“But goddam it, Richard, is this all!” she cried. “This is what bothers me. Here I am past forty and I’ve gotten nowhere. Everything I thought I wanted, I’ve had. But Jesus, is this all?”

“Yes, honey, this is it.” He spoke quietly, and the very fixity of his answer reassured her. He knew. He had looked into the nature of things and it was a goddam horror and he had the nerve to accept it.

Their arrangement, she speculated, would require separate rooms—his at one end of the hall, hers at the other—and meetings in the garden for drinks. She didn’t think that the inner secrecy he so cherished would stand the closeness of even breakfast together. They could only meet on a conversational level: “Yes, honey, this is all.”

By the first of June, Marguerite had moved into her lodgings in the villa. She had lined up several possibilities of steady work with the American college programs for fall and in the meantime was doing a translation. It would work out. Going to Florence was working. That Richard was there seemed to be the main part of it.

She wondered how free he was of sensual urgency. She herself could imagine being in bed with Richard, had been ready for weeks to be there; but he, she could tell, would never be.

He came to her place one evening bringing housewarming bottles of Chianti.

“Now, take this McLuhan,” he said as he looked through the books on her shelves—“this bit about us being so linear, so oriented to print and so on. I keep thinking about it when I give my sermons each Sunday. No one retains anything of what I’ve said because we’re no longer receptive that way; unless it’s written, we don’t remember. We’ve lost our sense of hearing. But with Pina, all I have to do is translate aloud a recipe for her and she’s got it the first time, retained for always. Not like you and me, honey, who have to see something in print to be sure.”

“It’s more than the sense of hearing that’s been lost—it’s all the senses. But the young are regaining them, Richard; they don’t sit around just talking the way we do. They communicate in different ways: dancing, singing, looking at each other, reaching for each other, touching and feeling. They’re recovering their senses.”

“Oh well, my dear, they’ve gone too far in the other direction,” he said quickly, just as she imagined he would. What else? He could only verbalize about immediacy, he couldn’t act it.