar. The Diaconos’ friends were all there, of course, and they managed to be a group even in a crowd of some hundreds of thirsty people. Eva stood beneath a huge crystal chandelier, shaking. By her side, the bird man was holding two glasses, from one of which she took a few distracted sips, every now and again. He had an elastic bandage on his wrist, as if some ornithologist had captured him, then set him free again, but with that sign on him in order to follow his migrations. Arianna wasn’t with them. I didn’t see her until the end of the show, when I had to throw myself into the mob at the cloakroom to retrieve Viola’s coat, and I wouldn’t even have noticed her if I hadn’t heard her voice. She was crossing the foyer in the company of a fat little man in glasses and begging for a vodka. The only result of her passing was that I lost the good place in line I’d captured for myself near the cloakroom, which meant I was one of the last to reach my target.

“I’ve seen better cloakroom attendants than you,” Viola said as I helped her on with her coat. “Let’s get a move on, we’re supposed to be going to Eva’s for a drink.”