“Then why do you bother to write? Why do you keep yourself looking good and run around so busily each day? Why are you ambitious for your work? Why do you bother to come to me—what would it all matter if you hadn’t some hope, some attachment to life?”

“I don’t know. I just hang on, that’s all. Let’s not talk about this anymore.”

She let the tears come and they slid between them, cementing their embrace. Why should she try to understand? Was this her old mania of wanting to organize, to probe and sort? Massimo was simpler. He accepted what was, he wasn’t set on understanding. Still, she tried.

“You will see . . . once you have the Strega prize, everything will be better. I love you, Massimo.”

“You would like to be the dominant one, wouldn’t you?”

“What do you mean?” she asked, raising her head a little to look at him in surprise.

“You would like to dominate men, have authority over them.”

“Who—me?” she asked incredulously in the same instant that she recognized the truth he spoke. Of course she had been authoritarian with him: Hadn’t she tried to buy him, to tie him to her by means of his books, the prize? Yet she had also been submissive. (“Set plagiata,” Massimo had told her once, semi-seriously. He had used “plagiarized” in the Italian sense of her becoming subjected to him, being totally absorbed in his influence, appropriated.)

“Sometimes I wonder,” he went on, “if we could have ever married if we had known each other when we were both free. If things had gone right I would have been an Alberto—a completely faithful husband and family man. What do you think?”

“No, Massimo,” she said, trying to change his mood. “I think we were made for other things. We’ll run off to Mexico together when you get the Strega. You’ll get a big advance for the film rights to your book, I’ll pawn Angela’s paintings and sell the car, and we’ll go off for as long as the money lasts.”

“That’s what we’ll do—eh, tesoro?” he agreed, smiling at last.

“Detto! Said and agreed.”

“Detto. Then when we’ve spent everything, we’ll come back, penitent, asking everyone’s forgiveness.”

“Clown!” And though she laughed with him, the tears were still in her throat.

32. Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-three

After Angela returned (“Neurasthenic and starving,” she said; “just imagine a poor romana in England for three years!”), Marguerite found it difficult to meet Massimo.

“I could come to your place after your wife goes to the Marche with the children,” she proposed.

But he objected. The portiere would see them, and the people in adjoining apartments.