He’s what you might call an ordinary man, so very ordinary that you wouldn’t even notice him unless he spoke to you. Five foot eight, dark, neatly trimmed hair, unexceptional suit, unexceptional face—you know the type I mean. He seems to affect a trace of an accent, but I can’t place it and don’t want to be so awkward as to ask. We exchange a few more observations. He asks if I’m flying for business or pleasure, and I tell him pleasure. I say I’m visiting a friend in Rome and turn back to the window. When we land in Paris, he takes his briefcase from the luggage cabinet above our heads, tips his hat, and wishes me a pleasant stay in Italy, and I think no more about him. I don’t think I could even recognize his face if you showed me a picture of it.

WE LAND IN ROME at the most beautiful moment of the evening, just before the sunset. By the time I make my way through immigration and customs and hail a taxi to take me to Orlovsky’s apartment on the Palatine Hill, it’s twilight. He’s expecting me. I sent a telegram on Saturday night, and though I hadn’t received a reply by the time I left for the airport, I didn’t need one. He can’t possibly refuse me.

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.