MR. VALDEZ WAS very like the rest of us. Few of us are expert tango dancers, skilled polo players, internationally admired authors and respected scholars. Very few of us have wonderful old cars or enough money in the bank never to have to worry about a thing. But, for the most part, we all believe we are good. We all assume we are more or less decent people, more sinned against than sinning, and if life has not turned out exactly as we planned, if it is a little less than we might have hoped for, if our achievements have not been as great as they might and our disappointments a little greater, if others have been left miserable in our wakes, that is invariably the result of circumstance and never because of any failure of our own, never because of any deliberate act of malice or selfishness. Except for Father Gonzalez, those who believe in Heaven are always sure they will get in.

Mr. Valdez was no different. His great ability to see into souls and open them on a page for others to look at, like frogs on a dissecting table, sliced apart and held with pins, did not extend to himself. His adulteries were, literally, past number and, since they could not be counted, that made them trivial and beneath notice. His visits to the Ottavio House, the girls whose names he never knew, whose faces he would never recognize, were no more than business transactions, like buying a suit, like putting petrol in his car. Maria was forgotten, he owed Ernesto nothing, the things he wrote in reviews were simply funny, bright, witty—not cruel, or career-destroying—he was a dutiful son and he was convinced that marrying Caterina would make her happy and enrich her life.

And if anyone had pointed out that he did not ask Caterina to marry him but simply ordered it, demanded it again and again until she agreed, he would have looked at them with puzzlement, since it was obvious that what he wanted was what she wanted too. So, when she said: “I’ll need something to wear if I’m to meet your mother,” he heard what he wanted to hear.

Mr. Valdez could write a sentence as elegant as a swan but his sentences were like the swans served before a Renaissance prince: a swan stuffed with a goose, stuffed with a capon, stuffed with a chicken, stuffed with a poussin, stuffed with a partridge, stuffed with a lark, layer after layer, one inside the other, there to be discovered, looking like a swan. When he read the words of others, when he heard the words of others, he expected those layers to be in their words too. Sometimes they were not. There was nothing layered inside Caterina’s words—not in the words she spoke. Her stories were her stories but when she said: “Wouldn’t you rather have sex?,” when she said: “I would like to love you, Chano, if that’s all right,” when she wrote: “I write,” that was all there was. The simple truth. No layers. It was absolutely incomprehensible.

After the champagne was finished and they had showered together and he had scrubbed away the dust of the graveyard from his skin and gently washed the smell of his sweat from hers, he took her down in the lift and they went shopping. There was a place along the Avenue which Maria had mentioned and he went there. It was a mistake.

The place was stately, like an ambassadorial anteroom. It smelled of lilies and there were two women—women just like Maria—standing by the back wall, graceful as herons, whispering about something. One of them held up a violent yellow dress and tittered. Caterina was uncomfortable and embarrassed, even a little ashamed, and her unease spread to him, like a spark across a gap. She stood there in her silly cloth shoes—why did she always wear those, when that first day she was wearing heels?—and that coat, that shapeless, brown conical coat, not brown like the browns Maria wore, not honey-yellow, not treacle-black but the color of rot and mushrooms and compost, and she looked like an intruder. He put his hands on her shoulders and, gently, tugged the thing from her shoulders.

She did not resist. She was stunned into compliance, like a heretic being stripped for execution as the flames are kindling. “This isn’t the place for me,” she said.

“Nonsense. This is exactly the place.” He wasn’t listening again. “It’s a bit of a leap, that’s all.”

There was a woman approaching across a silent carpet, pallid, bloodless as a vampire, with an impenetrable, unreadable face under a mask of cosmetics, angular, plank-like, a woman with corners, and she was looking at Valdez, not at Caterina. She would not look at Caterina.

“It’s too much of a leap. This isn’t what I need.”

The woman said: “How can I help you, sir?”

Even for Valdez, who was used to sipping on a drink in a quiet garden while he explained his requirements and made his selection, that was a brutal epiphany.

He said: “Why are you talking to me?”

She made no answer. Caterina noticed, although Valdez did not, that the woman’s painted eyebrow flickered the way a seismograph does in Paris when a pomegranate falls from its tree in the gardens of the Japanese Emperor.

“Why are you talking to me?” he said again. “Why are you not talking to this lady?”

Caterina said: “I think we should try somewhere else.”

But he wouldn’t stop. “Why are you talking to me? Why?”

“Let’s just go, Chano.”

“This is a dress shop for women, isn’t it? Do I look like a woman?”

Caterina took back her coat.

“Sir.”

“Do I look like the sort of person who wears dresses? Do I look like a pervert? Do you think I’m some maricon?”

“I’m going now, Chano.”

His fury spluttered out and embarrassment came in its place. He glared at the woman, refusing to look away from her even when the door clicked quietly into place behind him.

“Besa mi culo, puta.” Mr. Valdez fled from the shop to where Caterina was sitting on a park bench across the street.

When he sat down beside her she said: “I can’t be the person who shops there.”

“You make me ashamed.”

“Ashamed? You’re ashamed of me?”

“I’m ashamed of myself. Yelling like that. At a woman like that. At a woman.”

“You’re embarrassed about behaving badly toward a social inferior.”

“Maybe.”

“No, you are. That’s it. You are ashamed about her for the same reason that you were protective of me. She saw all the reasons why I can’t be your wife and that made you furious.”

“But you will be my wife.” He took a deep breath. “Please, be my wife.”

“You are the great L.H. Valdez. I am a girl wearing torn jeans. How can I be your wife?”

“Because we love one another.” Mr. Valdez said that and he believed it.

“Yes, we love one another.” She believed it too. “Do you think that means nobody will notice that I come from a little town in the mountains? All your fancy friends, all those editors and authors and university professors, they won’t notice that I’m wearing ripped jeans? They won’t care that I’ve never been to the opera and I’m not clever like them—oh, I’m clever, but not like them—and I never use a fork and knife when I eat a peach? Your mother? She won’t notice?”

“My mother won’t care. She will love you because I do.”

“You can order that, can you? Simply tell her to love me?”

“Yes. And the rest doesn’t matter. I have had enough cleverness to last a lifetime. I have had enough of all the things you are not. Things will be hard for you—much harder than for me. I’m the man with the gorgeous young wife. They will be sick with envy.”

“They will be sick with laughter.”

“I don’t care if they laugh at me.”

“But you care if they laugh at me. That woman in the shop, she only ignored me and you went crazy.”

“Nobody will laugh at you.”

“Chano, they will.”

“Yes,” he said, “they will. Can you bear it?”

In the dress shop, the angular woman drew down the blinds and glided, smooth and silent, putting down one pointed toe, shifting her jagged hips, stepping forward, the thin lozenges of her soles, the vicious needles of her heels, one after another in a single line, marking the thick carpet with her passing as the jaguar marks the moss at the riverside, softly, so it springs back with no sign, walking silently into the shadows.

After a breath, Caterina said: “I would bear anything for you.”