“No, mia cara, it’s not like that. It’s not that your life is going well but that you’ve come back to life from a long hibernation. Coming back, you’re seeing things freshly and creating. It’s this that makes you feel your life is going well.”

First she thought, He’s right; the work is important. But then, no; what good would any of it have been without him?

In her clear moments she knew that she was seeing the two of them disjointedly, only in the good scenes. Like editing her photographic shots and taking only the pleasing ones. As if the possibility of living with him in the future weren’t also other images: waking in the morning with puffy eyes and bad breath and putting on an old bathrobe to make breakfast; his coming home at noon to the conventional Italian dinner, which would take up all her morning to prepare and mean sacrificing her freedom as she didn’t with Alberto, who was used to American ways; his going off in the evening, leaving her alone while he developed his contacts; their never being invited anywhere by the friends who would remain loyal to Alberto; her growing loneliness and resentment; her daughters’ hate.

There was even the question of his shirts. He had his shirts made to order. Twelve to fifteen thousand lire each. He dressed carefully, he kept his body well. He looked like a boy. His one extravagance was those shirts—she loved especially his blue ones, or the warm brown and apricot ones. And if they were living together who would iron his shirts or squeeze the grapes he drank fresh in the morning?

No, they would never make it together. They could do so now only because, in their separate lives, they were free of each other.

Dr. Verdile was right. To have turned her encounter with Massimo into a Love Affair with all its attributes of irritability, explanations, questionings, and insecurity was poco Zen. Like that conversation after she had first learned of Massimo’s other involvements with women.

“If I had a complicated life like yours,” she had said, “and if from a feeling of sympathy, or loyalty, or simple attraction to a person I had once loved I found myself again—even if only for once—with someone from my past? Gillo, say, or the Englishman . . .”

He had pushed her away so that he could look at her directly in the eyes, his face serious. “Why do you joke like this?”

“I’m not joking, I’m asking. You’ve told me how it is with you.”

“I told you with me it’s different.”

“Yes, I know, you’re a man. An Italian.”

“If you want to know, I’ll tell you. I wouldn’t make a scene. I wouldn’t say anything. But you’d never see me again. I’d just go out of your life without a word.”