The sun had set, and we’d finished our dinner. “These days,” I told her, “I’m living on Tiburtina, a friend’s ninth-floor apartment, I’ve just come back to Rome from Milan—I used to work there—now I travel back and forth. From my friend’s place, you can see the mountains. The sky’s pretty clear tonight. You know what I think we should do—we should go back to my place and make love on the balcony. My friend has a nice, big shower: you can wash up after, and then I’ll take you home.”

“Why wouldn’t there be a shower?!” she said, laughing.

“Well, sometimes even the most mundane things are amazing. I want you to get the whole effect—like a brochure. Afterward, I’ll take you home, everything all nice and easy and uncomplicated, and so you’ll get to have sex with someone you feel incredibly compatible with (or maybe he’s the one who feels it—he’s been sucked in by your incredible charisma!), and you’ll have given yourself this little treat.”

“What an amazing proposal. Would you really do all that—for me? Just amazing. And then of course, we’d never see each other again—so I wouldn’t get stressed out if I ran into you somewhere.” After this last absurdity, she called the waiter over for the bill and said: “You’re the perfect man to see once in a lifetime.”

“What a nice compliment.”

We laughed.

“The poor girl who ever marries you,” she said to me. “How will things ever go back to normal after the seduction?”

Then she gave her credit card directly to the owner, who accepted it with the utmost gravity, in both hands, Japanese-style.

It went as planned: we got on my Vespa, wrapped around each other, kissed for the first time in my friend’s elevator—he was such a great friend, he left with only fifteen minutes’ notice. I asked her if she trusted me, she said yes, then I got a condom from the bedroom, slipped it in my pocket, went out to the balcony with her, told her to hold on to the railing, and she bent over as I lifted her dress from behind, and that’s how we made love, drunk and amazed with our realized fantasy, both of us mysteriously unaffected by vertigo. I came inside her, her knees buckled. After, she asked me where the shower was that I’d raved about, she had the bathroom to herself while I dressed without washing up, then took her back to her place, and I thought about her long body bent over, first on the stationary bike, then on the balcony, her small, pointed breasts, that buzzy laugh that had been with me all the way from the theater.