“Listen,” he said. “It’s fine if you come by and my heart is full. Equally fine if you don’t. What for? I’m not lonely. How is Raf?”

“Gone,” I said. “In Houston, I think. I’m going to try there, anyway. I must be stupid.”

“No, don’t insult me, Piagga, with you are stupid!”

“All right, all right.”

“You know what my dad used to say? At dinnertime? Your Grandfather Amelio?”

“What did he say?”

“He would look up at me and he would say, he would sigh and say, ‘Let’s eat.’ ”

Setting my overnight things in Mario’s guest room, I had noticed a new mural on the left wall.

In my bedroom in our house in Maryland, Mario had painted “Apollo’s Victory Over the Python” opposite my bed. I was eight or nine. I hadn’t wanted ballerinas or circus ponies. Struggle, muscles, and violence were what I asked for.

Mario had shrugged, nodded; primed the plaster wall surface. Later he pencil-sketched a twisting dragon and a descending god, and overnight painted the scene in with thin brushfalls of sienna, brown, and dark brown.

Over dinner that July evening, Mario said, “I’ll tell you what about Monteverdi. Opera’s turning around, time for a changing point. Monteverdi doesn’t get shaked up. Already he did the plays, the madrigal, also ballet. Most of all, he knows music. For Orfeo, he has every instrument played by the greatest musicians alive!”

For Mario, opera was history—what people believed and when, their angers and passions.

“Are you working at all?” I asked him.

“Sketches.”

“May I see them?”

“No,” Mario said, “they’re weak.”

“I bet they’re not weak.”

“Not weak,” he had said. “They’re just not strong.”

I sprawled in the inn’s fancy sitting room, where sofas upholstered in silk crowded a marble fireplace. An afternoon fire there snapped logs on a tiered piece of ironwork. Persian rugs were squared around. Two floor lamps with parchment shades lighted a magazine in my lap.

“I’m so trashed,” Dottie said.

“Me too. In a sense.”

“Innocence?” she said.

I had pushed off my shoes, hitched up my cargo jeans so I could warm my socks before the log fire.

“Yes, fried and famished and going for food down on the boardwalk,” I said.

“When?” Dottie said. “Earlier in the week?”

“We are very, very high, Mother. If this is what life is like for Raf, I have new admiration for him.”

“I know,” Dottie said. “I think about that.”

I said, “I can hardly make a sentence.”

“This decade. Or you mean me?” she asked.

“We need food,” I said.

We raided the kitchen, in this case a storehouse, with drum cans of vegetables, soups, cooking stuffs posing on utility shelves, hundreds of wine bottles in rows in wire cages, a meat locker, two freezers, Dottie’s personal refrigerator.