April 25th

Well, it wasn’t as easy as I thought. After a little stab at holding back, I simply called and asked her out. And do you know what she answered: Why?

Why? It never occurred to me that I would have to explain (it’s funny how unused I have become to people other than Howard asking me simple questions like Why?). Because I found you intriguing, I said. Because I went back to Natalia Ginzburg as you recommended, and liked a lot of what I read. Because I thought we could, I don’t know, talk. It came out more like “I dunno”; I sounded like I was seventeen.

At her end of the phone: a long excruciating silence.

To be doing this at my age. To be feeling this.

Then she said, All right.

On Thursday I picked her up at her apartment in the East Village. Old kilims, a sofa covered with a printed Genoese fabric, a wall of thumbtacked drawings, quotations written out on three-by-five cards. “I’m experienced at improvising homes for myself,” she said. “It’s the flip side of a wandering spirit.”

Even though she grew up near Genoa, she spent summers in Tuscany, where her grandfather had an old farmhouse. Her summers were a mixture of country and “town” (imagine thinking of Florence as a town), where she used to stay in a pensione with her father and spend the weekend looking at paintings and sculpture.

She said that she was drawn to the backgrounds of those pictures, the fantastical roads and cities that hover in the distance of religious paintings and certain portraits. Most people think of them as an afterthought, she said, but for her they were the main attraction. I asked if that was connected to her wandering spirit, and she said that she hadn’t put that together before. I said, “But it’s so apparent.”

I loved watching her think. It made her more radiant, if that’s possible.

She said that whenever she goes to a notable place—a ruin, a monument—she always turns away from it, to see the secondary view. In great houses she likes the kitchens and attics best. She’s captivated by the provenance of paintings, footnotes in biographies. Her favorite part of a menu is the side dishes; on trains she prefers to ride facing backward.

“I prefer to ride forward,” I said. “That way, I can fool myself into believing I know what lies ahead in life.”

“So that’s what I’ve been doing wrong all these years!”

I laughed. She laughed. Then I asked if she was seeing anyone romantically.

“Not at the moment. What about you?”

“That depends.” I held her eye.

“On what?”

“On you.”

Costanza knew she was right to limit her reading. She had not brought more pages with her, and she was glad.