She got the runabout bus at the station and gave the name of her hotel, a fancy place on the Lungarno. Her room was 505 and she wondered if she should play lotto with all the fives that were turning up. But it was already two in the afternoon, too late. Clutching her lists, Marguerite skipped lunch and went desperately about her Florentine pursuits.

But everything was wrong. The Arno was thick and muddy, the shops full of tourist stuff, the city dismally flat and Jun-colored. Was this Florence, jewel of the Renaissance, as she had known it newly arrived in Italy as a prospective student; when the bombed bridges over the river hadn’t yet been rebuilt and there were postwar ponti di fortuna connecting the two sides and always thronged with people going on foot from one part of the city to the other?

There on a jerry-built bridge over limpid water in the middle of hurrying crowds, Alberto Morosini had offered her not only love and devotion in marriage but redemption of everything previous to that moment: “I’ll make you a positive human being yet,” he told her. “You’ve suffered enough.” He would learn her language and she his; she would give him youth and American optimism, he would give her his stable, experienced maturity. All that was long ago. The temporary bridges had been replaced by stone and concrete ones over which an endless traffic of cars, buses, and motorcycles roared, and no one now passed on foot. The air smelled of exhaust; the sallow water was sluggish with mud; and the words that had been said were unrecoverable.

Useless to think of the past, she told herself. What I have is now . . . day by day, for as long as it goes. Useless to think of the years with Alberto—years of being anesthetized, of withdrawing while he emerged in his work, in his books of poetry and criticism, in his encounter with America, where they had lived half their married life, and now in his prestige as a critic and as editor of an Italian review. She saw it as his success story. They could make a movie.

She had always loved the movies; she liked to think of herself as a camera’s eye shooting movies of all the people she saw around her. Everything that took place in her life unfolded at a distance from her, as if in a movie. She felt detached from the feelings that could, if she let them, connect her to people. (“Do as you feel,” the good doctor said. But how could she if she had stopped her feelings?) She liked to be a spectator, an observer. That way she could put a frame around the parts she liked and discard the parts that didn’t come out well, the ugly parts. She could see something in sequence, see it whole and understand it. Rerun it, clip it, splice it. What she really wanted was not to be in it herself, just look on as the others performed: her parents, brothers, teachers, friends and lovers, husband and children.