He didn’t notice but started taking off her dress, unzipping it in back, tugging at it impatiently when it jammed. Marguerite was aware of how stupidly she was dressed for that night; she had dressed not for lovemaking with Gillo but for a date in Gloversville. Everything was snaps and buttons and zippers, even her girdle. Gillo tugged, and any feeling she might have had toward lovemaking now centered on the goddam zippers and her discomfort as she lay on the narrow bed while he tried to get at her. “No . . . no . . . no,” she was saying, not knowing why. Finally, Gillo had torn off everything, flinging garments all over the floor, and was upon her, welded to her in perspiration, fused. They were drawn together by the suction of their sweating nude bodies that squeaked and sucked as they moved toward their union.

Her flesh felt scaly, cold through the sweat. The sucking seemed a monstrous noise drowning out the cheerful girl and boy voices calling to each other in the hall outside Gillo’s door. She thought the whole house must be reverberating and echoing the sucking and smacking of their bodies. Is this better than Len? The thought came quickly and she just as quickly smothered it.

The sound of their bodies continued as they came together then broke away, in rhythm to his thrusts, the air rushing between them. Warmth, then cold. She felt his spasms and then he was still. Sprawled across her, he seemed to sleep. She waited. After a time she extricated herself. Naked, she got up to look out the window. The house was quiet.

Streetlight. Shadows of branches. The dim outline of an owl. Minerva and wisdom. She stood for a while and then quietly dressed. She washed in the deserted john and wished she had a toothbrush to take away the bits of lettuce leaves from dinner that were still between her teeth. How would she get back to her place in full daylight in her torn and too-dressy clothes? She should have thought it out better. But it wasn’t the first time she hadn’t.

Gillo was snoring lightly. She covered him with the bathrobe that hung from a peg on his door. She sat at his desk near the window, put her head down on her folded arms, and dozed off.

That morning Gillo brought her coffee in the room. “How are you?” he asked. Distances were still in his eyes.

After that, they met sometimes in his room, sometimes in her hotel, or sometimes not at all, when he would say he was busy because he had to meet the person from the British Council in Venice who had gotten him the grant to study in England and wanted to keep in touch with his progress.