He kept a hot plate in his office, one of those single-burner electric jobs you find in efficiency apartments and cheap motels. Tucked between it and his semantics texts was a tin of coffee, real coffee, not the ground-up dust they stocked the faculty kitchen with. We’d met to review the progress on lexical recall in my patients with anomia. For some reason, the anomics had me stumped; their inability to conjure up the names of the most common objects while knowing exactly how to describe them had set my research back to ground zero. If I couldn’t produce a positive report by the end of the month, I’d be saying goodbye to funding and sayonara to tenure.

Lorenzo set the coffee to percolate, and we walked through the latest brain scans. There, among MRIs and EEGs and Italian coffee, it began.

The first thing I noticed was his hand as it poured thick black espresso into a demitasse. His skin was dark, had none of the scrubbed pinkness of Patrick’s hand. One of his nails was chipped, and there were calluses on the tips of his fingers, which were long and thin.

“You play the guitar?” I asked.

“Mandolin,” he said. “And some guitar.”

“My father played the mandolin. My mother would sing along; we all would. Nothing great, just the usual folk songs. ‘Torna a Surriento,’ ‘Core ’ngrato,’ things like that.”

He laughed.

“What’s funny?”

“An American family singing ‘Core ’ngrato.’”

Now it was my turn to laugh. “What makes you think I’m American?” Only I didn’t say it that way. I said it in Italian.

We met like that, in his office, where the hot plate and the little coffee maker were. Once I’d put the anomia project to bed, thus securing my somewhat unstable future for another semester, we still met.

“I brought you a bit of Italy,” he said one day, not long after he’d returned from visiting family over spring break. Our speech had migrated from half English, half Italian to full-throttle Neapolitan, and Lorenzo’s office became an oasis of continentalisms: caffè, music, the crunchy baked taralli cookies he brought in on Mondays after slaving all weekend over his grandmother’s recipe.

He pushed a newspaper-wrapped object across the desk.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Some music for you, Gianna. Open it.”

I did. Inside the paper was a wooden box, inlaid and polished, a five-petaled rose motif around the border. It didn’t look much like music until Lorenzo reached over and pushed up the cover with a finger.

I still remember that, how he lifted the hinged top with such care, like a bridegroom sliding a lace skirt above his new wife’s knee, preparing to hook his finger into her garter. A lascivious action made tender by the gentleness.