All of that now seems like it happened to someone else.

Frank stopped on the bridge. He got morose all of a sudden, and whatever youth remained fell out of his face.

“There’s something I need to tell you . . .”

“Hush,” I said.

He let it go. He kissed me instead. That was how it was between us. He put his arm around my waist and dropped his hand onto my hip. He liked to feel me move against him as we walked. Meanwhile I could feel the young Italian men, loitering there along the river wall, watching as we passed.

––––––––

After my brother, Johnny, came to Rome, things changed. It would be easy to blame Johnny: his smile, his brown eyes and tousled hair. Strictly speaking, Johnny wasn’t my brother but my half brother. We were very close: almost inseparable.

My brother had always been a bit of a delinquent, but he knew how to take care of himself. He had his own apartment across the Tiber, and work that took him back and forth from Naples. He spoke Italian well and had a way of getting around, slumming it, working both sides. He moved in circles you might not expect.

I went with him sometimes to the clubs. On one of those nights Johnny introduced me to Paolo Orsini, an Italian senator who’d spent time in New York. Because Orsini was a bit of a celebrity—nice-looking and married to a famous woman—Johnny thought we should meet.

“Mia sorella bella,” my brother said. “The actress and poet. Vittoria.”

This was typical Johnny. I’d done some acting, it was true—more modeling, if I am honest—but I wasn’t a poet. That was just Johnny talking. The name, one I’d taken since coming to Rome, wasn’t mine, either.

My real name was Vicki.

Vicki Wilson.

“We’ve met,” said Paolo.

“Oh?”

The man’s eyes went shy. He had black, unruly hair. The way he looked at me, dark eyed and glassy, as if he didn’t quite know what to do with himself—I hadn’t expected that.

“Not actually . . . but I saw you, at the Cinema Aventine,” he explained. “So I’ve admired you from a distance . . .”

He was speaking of my brief appearance in a film by the Italian director Marino. It was a small role, won partly by chance: because of a night like this, some time back, stumbling into a casting director, a small, ruddy man I hadn’t taken seriously at first. I looked the part, the man said. Or maybe it had something to do with the fact my husband was a writer, or had been once. Though I was American and my Italian could be clumsy, the audience had found the moment arresting. I had been written about in the expatriate newspapers and featured in Roma, one of the Italian gossip sites.

Stellita, they called me.