THEY MET ACROSS A crowded roof, where the trappings of romance ensnared them. The occasion was a sunny June wedding in Rome in the late fifties. She was a friend of the bride, Ivan a friend of the groom. Cory and Joan, the nuptial pair, were later divorced, for intricate reasons, back in the States. Caroline and Ivan, for reasons no less intricate, endured.

Ivan and the bridegroom had Fulbrights; almost all the laughers and drinkers on the noisy crowded roof had Fulbrights, and with the Fulbright year drawing to a close, the party had an aura of ritual joy, consummating the year’s friendships and leisurely labors. There was an accordionist, a short stocky man with glittering gray eyes and ruddy cheeks, who swerved among the clumps of wedding guests smiling beatifically, his belly gravid with the instrument that hung from thick straps on his shoulders. He was playing the most beautiful melody Caroline had ever heard. Or perhaps it just seemed the most beautiful. She was aware that it might be the champagne. Even the goblet seemed to refract the melody in its cut-glass surfaces, beaming flashes of red and blue and green in the sunlight. Intoxicating too were the red flowers in boxes lining the walls of the roof, the heady smells of cheese and sausage leavening the fragrant air, and the array of dresses, the filmy dresses of the women. She wore a shimmering romantic dress herself, lavender, a throwback to an older era, with ropes of beads and a pearl-gray garden party hat whose great brim hid most of her fair hair and shaded her inquisitive, stern, and rather fragile face. She felt she was masquerading. The accordionist’s tune rose like a kite, then dipped, rose again and plunged. In the curve of every plunge, as in a kite, was the promise of the rise to come. The melody shifted from major to minor and back again, showing a touching faith, Caroline thought, in the recurrence of opposites: that the crooked would become straight and the broken mend. The tune must have a name, maybe even words; it came from somewhere. The little accordionist drew her like a Pied Piper. Carefully, she shaped a sentence of inquiry in her minimal Italian, and plucked the man by the sleeve.

“Scusi, ma come si chiama questa canzone?”

He bent his head towards her, adjusted his smile, and shrugged in the classic Mediterranean way, ambiguity elevated to an art. Then tipping an invisible hat, he receded, moving backwards through the crowd, facing her with a rueful smiling mouth, so sorry he couldn’t explain. Puzzled, she turned to the panorama of tiled roofs below. Rome was a mosaic of segments of earth—amber, ochre and brown, the churches and the bridges spanning the somber river gray and white cutouts pasted on. Above, the sky hung flat and static, the artificial blue of postcards. She felt like throwing her head back and laughing, though why she should feel so happy she didn’t know; she didn’t know a soul at the party except Joan, the bride; didn’t know a soul in Italy, for that matter. She was a stranger to everyone, and had recently buried her father in chilly dark New England earth. April in Massachusetts had been not only cruel but cold. An only child, she sat at his bedside during the prolonged illness whenever she could, stitching a needlepoint hanging from the hospital gift shop, later to be tossed out unfinished, the horse in the center incomplete. For weeks her life was circumscribed by his death, the four walls of the square hospital room, the four fibrous edges of the square hanging. Finally he died. The cold, pebbly soil resisted the spades. The diggers struggled while she watched with her heart dulled, out of patience at last. Afterwards she bought herself this trip with the savings he left, like a treat for a child who has behaved exceptionally and unexpectedly well in a difficult situation. Good-natured Joan arranged for her to stay in the apartment of a nomadic Fulbright who was off in the south. Caroline was drunk on the unreality of it.

Turning back, she leaned against the low wall and surveyed the party. A quite tall man with darkish skin or a permanent suntan seemed to be looking at her, glowering almost, with concentrated feline eyes, above the heads of the crowd. His expression was strained, as though he couldn’t make her out clearly, or couldn’t remember where he knew her from. He did not smile, and he appeared solitary, distinct from the people surrounding him. His stare was so prolonged it might have been rude, except that it was utterly without hostility. An elegant stare. She could be mistaken; no doubt she was. He was squinting not at her but at the splendor behind her—history, gloria mundi, while she was only a particular young woman at a party in a romantic hat. As if on a dare, she winked at him. So faint, a mere twitch of the lid, he would never notice. The probability that he would, considering the distance between them, the number of people present, the faintness of the gesture and his state of readiness, was something infinitesimal, which she might attempt to calculate were she not high on champagne. Immediately he started towards her, clearing a path through the guests, moving with a sort of stealthy grace, all unaware. Aha, the noble savage approaches, thought Caroline. She drank some more, her eyes cast down.

“Hello. You winked,” he said soberly, halfway between question and statement. He was less elegant, less finished, close up. Shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows, red tie hanging loose and askew, and longish hair mussed from the breeze, he might have been one of the broad-backed Roman stonecutters in his Sunday best, out slumming among his social betters, proud and wary.

“I’m really not that sort of person at all,” said Caroline. “I don’t know what came over me. I didn’t think you’d see from so far away.”

“I have contacts.”

“Contacts? Oh, contact lenses.” She laughed and peered up at his face from beneath the brim of her hat. “I can’t tell they’re there.”

“Of course not. That’s the idea.” His name was Ivan, he said. What was hers?

She hesitated. People of primitive tribes, she once read, do not give their names away; they cannot so readily entrust that emblem to strangers. Her name, too, seemed more than she could afford to give away to this large and sober person. He looked tenacious; she might never get it back. Besides, his eyes were peculiarly powerful, not from any supernatural glow but because they did not always focus accurately. When she thought he had been looking past her they saw her wink. And just now, while they gave the impression of profound penetration, Ivan was nodding to someone passing by. Only a fraction off—there must be a term for it in pathology—but it certainly gave him an air, and made her suspicious.

Still, this was a party and she could hardly refuse.

“Y-n or i-n-e?” he wanted to know.

“I-n-e. Why?”

“I don’t know.” He smiled for the first time. It changed his face. He became ingenuous, accessible. “I-n-e sounds more interesting, for some reason.”

“Oh. Would you have lost interest in talking to me if I had said Y-n?”

“Almost nothing could make me lose interest in talking to you,” he said in his serious manner, and then he smiled again, gallantly.

Caroline played with her beads. She was not used to such candor, or such flattery, so fast. But why “almost,” then? What was the “almost”? And fast was the last word she would choose to describe him. He bore himself with uncommon calm, as if he issued from a leisurely, antique place off the beaten path, a place from which old-world gallantry might travel full circle to meet new-world frankness. She lifted her glass but it was empty.

Ivan led her over to the opposite edge of the roof, where a row of tables served as a bar. They passed the accordionist, once more playing the rare tune. He widened his eyes at Caroline and grinned as though they had a common, conspiratorial past. She edged past him in confusion.

The young Americans hovering around the bar in bright colors appeared flighty against the historical backdrop, out of their element, like mounted butterflies inspirited with life. Vulnerable, enthusiastic prey. A bunch was laughing and exclaiming over some kind of emblem hung from a hook on a pillar. Caroline had to stand on tiptoe to see past the shoulders of the young men guffawing. The thing was a fat carrot, point downward, with a tuft of green growth on top, flanked by two large round purple onions.

“What is that supposed to be?” she asked Ivan, and saw the instant the words left her tongue. It was bad enough that she had winked. Now he would think her not only forward but naïve, or else willfully provocative; easy game either way. Strangely, this prospect gave her a humming exhilaration.

Ivan glanced up at the vegetable object and glanced quickly away. “It’s some kind of...uh...fertility symbol, you know. Maybe it’s a tradition at Italian weddings.” He cleared his throat and busied himself reading the labels of the champagne bottles.

Why, he is delicate, she thought. A man of taste. She smiled more freely as he finally handed her the glass. His party manners were perfect, as though acquired with diligence. “Rather blatant, wouldn’t you say?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he replied awkwardly. “It must be left over from some primitive rite. People used to be more matter-of-fact about these things than we are. A wedding, after all...” He stole another glance up at the fertility symbol. “Would you like something to eat?”

She couldn’t help laughing out loud. “Oh no. Not right now, thanks.” Not quite yet, anyway, she was drunkenly tempted to murmur. But no, not to Ivan. She had to respect his modesty. They walked away from the tables. “You must be one of the ubiquitous Fulbrights, is that right?” Caroline asked.

“Yes. You make us sound like a lepers’ colony, though.”

“I didn’t mean to. What are you studying?”

“Something about the relation of architectural style to political regimes, the rise and fall of empires, and so forth. A narrow little study. What about you?”

“Oh, I’m not studying anything. I have no group or intellectual purpose. I’m on vacation. Between jobs, actually.”

“When you’re not on vacation or between jobs, what do you do?”

“Math.”

“Math?” He stepped back. Caroline nodded. “Can you do statistics?” he asked with a kind of reverent disbelief.

