The store was on a narrow road with hunched, early-nineteenth-century buildings, a neighborhood along the city walls, full of students and drug dealers. I was walking with Francesco, my best friend, a writer: we’d been drinking since four that afternoon, and balancing the two of us on my Vespa had gotten too difficult. We’re both over two hundred pounds, he’s taller than me, six foot two, and we both like to eat and drink. It was only after we’d been drinking and riding along on the scooter that he told me the magazine he edited wouldn’t be renewing his contract as they’d promised. I arrived at the bookstore with this awful news in my heart and a pair of new sneakers on my feet. We stuck out: big, tall, almost drunk, him in baggy pants and a jacket, me in shorts and my bright-white shoes, and holding a plastic bag with the shoes I’d been wearing.

The street was crowded, mainly with people I knew. I’d worked with many of them but had either lost track or lost interest. Even just by the doorway, I saw two from publicity that I’d had affairs with at different times, never telling anyone; they were chatting with a journalist whose book I’d rejected ten years before. Sitting on the scooter of an old friend of mine was a guy I used to meet for coffee once a week, but then, after a summer of doing this, I just quit; there was a woman with whom I used to exchange book recommendations, but when she took a long trip to Africa, I forgot all about our shared interest: I watched her say goodbye to a former author of mine and then go off to talk with the guy I used to meet for coffee.