I had a meeting the next day at the office—I’d have to see Eleonora. With this thought, while I lay stretched out on the bed, the television back on, I asked myself out loud: “Should I go back there and tell her I love her?”

My phone was next to me, I picked it up and drafted a text: “Maybe we should try to stay together, because I can’t be without you.” I didn’t send it. I went back to my messages and clicked on Barbara’s, making sure I’d chosen correctly, rereading her name until I almost wasn’t sure if she was really my live-in girlfriend; her name seemed funny, almost a stutter, like the word “barbarian,” the Romans mocking the sounds those northern people made—bar-bar.

I wrote: “I can’t bear coming up to Milan anymore. Find me a job in Rome?”

After I’d brushed my teeth, swallowed a half gram of a tranquilizer, and slipped my bare legs under the coarse sheets, she sent back a heart. With my meds kicking in and my eyes welling up, I decided I’d return to Rome tomorrow without going back to the office. The editor in chief would certainly understand: I would be doing it because Eleonora belonged to him now, and he’d forgive this rare professional lapse on my part.

Barbara

We were ordering some comfortable chairs and a comfortable couch covered with chintz to replace some of the Italian furniture that Gertrude Stein’s brother had taken with him. This took a great deal of time. We had to measure ourselves into the chairs and into the couch and to choose chintz that would go with the pictures, all of which we successfully achieved.

—GERTRUDE STEIN,
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

She was pedaling away on an exercise bike in one corner of the stage, while two actresses, one of whom had written the play, discussed their relationships with their mothers for the audience, drawing closer and connecting in a mirror exercise. It was a small production, a performance I found moving, that seemed to be about mothers failing to understand their daughters. A spotlight stayed on her, the short-haired woman pedaling on the bike. She wore a pair of old-fashioned Walkman headphones, the metal headband glinting in the bright light, and an aquamarine rayon tracksuit that was rumpled and hid her shape. She pedaled until she was breathless, singing the whole time, an Italian song I can’t remember, a melody that rose and fell, like one of those blow-up air dancers in shopping-center parking lots: her voice, competent but untrained, so charming and enthusiastic, made me really want to meet her.