“Massimo, is it true for you that when you are working well, writing something that is going well, sex is not so important?”

“Yes, it’s true. I could do without. . . . I don’t even think about it.”

“What are the big things in life, Massimo?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course you do—your work. . . .”

“Yes, my work.”

“I’m one of your works, too,” she said. “You’ve given me hope for myself—for my work. It never happened before.”

They lay in the light of the stove’s soft, rosy glow. It made him as he reclined on his side, torso nude, his legs under the blue blanket, like an Etruscan sepulchral image, recalling those happy images of man and wife banqueting on the lids of their stone sarcophagi. Then she sat across him, leaning into the curve of his shoulder, her legs over his on top of the cover, white and long in the candlelight. And they banqueted too, picking up the sausages and eating them with their fingers till the fragrance of herbs and spices and the slipperiness of the grease was all over them. Then she got up and brought over a melon.

“A melon in this season, tesoro.” He frowned, looking at it suspiciously.

“This is a Spanish melon and this is its season. Don’t be afraid—it’s delicious. I like to eat in bed. Like this. With you. And you?”

He smiled and caressed her hair, her cheeks. She leaned over to kiss him, to suck and bite the hollow of his shoulder blades, feel the thick mat of hair on his beautiful chest, slide her hands over the still-tanned musculature of his arms, hold his thickening penis against her breast.

He said, “I wish I had known you as a girl. I can imagine you there, in America, in the cold and snow, laughing, your cheeks red and your eyes glowing.”

Marguerite said, remembering, “I miss the trees of my childhood—those beautiful tall leafy trees Italy doesn’t have.” The elms of Prospect Avenue shading the sidewalks and casting their generous shade in the still summer days as she sat at an orange crate in front of the house to sell lemonade; the spasm of fall—unbearable suspense as she tried to hold back forever that moment of color which, too soon, fell dead; the glossy horse-chestnuts collected by the pocketful, the leaves, the milkweed, the bicycle rides to the country to catch butterflies in an improvised net and smoke cornsilk in a field. The cold blue nights of winter, sad with streetlights already lit at five o’clock, and the peril of dusk, when frozen numb and holding back tears, she and Sammy trudged the long way home from sledding. The distance was immense, and the home when they reached it, a haven blissful beyond all imagining.