She was recounting the anxieties preliminary to each of her meetings with Massimo: the necessary machinations and the resulting intricacy her life had taken on. “After all, life is also contingent; it isn’t just our good, inner resolves to be healthily egotistical that decide everything.” Did he think she just walked out the door saying “Ciao, see you later, I’ve got a date with my lover now”? Is that what Verdile imagined? Couldn’t he conceive the stresses implicit in her arranging her time within the network of Massimo’s? Did he know what it was to have teen-age daughters?

“There are all these external pressures. . . .”

“You always tend to look outside either for the motivation or the excuse. What of inside?”

Già: her inner doubts. Her fear of not fulfilling Massimo’s expectations of what she could do for him; the pressure of time and aging; her jealousies of the time she wasn’t with him; her anxieties about his work and health; her momentary discomposure at Aurelia Eccli’s brusque question, “Are you and Bontelli in love? I told Leone I bet you’re already lovers”; and her growing dependence on Massimo. Somewhere she had lost her footing from that safe hold she had reached with Alberto. Somewhere the balance had tipped and made her no longer her own woman, but Massimo’s.

There was more: the way Massimo referred to his wife. His domestic, he called her. Marguerite understood Massimo’s estrangement from that woman, but it bothered her that on the one hand he despised his wife for not having evolved with him and on the other he put up with the situation for the sake of being served and seconded in everything. In comparison Alberto was a generous husband, and though Marguerite had jested with him about it for years, a faithful one.

Did she get along with Massimo only because they had no life in common? She didn’t see to his shirts, his shoes, his special diets; she wasn’t left home while he went to the theater, to art openings, to dinners and receptions as the escort of other women. “He’s married according to municipal records,” Aurelia said once, introducing Massimo at a party, “but you can consider him a bachelor.” No one had ever met his wife.

Marguerite couldn’t be jealous of such a wife, only of that previous great love for whom he would have given up everything; and then one day, in an inexplicable burst of apprehension that made her ask if there were others, she learned that, yes, there were other women he saw from time to time.

“Then I took this too seriously! Our being together is only another casual experience for you.”

“How can you think that? This is serious!”

“If I had known . . . I would have never started with you.”