Meet an editor friend of Giorgio’s and we talk about Italian writers. Agree they all look like lightweights on the current literary scene—they can’t keep up the commotion on a global level because they’re so concerned with their provincial infighting. “The whole Italian bunch is irrelevant in the world today and they don’t know it,” says an editor. I think of Alberto, who knows it and doesn’t care. “They want to play the scene in their terms, the old thirties thing; they haven’t a clue to what’s really new and popping.” He tells me to keep in touch if I discover any popping Italians.

Some of Alberto’s old contacts take me to lunch, and they take the news of our breakup with the same interest as if I were giving up smoking. No—less. All want to hear of fresh Italian talent, as if we were talking of produce: tender Treviso lettuce, fragrant Sicilian lemons; luscious Verona peaches; and—why not?—Calabrian chestnuts. Un fritto misto. We talk. I suggest. They listen. Should have done this years ago. Something I learned from Alberto after all. Dozens of full-voweled Italian names roll off my lips. I’m connecting—they can hear me, see me. Me! A few months ago I was telling Verdile I didn’t exist. . . I couldn’t use the telephone because it increased to the point of terror my feeling of being detached from people, from the world.

Once in a while I remember Alberto. I walk through Bloomingdale’s and see his jockey shorts, a gilded pocket toothpick, a fold-away mattress. I hear his voice: “My only fear is that when you realize your mistake, you’ll be too proud to come back.” At the airport I told him, “I didn’t want it to be like this.” He said, “It will be all right.”

I wanted it to work. For years I worked at it, and maybe that was the trouble . . . laboring at something that should only have been accepted, without that uptight compulsion to better things that I, American, was born to. Better my life, my marriage, my husband. America the Betterful. “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better,” says Mother You-Better-Better-Yourself.

New York is great, fantastic, everything’s crackling. A yardstick of packaged matches with sun designs for Dr. V., only 59¢ in a Japanese emporium. Pastrami on rye at Lexington and Fifty-sixth Street—gorgeous! Serrated grapefruit spoons at Hammacher Schlemmer for Angela, Winnie-the-Pooh animals and Zen books for Weezy, sale dresses at Saks, apricot chew on Eighth Street, fabulous underwear, shoes that fit. Orgasm is everywhere. A whole new vision in the fifties from Seventh Avenue to Third. The vegetables in The Village greater than life, and the pastries enormous and death-defying. The public library—what can compare to it in Rome? Hot fudge sundaes. Cranberry juice. Spareribs. America the Bellyful.