CAROLINE THOUGHT IT WOULD be so easy. Everyone else managed to do it in a flash, managed so well that half the women she knew had at some time taken the weekend economy flight to Puerto Rico for an abortion. She had scant pity now for those horror stories. What was wrong with her and Ivan! In algebra, if only you persevered, eventually you would get results. But in human endeavors there was no just correlation between effort and results. She and Ivan, like the aborters, were the proof. Her flat stomach was, anyway, as it was equally the envy of friends working on their second or third.

A few careless words, and soon advice and sympathy poured in from all quarters. Obvious cripples were treated with respect; they were patronized. A pair of freakish losers. Caroline did not care if the problem lay in him or her or both or neither; she was only vastly irritated. So was Ivan. The irritation spilled out onto the advice-giving friends, who maddeningly excused them—the strain they were under. They could not afford to be too irritated with each other. Anger, they already knew, could be a powerful aphrodisiac; irritation was not.

They did not try hard enough, it was suggested. There were ways open that their pride balked at. Caroline would not take her temperature for five minutes every morning and enter it on a chart, seizing the hottest occasions for sex and graphing the event. Carpe diem, Ivan called the chart. She called it Frequency of Fucking. She would rather die barren than divulge to a doctor the patterns of hers and Ivan’s desire, or lack of it. Yet the vulgar truth was that she needn’t graph the frequency of desire, merely of performance. Once these were a single line, now split and diverged along separate paths. They desired without performing, performed without desiring.

She studied the chart as they sat drinking Scotch before dinner. Ivan leafed through the National Guardian, which had gone wild over the Cuban missile crisis. A past master at graphs, Caroline found this one a poor job. Messy. An uncontrolled experiment with a highly imperfect grasp of the complexity of factors involved. The data, because they were incomplete, might incorporate gross and misleading fluctuations, with no means of correction. Aesthetically, it offended—the sophomores under her guidance could do as well. But of course aesthetics was not her concern. Her concern was to get pregnant. You did that by placing a dot, placing an asterisk, placing a letter. There was a code, with a legend.

“Aha! I bet you don’t need to record it if you do it orally,” she remarked.

“What are you muttering about?” Ivan asked, still reading. “An oral thermometer?”

“Oral sex.”

He coughed discreetly. “I would imagine not. What for?”

“Tut tut, I guess that’s out, then. Unless I want to try growing it in my throat.”

He gave her the sidelong look, a disapproving schoolteacher. She tossed the chart aside. “I don’t have the patience for this stupid thing. I can’t think about this first thing in the morning. I have to go to work.”

Ivan turned pages. “It is incredible,” he said, “how close we came to a full-scale nuclear war.”

“Ivan. How would you like to beat the system by performing an indecent act?”

Always a selective listener, he put the Guardian down promptly. “I wouldn’t mind.”

And if she would not keep a chart, the other option was even more unthinkable. She knew Ivan. She knew exactly what he would and would not do for her. He would stay married and be a father, but he would not follow a white-coated attendant into a small room where Muzak played, and jerk off into a plastic container while studying photos in Playboy, Hustler, and Swank. She did not even bother to suggest it.

Ivan did not wilt from anxiety. He became more potent, with a raging determination to get the better of nature, which in its futility grieved her heart. She wished she could explain that this was not an experiment in physics, where increased thrust and depth and velocity might make a difference, but in chemistry, a more subtle, less easily controlled discipline. But she could not hurt him in that way; she had never been the sort to give critiques in bed, so she shut her eyes and suffered it. When he exploded within her she felt relief, and thought about probability theory. She forgot what it could be like without a goal.

Her own reaction to failure was nausea. There were sporadic stretches when she was barely able to eat, spells of vomiting bile from an empty stomach, headaches and dizziness. At the beginning she thought they were viral infections going around, but they came too often for that. They came when everyone else was feeling fine.

She hoped she would be all right for the Valentine’s Day party given by one of Ivan’s colleagues at the Institute. They arrived late, as usual; Ivan had to finish reading a proposal. As they entered they were each handed a small red satin heart to pin on. Ivan said, “Maybe I should wear my heart on my sleeve.”

“You! You’re hardly the type,” she replied. “Wear your heart on your heart, that’s good enough.”

Ivan wandered off and Caroline sat down near a friend, Antonia.

“There you are at last. I have Jerome for you,” Antonia whispered, nodding at a plump man opposite, who was lighting a pipe. “Don’t you have a drink?”

Antonia, a former ballet dancer, had recently given birth to twin boys. She came to these parties sullen and bedraggled, but as the night wore on her eyes began to sparkle: she drank the hours away and usually had to be carried home by her husband, who worked with Ivan.

“No, I’m not drinking tonight.”

“Why not? Are you saving yourself for the pot later on?”

“No,” said Caroline. “No pot either. I just don’t feel like it. Hi, Jerome. Hi, Sheila.”

