“I meet you like this,” Massimo was saying, “because of Alberto’s name, because of your and my home situations.” She didn’t stop him. She was prefiguring the end: the wearing out of each other with unresolved encounters; his wanting to play for some long-term thoroughly studied goal that was too far, too impossible for her.

“Alberto is going to Venice on Sunday for some family matter and the girls will be away. Will you come for supper? We could eat on the terrace and go over the translation that I’ve just finished.”

“Yes, I’ll come.”

It was hot, she couldn’t think, she looked at her watch and said she had to go. Maybe he was right. He walked up the Spanish Steps with her, and at the top, as she extended her hand to say good-bye, he took it and kissed it. But he wanted too much and too little: the abstraction of her flesh and blood and tumult of nerves.

She looked down at the hippies lounging about the steps and the balustrades, camped on the landings: flaunting, costumed, stalking crotches. Immediate and free.

What was happening to her was too stupid to be happening in this day and yet it was happening. Where today was such a wooing as that between her and Massimo still being played out. Ireland? Afghanistan? Up there on the moon?

“Do as you feel,” she heard the analyst’s old refrain course through her. She left and walked home.

Sunday night men reached the moon and Massimo her bed.

They dined that evening on the terrace under a moon that hung as fulvous and fleshy above Rome as the slices of melon they ate with prosciutto.

“How well you look!” he said, greeting her; she wore geranium crepe pajamas in which she knew, in fact, that she looked well.

The house was empty—Alberto gone, Weezy and Tina off to Porto Ercole with friends.

Roses and jasmine were fragrant in the night; the sight of Palazzo Barberini below them was a testimony of what they were and could aspire to be; the sound of the fountain a soft splash.

“I look over there every day, you know,” she told him, indicating Palazzo Barberini. “And I keep thinking of Milton, the English poet, when he stayed there. He was a Puritan and yet he stayed there, the guest of Cardinal Barberini.”

“Why not?”

“It seemed strange to me in the beginning—as if he were betraying his ideals. But it was his humanism that saved him. At least in Italy. Here he could accommodate everything. That’s the secret of Italy. What a night! Everyone should be out in the piazzas making love to celebrate the moon shot.”

It was an old-fashioned scene of lovemaking, the kind not seen in the films anymore or written in any novel.