Jesus! Once he told her that in his wish to improve himself culturally he had spent a whole year studying French at the lycée—and had come out with a zero because he was always too involved with his work to do the lessons, and too tired to remember anything. And now if she were like his French? If nothing came of his studying her except another zero? But why should she be subject to study? Why must he be so ponderous, so heavy-handed with a moment in their lives of which the only thing he could be sure of was that it, too, would pass? Why this miserly circumspection?

“I want to go away with you,” she said.

He looked at her and continued to spoon up the lemon. “Where do you want to go?”

“England? Greece? Mallorca?”

“Sardegna?” he ventured.

“Castagna!” she exclaimed as if just remembering something.

“Where’s that?”

“In Calabria—it’s the village my grandparents came from. I’d like to go and photograph it.” She was momentarily exhilarated by the idea but then everything she didn’t understand about him clouded her eyes as she looked at him. Perhaps he was an illusion, like the boy in pajamas across the way. Too far to reach.

“Marguerite. This is important. I don’t want to make mistakes, to ruin everything . . . to lose you.”

“Listen, Massimo, you don’t have to be with me or feel obliged because of my sending your stories to New York.”

“That doesn’t even come into the question. That whole business can go to hell. I’m with you because I want to be. And you?”

“Yes, the same.” But her voice was spent. She reached for another cigarette.

“I don’t want to lose you; you’re what any man would desire—beautiful, elegant, cultured. You’re everything ideal.”

She felt defeated. He was weaving the abstraction of the ideal woman, or as Dr. V. would put it, the projection of his anima. And all I wanted, she thought bitterly, was to be a sex object. The hell with this reverence; it’s getting late. She should have stopped him then, for it was dangerous and wrong, but she was both fascinated and fatigued by this cobwebbery and let him talk.

They sat in the back of the caffè, not near each other, sipping lemon ice in a room now filled with other couples and tourists, and she let him go on talking because it hardly mattered, the damage was done. Beauty. Poetry. A man’s ideal woman. Crap. And she remembered Dr. Verdile’s saying sarcastically, “There’s nothing dirtier than Platonic love.”