This all started in Rome, not long ago. It wasn’t quite the Rome of my imagination, full of motor scooters and ruins, an endless film set where I might wander in a sleeveless dress, immune to heat and noise. I was naive that way. The streets were dirty and hot. Flies swarmed the Colosseum. The spring was so short that year, nonexistent. Everything stank of itself. The Italians in their bright synthetics. The Pakistani vendors. The streets, too, the old stones, the restaurants, the English women with their toy dogs drenched in cologne.

It wasn’t what I’d expected, but I grew to like it: my own stink mixed with all the others, the dampness beneath my clothes when I went walking or sat with my legs crossed on the metro.

I lived with Frank Paris, my first husband, in a small flat by the Tiber. He was running out of money, but it wasn’t something we talked about. I had my own secrets. Maybe it’s the same with everyone, I don’t know: a place inside, an emptiness, where matters get lost. At night Frank would lie there and study my features. The curtain billowed and the shadows moved. He didn’t press me, not at first. I lay with my eyes closed, feigning sleep—but I felt him watching. He’d kiss my cheek, run a finger down my leg.

Frank was quite a bit older than me. He was a thin man with sandy gray hair and a nose something like a boxer’s—a bit crooked, pushed to one side. Despite that injury, or maybe because of it, his face had a wry character. I liked that about him. I liked touching his wide, battered nose and straddling him in the dark . . . I put my hand on his gray chest . . . He disappeared underneath me . . . Then he rolled me over and I disappeared, too . . . Eyes closed, falling into the darkness, we might have been anyone . . . his tongue, my tongue, his hands on my breasts, my legs in the air . . . Our sweat soaked through the sheets, the mattress damp like a riverbed . . . How I met Frank—he’d helped me out of a situation in Dallas involving my brother and an ex-boyfriend that had ended in a pretty ugly way.

I tried not to think about that, and Frank never mentioned it.

When we were done in bed, we’d go outside.

I walked beside him with nothing in my head—no past, no future—feeling just barely outside myself in the Italian night. I liked being empty like that. I liked the sultriness of the night, the dampness and the heat. We ended up under the umbrellas by the Tiber. Frank drank. Sitting there—in that black night, watching the people, listening to them laugh and flirt—I ached with vagrant desire. A longing to become someone else, to disappear. Afterward, we strolled along the glistening river.