After a seemingly endless period of psychiatric training and analysis, Jerome was starting a practice. Because he was a zealot, Caroline badgered him as a matter of principle. Sheila, his wife, was in the final stages of pregnancy.

“What’s the matter, are you queasy again?” asked Sheila. Her hands were clasped around her stomach as if it might detach and roll away.

“Oh, just a little. So, Jerome, how is business? Have you encountered anything like the Wolf Man yet? Or Dora, poor girl? Remember you told me about Freud and Dora?”

He held the pipe between his teeth. He wore his satin heart on the knot of his striped tie, over his throat. “Your symptoms sound like morning sickness.” Perhaps to keep the pipe in place, he barely moved his lips when he spoke.

“Hardly that.”

“You sure?” asked Sheila.

“I’m sure. But really, Jerome, how’s it going? Are there enough willing neurotics in the Boston-Cambridge area? I imagine this would be a fertile field.”

Antonia put a restraining hand on her arm. “Caroline,” she whispered, “don’t be outrageous. Jerome’s not in a good mood.”

“What happened,” she whispered back, “faulty transference?”

“My diagnosis is, just horny.”

“It’s coming along,” said Jerome. “Fortunately, most people are not quite as resistant to their own best interests as you are.”

“Aha! Now what is that supposed to mean?” She lit a cigarette, even though smoking sometimes made her sick.

“I’ve told you before, for your problem you ought to seek help. Then you’d be able to drink at parties, at least.” Jerome removed the pipe, and taking from his lapel pocket a small tubular chrome instrument with a sharp point, began cleaning it. He dug the instrument with mincing thrusts around the circumference of the bowl and dumped wads of tobacco into an ashtray. “Tell me something, just out of curiosity. When you were a little girl, how did you think babies were made?”

“I believed in the Immaculate Conception,” said Antonia. “I always wanted to do it that way. I think that’s still one of my wish-fulfillment fantasies.”

“That’s another story. I’m asking Caroline.”

“Oh, Jerome, take a night off.”

He pointed the stem of the pipe at her. “What are you afraid of? I’m only making conversation.”

“I don’t remember. I think I always knew how it was done. I had a couple of rabbits for a while, in the backyard.”

“Did it have any connection in your mind with eating and digestion?”

“Eating?”

“There is a common fantasy among girl children that a baby gets started because of something eaten. It’s quite natural, because they see how it expands in the stomach region.” He cast a brief glance at his wife’s stomach. “Like Sheila here, a child might think she had eaten a watermelon whole.”

A wave of nausea rose through Caroline, and her thighs felt watery. “I would eat, then, wouldn’t I, to make it happen?”

Jerome leaned forward and tapped at her knee with the empty bowl of his pipe. A few grains of tobacco fell to her skirt. She stared at the little cluster they formed, a nearly perfect hexagon. “It’s not that simple,” he said. “What you’re doing is rejecting food. You’re fighting the idea of pregnancy, obviously.”

She put her hand to her throat. He was so close she could see the pores around his nose. He smelled of pipe tobacco. “That is the most ridiculous thing I ever heard.”

She blinked several times. At the peripheries of her vision, about Jerome’s round face, shadowy scallops jiggled. The room swayed and slowly turned. She leaned back. “He is literally making me sick,” she said to Antonia.

“Go lie down then, Caroline. You’re a delicate shade of green.”

“Could she be unconsciously imitating the symptoms of pregnancy, Jerome?” asked Sheila.

“Sheila, please,” said Jerome with a cautionary look. He replaced his pipe between his teeth, unlit, and tapped Caroline’s knee with his fingers. He rested them there for a moment. “Also, little girls are confused about how a baby comes out. As an extension of the digestive metaphor, they think—”

She rose, gripping the arm of the couch. “You know you’re quite a wit? That theory is second only to penis envy.” She looked around vaguely for Ivan, but Ivan was standing way across the room, talking to some woman. “Pardon me while I go throw up. Jerome, I think you have just violated the Hippocratic oath.”

After she threw up she lay face down on the tile floor till her strength returned. She was used to it now; this was a short spasm. Once she washed her face and combed her hair she would look none the worse. Back in the party, she glimpsed Jerome leaning against the banister talking to another woman, a younger one, who was listening intently as he gestured toward her breasts with his pipe, from which a thin trail of smoke curled upward like a small tornado. Famished, Caroline ate half a roast beef sandwich and went off to find Ivan. On the way she tapped Jerome’s companion on the shoulder. “I would watch out if I were you,” she told her.

Ivan too was talking earnestly to an unknown blond woman, but he waved no object at her. They laughed together easily, like old friends. As Caroline approached he turned to make room for her in their tight space. He put his arm around her. “Caroline,” he said, smiling, “I’d like you to meet Chantal Morgan. Chantal, my wife, Caroline.”

“Hi.” Chantal held out her hand. “Ivan talks a lot about you.”

