Tina turned away from where she was watering fuchsias and begonias on the terrace ledge and glanced over her shoulder at Missy. Her friend was stretched out on a wicker lounge in the still-sunny part of the terrace beyond the overhead straw matting. To be like Missy, she thought; to be long and rangy, a dancer, with that wild blonde halo of hair and those guileless blue eyes that looked at the world as if it had been created that instant. Missy wore skin-tight faded jeans and a tight poor-boy sweater that didn’t quite meet the jeans, showing a strip of her tanned firm flesh. She was as supple and indolent as Weezy’s cat Romulus, curled nearby in the shade. Feline, thought Tina, felix. Sis felix, Caeli, sis in amore potens. That was it—happy Missy, potent in love. No hang-ups. Missy could love easily, and either sex. Not like me, who makes everything a crucifixion. I’m not a dancer, Tina thought.

Missy was her friend from the days at St. Gregory’s in Rome. They had separated to go to different colleges but always came together again in Rome or New York.

They had even spent a semester together in Florence—Tina coming from Bryn Mawr all resolute and directed to do the Renaissance and tuck that away, accomplished, in her bag of tricks where Greek, Latin, and medieval and Provençal lyrics were stored; and Missy arriving like a sprite from Bennington, forgetting why she was there except to dance in the amphitheater at Fiesole, love and leave Italians, or stand in front of Botticelli’s Primavera at the Uffizi studying the arrogant and sensuous arch on the foot of that woman she resembled.

In the States, things were always wilder, more threatening. She and Missy had hitched to Massachusetts one fall, the leaves a torrent of color all around them, making them giddy, and they had made the mistake of getting out of a car right on the Mass. Pike, where a cop picked them up and acted as if they were runaways. Tina started a compulsive chatter about the leaves while he drove them to the next exit, put them out, and said to Tina, “You’re too young for me, anyway.” That was America—unsettling. Give her the bounds and forms of classicism anytime.

“Missy, you know what I love about you?” Tina said, moving toward her, watering plants as she went. “You have no existential predicament in your nature. You’re pure.”

“Oh, come on, Tee, cut out the crap.” Missy leaned over lazily on her side, watching. Her body was perfect, long but forming rounded hillocks in the right places.