The next day, she wrote me that her palms had been scratched and that she liked how I took her home, even if she did have to walk back to the theater to get her moped.

The times we got together after that, I gave her what she wanted, and so those first weeks I felt pretty special. Barbara was ending things with her boyfriend, talking with him so much over Skype that sometimes she had to cancel on me. I felt so good, I stopped going out with the other women I’d been seeing. I was her pleasure, her solace while she broke away from this other man. For the time being, she had two lives: one with me that was almost entirely secret (though her roommate knew), and then another, pale and listless life with a man she’d been seeing long-distance for three years.

But if everything was going great, it wasn’t just because I was fulfilling a fantasy role for a woman no longer in love or because I felt I’d found someone like-minded, whose vision of life was inspiring; there was a third and fundamental factor—her apartment, the last one on a dead-end lane, before the canebrake leading down to the boulevard.

It was a one-story building, square and white, of unknown origin, maybe a railway building once, or an abandoned warehouse, and rumor had it that drug addicts had squatted there, until finally an architect bought the building, stripped it, and put in modern insulation. The building was now divided into three units, each with a section of roof for a terrace that you got to by a spiral staircase from the small courtyard near the entranceway.

Barbara wound up there after living in various parts of Rome, always renting and subletting with various female friends; but this group of friends, including the two from the theater, had dispersed, many going off to live with their male partners, some of them breeding. Barbara didn’t want children, and so she found this recently restored place; the area, around Via Casilina, was quiet, with no loud clubs, just a very quiet communist bar at the edge of the neighborhood. She’d been looking there awhile before she found something and had been in this home now for a few years, lately with a roommate.