“Listen, Marguerite, I had a whole pattern of life going before we met—other involvements. I can’t suddenly undo the strands overnight. People are involved. It takes time.”

“And what am I in this pattern?” she asked bitterly.

“You are the center! The one point in all the tangle. You have to be patient while I undo the rest. I can’t hurt people.”

“But what about me! Why did you start with me if you were already entangled?”

“That’s why I went so slowly . . . I told you before, I didn’t want to lose you.”

She tried to tell herself she shouldn’t suffer; it was she, after all, who had forced things, who had intruded into his already patterned life—but she did suffer.

“Massimo . . . I don’t know . . . I’m confused. Maybe it’s better if we don’t see each other.”

“Are you sure you aren’t making one of your usual mistakes? You’re the kind of woman who goes right to the end of something even with mistakes.”

“Which is the mistake? Maybe being with you is the mistake.”

“Amore mio, I know what we feel together. I have no regret about us. We’ve given each other something . . . have much more to give. We need each other.”

“Massimo, I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to struggle with this anymore.”

“You’re right. Accept it as it comes.”

“It was my fault for taking it too seriously.”

“But it is serious! This is no adventure, nothing casual. In a year, two years—five years from now, you’ll think back to this time and laugh at your doubts. Everything else is meaningless. I’m not going to waste myself anymore. We have a long time ahead of us. You have to take it seriously.”

He was right and yet he wasn’t. It was all part of his waiting game, his keeping her involved with him while he refused total commitment. It made her demanding and unsure.

It made her, in her moments of deepest honesty, know that Verdile was right: Her situation was, by now, not very Zen. Because it had changed in a year from a free encounter into that last refuge of irreality, that last abstraction: the Love Affair. She was contriving her old error of casting her life into categories and trying to define herself. (“Are we lovers?” she asked, wanting to be systemized by a word, a slot. And for what? If she didn’t feel what she was, what they were together, without Massimo’s saying it, what good was it to be told?)

Loving Massimo, she had succumbed to the old affliction of fixing a point of arrival and, once arrived there, raising the old cry (hers and everyone’s) “Is this all?” She remembered Richard’s calm answer to that query: “Yes, honey, this is all.”