“Oh, Missy, you’re impossible! That’s what I mean about you—total acceptance.”

“Actually, this is a great place. That crowd of St. Gregory boarders who are always hanging out at the Fontana di Trevi looking for men should know about your terrace!”

“Poor soldiers,” said Tina. “Always on duty and having to salute their stuffed-pants superiors. If I come back in the afternoon around two when the Ministero della Difesa is closing up for the day, there must be twenty thousand generals and admirals streaming down the street with all these poor soldiers going crazy saluting them all. More brass in Italy than in all the NATO countries—or all of Europe. Maybe the world. Then I think, What am I doing in this never-never land where life is like an operetta, where Sophia Loren pays no taxes, and the pope comes out in his white nightgown and capelet to tell people how to vote while they cheer and drop on their knees.

“Or I’ll get on the bus to go someplace, and if I’m standing in a crowd I get dead-handed on the ass by some greaser until I get a seat, and then they’re all trying to look up my skirt or down my shirt. I feel like Weezy when I get back sometimes—I want to throw bombs at the Ministero and join her compagni marching in the streets for the homeless and jobless.

“Then, after three or four days at the most, I get into the rhythm of the place. I go down to the kiosk on the corner to chat with the vendor while I look over the sensational titles of his gossip mags, then I go across the street to the bar for a cappuccino while I read Gente or watch the people go by. I walk up Via Sistina and look in the windows and know nobody knows how to dress or live better than Italian women. Yesterday I saw this woman in a hot pink shirt-and-skirt outfit coming down the street with her little girl; she looked down, noticed something not right with the girl’s headband, took it off, and dropped it in the street while the girl smiled at her. How natural these people are! In three days I could be a romana di Roma; I start dressing differently, eating differently, thinking differently—that’s how easily I’m reabsorbed into this place.”

“And why not, why not?” Missy murmured.

Tina knew why not. Her sense of the illimitable possibilities awaiting her could not stop at the softness and languor of Rome, beneath which, she knew, there were deadly poisons of unrest and discontent. Rome is too old, she thought; nothing matters anymore. In New York everything does.