She might easily have taken offense; it was a stupid question she had answered sharply enough in the past. But happy and vaguely excited by standing so close to him that their sleeves brushed when they raised their glasses at the same time, she gave Ivan a reprieve.

“Of course,” she said smoothly. “I’ve tutored people in it. People in the social sciences or the arts, who need it for a project. People like you.” She smiled.

He stared as before, ran his fingers nervously through his thick hair, and refocused his eyes on her. “Listen,” he said softly, touching her wrist with two fingers, “if you’re not busy tomorrow we could go to the Campidoglio. You know, the Capitol, where they got married today? I’ll show you the wolf.”

“Wolf? What wolf?”

He was a man to rely on. He promised a wolf and there was a wolf indeed, beneath the great hill of the Capitol. It was a golden afternoon with a glaring, overripe sun and clean dark shadows. Yesterday, alone, Caroline had followed the other wedding guests up the stairs to the grand piazza overlooking the city, where Michelangelo once scattered flagstones, dark and light, to make a mad checkerboard. Today Ivan led her away from the steps and off to the left. Though gentle, his grip on her arm was very firm. The side path he chose seemed to lead nowhere: shadows, bushes. She had a flash of crazy fear. Where was he taking her? Who was he, anyway? And why was she letting him pull her—yes, pull, for his fingers had tightened around her arm—off into the shadows? But in less than a minute they stood at the bars of a small murky cage dug out of natural rock. Their arrival roused the wolf, who sat still and attentive in a far corner. She lifted her head and bayed, an eerie sound reverberating off the stone. Ivan beamed proudly, as if he had conjured the entire scene.

“And I didn’t believe you.”

“I know.” He grinned. “But it’s full of unlikely things. You’ve only been here four days. You have a lot to see.”

“Yes,” she said, feeling suddenly weak. He made it sound overwhelming, like the ritual labors assigned in mythology. She wondered if he would be taking her on any more bizarre excursions, if he was planning to make her labors his own. Would they fetch golden apples from the ends of the earth?

“What’s a wolf doing down here?”

“Remember Romulus and Remus?”

“Oh, those twins that were suckled by a wolf.”

“Yes. Their mother sent them down the river in a basket, and the wolf rescued them and nurtured them. Later on they founded Rome. So this wolf commemorates the founding of the city.”

“A wolf for a grandmother,” said Caroline. “Without her, no Rome, no Empire, none of it.”

“Great mother figure, you mean?”

“No, what I really meant was the idea of a beast as responsible for all of this.”

Ivan laughed. “Behind every great civilization is a beast.”

“Well, look at the ancient Romans, how beastly they were, all that murder and intrigue.”

“But they were noble too. Remember all the noble Romans in Shakespeare?”

“Noble and beastly together? A neat trick. Look where they put it, though, right below the City Hall. Beneath law and order they hide this savage wolf, who keeps them alive on her milk.”

The wolf, as if eavesdropping on its visitors, approached them from the rear of the cage. Glowering from slate-gray eyes that looked at once treacherous and ready to weep, it grasped the iron bars in its front paws and raised its gray-white muzzle up towards them, against the wire-mesh barrier. In that pose of supplication, or threat, the torso of paler gray, with rows of teats like hairy knobs, quivered with each intake of breath. The wolf appeared to be panting with rage. Caroline could see tiers of ribs below the fur; she could imagine the stripped carcass.

“He doesn’t seem very glad we’ve come,” said Ivan, resting his hand on her shoulder.

“She. It may just be her standard performance.”

Staggering slightly on her hind legs, the wolf jerked her head back and opened her mouth so wide that the angle between her jaws could have spanned a human neck. The teeth, glistening rows of them, were sharpened to a fine point; Caroline could picture them descending cleanly into their prey. The pink tongue was curled in a tremulous arc. The throat undulated as the wolf swallowed, and then she gave out right in their faces a howl starting in the depths of her register, streaking its way up like a siren, and ending on an unresolved querulous note. Anguish, it seemed, and vast in its breadth. Caroline gasped at the sound. Ivan squeezed her shoulder.

Abruptly, the wolf dropped down to four legs and trotted calmly back to the corner of the cage. She had withdrawn into herself and no longer projected anything, like an actor reaching the wings, the character falling like a cape to reveal the person beneath, innocuous.

It was chilly down there in the shadows. They walked back along the path and turned to climb the stairs for the spectacular view from the high piazza.

The beast in him did not show itself for a long time. Caroline was baffled. Perhaps he was lacking something, or she was. She had come here for pleasure and now she suffered in the flesh from wanting him. Exasperated, she pondered whether his backwardness—if she could call backward something which had hardly demonstrated an existence—might be a mode of originality, a “line,” a feat of abstinence designed to so impress her that it would be the more amply rewarded later, as in a fable. But she was no Puritan; brought up by Puritan parents, she had seen the hazards of that way early and averted them through force of will. She was unimpressed by abstinence and disliked fables where rewards were meted out with an unreal justice. Ivan could have whatever he asked of her at once, deserving or not.

On the trip over—a ship, chosen to stretch the crossing and unravel her nerves—the images of her father dying were fresh, superimposed on the line of the horizon as she sat alone on deck. She rallied her spirit with childish visions of the sensual goodies awaiting her now that she was cut loose—dark-skinned, white-toothed musical Latins escorting her about the city of legend, making ardent love to her in shuttered rooms, povera orfana that she now was, healing with their tongues all her wounds. Mother bears licking the cub into shape. But her time was taken up by Ivan, wining her and dining her, cheaply—Fulbrights were notoriously poor; she had money and offered, but women weren’t allowed to pay. Morning and night he telephoned with intriguing plans: the beach at Fregene, the Pantheon, picnics at Ostia...He was dark-skinned and white-toothed, and he sang, too, badly, mostly corny songs from musical comedies, and occasionally he hummed the wonderful tune that the accordionist played at Cory’s and Joan’s wedding. Only he did not make ardent love. Caroline waited, a child of her time after all. Her freedom went as far as accepting advances or fending them off; nothing else.

Instead he orated on the stones of Rome as they trod them. He walked her through the ruins of the Forum and showed off his Latin on the inscriptions. He had attended a special high school in New York for smart boys only, he told her in a rare mood of revelation, a school favored by the sons and grandsons of Jewish immigrants, like himself. Besides that, he was a Boy Scout, he informed her. Couldn’t she tell? He could still recite the Boy Scout pledge, and did (“courteous, kind, reverent...”), while they drank wine thigh to thigh in a trattoria. He knew everything about the paintings and sculpture, the fountains and the architecture, and he perused her with the same tender, educated discrimination. He looked for structure and composition, he told her, harmony of the parts and general resonance. She saw a great deal of Rome, but a Rome filtered through Ivan: he stood between the world and her eyes, refining the particles of light. And he kissed her good night at her door two times: lips warm and slightly parted lingered on hers briefly with a feeling of misplaced nostalgia, as if he and she had been lovers long ago and their passion long past, a frenzy remembered rather than anticipated, and this kiss merely the remnant, a little dangerous, a little teasing, and a little false, yet so sweet. Then he moved his lips away with the regret of old war movies: late for the train that would carry him from her, to battle and maybe to his death. She asked him in for the euphemistic coffee, but he said no. He wished he could, but he had an early morning meeting at the Fulbright office—if he came in he knew he’d stay too late. Damn right, thought Caroline. Those kisses left her wobbly as a teen-ager as she gazed from her open window after his body in retreat down the narrowing Roman vista—a study in perspective, Ivan the vanishing point. Her fingertips tingled and her mouth hung open in a moronic droop until she realized and clamped it shut, furious.

It hurt her. She woke in the middle of the night, cold and alone and indignant. She pulled the covers close around her and huddled, then threw them off and reached for a cigarette. Inhaling with long deep breaths, she imagined them in her bed in every possible pose, his full lips open and smiling, his dark hair like an Indian’s mussed and falling over his eyes, from which he had removed the non-contact lenses and which perused her as always, and she displayed everything, she didn’t care, so long as he would...He came closer to her. It had grown so very dark all around them. She felt the heat of his skin, and an unbearable excitement. With a start, she awoke again in the dark. The air had the nasty smell of abandoned, burnt-out butts. Luckily the cigarette, half-smoked, had died harmlessly in the ashtray. There was a dreadful restlessness under her skin, as if a layer of fine ash were sliding beneath the surface. She had to get up to fling herself about, dashing in and out of the three rooms and pausing finally at the windows in the bedroom which overlooked a small square. In the daytime sturdy women, their hair wound in buns, with aprons and string bags crossed in ceaseless procession from the dairy to the butcher to the tobacco shop. They nodded to each other with austere dignity, or else stopped for vigorous dialogues that from Caroline’s window had an aura of high significance. The men, narrower and lighter on their feet, skimmed past the women like frisky motorboats skimming past steamers or barges, saluting with admiration, a touch of awe, and a whimsical recognition of difference. But now in the small hours the square was still and dark; one wrought-iron street lamp with a diminutive gargoyle at the top shone a faint yellow light on the stone walls. Every few moments a Fiat, a toy car, bumped along the cobblestones with a clatter unnatural for the hush of night. Only three windows in the buildings around the square were lit: for celebration, sorrow, conspiracy, love?

