All right, so those extravagant lies I told the nice lady on board the Antigone weren’t entirely truthless. I first met Valeri Valierovich Orlovsky only a couple of weeks after arriving in Rome in 1939. He was, in fact, a Russian émigré. He could have styled himself a prince, if he chose to, but in his professional life he was simply Orlovsky. He’d arrived in Rome twenty years earlier, young and penniless, and apprenticed himself to a tailor. Now he was head of one of the great fashion houses in Italy. He had married a beautiful Roman aristocrat who went into rages whenever he got a new mistress and could only be mollified by diamonds of the first water, and his atelier was the most beautiful building I had ever seen. He kept a private studio on the piano nobile, decorated—he said—by those Carracci frescoes I mentioned earlier, although as I knew nothing about frescoes, then or now, I can’t say whether he was telling the truth. They were mesmerizing, however. Whenever we slept together, I would stare for ages at those entwined nude figures that so mimicked our own and thought how erotic Rome was, how you simply couldn’t do this back in New York City—sprawl with your lover on a studio couch in the middle of the afternoon and gaze at some ancient, obscene painting that was part of the wall itself.

This is the building where I direct the taxi. So far as I know, his wife has neither died nor divorced him (she’s Catholic, and they have seven or eight children together at last count) nor yet murdered him herself, as I would have done. I admit, I feel a little anxious when I ring the bell. Will he meet me? Will he care at all? We parted in such terrible anger, after all.

But the door opens, and there he stands, a million years old. His hair has turned gray, his jowls now merge seamlessly into his neck. His famous black eyes glitter as he holds out his arms to me. “Bambina!” he says in his curious accent—Italy by way of old St. Petersburg, a residual disdain for definite articles. “I thought you would be married with dozen children by now.”

I allow myself to be folded into his embrace. “Who says I’m not?”

“Your figure, bambina. So slim and beautiful still. And your skin, smooth like butter. But come inside. I brought out some good wine for you.”

It’s like I never left—like the past dozen years never passed. The vestibule is exactly the same, down to the single umbrella and four ivory-handled walking sticks in the wrought-iron stand. The little courtyard holds the same lemon trees—a few feet taller—and the same stone benches I recall. The staircase curves upward in the same spiral, the stone steps are worn down in the same shiny, dark divots. When he opens the familiar thick wooden door to the studio, every stick of furniture sits where I remember it. I stand next to the large, wide couch, which bears the same soft upholstery, and stare yet again at the domed ceiling, where the nymphs still gambol with their satyrs.