Her flight is so light, I’m not sure how to trap it under glass, to preserve that grace, or my impression of that grace.

I can’t recall reading a novel by a woman, I mean a real author, that uses a man as a deus ex machina. Real male authors, on the other hand, are always using women. I know I’ve helped a lot of people, like my sister did for me: I’ve called a young, introverted writer to tell him he was good, that sooner or later, he’d get published; I’ve sent out email recommendations for people when I was the only one who could get them that dream job. But I’d never see a character like me treated as a savior in a woman’s novel. There’s everything residing in the person giving you a hand: affection, manipulation, calculation, compulsion … If a woman knows how to listen and is generous with her own money, why then must she wind up being either a savior or, ironically, a temptress?

I have to do for my sister what I’ve done for myself: allow her the privilege of being a person. Appearing, disappearing, minding her own business, showing sudden affection, boarding a plane without telling me, sneaking all my cereal at night, making me look like an idiot in front of her girlfriend because I’m being pedantic.

I’ve stopped telling my sister I love her every time we drink together. We’ve talked so much. I told her if I got back together with my wife, I’d want to kick out the couple living in her old place and move in there with Barbara. Irene said it was bound to happen sooner or later—a brother and sister living together after forty is pathetic (we had an old couple like that in my parents’ building in Rome)—but until then, she was happy to have me.

She came up to Milan in the spring.

She wasn’t used to panoramic views, and she suffered from vertigo. But she did enjoy seeing the tall buildings at a distance, from my sister’s living room. For ten years, she’d lived on the main floor, and in Anzio, she grew up on the main floor in two different places. At Irene’s, she never leaned over the long balcony, to watch the boulevard. The railing was a neutral color, and we both felt it put us far too close to the emptiness beyond, and sometimes, just for the pleasure of feeling ill, we’d play at seeing who could stay out there the longest, huddled on the pavement, back to the wall. We’d goad each other to venture farther, to the point where it felt like we were floating. We didn’t remind each other of that balcony where we’d made love the night we first met, when neither of us admitted to our vertigo.