“Don’t you ever work?”

Ivan, leaning back with his eyes closed, lids against glass, laughed and shook his head. “I work going around like this.”

They were sitting in a small angle of shade on the Spanish Steps, near a flower stand. The mingled aromas wafted through the hot air in sickening ripples. Caroline wiped her face with a handkerchief she had just dipped in a fountain when they emerged from the dead heat of Keats’s house at the top of the stairs. On the way out of Keats’s house their bodies had brushed and Ivan’s mouth touched her hair. Maybe it was an accident, but she wished he wouldn’t touch her if he didn’t really want her, if they were only stray Americans going about together.

The slow-moving people in the square below were licking ice cream cones. She closed her eyes and conjured: cold, wet, sweet and vanilla melted on her tongue. Since she was a child she had done this. When her mother took away her ragged blanket she learned to fall asleep clutching a fantasy. The ice cream was cooling as it slid down her throat. Sweat dripped from Ivan’s temple to his jaw, from his jaw to his shirt. She tasted that in secret too, running her lips over the angle of the jaw, feeling the roughness of skin on her tongue.

“I mean for your Fulbright project. Don’t you have to do a paper, or an outline, or something?”

“Nothing much.” He smiled. “A very general outline. Mostly we’re on the honor system.”

“That’s a good deal you people get. At my job I had to come up with results all the time. Evidence of activity.”

“I wish work didn’t have to be like that,” said Ivan. “I wish I could support myself someday doing exactly what I like. I mean, by some miraculous coincidence doing exactly what I like would be my work.”

“What sort of work would it be?”

“Oh, I don’t know how to say it. I’ve never really said these things out loud.” He laughed and looked down at the square. “Not political science or history or the sort of thing I’ve been trained to do. I think I would be good at telling people how to go about getting what they want. That’s if they know what they want to begin with.” Ivan paused, as if what he was hearing was new to him. “I would like to figure out strategies—it wouldn’t matter what field they were in. I would need to know just enough about the content to shape the strategy. It would be like an abstract design, but purposeful. Does that make any sense?”

“Sure.”

“People would come to me with their ideas and dreams, and I would figure out a way for them to be realized.” He laughed again, shyly. “Then I could do it for towns and countries and continents, and then I could be God.”

“I see,” she said. “Well, a little ambition never hurt anyone. Tell me, do you lie awake nights figuring out strategies to get what you want?”

“Oh no. I’m not a Machiavelli. But I have tried to do pretty much what I like, on a small scale. So far, anyway. Haven’t you? That’s the way I thought of you that first time, when you winked.”

I didn’t wink, she longed to object, but couldn’t. “I’ve done what I had to, what needed to be done. Sometimes I liked it, not always. Even now, I can’t always do as I like.”

“Why not?”

She laughed without pleasure. “Because, Ivan, sometimes what I’d like to do just isn’t done.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t think I want to elaborate. After all, we’re really strangers.”

“Are we?” asked Ivan, peering at her in surprise.

“I would say so,” she replied coolly. “I would say you have kept us strangers. Strategically, maybe.”

That was all, she decided. With that she had come more than halfway, if being met halfway was what he required.

He was honest enough not to protest. “Let’s walk,” he said with a sigh, and got up. Out of instinct and habit she watched his long body uncurl, a procedure invariably complex and beautiful. Then she remembered and turned away.

“You see those people coming around the corner licking their cones?” he asked. “I can’t stand it any more. I must have some. The place can’t be far.”

Licking their cones, they walked together slowly toward cooler air. They were nearing the river.

“There’s something I’ve been wanting to say to you,” began Caroline. “I hope you won’t be hurt, or think I haven’t enjoyed all the things we’ve done, because I have. It’s simply that...I really did just get here. I need some time to myself. To wander around a bit, on my own.”

“I had a feeling you were working up to this.”

“You did?”

“Yes, I can read your mind. Oh no, it’s nothing mystical. I can see it on your face. I knew you wanted ice cream. I bet you never played cards. You wouldn’t have a chance, even with all your math. Everything you think is written right there.”

“I certainly hope that isn’t so. And anyway, I can play chess.”

“Well, I can’t.” He bit aggressively into the cracker of the cone. “Okay, when did you want me to disappear?”

“Come on, Ivan, I didn’t say it like that.”

“It amounts to the same thing, however you say it. So, when did you intend this moratorium to begin?”

Watching him attack the cone with feral motions, she was suffused with irritation. “Soon, maybe. Maybe right after we finish our cones. For a few days.”

“It’s your script, baby. Whatever you say. What do you call a few days?”

She stared. So he could talk that way too. A stripping away of civility to show the nakedness beneath, or the opposite, a cloak of brashness. Either way he tantalized. Were she an intimate of his she would hear such strange and jarring notes, atonal music. She would know him in his nakedness and in his masquerades.

“Do you want to call me on Friday?” she asked, suddenly frightened. It was Tuesday.

“If that’s what you want.”

They reached the breezy promenade along the river and stood facing each other like adversaries, each with a hand resting on the balustrade high above the water. Caroline had thrown away the empty tip of her cone but Ivan was eating to the very bottom.

“You could work on your outline,” she said with a faint laugh.

“Don’t tell me how to spend my time.”

“Sorry.”

They moved a step farther apart. The breeze gathered force, blowing their hair in their faces. Caroline’s full skirt whipped about her legs. The sun was descending for a cool evening. Already, passing women spread dark knitted shawls about their shoulders. A red-haired boy speeded by on a bicycle, nearly grazing them. As they each drew back the boy bared his teeth and laughed devilishly.

All at once, with a shake of the shoulders like casting out evil spirits, Ivan recovered his good humor. He moved toward her. “It’s too bad you’re doing this right now, because actually, I was planning to ask if you’d like to come over for a drink.”

“Were you?”

“Yes,” Ivan said. “Come on, I’ll show you my place.”

Caroline’s cheeks smarted, red in the wind. What had rushed through her as desire was molten rage. So he took it as a challenge. Well, she would not have him that way. No, love was not love that crept out of hiding through threats or ultimatums. If they were to duel, let it be with the grace of swords, with swoops and lunges, not the fists and hatchets of gladiators.

“I’m not in the mood any more. Your timing is off.”

“Oh, do you require everything perfectly measured out and timed, everyone lined up like horses at the starting gate, mathematically precise? I don’t know, then, whether I can...run in your track.” It was not even sarcasm; he was soft-voiced as ever, and smiling straight at her. There was a proper lunge. And she might have negotiated a worthy response, might even have smiled back and conciliated, except Ivan had sliced so near the bone, his thrust slipping right into the groove of old wounds, of others who said the same thing—only not as succinctly and never on such short acquaintance. How did he know? Undeniably, he had contacts—he had warned her the minute they met.

In pain and shock, with all the civility of stomping fists, she muttered, “You wanted the last word, you had it,” and walked off quickly, her head bent against the wind. Tears clamored behind her eyes but she wouldn’t let them out.

She set out aimless and free the next day, Ivan’s absence from her side a palpable relief. His long legs kept an almost martial pace, while she liked to amble. She could look now, or ignore, with unaided eyes; childishly she prized her ignorance simply because it was her own. She walked along the river again. Surely she could appreciate what a river had to offer without his refinement of vision. Today the water was black with a salacious tinge of green toward its banks, and sluggish, as befitted a river that had witnessed so much human intransigence. Against the flat milky sky jutted the castellations of an old fort where Renaissance Popes had fled for their lives. She didn’t need Ivan to find that out: the stories were right in her guidebook. With Ivan she wasn’t permitted to display a guidebook.

She stared her fill in the windows of expensive shops. Ivan, with fingers that could circle her arm, had dragged her from shop windows. He scorned the consumer economy and had a dread of being taken for a tourist. During the year he had bought ready-made clothes in Roman department stores, and with his dark hair and coloring he could easily pass for a native. How he loved to examine the menu in a restaurant and cast a nonchalant, compatriotic glance at the waiter, a tableau inevitably ruined when he opened his mouth to order. Harmless vanity.

