So this was a love affair, she thought. For each joy you paid out huge sums in uncertainties, jealousies, the anguish of a predictable end, the loneliness of never being completely with your man, the rage of not being part of his life, the sadness of not having with him anything of the real stuff of life but only occasional moments of love.

Like Anna Karenina, all we have is our love, she thought.

“Poco Zen,” said the analyst, drawing on his pipe. “You are like a teen-ager,” he remarked ironically. “Why not?” she replied heatedly. Could she be more Zen than that? Without strain, just naturally, trusting her senses.

Like the time Massimo had asked about the melons.

“How do you choose a melon?” he had asked one late summer night as she rose from the daybed to go about the room gathering the pieces of her clothing she had flung off. He was lying there eating the slivers of melon she had prepared for him.

“What do you mean?”

“Do you pick it out yourself or take what they give you?”

“I pick it up and feel it and smell it. Don’t you taste how good that melon is?”

“Superb. That’s why I asked—you’ve gotten me used to having the best.”

“The best of what?”

“Melons.”

“Sciocco!”

It was through his questioning that Massimo knew her. Like the night on the river when he asked about her separation. She answered correctly both times—about her marriage and about the melon. She told the truth without calculating whether she should or not.

That was then. But how would she answer about her marriage now? It was as if she had congratulated herself too soon on achieving her liberation. Now that she loved Massimo, what had happened to the equilibrium she had reached with Alberto? Would she start a new upheaval? Yes, she thought; but only if she felt Massimo’s love strong enough to strengthen her. If it wasn’t an abstraction, but was real. And how would she know? Only with her senses? Unfortunately, no; there was more to it than that.

Somewhere she had been trapped: a little by his casual talk of the future (their future); a little by her need for security; a little by forgetting Dr. Verdile’s prime injunction, “Nothing lasts”—everything changes in accordance with its own inner rhythm.

She had begun to play her own games, gambling on Massimo’s vanity and ambition; if she gave him the satisfaction of being published in America, this of itself would tie him to her. He was driven by the need to succeed as a writer. He gave her clues for helping him: Alberto and Alberto’s friends were influential figures in the literary world.