She had time, as they drove up the Storm King Highway on their way to Gloversville, to consider the ever-present miseries of Man. In the first dimness of twilight she had glimpsed a person, his pants lowered, his head hung down, defecating, with one hand clutching at the fence against which he cowered, the other at the shame of his lowered pants. And the sight went with her. As did the sweet-sick smell of the aftermaths of Lennart’s intercourse with her. There it all was: ingesting, voiding, vomiting, copulating, laboring, farting, nose picking, pimply skin, bad breath. Always present. No matter how you arranged your life, no matter how grand a Tudor house you arrived at, the low gross part was at the bottom of everything.

Sam and Carla Scalzo could never understand the elopement and didn’t want to, but they moved quickly to have it annulled. No trouble; they liquidated Lennart with a good sum, had Marguerite go through a physical to make sure she wasn’t pregnant or infected, and promised her a trip to California or a new car.

She wanted nothing. She got a job in a store, where she met an Italian printer named Matteo de Mariani who stopped in weekly to pick up copy for the Gazzettino that he put out. Marguerite persuaded him to give her Italian lessons. (“Why Italian?” her father said. “Where will that get you?”) For a whole winter, several nights a week, she sat with the gentle, elderly De Mariani in the clean kitchen where his wife had just cleared away the supper and learned Italian. He wanted no money, and under his patient teaching she learned the verbs, the “impure S,” the pejoratives and the amelioratives, and began to read with him in the empyrean of Italian opera libretti.

“Italy is a great and sad country,” De Mariani told her. “I do not hate her.”

Nor, anymore, did Marguerite. In June she took her parents’ offer of a trip and headed not west, but east to Europe. An unselected candidate for American happiness, a family failure, she sailed for England harboring the certainty that her destination was surely Italy.

21. Chapter Twelve

Chapter Twelve

They had met in the bar of the cabin-class lounge on the ship sailing to England.

“Need some help there, miss?” he said as she tried unsuccessfully to light a cigarette from her lighter. He was a short, grinning man with a thick thatch of sandy hair and the marked accent of northern England. “I couldn’t help noticing you.” She noticed him, too: the two missing front teeth, the scruffy necktie, the reddish face, and the roguish cocky air. “The name’s Alec Dunn.”

Alexander Dunn. The meeting with Alec, any Alec, was inevitable.

“Are you a smart aleck?” Marguerite asked him, laughing.