My brother and I tend to attract attention. This has been true ever since we were young. Partly it’s because of our resemblance, though it might also have to do with the similarity of our gestures or the intimate way we arrange ourselves in public, sitting close. When we were young our mother dressed us in matching outfits and posed us as kissing cousins. We didn’t continue this habit as we got older, but our tastes were similar enough. “People enjoy looking at you,” my mother used to say. “At how handsome you are together, how cozy.” Maybe this was the case now as we sat under the rustic awning at Il Volpe, but I felt anxious, given Isabella’s death and the rumors going around. And the waiter knew my brother, since Johnny had been here often with Orsini.

“You didn’t tell me your sister was a twin.”

“In more ways than one.”

“We’re not twins,” I said.

Most of the waiters at Il Volpe were professionals of the old-world sort, practiced in the trade, who looked after you but didn’t pry. This man was younger.

“You were in a little film, your brother tells me.”

“A little one, yes.”

“And you model?”

“On occasion.”

“I believe I saw you on a bus shelter.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t do bus shelters.”

This wasn’t true. I had been on several bus shelters, with my eyes heavily made up, in the campaign for La Marche, the one that showed me as a poet. I lit a cigarette now and blew smoke in his direction. Unlike in the States, you could still smoke here. You could still blow smoke in the face of someone who irritated you—or whom you wanted to seduce. This man, I only wanted him to go away.

I had never been a been a big smoker, as I said before, but begun craving it more since that evening at the palazzo.

“It’s too bad, this tragedy with Isabella.”

“I didn’t know her so well.”

“You were at that party at her house,” he smirked. “Before she left Rome.”

“Maybe you should mind your own affairs.”

The waiter was taken aback. It was possible he had only been trying to flirt, or ingratiate himself in some way. I worried I had spoken too sharply, but at the same time I wondered how the waiter knew about the party. I suspected my brother had told him. Johnny sometimes talked too much.

“I didn’t mean anything,” the waiter said.

“Of course not.”

“Your friendship with Paolo Orsini, I’m sure it’s all very innocent.”