He was surprised and apologetic. He said it was an unfortunate coincidence, but he had promised his wife he would give me up, and he could not go back on his word to Laura—she would tear his balls off—and anyway theirs was a sacred union ordained by God. I asked what was our union, chopped liver? The idiom perplexed him so he didn’t answer right away. But I didn’t wait for him to puzzle it out. I saw at once that I had been an idiot. I put on my clothes and stormed out, which solved Orlovsky’s problem rather neatly, now that I think about it, and after some dithering—naturally he wrote to me and offered money, naturally I ignored him—I consulted one of the other models and found a reputable doctor to perform an abortion. I know you’ll hate me for that, but the situation seemed impossible to me. Aside from being unsuited to motherhood, aside from the practical difficulties, aside from my irrational, outsized fear of the physical travails, in what possible hell could I give birth inside some shabby Italian hospital at the exact same time the Princess Orlovskaya was giving birth inside the grand villa she and Orlovsky shared in the hills outside of Rome? I scheduled the procedure for the beginning of May, when Iris was going away on her dirty weekend with Digby in Tivoli—adorably, she told me she was headed for some kind of artist holiday—and after that I had no wish to remain in Rome at all, war or no war. I simply couldn’t get out of the city fast enough.

SO YOU SEE, IN addition to the great moral debt Orlovsky owes me for acting like such a skunk, I know he’s disposed to hate the Soviet Union with a passion peculiar to exiles. In former days, I even suspected that he did what he could to undermine the Communist regime from time to time, by passing along whatever interesting tidbits came his way. I don’t know if this might still be the case—the espionage, I mean—but nobody changes his political views once his hair starts to turn gray. If anything, those views harden into obstinacy in the face of any contrary evidence. It’s almost as if that entire painful episode with Orlovsky—which I refused to think about afterward, so that it took on the quality of a dream and I had to remind myself that it really happened—has perhaps found some purpose after all. The sacrifice of young love and nascent life wasn’t for nothing.

Orlovsky is more skeptical.

“To Moscow?” he says, incredulous. “Do you know what you are asking?”

“Obviously there’s some difficulty—”

“Difficulty? Bambina cara, is suicide. Do you speak Russian?”

“Nyet a word.”

He smacks his forehead. “Gran Dio. What do expect me to do?”