“I think it’s time for me to have a vacation from these visits—I’m feeling depressed, I have to get away for a while. And besides I have to see about moving there once I’ve gotten the legal separation. I want to be settled there with Weezy by the time Tina flies home. Alberto is going to Florence and his expenses are paid for me, too.” As usual she had told him too much, given too many explanations. She turned her eyes from his face to his hands.

You’re not different from me, she thought, looking at his chewed fingernails. Except that you can hide it better under your analyst’s uniform: pipe, turtleneck sweater, thick black-rimmed eyeglasses, white hairs all over your trousers from the Dalmatians you keep at your country place, dispassion, intelligence, aplomb, Swissness.

“Yes, it’s a good idea sometimes to take a vacation,” he told her equably.

“It’s more than that—it’s all the influencing going on that I can’t stand! All those erotic dreams! I never had them before; it’s the effect of analysis. I want my life to be my own, not conditioned by these meetings with you and the whole thing pressing on me like a chain I can’t lift.”

“Now we come to something!” he said sharply. “Now we come to the real matter, and so, typically, you want to escape it. It’s not these meetings that create the erotic dreams—that material you’ve always had in you. The present confrontation only favors its release. But if you refuse to face it now you go back to your favorite escape-hatch, the self-punishment you’ve inflicted on yourself over the years in order to avoid your main problem. You can go—but you won’t have solved anything. You’ll simply end up in another place with another analyst going over again and again the reasons for your not facing up.”

“But you know my situation! Alberto and I live together in name only; I’ve decided on the divorce, and now I’m overwhelmed with dreams of making love to young boys, in Venice, Mexico, England, all over the world—of wanting to make love, of craving it and not being able to do anything about it.”

“And why can’t you do something about it?”

“But what do you expect? That I put an ad in Il Messaggero saying ‘Lady available’? Besides, it’s too late . . . too late . . .” (If anyone, I’m the white rabbit, she had told him once when he compared her to Alice in Wonderland—timid, tremulous, always late, fearful of duchesses and everything else.)

She wanted to go away and show him that she, Marguerite Morosini, an American transplant filled with fears and desires, who was about to divorce her Italian husband of eighteen years so that she could start again, didn’t need him and his professional cool.

She felt stupid. She had put on her long hairpiece; she had done her eyes; she had dressed carefully as she always did for the Monday and Thursday meetings held in the front room of an apartment whose walls admitted the barest attenuated sounds of an invisible young Finnish wife moving somewhere in the adjoining rooms. All the time the echo chamber behind her ears went on sounding: “It’s late . . . it’s late . . . my word, it’s late . . . what will the duchess say?” Now she heard herself ask him abjectly, “What about sex? Sometimes I just want to say to Alberto, ‘Oh, come on and sleep with me tonight.’”