She was an unabashed alien. She tried on dresses in an overpriced boutique on the via Frattina and ate in a place where waiters in red bolero jackets guarded the door with napkins over their arms. Ivan wouldn’t be caught dead here, she thought slyly as one of them pulled out her chair. All day she played tourist—a relief to assume so general and commonplace an identity—and hours later, coming home, she smiled at the children on her square, who ran about in summer darkness till the moon was high, then yawned, sallow-cheeked, in the morning. Into her dreams crept parochial images of ruins, pasta and anchovies and coins shimmering inanely at the bottom of fountains.

When she woke she wondered, still in the thickness of sleep, what she and Ivan would do today. She raised herself to her elbows. Through the half-open shutters the blue trapezoid of sky was lit with dusty gold sunshine. There would be no Ivan today, she remembered, maybe never. She herself had dismissed him, in a fit of perversity or pique. No, pride. The p’s of those brittle words popped at her insolently like mockers. The day was a sightseer’s delight, but Caroline was her specific self once again, set afloat like a lone particle in space. Queasy, she drank tea in sidewalk cafés. She shivered in the sun, grew dizzy walking in the Borghese Gardens, and finally, in the square of St. Peter’s, tilting her head back to look at the dome, was hit straight in the exposed, tender throat by panic like a six-foot wave.

She sat down on a bench, relieved that it had risen and crested. For she knew panic; once visible and labeled, it could take its finite course. When she was fifteen years old she came home from school to find her mother lying on the couch in the living room. Day after day. It was strange to see. She had always been energetic, buoyed up by a life devoted to propriety at home and good works abroad. But now she simply lay on the couch. At the beginning she would read, then she would listen to the radio, and then she did nothing. Caroline started cooking without being asked. She took over the laundry in the evening and the shopping on Saturdays. Her father was silently grateful, withdrawn, possibly embarrassed. He was a prim man who taught earth sciences at the Milton Academy; his mind was safely fixed on inanimate rocks of arcane stratified ages. Even then, Caroline understood that the fleshly present was almost more than he could bear, and she sometimes marveled that she had been conceived at all. So no one spoke the name of the illness; it was a house where unpleasant things were never spoken out loud. She was sorry for her mother, and kind, but as far as she knew, sickness was a passing thing; there were no ugly symptoms, and there were pills. Surely she would get up again soon, the swishing, clicking noises of her fine administration would return. Caroline’s attention was elsewhere.

She had become enchanted by mathematics, a Minotaur’s cave of proliferating abstraction whose paths led to ever vaster but more intricately divided spaces, world without end. In excitement, she pursued the vanishing thread. The teachers gave her special projects because she had gone through the textbooks on her own, over the summer. They sent her to hermetic volumes on dusty back shelves, books about Fourier’s Series, books with lushly complicated repeating patterns and sine curves that set up corresponding undulations of excitement in her head. One special teacher took her aside and initiated her into the secrets of spherical geometry, where—wonder of wonders—parallel lines met, on the rounded surface of the earth. And then, late Friday and Saturday nights, on the very couch where her mother’s strength leaked out afternoons, the editor of the school paper, a slim talkative boy of astounding verbal agility, took off his plain silver-rimmed glasses to reveal liquidy blue eyes, slipped a hand under her sweater and under her skirt while her parents lay chaste and dreaming upstairs, and went home leaving her flushed and wakeful, tossing irritably in the dark. There was plenty to claim her imagination.

But one day she experienced a flash of knowledge of the kind that seems to come from nowhere, from the empty cavities of the body, yet has come from everywhere. And immediately from being a flash it congeals into the most obvious truth, the essential truth, around which our lives will bind themselves thenceforth like scar tissue around a wound. She knelt beside the couch where her mother slept and saw that the color of her skin was cement, and her yellow hair was no longer springy but sagging; even her eyelids and her lips had tiny wrinkles, and her cold hands were colder than ever. She shook her; it was urgent that her mother wake and acknowledge her, Caroline. The eyes opened with reluctance. In them, before they fixed on place and time and Caroline kneeling, was the knowledge. Quite plainly, Caroline saw death, which was no more than a soft, pleading terror coating her mother’s eyes. It was not the terror that was so painful to see but the softness.

“What’s the matter?” her mother asked. “You’re staring at me.”

She broke her stare. “Nothing. How are you? Do you need anything?” But she wanted to burst out in shamed laughter, as if she had said a gross and stupid thing. What could she fetch her now that would make any difference? That stern shape was going away from her. Looking closely, she saw that her mother was much thinner, thinning out every day, discarding cells like cargo from a sinking ship, removing herself gradually to lessen the shock. Going, going, gone—evaporating like a movie ghost. Being a lady in the eyes of her neighbors and teaching a daughter to be the same had been a consuming vocation. And now she was consumed. By sixteen Caroline was gritty; she had thought her mother’s era of usefulness was over. She had even finished rebelling against her severity of outlook, and they had made a tenuous peace. Yet senselessly, as though she were an infant, it suddenly appeared that all rightness and balance came from the skeletal figure on the couch. Losing her, she would be adrift.

So it was that she became acquainted with panic, living with it nine months. For as long as it takes to make a baby, she labored to free herself of her mother. At the end she had the illusion that her labors enabled her mother to die. And she herself was delivered as well, of her panic. So that years later when her father’s eyes softened over with terror, she could suffer the panic to abide in her for as long as it took. And the bearing of it and the ridding herself of it came easier, like a second baby.

But Ivan! A stranger, no blood tie, what had he ever done for her or given her that the loss of him should be such an ordeal? Some accomplishment, she groaned. Some love, to be distinguished by the degree of pain it could cause. She despised people who doted on the sources of their misery.

When night fell she bought a loaf of bread and a liter of wine to take upstairs, and she sat on the floor trying to drink herself to sleep. There was not even a radio, and the square below was inexplicably quiet. “They have all gone into the world of light,” she murmured, and slipped naked into bed. Now, what had he found repellent about her? In the dim light from out the window she touched her face with her hands as if something grotesque might have sprouted there without her knowledge, as if she might resemble the small gargoyle thrusting from the solitary lamppost below. She did not imagine love, or Ivan’s body against hers. What she needed seemed, monstrously, to have gone beyond the consummations of touch. She wanted to be enveloped even more thoroughly, obliterated. She wanted to subside to something he could carry hidden in his flesh like a mother kangaroo. These images filled her with self-disgust. In a fury she bolted upright and threw a pillow across the room. She had a powerful arm. It hit the half-filled wineglass, which fell over and shattered. As in a Jewish wedding, she thought bitterly. He had shattered the glass by proxy. Her innocence gone, the temple destroyed. She had been pierced by the cruel, mocking shafts of love.

He called the next morning. She leaped from sleep to the phone, to bask in the voice coming at her like pure warmth. His voice had a low, narrow range and a huskiness at the edges that might break into a laugh at any moment.

“Well, can you?”

“I’m sorry. Could you—I didn’t hear what you said.” Her cheeks flushed.

But Ivan said sharply, “Are you alone?”

Aha! She could see his dark head pulled back warily, his pupils crouching behind the lenses. Was she alone! She had barely a living relative.

“What do you think? At this hour, God! What time is it?”

“Eight-thirty. I’m sorry I woke you. Cory and Joan are having a party tonight. A sort of farewell. Joan tried to get you all day yesterday. Where’ve you been?”

Caroline leaned back in bed, crossed her legs and began to smile. She would have him yet; she could almost feel him on the tips of her fingers. “Out.”

“Well, anyway, do you want to come?” he went on. “About nine. We could have dinner first.”

“Sure. I don’t have any pressing engagements. But listen, Ivan—” She paused, shocked at herself, and plunged on. “Before I see you again I have to tell you something.”

“Well?”

“Okay. I had a really bad day yesterday, and I’d like to know...is this a—a love affair or what? I’m not the subtle type. I need to know what’s going on.” Again she colored, but he couldn’t see her.

There was a wait. “What do you want it to be?”

“I asked you first.”

“Well, I should think it was obvious, what I want.”

“Obvious! It’s not obvious at all,” she cried. “If that’s your idea of obvious I’d like to see what you think is confusing. If anything is obvious, it’s that you don’t know what you want.”

“This is something we should discuss in person.” She could hear his relief, and even a tinge of jubilation. The laugh was poised and ready to break out. Conniving lazy bastard. She would have him, all right, but she had had all the labor of it.

“Caroline.” It was a voice that could tease like a probing finger. A shiver rose through her. “Are you still there?”

“I’m here.”

“Do you have your haughty look on, you know, your Greta Garbo look?”

“You’re vile.”

“Ah. I’ve wondered,” he said cheerfully, “what sort of sweet nothings you’d murmur.”

“I’m not at that point yet.”

“Believe me, I’m not taking anything for granted.”

“Oh, please,” she cried, “let’s not start all over again. This could go on forever, till we’re too old.”

“You’re right. I submit.”

“I don’t want you to submit,” she cried even louder. “I want you to...want.”

