“Our summer is over,” Massimo said toward the middle of October. They were gathering dried stalks from among the beach pines at Fregene, and he was cutting her some that ended in feathery plumes.

He set out their program. “I don’t want you at loose ends, missing me and turning sad again when there are no more beach days. While I work, you have to also. At least three or four hours each day on your photos, getting together material for a book and doing research so that you can have it set out in rough form by spring. We’ll see each other the nights you can get out and whatever afternoons I can manage.”

He believed in her project, encouraged her in it: for years she had talked vaguely about photography to Alberto but he had never been much interested, considering it a pastime.

“This time you’ll do it,” said Massimo sternly as they ate grissini and grapefruit from her beach bag. “You’ll do it because I want you to. If you haven’t finished by next spring, you won’t come here with me again. Remember.”

“Blackmail!”

“In between, in your free time, you can work on the translations for me.”

“Jesus! There won’t be time for lovemaking.”

“There’ll be all the holidays—the American ones as well as the Italian.”

“We do spend all our holidays together,” she told him as they went up the stairs to her room, “even if it is only by coincidence.”

“What’s today?”

“Armistice Day. And I’ve got pot to celebrate.”

It was a Sunday afternoon. She brought, carefully wrapped in tissue, the bit of grass that a hippie friend of Tina’s had offered her after being given dinner and a place to sleep one night.

They rolled two joints which they smoked, blowing the smoke into each other’s mouths, dropping sparks, making faces at the dust that gathered on their tongues, and waiting to see what happened.

“Tesoro, this stuff is tea—camomilla” Massimo told her disparagingly. “Either you were given the wrong stuff or everything they say about marijuana is exaggerated like all publicity.”

But they made love, and then again, laughing in the intervals while they stuck close to each other under the blanket.

“Massimo . . .”

“Ummm . . .”

“What are you thinking?”

“I feel very close to you, amore. In more ways, perhaps, than to anyone else I’ve known. I dreamed I was in the Marche being hunted by some kind of secret police and I fled from there to Rome, all the way over rooftops, to your place here. Our place. Because it was the only place I felt safe, and I knew you would take care of me. If you were to go or disappear my days would have no meaning, there’d be this monstrous emptiness; I’d feel lost, unsure, disoriented.”