I love each of the women who lends her name to a part of this novel, but when I look over what I’ve written about them, I find that, in a written work, these two types of women—who might live in nearly closed-off worlds, where they don’t have to force themselves to question their every movement and choice based on the movements and choices of the other—still seem to compete in an incorporeal beauty contest where it’s not legs and hairstyles that are judged; it’s the soul. Is a man’s prose a women’s beauty contest? I can feel it, that everything leads to me lining up women, then holding up cards with a number from one to ten. If I force myself to stop rating them, is there anything left? Or is a man’s prose nothing more than a fancy cow auction, with the best cows picked? And if I refrain from this, is there anything left?

One afternoon every week with Daniela, for a number of months, in her dim, badly lit apartment, the sound of rain on the windows, in the quiet after putting the babies down for a nap. Or out into the dazzling winter sun those days you could get to the park to air out the little inmates. Me and my sister-in-law, in an intimacy I’d stolen from my brother. I liked being there, in that apartment, immersing myself into a few hours of exhausting drudgery, mopping the floor washing the dishes fixing a toy or kitchen cabinet to calm someone down potty-training helping a kid climb the stairs: a whole slew of activities emanating from a calling that, because of my own psychological limitations, I’d been denied access to before.

The main room and kitchenette faced east: mornings were sunlit and glorious, afternoons depressing. Further adding to the intensity of those afternoons with my sister-in-law was the fact that I grew up here. Forty years ago, my parents owned just this section of the fourth floor; thirty years ago, they bought the next-door apartment and combined the two, in part because my father wanted to see the sunset, and the abrupt darkness that settled over this side darkened his mood; he moved his office to the other half, where, at that hour, through the pine boughs, a mawkish pink or dramatic orange spread over the sky. The light my nephews were growing up with was the same light in which I learned how to obey, how to please others, how to leave projects unfinished. The square footage doubled after purchasing the place next door, this after my father started earning real money: they installed double-glazed windows, and added gilt frames around the mirrors, the first pretenses of a couple coming from two different backgrounds—my father more lower-middle-class, my mother more elegant and more religious—who had found common ground in their frugality in the seventies and in Catholic social movements; newly rich, my parents now felt compelled to invent a style that represented them, even if they were still socially frugal, because my father didn’t wish to socialize with his work colleagues, and so my parents’ dinner parties for old friends—not entrepreneurs or investors—just became more sumptuous, with chicken in aspic, silver dinnerware, sets of eighteenth-century glasses in a cabinet … that extravagant square footage had now disappeared between two families, and traces of the elegance demanded of the rich in the eighties survived only here and there, like ancient architectural ruins. My parents had an imperial age purely due to the demands of status, but they passed through this period with no ideology and therefore no great need to erase it completely. Now my parents and Luca and Daniela all lived surrounded by stucco and decorations and colors that contrasted with the new design sense that Daniela (a graduate in architecture) had brought to her side of the apartment and then to her in-laws’ side, through her various presents. She’d scraped off the veneer, removed the gilt frames, the fake columns, the Greek-shrine bookshelves, the trompe l’oeil.