Marguerite remembered a dinner party in Rome at which the Great Man of Italian Letters and his young blonde companion, Lalla Fonti, had been present—not only present, but peremptory in their presences: he wearing a great wide Roberta da Camerino necktie over a canary-yellow shirt under a brown velvet suit; she with a phallic charm around her neck. The Great Man, a formidable name when presented on college reading lists, was in excellent spirits. Over tortellini alla crema he told everyone at the table how his wife had wanted to be married in church in front of the altar where the intestines of St. Ignatius Loyola were conserved in a glass urn. But he had declined; he hadn’t the guts for it, he said jovially.

“Arnaldo,” someone had then asked, “you’re a Roman, but is it true you’ve never been to the Capitoline Hill?”

“Of course I have—it’s my legend that says I’ve never been there. Sometimes I forget what’s legend and what’s real. In any case, like any Roman I don’t care for Old Rome; that’s for the foreigners. But I’ve been to the Capitoline—that, yes, though never to be married. I marry in church.”

For six or seven years he had been living with Lalla. The connection had launched her as a full-blown star into the international literary scene, consecrated by his favor no matter what she did; and she did everything from parodying Tennessee Williams to writing poetry and novels, dabbling in women’s lib, making films, and doing political reportage and High Pornography. If being with Lalla had made the Great Man a more affable, entertaining, charming, and humanly accessible person, it had, on the other hand, also greatly diminished his own art.

So there was the old conundrum: Life over art or vice versa.

But, Marguerite considered, no matter how it came out for the Great Man, he had made it. He had written his finest work while married to a myopic woman who was herself a writer, perhaps even more so than the Great Man himself, but so ugly and scruffy-looking as to take the heart from any man, despite her soul. She was Art.

Lalla, pretty and cheerful, and twenty-three years younger than Arnaldo, was a writer, too, but not an artist. She was a good biological force in the Great Man’s life—a blue-eyed St. George so committed and willing, so much the good Girl Scout of Revolt and Protest and Reform, so sincerely battling against bigotry, that you forgot the rest.

Everyone credited her with changing Arnaldo’s life. “She’s turned Arnaldo from a compulsive grouch into a human being,” Leone Eccli sanctioned. So, thought Marguerite, life is more than art; but that was too simple a solution since the Great Man had both.