She should have known it would be. He had his own terms for their being together; he was cautious, he wouldn’t do anything that would make Alberto wonder. It was as if she were learning how it would have been to be his wife, to live on the margin of his existence.

“Massimo, for a lover I’m really treated like a wife!”

“You’re right. I’m not very attentive—I’m not like Alberto, am I?”

“It doesn’t matter. You’re tired, aren’t you?” She made and handed him a Scotch-and-soda. “It’s the letdown from having finished your book. That’s natural.”

“I’m worn out. I can’t think . . . I can’t plan. I lack the drive and energy to make the decisions I should be making now about my work, my future. I can’t see anything clearly.” He took a long drink from the glass. “How does Alberto manage!” he burst out bitterly.

“Alberto is generous toward life, Massimo. Receptive. Not diffident like you.”

It had been her mistake to think that Alberto was negative; now she realized that he had a disposition toward life, a Franciscan grace, that was free from the ambitions and pressures of the closed, defensive Massimo.

How strange that the youthful Massimo who wrote so engagingly and spiritedly, with all the humorous malice of a Neapolitan urchin, should turn out to be ridden with dark moods, suspicions, and the inability to be other than alone. (“Not strange,” the echoes of her Sicilian wizard, Dr. V., rebounded back to her; “we are all ambivalent, all our natures have two parts which alternate constantly, just as every question has its two sides.” Yes, yes, the eternal paradox—the two sides of Massimo and Alberto, and her own to fit them both.)

Massimo had never opened himself completely with her; he held himself back from that total abandon and intimacy which is beyond sex. Of the men she had known, he had, however, come the closest to giving her herself. And he envied Alberto.

She understood. For all Alberto’s seeming conservatism, his old-fashionedness, his inexpertise in the intrigues of Italian life (while Massimo and the others schemed and operated among the mazes, starting with the premise that life was devious and dark and you made your passage through it by vigilant suspicion), Alberto had gone his way confidently, lit inwardly by his acceptance of life. He had his own persuasion; he didn’t have to bend or conform with what was expedient. This, in the end, made for the serenity that so puzzled Massimo.