In the next instant he was telling her of how he lived with, but, in effect, separated from, his wife; of the other woman he had loved for years and for whom he would have given up everything—wife, children, home, career—in order to go away with her. She had had a child she said was his, but in the end she hadn’t had the courage to break from her own marriage. It was now almost ten years since he had seen her and almost as many since he had thought of her.

“No matter what,” said Marguerite, “it’s like a moment of grace in one’s life to love.”

“Until it’s gone,” he told her.

“If one is lucky, it can come again. Twice in life, maybe, or even three times. But you have to know and accept the moment when it comes and sometimes it’s difficult to know. You have to be fortunate.”

She felt as if in their slow progression they had passed a first barrier. “About my separation,” she said uncertainly, looking away from him into the river, the words coming out like stammers, “I’m back with Alberto . . . I’m not looking for a way out. Is that what you wanted to know?”

“Yes.”

She took a deep breath of relief and looked at him again, smiling.

“We go well together,” he said, smiling too.

How careful he is, she thought, to make things clear at the beginning—no illusions, promises, or traps.

Once, looking across the way from Angela’s roof, she saw through a window a young man in the bottom half of his pajamas just getting out of bed and she had a fantasy of desire for him. And for no other reason than that she was feeling well and the man across the way was young and beautiful. Just sensuality and nothing else. Just because she was in old Rome on a rooftop and down in the narrow streets people called to each other and laughed and sang and hung their wash and watered their plants. In the young man’s room she saw old-fashioned photographs of family groups on the wall, a large armadio, a crucifix above the bed, the crumpled sheets. Just for sensuality she would have liked to be in that bed—just once, without complications. A brief encounter and no further disrupting of her life. Her life was at a good point, a kind of longed-for normalcy, with things going well between her and Alberto. She didn’t want to upset the balance. But just because she felt well she would have liked to have been in that young man’s bed across the way. That was no paradox; that’s how things were. Now she felt that for Massimo.