In the elevator, she watched me, excited, her complexion pink, almost golden, unlike the rest of us, and her eyes blue-green, also unique in the family: for a moment, as we stood in that cramped cherrywood box, which was manicured and polished by time, without so much as a vandal’s scratch, I felt myself falling into her gaze; her eyes were wide, like she was frightened. And so we hugged each other tight, and for me, that embrace felt like it revealed yet contained within it the wet sensation of discovery: like a glass, the inside wet, the outside dry. When we reached her floor, I glanced at her, and she looked shy and sad, her eyebrows drawn together. “It’s a gorgeous place,” she said, “I’ll show you around,” and we stepped off the elevator.

“I’ve been living on my own here for four years.” She opened the door. “Sometimes I’ll have people stay for a few months, but the rent’s a thousand euros, barely anything, it’s huge, on the eighth floor, with views on three sides. It’s a gorgeous building—I feel like I’m living in a novel.”

“Sure. Milan. Twentieth-century Milan.”

“Exactly.”

“Show me around.”

“You want another drink?”

“Let’s walk around some. I get vertigo.”

“So do I, so do I.” She smiled and squeezed my elbow. “I have to look out a long ways, not down at the street.”

“Yeah. Me, too.”

She set me up in her guest room; she’d stopped renting it out because she made good money and liked being able to host her foreign colleagues when they visited Milan, or the initially straight female interns who, once they arrived in the city, were more pliable. My room had an adjoining bathroom with a tub, and it was the one true room in the apartment: she slept on one side of a partition that divided her living room in two. She liked her bedroom in the living room, preferring to sleep without shutting herself up behind a door—the same style as my shoe-designer friend’s apartment where Eleonora stayed. This place was just as mysterious and beautiful: you could walk it in a circle via the V-shaped hallway, which led through three interconnected rooms and brought you to a second hallway leading back to the front entrance. And a narrow balcony ran along all three sides of the exterior.