I was living on the bourgeoisie’s trundle seat, acting carefree, like I didn’t belong there, when I’d actually worked pretty damn hard, like every true bourgeois, like Papa Grandet and Robinson Crusoe.

Anyway, I was thinking about my father on my way home: an entire library of thoughts evoked in one form or another between Termini, Porta Maggiore, Via Casilina, then along by the light-rail tracks and the Roman aqueduct, where my heart began to slow. I turned right and caught the smell of fresh-cut lumber off the sawmill. On that always empty street, a high-speed train sailed by. Up the street there was a somewhat irregular intersection; tonight it was crowded with pedestrians.

The residents’ association was throwing an antifascist street party. I reached the intersection, but the police had blocked it off to traffic. I parked my scooter, hooked my helmet under the saddle, and walked through. I greeted a few association members I saw in among all the people drinking wine, lemonade, and beer, the stalls of T-shirts, purses, and books. In the piazza, I found Barbara listening to a rockabilly-patchanka band. I walked up and gave her a hug, then took her cell phone out of her hands and put it in my pocket as a joke. She hugged me back and sent me off to buy drinks.

In the crowded bar, the waitress called me “love,” I got some beers, left, handed them to Barbara, and looked around. Barbara hugged me around the chest like a kid, and put her leg between mine, and I started to feel aroused. My overnight bag was still on my shoulder. I decided to bring my bag home and take a shower, find some beer in the fridge.

Once inside, I started undressing, dropping my clothes on the floor, and I shivered from the cold, maybe the first time since before summer. I went to turn on the shower.

Barbara cracked the bathroom door open: she’d followed me, she wanted to surprise me. She asked if I minded and undressed, slipped under the water with me. We turned and faced the gray-tile wall, one behind the other, and made love until the water grew tepid.

While I sat on the bidet to wash up, I started to cry; Barbara knelt down, naked, and held me, stroked my hair and asked me what was wrong. I told her what had happened in Milan and she stiffened. “Do you have to move?”

“No, no.”

“Well, okay then. Is it more money?”

“Yeah.”

“So why are you upset?”

I was still sitting and she, standing now, had my head against her naked belly.

“I disgust myself.”

“Why—because of your promotion?”

“Yeah.”

Her fingers slid along my bare back, about halfway down, then up to my hair again, slowly caressing me.

“So what do you think?” I asked.

“What’d your parents say?”

I frowned into her. “You think I’d tell my parents before you?”

She laughed and held my head against her belly: “Yes,” she said.