I couldn’t seem to show up sober for these things. Plus, that evening, inside the long, cramped bookstore filled with the best picture books and bottles of Sardinian wine and carrot-cake cupcakes, there was a presentation of a book by one of my former students, Leone, who’d moved to a new publisher, leaving me after I’d acquired and published his first two novels. And not only that: apparently, one Sunday morning last spring, Leone and Barbara met up in Villa Borghese to discuss a theater project for high schools. I was still in bed when Barbara had left the apartment with a container of wild strawberries and chocolate drops; along the way, she stopped to buy a bag of lingue di gatto. Francesco had told me this a few hours earlier, while we were sitting, drinking sparkling Campari and negronis on the steps of a fountain in a small piazza in the historic city center: “Leone was sure they’d sleep together,” Francesco let slip, because he was drunk, and obviously still shaken up from learning about his canceled contract: “And Barbara felt bad—it was a misunderstanding. So naive. Afterward, Leone insulted her behind her back to a few people and stopped talking to her. I don’t know—maybe they’ve made up, since you’re saying she’ll be there tonight. He was super embarrassed about it, though. Because it really seemed like she wanted it. And Barbara, you know, she’s getting bored with you, and she’s thrown herself into trying to make things right with Leone. She thinks about it nonstop.”

Listening to him was torture. I remember there was gum on the seat of my shorts from the fountain steps, and I listened to Francesco while I leaned over and studied this mess on my shorts, standing up and twisting around, and what he was telling me, and this stickiness, and the sickening sweetness of my drink, all merged into one.

The most complicated thing for me to accept, while I opened the glass door to the bookstore, was that there, inside, way toward the front, just as I imagined I’d see as I moved forward with my bag of shoes, past unknown bodies, in the fall humidity, that person sitting there was the person who shared a bed with me, shared the bills with me, the person who stepped outside with me in the morning, and tossed the bag of cabbage and fish bones into the garbage.

There she was, at a small table up front. From where I stood near the back, I saw her in profile: her high forehead, her cheekbone, her undyed hair, sleek, dark brown, with thicker strands of white. That day, she exuded sex: this way, she truly looks the part of the actress; when she’s nervous and withdrawn, she just looks old. That day, she was beautiful, holding a small glass of beer, her nails painted blue-gray.