She had no uniform; she had no official presence with which to impress people and help them recognize her. And yet she did: adult woman, longtime wife, past mistress, mother of two living daughters and one dead son, college grad, family flop, translator and sometime substitute teacher, forty-five typed words a minute, bella presenza, drives own car, Jungian analysand, job applicant, divorce applicant, life applicant. These were the buttons and stripes of her uniform and still no one saw her. She could no more exist alone than does a painting without viewers, or the Grand Canyon without tourists. Her existence depended on others. How could she get them to know, by Jesus, that she was here?

At the hotel she took a bath and was dressing for dinner when Alberto arrived, snorting and blowing busily through his great nose, his small dark eyes darting restlessly around the room.

“Ciao, cara, did you have a good trip? I find it very fatiguing these trips—and then these conferences. This room is not bad, though. I think I caught a cold on that overheated train. I ate like a dog today, let’s hope to go someplace decent for dinner. Are you ready?”

She regarded him dispassionately: his stooped shoulders, expanding paunch, receding hair. Alberto at fifty-five. Funny that just this year, of all years, his age should contain her lucky number twice. He didn’t believe in the separation. He was being patient about it. He would wait. He had faith. But he would see.

That evening they were at dinner with a group made up of the illustrious and the old, which included even those critics or writers still only in their forties who had managed to catch up in aging. The place was drafty, as all of Florence was, and Marguerite felt the cold seep in and cling to her bones. She watched the agile waiters make small talk at the table of a striking Negro girl and her Italian boyfriend. At her own illustrious old table, instead, the talk was of literary matters.

Bacchetti, a corpulent, solemn old man with the air of a Boccaccio abbot, the author of many novels and a celebrated trilogy, a maestro of the sensual passage, sat at the center of the table and carried on a vast monologue of self-praise, olympically dismissing as asses and prick-heads other writers whose names were sometimes inserted in his pauses. In her Gloversville girlhood the thought of being in such company, knowing such names, being married to one, would have seemed to Marguerite the summit of her aspirations. Now, vaguely excited by the waiters but feeling out of the conversation, she put on her uniform and signaled to be recognized.

“I have read part of your trilogy,” she told Bacchetti as he sat back, replete with food, a monolith of majesty.

He smiled benignly. “It’s been translated into English, but for some reason it is not well received in America—in England, yes.”

“It would make a marvelous movie, and then everyone would read the book.”