For the rest of his life, Saul will recall the moment he nodded and said okay and pushed his face into Sofia’s scarf and hair to kiss her and put his arm around her shoulders. He will be able to taste the metallic freeze in the air, and to feel, as though it is right there, the urgency of Sofia’s body leaning toward his. He will be able to imagine his life as it seemed to him in this moment: stretching out before him and filled with infinite pleasures. Sofia was always the only one who could reach down into the depths of his preoccupation with things he could not control and bring him back up to the surface. Take me home with you, she said, and the ice on his earlobe reminded him he was alive, and standing on his own two feet with a girl he loved in New York City.

“Okay,” he says, and they begin to walk east, shivering with cold and anticipation and both of them quiet, shuffling along in the tide of commuters going home.

—

Later that night, Sofia lies in the unfamiliarity of Saul’s narrow boardinghouse bed. Saul is asleep. She feels anonymous and powerful: a timeless woman, part of a ritual much bigger than herself. Moonlight shines in through the window and makes lurid shadows on the wall. There is a tree that grows and shrinks, distorted in the wind, and the unnaturally stretched-out bodies and small heads of pedestrians pass across the ceiling in a surreal parade.

Sofia believes in God the way a child believes its parents will know if it breaks a rule. She is curious, and a bit resentful, but God, like all big structures against which Sofia finds meaning in asserting her independence, is omnipresent in her world. God consists of the ritual Masses she stopped going to as a teenager, just to see if it would make a difference; of insalata di mare and baccala on Christmas Eve; of crossing herself as naturally as she breathes when she passes a cathedral. God is in the smells of her mamma’s cooking. God, in the waistband of her skirt, the one that feels like it asks too-personal questions of her hip bones but lifts her up and smooths her out and makes her the focal point of every man she passes on the street. It occurs to Sofia, just before she falls asleep, to wonder if God knows she is naked and unmarried in a Jewish man’s bed.

She wakes up in the gray predawn, and considers the shift of her bare body against Saul’s sheets. What have I done? For all her posturing, Sofia has never crossed a line as thick as this one.