Like most people past the age of sixty, Woman A often thinks about growing old. At the same time, she often thinks back to those years when old age seemed a very distant thing, more like an option than a law of nature. After graduating from college, she had gone to live in a large city. In those days, rather than look for a husband, or even a steady boyfriend, she was happy to date several different men, and given that she was attractive, fun-loving, and not terribly choosy, this goal was not hard to achieve. Of course, this playing the field wasn’t going to last, it wasn’t supposed to last (remarkable, in fact, how fast it got old), and she had imagined herself, in due time, settling down with the One. But long before this could happen, now and then when she happened to see a certain type of couple—an elderly woman accompanied by some geezer with rounded shoulders and sparse white flyaway hair, his belt riding high on his ribs—she would feel a sort of ache for the old man she herself was going to end up with one far-off day. That man, as she saw him, though bereft of youth, would still have certain essential things. To begin with, thanks to a long and successful career, he’d have plenty of money to live on. He’d have a good heart, and in spite of the frailties of old age, he’d have his dignity. (It goes without saying he’d have all his marbles.) He and she would live a quiet but stimulating life together, a rich, elegant life, as she saw it: going to concerts and plays and movies, and traveling abroad, though never as part of any god-awful retirees’ group tour please. Past the age of passion, they would still be romantic, as anyone who saw them, as she did, against the backgrounds of those foreign cities and exotic landscapes could tell. As the years passed, the image of the old man began to appear to her more and more clearly, almost as if he were walking toward her. But as more time passed, his image began, as if walking backward, to recede. And now that she finds herself facing a different old age from the one she used to imagine, the question won’t leave her alone. It plays in her head, like something from an old song, or a poem she was forced to memorize in school: Where is the old man? Oh where is the kind, companionable old dear? Could somebody please tell her?

That kind of woman’s story.

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Another story, this one set in Umbria.