“I want, goddammit. Is that what you want to hear? I want. I want.” It was the first time she had heard him so angry. His anger was hard, like varnished wood.

“But what are you mad about? Is it so awful to say that?”

“I guess it is. For me.”

“Well, I’m glad you called, anyhow.”

“I could come over right now, and bring you breakfast.”

“No,” she said quickly, looking at the broken glass, the stained rug. “I have to straighten up the apartment and take a bath.”

“Oh, I’m not fussy,” said Ivan.

“No.” She laughed. “I want you to suffer.” She might as well laugh, if that was how he was going to be. He was funny, after all.

The party was supposed to be held on the roof where they had met, but a heavy gray sky foreboded rain, so it was held in the apartment below, Joan’s until Cory moved in. Caroline and Ivan walked there, singing, from the restaurant. They had drunk a good deal at dinner. As he pressed the door buzzer, Ivan slipped his fingers inside the waistband of her skirt; she retorted that he was fresh, and they were laughing like fools as Cory opened the door.

“Come on in,” he said. “I see you two are already in the party spirit.”

“Saluti,” said Caroline, stepping in and pulling Ivan after her. Raising an imaginary glass, she looked around. “Do you still keep your vegetable genitals hanging up? They were hung so well.”

Cory paled. He was a blond, cherubic young man, younger than Ivan; as in poetry, the roses fled from his cheeks. Ivan soothed him, then moving on, he placed Caroline against a wall, leaned up close and kissed her. “You frighten people,” he whispered, grinning with a kind of pride.

“But do I frighten you? That is the question.”

“Not in that way, no.”

“How, then?”

“I’ll tell you later.”

He released her and walked into the crowd. As she followed, she marveled that they were here at all, in this fragile ambience of transients having a last fling. Why were they not back in her place, since that was all they could think of anyway? Ivan brought a piece of pungent cheese to her mouth. She opened her lips, he slipped it between her teeth and she understood why. Weeks of tantalizing. It was all part of the act, an extended prologue, and Ivan a lavish, leisurely producer, a Cecil B. De Mille of the boudoir. “My vegetable love should grow vaster than empires, and more slow.” Never had she encountered a virtuoso in the prolonging of desire: mostly they were eager to prove themselves at consummation. An uncommon lover, possibly, but also uncommonly reluctant. She touched his leg surreptitiously and he brushed her shoulder with his in response.

“Let me introduce you to some people,” he said.

They joined a man and two women on paisley-covered mattresses near a window. The man, Ed, had a Fulbright to study art history. He was lanky and boyish, with unruly pale brown hair and skin as smooth as a girl’s. Next to him sat an older woman, plump and bouncy, and opposite, his wife, Rusty.

“It was every bit as bad as I thought it would be, having it in a Catholic hospital,” Rusty said in a toneless voice. She was gaunt, with deep shadows under her eyes, thick brown braids, and buck teeth. Ed poured more white wine into her empty tumbler, which she clutched so tightly that her knuckles showed white. “The nuns wouldn’t give me a thing for the pain. They just stood there, three of them, standing over me yelling, ‘Spingere, spingere.’”

Caroline looked questioningly at Ivan.

“Push,” he whispered in her ear, lingering an extra second on the final, breathy sound.

“But it was finally all right, apparently?” said the older woman, Sarah.

“I pushed. What else could I do?” She moved her stunned eyes to the face of each listener in turn, as though they could offer alternatives. “But those nuns had no feeling. If something went wrong they would let me die—I kept thinking that the whole time I was pushing. It was horrible.” She tipped her head back and downed the wine. “I hated all of them, and Ed and the baby too.”

“How old is the baby now?” Caroline asked.

“Five weeks.”

She examined Rusty more closely for signs of damage. She was skinny on top, and the rest of her body was hidden by her long skirt as she sat cross-legged on the mattress.

“We thought of bringing him along to show him off,” said Ed. “We have a basket. But at the last minute we realized it would be pretty noisy here, so we left him home.”

“You don’t mean you left him alone?” Sarah asked.

“Sure. We do it all the time.”

“You can’t do that,” she cried. “You can’t leave a five-week-old baby alone in an apartment all night!”

“Our neighbor would hear if he cried,” said Rusty, waving her thin arm through the air. “I’m there all day. I have to get out at night.”

“Don’t you realize what could happen!” Sarah rose to her feet excitedly. Strands of auburn hair slipped from the bun at the top of her head. “Crib death. Fire. Burglars. He could even choke from crying. I don’t understand you two. You must go home right away.”

Ed patted his beardless jaw. “I don’t know, Rusty, maybe...”

“Nonsense. He sleeps straight through the night. He’s a marvelous baby. And he has his pacifier.”

“He could choke on his pacifier,” said Caroline without thinking, then she put her fingers to her lips. She was the stranger; they were all friends.

“I can’t believe this. I mean, we’ve been doing this ever since he was born. Times have changed.”

“Babies haven’t changed, and you’ve been damn lucky,” said Sarah. “Listen, I’m going over there. Give me a key. I can’t sit still another minute knowing that baby’s alone. Bob? Bob?” She elbowed through the crowd to find her husband.

“I guess we ought to go with her,” said Ed.

“Jewish mothers,” Rusty grumbled. She stood up, smoothed down her skirt on her jutting hipbones and stalked off, setting her empty glass on the window sill. The window was wide open; Ivan removed the glass.

Caroline looked at him. “I’m not keen on babies myself, but really...”

Ivan turned to her absent-mindedly, desire forgotten, and laid his hand on her arm in a simple, friendly gesture. “It’s scary, isn’t it, to have a baby at all?”

“Nobody has to do it if they don’t feel up to it.” She shrugged. “Joan and Cory seem happy, don’t they?”

“I don’t know. They look the same to me.”

Later, when they were leaving, Ivan wanted to drive around to all seven hills of Rome. The views at night, he told her, were spectacular. They went from crest to crest. Beautiful as Ivan promised, the city drifted below, black and starry. But back in the taxi after the fourth hill, Caroline reached out and put her hand on his knee, and he leaned forward and gave the driver her address. They were silent the rest of the way, and as she pushed open the heavy, recalcitrant door.

“Here we are,” she announced foolishly. Ivan moved to the center of the room, where he gazed around, sullen and helpless like a juvenile offender ushered into his cell.

“Is that where you sleep?” He gestured to the old gray couch piled with books and newspapers.

“No, there’s a bedroom. Over there.”

He came to her. He suddenly seemed very much a stranger—there was something demented about taking him inside her. Her yearning fled, leaving her vacant, chilled and a bit shaky. This was all a big mistake, but it was not too late. She could apologize and ask him to leave: she had reconsidered and it would not work out. She heard herself say softly, “Are you going to tell me now what you’re so afraid of?”

“Please,” Ivan said, shaking his head as if in pain. “I don’t want to talk now.” He lowered his lids and nodded toward the bedroom, giving her a slight nudge. Chivalrous even in this poignant urgency, he wished her to precede him through the bedroom door, and so she did.

“Well,” Caroline said right after, lying next to him and breathing hard. “I thought maybe you weren’t interested. Or you couldn’t do it.”

“What’s the big deal?” asked Ivan. “Anybody can do it.”

“Not like...”

He chuckled, looking the other way. As she chuckled, she remembered, alone in her room after she won a spelling bee. A solitary, proud glee.

“You’re not a wolf,” said Caroline. “You certainly took your time. A real gentleman.”

“I’m a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

She looked him over. “You’re certainly hairy enough. You must be the black sheep.”

“Actually, in my family I probably am. Drifter. Can’t stick to anything. Tell me, do you think I’d make a good gigolo?”

She laughed. “She’d have to be a strong old lady. What’s your family like?”

“Poor but honest,” he said. “Not now, though, all right? Now come over here. Please. That time was mostly a relief. Maybe we could...get to know each other?”

She moved closer. He took her hand and studied it, touched each finger and joint and brought the palm up to his lips. “We’ll begin at the extremities,” he said, “and work our way inward.”

“You’re lovely,” said Caroline. “But you’re not a foot fetishist, are you?”

“Oh, shush. Keep still and let yourself be worshipped.”

“‘An age at least to every part.’ Is that what you have in mind?”

“It’s not a bad idea.”

“Ivan, you’re such a romantic. I never dreamed—”

“Well, what of it?”

“It’s perfectly all right. Sensitive, aren’t you? Go on, get on with it. Then I’ll do it to you.”

She woke late. Sun streamed in through the slits of the shutters. Slanting bars striped the north wall, and in the flat parallel beams of intruding light, motes of dust drifted. She had her back to Ivan but felt he was awake. When she turned, his eyes were fixed on her, greener than she had ever seen them, and squinting.

“Where are your contact lenses?”

“On the dresser.”

“Do you make love with them in?”

