“If it’s worth anything. I seem to specialize in prizes that put me back instead of ahead. The last one I had to go all the way to Mestre to collect, paying my own train fare; and after dinner in a restaurant where they talked all night about my work, they gave me a figure of something in iron, an original sculpture by someone I’d never heard of, and that was it. You remember the Mestre prize, don’t you?” Alberto turned to Marguerite for confirmation.

“Oh, yes, I remember,” she said. How many things she remembered between them. Yes, they had a whole life together. A life that had intermeshed and made a rich, varied background of many-colored, many-textured strands. . . . This was Saturday. . . . Sunday Massimo spent with his family. . . . On Monday he had some special assignment that would occupy him completely; perhaps Tuesday, or failing that, Thursday for sure, they would see each other again. Once or twice a week they took up their life together, but the fabric on which they embroidered it was fragile. As Cesare Servi had said of Massimo’s books, they were fresh and pleasing and immediately attractive but also slim and light, and in the end, of no substance. So, it seemed, was her being with him.

Look, she thought, at Alberto’s generosity toward me; he gives me freedom and no questions asked. He’d never say anything even if he did suspect something between me and Massimo. He’d never accuse me; he would trust me even in that. And Massimo keeps worrying about Alberto—Alberto, who’s freer and less conventional than either of us.

Alberto was saying, “There’s the Fiuggi poetry prize next month at Castel Sant’Angelo.”

“Oh, let’s go! What a gorgeous place to have a party,” said Aurelia.

“I never miss a party,” said Clotilde. “We’ll all go.”