What does it matter! she’d think wildly. She’d suggest his coming to her apartment when Weezy was in school and the maid out shopping; or he could come to her room at night while Alberto was working late in the studio; or they could go someplace for the weekends . . . or even use her car.

“You’re mad,” he’d say. “Sex isn’t everything. We can still meet as friends.”

This increased her despair. He didn’t care! Maybe he was already meeting other women. And she? She was consumed by her need for him, not knowing how to find peace in the rest of her life without the part she shared with him.

“I haven’t even time for the beach these days,” he told her. “I’ve got the presentations of my book. The Strega is just weeks away.”

The weeks and months she had counted on the rosary of her good fortune seemed to have all been said and told.

Massimo was involved in literary politics, seeing the people who could be of use to him for the Strega, taking them to dinner, talking to critics, and being seen everywhere. There was no room for her.

If Massimo got the Strega prize they’d be together again. Otherwise, she knew him; he’d sink back into his sense of futility and let himself not want anything or anyone. Hurting, anxious, she redoubled her efforts for his book, counting on Alberto’s influence in the literary world to make things work.

Nothing else had worked out; Marguerite hadn’t, as her parents would have put it, been able to capitalize on anything very significantly. Massimo’s previous books had already been refused by several American publishers and were being read by still another; her room of her own was gone, and from it she had produced a few fine photos but not the assignments she had imagined; and from the exhilarating sense of freedom she had realized so briefly, she was now relapsed into emotional dependence upon a man who would always survive without her.

Her only accomplishment was a certain enlightenment; Alberto should have been the upright of her constructions. He was the safe clearing she had made in the jungle, a clearing tended and worked at and cultivated in all their years together; a place that was now secure, and ready to produce good fruits. Over this clearing Massimo, a note of dazzling grace, had come like a beautiful bird pausing a moment in flight. It was useless to pursue him far from the clearing. He would not be caught. Yet he was all she wanted.

There was a big send-off for Massimo’s new book at his publisher’s quarters in Piazza di Spagna. All Rome was there, and with them, Marguerite and Alberto.