“I can. It makes no difference.”

“Did you?”

“I suppose so. Yes, I got up later and took them out, after you fell asleep. What is this, the Spanish Inquisition?”

“I’m always in a rotten mood in the morning.”

“I’ll fix that. Good morning.” He circled an arm around her and pushed his leg between hers.

“Don’t. I don’t like that approach.”

Ivan moved away. “What’s the matter. Did something happen?”

“No, everything is fine. I’m getting up. I want to go to the bathroom and then make some coffee.”

“Will you come back after?”

They had coffee and rolls together in bed, and then he put his arms around her and kissed her. The touch was overpowering, and the impulse to sink against him unwanted and beyond control. Her body was no longer her own, nor, as in tales of passion, was it his. It was some lush, willful alien that knew only craving and brutish pursuit of what it craved. She began to weep.

“What is it?” he cried. “What the hell is going on?”

She wiped her eyes on the pillowcase. “You made me ask. You wanted to see if you could get me to ask for it. How long it would take you. So now you see. Now you can go home and pat yourself on the back. It’s humiliating, that’s all.”

Ivan lay without moving, his face impassive. “I don’t understand how you can say those things,” he replied at last. “It’s ridiculous. You’re assuming things that have no basis.”

“Oh, you’re so innocent, aren’t you? I see the type you are now. You don’t act like a brute, no, you don’t act like a boss, but you manoeuvre and manipulate. It comes to the same thing. Oh, you must love to see women wanting you—you are attractive, I admit. Some kind of operator.”

Ivan gave a dry, callous laugh. “You flatter me.” He pulled his arms close to his body, gripping one wrist tight. As he closed his eyes Caroline thought she saw his lids tremble, and was horrified. She touched his shoulder, but he had moved far beyond reach.

“Ivan,” she whispered. “I’m sorry. I hurt you. Maybe I was wrong. Tell me.”

“I have nothing to tell.”

“Tell me how I’m mistaken. I’ll believe you if you just say it.”

“You remind me of King Lear,” he said, opening his eyes. His voice was lighter; there was even the faintest trace of the edge of his laugh. “You want to hear how much? A lot, okay? I didn’t want to start something with you, because...”

“Well, why?”

“Because I could tell...I had a feeling that if I did, I’d have to go on doing it for the rest of my life.” He smiled ruefully. “Thumping on and on, sort of...fucking my life away on a woman.”

Caroline laughed. “But I’m not one of those insatiable types. I never thought...Do I seem like...like that?”

“You don’t understand. It’s not what you would want,” he said impatiently. “It’s what I would want.” He turned from her and shielded his face with his arm.

“Oh, God. I am sorry.” She tugged at his shoulder till finally he turned back to her. “This must be what happens when people are in love.”

“Oh, are we in love?”

“Yes,” said Caroline. “We love each other.”

“All right then, that’s settled. So let’s not talk about it any more. Now, how about it?”

“There’s just one thing,” she said later, as Ivan lay with his head resting on her stomach. “If you were afraid to start this, I mean, if you weren’t sure you wanted to risk it, then why did you?”

He moved up and bent over her face. His eyes were very green again and very amused as he brushed the flopping hair off his forehead. He was trying to keep from smiling. “You asked, Caroline, remember? You said yourself I was a gentleman. I couldn’t refuse a lady.”

“Oh, you!” she cried, and lunged for him with hands like claws. But he was so much bigger, he had her pinned down in an instant, and he laughed at her squirming efforts to free herself. She didn’t want to give in by laughing too, so her only defense was to close her eyes and simply feel him there.

She had never been given to having close friends. (Nor had he, he protested when she told him that, as if she had insinuated a secret, shameful weakness in him; she was his exception.) Growing up, she cared for math and music and chess, which endeared her to neither the arty nor the domesticated girls. Friendships with boys were not in fashion, so she got used to keeping her own counsel. She had never traveled in a pack, never learned how to make accommodations of the subtle, intimate sort. At college she roomed alone. She was agreeable and had friends, but they had to knock on her door and wait for her to open it.

How come, then, after so short a spell, she gave Ivan a key? She didn’t understand it. She didn’t understand herself any more. At the age of twenty-three it outraged her to suspect that lust could have so great a dominion. That was a comical concept and a comical word, not one you used in the ordinary course of life. “Desire” was what you called it, if you had to call it something. Lust: when she whispered it aloud to herself in the dark of night it had an ancient, quaint and scary hiss. More amusing than frightening, but she was frightened nonetheless. Never had she been so much under the influence of another person. The phrase itself suggested something shoddy and disreputable, as when her mother used to remark archly from time to time that the butcher seemed “under the influence.” “He’d better watch his knife,” she would add. Caroline, who took things literally, still remembered holding her breath and watching the steel of the cleaver flash as it tore into the raw red meat.

In college she had known men, and in the two years after, while she went to graduate school evenings and worked days for a firm of consulting economists. She understood little of their work, only the figures, which at the beginning she manipulated quickly with a richly joyous abandon, till she grew bored, and realized that statistics and computations would never keep her interest over a lifetime. She went through the men quickly too, and began to suspect that she manipulated them as well, though with an abandon less rich and less joyous. Always she felt driven more by curiosity than by passion or affection. Who were they, the students and economists, the lawyer and the actor? What were they beneath the clothes, the face, the patter? Strictly speaking, she supposed, a few of them plumbed her depths, physical depths she regarded without mysticism. But it was she who did the exotic spelunking. In fantasy she bored a hole in their foreheads and crept through the crannies of the brain to its visceral reaches, till a narrow shaft of light showed through. She came out the other end and dropped them. They were all too easy, a short trip, no lodes of treasure. A couple said she was callous; so what? Let them soften her if they could.

She had never lived with any of them, either. Sometimes she woke to the feel of their muscular legs twined with hers in the bed, not always a pleasant surprise, but she had never been so entwined that any could say to her as Ivan now did, “Where do you want to eat tonight?” or, “Let’s rent a car for the weekend,” or, “Do you want to go to a movie with Cory and Joan?” Cory and Joan, she thought wryly. Cory and Joan were only married, like thousands of other ordinary people, while she and Ivan were yoked together like animals in harness—flexible as elastic, true, but as hard to break. And it would surely leave telltale marks on the skin.

She was not the only one who had misgivings. The stout portiera of Ivan’s building eyed Caroline with rancor and disapproval. Signora Daveglio dressed in black and always wore a striped apron tied around her waist. She had a wide clear brow and a tight mouth; horn-rimmed spectacles and gray-streaked hair gathered in a knot gave her an ascetic air. During the day she was most often found indoors on her knees, not in piety but scrubbing the steps of the building with a pail and brush. Her tenants grew accustomed to stepping around her and her pail, as well as to her penetrating stare directed at their backs as they proceeded up or down, away from her crouching form. In the evening she sat outside on a folding chair, her large feet in men’s slippers planted squarely on the pavement, and read from beginning to end l’Unità, the Communist newspaper, holding it fully opened in front of her face like a book. On cool evenings she wore over her black dress a long green knit cardigan with a white stripe around the neck and down the center of the front; across the back stretched the word “Starlets” in white satin script, and above the left breast, in much smaller letters, “Diana.” She said it had been sent to her by relatives in New Jersey.

Walking past the pail, Caroline could feel the stare boring into her back like twin rays of condemning fire. There was an oddly personal note in Signora Daveglio’s disapproval, as though Caroline’s evident willingness tainted all the members of their sex with disgrace. Her attitude toward Ivan was stern also, but more tolerant, as one excuses little children for bed-wetting, but not bigger ones, who should know better and whose offenses become a public nuisance. Caroline complained to Ivan, so one day he paused, before stepping over the pail, to greet Signora Daveglio, astonishingly, with the smile of an accomplished charmer, and presented Caroline as his fidanzata. The woman smiled back with relief. She wiped her fingers on her striped apron and shook their hands, regarding them as warmly as her stony features would allow.

“So I’m your fiancée now, eh?” Caroline said as soon as they entered the apartment.

“Well, you wanted her to stop looking at you that way. Anyhow, what’s wrong with that? Isn’t it a possibility?”

“I don’t believe what I’m hearing. Are you suggesting marriage? The unregenerate independent spirit?”

“Oh, forget it. Are you hungry?” said Ivan, retreating to the refrigerator. But later on he brought up the subject again.

“I don’t know what to say,” she answered him. “I didn’t have marriage in mind at all. I came here for a good time.”

“But aren’t you having a good time?”

She sighed, lying in his arms. “Yes. That’s not what I meant. Marriage doesn’t strike me as a good time.”

“You don’t want to live in sin,” he said. “You lose on income taxes. You have trouble with leases. You’ll get your Ph.D. and try to get teaching jobs in colleges, and they’ll spread nasty rumors about your private life. And what about the children? You don’t want little bastards, do you?”

