Sometimes we arranged to meet in Porta Venezia and we’d head for home or stop for a negroni. While we walked, we’d feel homesick for that hour in Rome, when the architecture was soaked in yellow sunlight and then the evening, still yellow, with pink streaking the sky and caressing the clouds. In Milan, negroni hour wasn’t composed of light but of mid-century and early-twentieth-century buildings, seen from the street, looking up, art nouveau friezes, and rosemary gin and tonics. These days, the most beautiful sight for us was the blue and ice-white of the sky at breakfast at the coffee bar; but also the cold sun slipping through at lunch break …

(A conversation about the lights of Milan was the first one we had that felt natural, so I remember it.)

We didn’t fight when we were drunk, but sometimes she cried and waved me off so I couldn’t console her—she didn’t want my tenderness to take her where I wanted her to go.

She’d buy an apple on the street, take a bite, then pour water over it from her water bottle. Those first days, I wasn’t sure if I could tease her.

[I can’t even call her Barbara in this chapter—now her name means something else entirely—deep down, I link it more to Leone’s name than mine. While the woman I walked with in Milan, or sat cross-legged with on the balcony, that woman was something else, something unfamiliar, not belonging to me or Leone.]

Some mornings, from the bedroom, we hear the sounds of Irene and Francesca at breakfast. My sister has a large, five-cup moka pot. She wakes up in a good mood and the only trick to being a part of that happiness is not to talk, not to make speeches. A preference Barbara shares, and they both tease me about my tendency to groggily philosophize.

Barbara would get up and have coffee with Irene, or Irene and Francesca. I’d dress quickly and follow her out, sit down and start gabbing, or begin to make an omelet like I’d once seen done in a Cambodian hotel: tilting the frying pan, over the flame, the egg gathering there, solidifying.

Barbara and Irene would laugh. I’d protest, briefly. When Irene bragged about something—money, or trips, or people she hung out with—no one teased her, but if I put so much as three sentences together to tell them about something, I got teased; I was always the first one to leave the table.

I’d head out for work on my bike and wonder if Irene and Barbara might … Like a Dostoevsky novella, me in the role of the humiliated little man who wanders about embracing and insulting figures larger than himself, trying to destroy and to save them all at once, to destroy and save himself. But then I’d remember that I mustn’t cut in on that budding relationship, to direct it where I wanted it to go, because that invisible place, where everything is within my control, is orange, and when life first appears in that orange shade, it dies.