I had a room reserved at a pensione by the station, which I often didn’t use: I’d agreed to settle up with the proprietor at my next visit. Sometimes I’d pay ahead, to stay in his good graces. I took the stairs down to the metro and traced Eleonora’s steps; I was wearing my dark backpack, tapered and inconspicuous, bought just for these Milan trips, since I never knew where I’d be sleeping and didn’t want to raise any suspicions if I ran into colleagues: it’s a small city, and in publishing, everybody knows everybody.

To get to her place, I’d walk along a canal until the blocks grew less dense and the old converted factories and condominiums began to spring up. (I’m not sure if I’m describing this correctly—memory’s map is imperfect.) Suddenly, I was in among the cocktail crowd, where the most attractive people in the world glide along, never mixing with normal folk, and the first group and the second both feel exquisite—the first by comparison and the second by proximity—and where the networking is relentless, as I saw one day, when a friend of mine in the fashion industry introduced me to some of her colleagues, and while I was getting up to use the bathroom, I noticed that one of them, sitting, facing me, was also checking out my picture online, reading up on me even as we spoke.

The apartment Eleonora rented was in one of the ex-factories: a residential area now, with no open bars or restaurants and no nightlife. The factories had been divided into apartments that were elegant but not overly luxurious, for professionals in fields far removed from our own.

I rang at the freshly painted gate, and twin lights went on from the surveillance camera in front of me. She let me in! Her apartment was on the second and third floor of one of two buildings in this complex, surrounded by a wall laced with barbed wire; I rang again, she buzzed me in, I took the stairs two at a time and stepped inside the door to this apartment I loved so well, where tomorrow, while I made my coffee, I’d look down and see the morning light playing over the table and onto the floor.