“Who said anything about children? I’m afraid of having them. I want to work with abstract concepts all my life. That’s what I enjoy. Incidentally, you seem to know an awful lot about joint occupancy.”

“I’m not interested in children right now, either. But we might change our minds, you know. You could wake up one day with a yearning in your bosom, Caroline. Right here. Or a longing in your womb. Right about here. An emptiness. A longing to be filled.”

“You don’t even know where anything is in a woman,” she said, and moved his hand. “A longing to be filled over there would mean hunger. Anyhow, I’m not sure we’re so well-suited. You can’t go by this. This is not ordinary life, Ivan. This is a dream.”

“There’s never any guarantee. Listen, baby, I’m not going to beg. Excuse me.” He reached over her to pick up the stack of Daily Americans alongside the bed. Sitting up, he began leafing through the back pages.

She would not read a newspaper with him naked in bed beside her. Not yet, anyway. But Ivan, at the mere mention of marriage, behaved like a husband.

She put her arms around him from the back. “Why can’t we just go on like this?”

“Because my money is running out. I have to go back in a few weeks and look for a job. Caroline, please, I’m trying to find a certain ad.”

“What ad?”

“For a used motorbike.”

“You never told me you were planning to buy a motorbike. Do you think it pays, for only a few weeks?”

“It’s not for me,” he said tersely. “It’s for Cory.” Cory and Joan were staying on till winter.

“Oh,” she said, and moved away. They even sounded married. The space between them felt cold, and Ivan very far. He would not like it if she touched him now. Did marriage confer rights? Did it mean you held bodies in common like so much jointly owned property? Ivan guarded his separateness. Once, watching him undress, she said as a joke, “It’s wonderful. And it’s all mine!” He had raised his eyebrows. “Mine,” he corrected. And just as well, Caroline thought. That left her to herself too. But this feeling now of hesitating to touch made her sad, and nostalgic, as if the best of life, its richest flowering, were past.

She regarded his head, dark, large-featured, and meditative, as if she had truly attempted to bore through and failed. If she stayed with him she would fail continually; that would be her life’s work. Maybe he could be peeled instead, in layers like an artichoke, till she reached the heart. Gobble that up and toss away the tough leaves and the chaff. But no, this one was something you might have to break to discover—a coconut, irregular and smooth; hard and dangerous and of manifold possibility, with a sweet pungent liquid concealed in the center, a nourishing milk like a mother’s.

She might never get to the mother’s milk. His talk was clever and off-center like his eyes, and most often a running companion to the instant, as if words were marginal to life; the past he put aside as soon as it became past. She knew very little about him, in the way of facts. If she probed he would tell her concisely what he thought, but not how. A mystery. Silent, his body spoke; the vocabulary of his touch was formidable.

She turned away from him. In a few moments she heard paper being carefully torn, then the stack of Daily Americans was tossed to the floor and Ivan’s arms were around her. “Let’s be friends,” he said.

She let him. For her, things were left too unsettled; she could not make love in such disorder. Her mother could never cook in a messy kitchen, either. The counters had to be cleared, the floor swept clean, the dishes from the last meal put away before the next was begun. She let him, as tired wives must sometimes let, she thought, offering little encouragement but no hindrance. He did it in silence and uncertainty. She felt for the first time the hardness of the floor in her lower back. Ivan believed in living simply, like a Quaker or a hermit. His bed was a lumpy mattress on the floor. When he was finished he gave her a hurt and puzzled look. Though she liked to pretend otherwise, she couldn’t tell whether he was wearing his lenses or not. He did not ask what was wrong and she volunteered nothing.

He poured two glasses of wine and handed her one, then put his clothes on. Caroline watched, enthralled by the way he brushed his coarse thick hair in front of the mirror, with long vigorous strokes back and forth like a farmer swinging a scythe through a field of billowy black wheat. Her back still ached slightly. After a while she wrapped herself in his red satin kimono and went to look out the window. The Japanese kimono, taleggio cheese, expensive coffee, Piranesi prints and custom-made leather sandals were a few of the exceptions he permitted himself while living the simple life.

Out the window the natural light was fading and soft street lights, house lights, and the garish yellow lights from across the square were coming on. A door opened below and Caroline saw the white horse with its keeper emerge for the evening. The horse was sleek and bare except for its halter, trimmed with two red pompons near the ears.

“The horse is out,” she said without turning around.

“Already?” Ivan came to look, standing behind her, still brushing his hair. One tuft stood out stiffly, as if infused with an electric current. She touched it and it fell. “Don’t you love me any more?” he murmured in her ear.

“Oh, Ivan,” she said hastily. “Of course I do. But this is a fairy tale.” She gestured down to where the white horse paraded smartly with its costumed leader.

“We won’t get like everyone else. I know it. I want to be sure you’re there.”

“You’re pushing me...”

The horse stood on its hind legs and cavorted in a circle, a little mocking dance. Ivan gave a heavy-hearted sigh. “Let’s go out and eat.”

“Do you want to eat there for once?” She nodded again towards the square, the horse.

He laughed. “Are you kidding?”

Ivan lived on a small square opposite a large restaurant called La Taverna Romanaccia. On a huge wooden sign hanging over the door the name was painted in fat bulging script that had a wobble, as if a jolly drunk had guided the brush. Every evening at about six o’clock three lean and gawky boys dressed in tuxedos carried out round tables and lined them up in the square. They laid checked cloths and set out tear-shaped citronella lamps. As dusk fell, the beautiful and immense white horse came out a side door and was led around and around the square by a short smiling man in Renaissance garments: a green and gold satin tunic puffed out at the upper arms and below the waist, mustard-colored tights, a scabbard hanging from the wide belt, high-heeled boots and a broad-brimmed tufted hat. Ivan called him the Renaissance man, and said he wished he could have his job, even though he wasn’t fond of horses—he wanted the costume. The Renaissance man and the horse paraded around the square till midnight, attracting tourists, Americans mostly, portly men in lightweight gray suits and women in pastels and white shoes; many of them patted the horse. As the early tourists filed in, music began, accordion music that could be heard in Ivan’s second-floor apartment. Every half hour or so it grew loud and full, when the accordionist came outside to play for the tables on the square. He played Italian tunes Americans liked to hear, like “O Sole Mio” and “Funiculi Funicula,” and an occasional melody from The Barber of Seville or Don Giovanni. Often when the tourists left, satiated, the men sluggish and the women languid, they gave a few coins to the Renaissance man. Ivan claimed he didn’t mind the noise and constant movement. His rent was cheap; many people would not put up with Romanaccia. In fact, he confessed, he loved it, corny as it was: the sign, the waiters dashing with steaming trays held high, the horse, the Renaissance man, the accordion. Purely as spectacle, of course. He would never eat there. He ate in small quiet restaurants where real Italians ate. Way past midnight, after La Taverna Romanaccia closed; while the gawky boys rolled up the checked cloths and carried in the tables and the citronella lamps, the Renaissance man in gray work pants and a smock came out and swept up the horseshit.

Caroline took off the kimono and got dressed to go out. Downstairs, Signora Daveglio, on her folding chair and in her green club sweater, oblivious to the horse, the Renaissance man, the early tourists and the music, nodded at them from behind l’Unità.

“Bello, vero?” she commented unexpectedly, lifting her face to the heavens in surprised, almost grudging gratitude. The weather was indeed fine, crisp and cloudless. Signora Daveglio was often surprised at favorable weather. She nodded once again, abstractly, as if to commend the infrequent but welcome rightness of things. Ivan and Caroline proceeded across the square.

“Do you hear that?” Caroline stopped in the middle.

“What?”

“The accordion.” It was the tune from Cory’s and Joan’s wedding, the one with no name and no history, that climbed and plummeted like a kite in the wind. She could go in and ask; maybe this musician would tell her what it was. Except she didn’t want to know any more. Why pin it down, assign it a local habitation and a name? Let it be whatever it was, only let her hear it. It had every possibility, a wondrous, luscious tune. At least for the accordion, she amended, and for Rome and for summer.

They traveled for two weeks in a rented car to see the smaller cities north of Rome. In Arezzo they got sick and lay groaning in a hotel room for three days, while every few hours a boy in knickers brought them up tea. But in Lucca they felt restored. In gray weather Lucca had a muted, ancient splendor; they loved it as a shared dream. Through the steady, soft rainfall they walked on Lucca’s broad medieval walls and looked out over a mild hilly terrain. They went in and out of churches on cobblestoned streets to listen to the glorious singing, for it was a saint’s day, the festival of Sant’Anna, and Caroline’s birthday as well. She was twenty-four.

“Time you were married,” Ivan said back in the hotel room at night, raising his glass in a toast.

“It’s usually women who are so keen on getting married. Men are supposed to feel trapped.”

