“Seven thousand each, or was it both? We’ll sell them for twenty.” He put his arm around her and laughed.

It was a still, mild night. He drove toward Palazzo Farnese, where the striped Gothic tower of St. Brigid of the Swedes was illuminated and the two giant fountain-basins were empty of the neighborhood urchins who swam there by day. The whole piazza was still. In front of Palazzo Farnese a young couple sat and clung to each other, kissing; further along the stone ledge two old men talked quietly. Campo di Fiori was deserted, all the commotion of the market now swept away with the garbage, leaving only the odor of the fish stalls permeated in the old cobblestone pavement, five centuries strong, despite the daily hosing. Giordano Bruno, hooded, stood brooding on his pedestal over the shadowy place where he had been roasted.

“Rome-by-Night,” Marguerite called out as Massimo circled Palazzo Farnese, swung under the green-festooned archway of Via Giulia, and went over the bridge that joined the Tiber island to both banks and led into Trastevere. Rome swept clean of its traffic; emptied of exhaust, sweat, odor, closeness, frustration, nerves, rage. A fabulous city. Castel Sant’Angelo. The dome of St. Peter’s. The leafy plane trees along the river. She thought, I’m sitting beside Massimo, my knees turned toward him as sunflowers turn to the light, and we’re driving through Rome after midnight to go to the flea market and sell these crumbling candlesticks of the eighteenth century that someone stole from a church altar and sold to me.

But the long wide avenue at Porta Portese, so thronged and jammed on Sunday mornings with all the debris of the world, was empty and dark. “Amore mio, I knew there would be no one here at night.”

“It was possible. . . .”

“Yes, it was possible; that’s why I brought you. Do what I say—use the candlesticks for lamp bases. I’ll get you wood for the winter.”

Yes, the coming winter, when he foresaw them in front of the stove at her place. Again he spoke of a future she had never programmed. An encounter, yes—but this beautiful thing? To imagine spring seemed almost too much.

As their meetings went on and entwined the strands of their separate lives indissolubly together so that they talked of his work, her work, his children, her children, his wife, Alberto, and all their previous time before knowing each other, fashioning themselves joint dimensions—as, in short, they created themselves as a couple—she began to believe in them. She began to count on all the things he said they’d do together: go to his hometown in the Marche and drink the wine there with his friends, go photograph the castles of Apulia, go to the sea, to Rumania where his books were being translated, to America, to the shirt maker’s and have matching shirts made.