“I felt trapped when I met you; marriage is merely a formality,” said Ivan.

“What a charming thing to say.” Caroline sat in a straight, stiff chair near the door, across from Ivan, folding her arms into the wide secretive sleeves of his kimono.

“Why don’t you come over here?” His pose on the bed recalled Michelangelo’s Dusk, which they had just seen in Florence, brooding and menacing but seductive.

“Because you distract me.”

“From what?”

“From thinking.”

“What is there to think about? It’s almost time to go to bed.”

“Marriage is very intimate, Ivan. You take a person to be your family.”

He stroked his jaw and nodded sagely. “You fear intimacy. I see.”

“I don’t know a thing about you. You come out of nowhere, with no...no references, nothing. I have to take you completely on faith. What did you do over the past five years? What did you live on? You might have been married before. You might have children somewhere. You might have been in jail, or been a drug addict, who knows?”

“You know none of that is true. You just want to have everything spelled out before you make a new move, like a series of equations. All right, listen carefully, I’ll give you my résumé: I was never married, I have no children that I’m aware of, I was never in jail. I’ve worked as a reporter, and for a while I put up houses for rich people on the beach, but I quit both and went back to graduate school. I’ve fooled around enough with girlfriends. I don’t want to have to carry my hairbrush around late at night any more. I want to share the pots and pans and the food that’s in them.”

“It sounds like I’m incidental. I came along at the right time.”

“I never asked anyone else.”

She was silent for a while. “I don’t even know your right age. Remember, the day we saw the wolf, you told me you were a well-preserved sixty?” She smiled unwillingly, remembering that day.

“I was born in 1928.”

Typical. Like those authors in school they used to call “difficult,” everything he said required a collaborative effort. “You’re twenty-nine.”

“What a deduction,” he muttered. “Oh, but that’s your field. I forgot.” He took his book from the night table, Suetonius on the Roman emperors.

“Don’t read!” she said sharply. “I’m trying to talk to you.”

“I’ll read if I want to. I’ve said all I have to say on this subject. And don’t give me orders, either.”

She watched him coldly. He turned a page and suddenly raised his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to snap. Listen, Caroline, do you want to fight or—” He hesitated, glancing down at his book. “Or do you want to make love?”

“Fight or fuck, you mean. Isn’t that what you were starting to say?”

“Okay. Fight or fuck. You win.”

“Why can’t you say it, then? You think you can’t say what you want in front of a lady? Say anything you damn please. If we’re going to be married we have to be frank, don’t we? Uninhibited?”

Ivan groaned wearily. “I wish they had a TV. That’s the trouble with Europe, not enough TV.”

“Fight or fuck. Well, well. Is that the whole range of choices?”

He focused on her narrowly. “Maybe you’re right, Caroline. Seriously, I mean. This just might not work out. We have such...differences. Maybe we should forget about it, after we get back to Rome.”

“Oh no!” she cried, and rushed over to him. “Oh, please don’t say things like that. Of course it will work. This”—and she waved her arm at the straight-backed chair near the door, as if she had left there her perverse pleasure in dispute along with his maddening resistance—“all this is nothing. Nothing,” she repeated in a light, almost playful tone.

“It may be nothing, but I don’t enjoy it and you do. That’s the kind of difference I mean.” He was searching her face acutely. It was essential to win him back. She used the most primitive methods there were.

Later she spoke into the still air. “Ivan?” He might be asleep, but something alert in his stillness made her doubt it. She nudged him. “You said you fooled around enough. But what if I haven’t?”

His lips parted drowsily. “So do it later. Let me sleep.” His voice was thick with grogginess.

“Do you mean to say you’re giving me the...the...?”

“Oh, for Chrissake, Caroline.” He sat up. “I’m not giving you anything. It’s all yours. Have a little imagination. You’re so literal.”

She had heard that before. It was probably what drove her to mathematics in school, where the clarities of Euclid could reach across centuries with nothing lost in translation; solutions were right or wrong and propositions were binding. Then as in any discipline, as she advanced it mellowed, and ambiguity slithered in. Euclid was expanded upon: deeper questions arose. Everything changed when you looked at it in three dimensions, four dimensions, in the context of the world and of time. But even so. Even so, in mathematics ambiguity, no matter how prolonged, was always regarded as a temporary state of affairs. The prospect of life with Ivan frightened her.

Worse than literal, she was crude. One day her indelicate poking would mortally wound his discretion and he would not want to live with her any more. She watched him trying to sleep again. His hair, mussed and unstylishly long, and his soft vulnerable lips were precious and ephemeral, and she suffered a premonition of loss, like a piercing pain in the throat. What was it Molly Bloom said? well as well him as another. But she also said she liked Bloom because he understood or felt what a woman is. Did Ivan? It was too soon to tell. Not yet, probably. But he had possibilities.

“All right,” she murmured, stroking his hair. “I’ll use my imagination.” Most men nowadays, back home at any rate, had ugly crew cuts. She began to weave a tiny braid at the back of his neck. “It’s possible we might be very happy.”

“Happiness is not the point.”

Had his tone been oracular or pompous she would have laughed out loud. It was sleepily casual, however, and took so much for granted that she wondered what was the point. But she couldn’t be so unimaginative as to ask right now.

“What are you doing to me?” He jerked away and felt the back of his head. The tiny braid stuck out, wiry and stiff. Caroline laughed as he tried to untwine it. Inept at women’s work, he tackled her instead, pummeling, and bit her shoulder gently. She bit back.

“Hey!” Ivan cried out in pain. When they compared bites, it was found she had unintentionally drawn blood.

“You see?” he said. “That proves that even though I’m physically more powerful I’m not the dangerous one. It’s you we have to watch out for.”

Ivan and Caroline didn’t mind that it rained continuously for a week—it was a warm light drizzle that gave a shine and a haze of romance to the architectural wonders they set out to see—but Signora Daveglio, polishing the mailboxes in the hall on the damp afternoon of their return, was plainly offended by the weather. Her black umbrella, closed in limp folds, stood in a corner of the vestibule, dripping in uneven rhythms on a pile of obsolete copies of l’Unità. Her greeting was a grunt and a displeased tilt of her chin skyward.

“Dunque,” she pronounced at last, magisterial with hands on hips. “Già sposati?”

“What is it?” Caroline whispered to Ivan as he shook his head no, with that smile again, the smile of the irresponsible but irresistible rake, which as far as she knew he used exclusively on Signora Daveglio and which never failed to placate her.

“She wants to know if we went away to get married.”

“Oh.” Caroline lowered her eyes. Now Signora Daveglio would stare at her again, not so much with disapproval—she was too far gone for that—as with pity and scorn.

“Ebbè...” said the portiera, shrugging philosophically. She spread her palms and gazed at the ceiling as if to query, with Lenin, What is to be done? “A Roma è stato un brutto periodo,” she informed Ivan.

“Anche a Lucca,” he responded, and led Caroline off toward the stairs.

“What’s that, a brutto periodo?” she asked at his door.

“A nasty spell. An ugly period, literally. She was talking about the weather.”

“Ugly spell. Brutto periodo. That’s nice. It has a nice sound.” It was comforting somehow. Only a spell, then bad weather passes.

They married. After the ceremony and the festive dinner with Ivan’s lingering Fulbright friends, they walked hand in hand through the dark warm streets. “I guess I’ll have to take you to meet the family now,” said Ivan.

“Well, I should hope so. Did you think you’d keep me hidden away, like a secret vice?” She hesitated and let go of his hand. “How much will they mind that I’m not Jewish?”

“Not a lot. And however much it is, they won’t show it to you. But believe me, they’ll probably feel nothing so much as relief when they see you.”

“Why do you say that? What did you bring home before?”

“No one. That’s the point.” He laughed. “They must think I’m not interested, like you did, or that I can’t do it. Or else they have awful visions.”

“Still, I’m afraid they’ll mind. They’ll think I’m, I don’t know, an alien. Or suspect, at least.”

“No,” he said sadly. “They’ve forgotten their own history. My grandparents wanted American children and they got them, with a vengeance. My mother and father were born in America. They became like the people around them. They’re the aliens.”

His quick pace slackened and his face was closed to her; he was withdrawn to some remote, hollow recess, a place within that her burrowing might never reach.

“And you, Ivan? Will you mind? You’ve never even mentioned it.”

“Caroline,” he said, in a tone that made her feel stupid for asking, “it’s not anything missing in you, so how could I mind? I only mind what’s missing in me.”

That was distantly chilling, beyond any help she could give. She took his arm and said, “Well, you got what you wanted, anyhow. We got married.” But the words sounded strained and foolish.

“Yes. Now that that’s taken care of, we can get on with our lives.”

After that remark she didn’t feel like speaking to him for hours.