“Hello. I feel as though we should have met before,” said Caroline, also smiling. Chantal! She had nearly forgotten about her over the past months. She looked neither frigid nor gypsy-like. She was slender and of medium height, with short shaggy hair and a blue dress that was short too, simple and almost severe. She wore no jewelry or make-up. Her face was very beautiful in an unproclaiming, sculptured way. When she laughed her light brown eyes narrowed, her severity disappeared, and she looked at Ivan and Caroline as though to draw them into her mirth. She was talking about how well Ivan had handled a crisis that arose with the Artmobile. One of the pieces had gotten slightly damaged while out on loan, and the museum director wanted to use that as an excuse to halt the project, but Ivan had managed to have the damage repaired and to placate the director. Caroline tried to imagine her flat on her back with her legs spread out for Ivan, but for once her imagination failed her.

“If it had been up to me, I would have argued and alienated him,” Chantal said, “but Ivan is so diplomatic—he can get around anyone.”

“Yes,” said Caroline. She had never thought of him in quite that way, but now that Chantal pointed it out, she saw it was true.

“Is Joe in town?” asked Ivan.

“Yes, but he wouldn’t come to this. He hates these kinds of parties.” She laughed. “I left him in front of the TV with The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”

Toward the end of the party Ivan sat down on the floor in a small circle of people. They passed joints from mouth to mouth, from Antonia’s mouth to Jerome’s to Chantal’s to Ivan’s. He was high, ambling around in slow motion, touching the arms of women, with a dreamy smile. Caroline drove the car home through the falling snow and he lay back in the seat next to her, sighing from time to time.

“So that’s Chantal,” she said.

“Hm.”

“She’s not the way I pictured her.”

“Hm?”

“She looks something like me, doesn’t she? I mean, the same type.”

“Mm-hm.”

“Jerome says my nausea is a symptom of secretly not wanting to be pregnant. Subconsciously I think that if I keep the food down I’ll get pregnant. Some hangover from childhood.”

“Jerome is an asshole. If you provoke him, what do you expect?”

“I don’t want to try to have a baby any more. I don’t want to go to any more of these parties. I don’t like any of our friends.”

He gave a long sigh.

“Did you hear what I said?”

“I’m not deaf, Caroline. Deafness, unlike possible sterility, is not one of my infirmities,” he intoned very slowly. “I hear everything you say. I hear every word, every syllable, every phoneme, every letter. I could repeat everything you have said in this car since we entered it. I am one of those people on whom, to quote one of your favorite authors, nothing is lost. In fact, at this very moment I hear music, I hear bells, and I hear that you don’t want to have a baby, or go to any more of these parties, and you don’t like any of our friends. Every...single...syllable.”

At the next red light she turned and took a long look at him. “How much of that stuff did you smoke?” she said.

They were tired of Boston. The Back Bay, with its ever younger inhabitants, had grown too chic for their tastes. Their friends were defecting to the suburbs, where their preoccupations were formulas, night feedings and car seats, adultery, money, and analysis. When they visited, and Caroline saw and smelled the babies, watched the puréed foods dribbling down their chins, and heard their peculiar, grating wails, she felt a kind of panic. Once one of them spit some white lumpy stuff on her shoulder, and she kept smelling the curdled milk even after she laundered the blouse. Finally she gave up and used it as a dust rag. Ivan found a job in a small university town a couple of hours away as associate director of a foundation that gave grants for the visual arts. And Caroline, through a combination of her contacts, published papers, and notoriety as a female researcher, was hired as an assistant professor in the math department. When they drove out to visit the foundation and the university and to look at houses, their future neighborhood appeared mild, even beneficent. Speeding back along the turnpike to Boston, she asked him, “Do you mind leaving?”

“No.”

“I’ll miss some of the people.”

“We can still see the ones we really like.”

“You’re very detached, Ivan. Isn’t there anything you’ll miss?”

“Not much. I’ve had enough of that sort of life.”

It had not been what she expected, either. Except for the very beginning, when they were so close, there had been long stretches of bleakness. Yet the odd thing was, her richest memories were from that time she called bleak, when they would be estranged for long stretches then come together, unaccountably, for days of ineffable common delight, knowing all the while that the delight could fade instantaneously into bleakness again. What she recalled most from their first two years as the happy couple was a vague constraint, like behaving well in school. A too tight embrace. The blankets at night heavy, like straps. Unhappiness loosed them into a manic oscillation, like the needle of their speedometer, which had broken and ran wild. It made the future unimaginable and frightening. No wonder they were weary and sought rest.

“What about Chantal?”

“What about her?” He passed a car, accelerating to possibly seventy-five, though the needle was at twenty. As he grew older he drove more and more furiously. Caroline did not comment—she knew him too well for that—but trusted, a virtue born of necessity.

“Won’t you miss her?”

“You’ll never get that out of your mind, will you?”

“I don’t even mind so much. It’s just that you don’t say one way or the other.”

“You know I’ll never say now, don’t you?”

“My punishment for asking.”

“Did I ever ask you one thing?”

“Never. But then you are a saint. We know that.” All very quiet, she thought. So quiet, like after a death.

They stopped on the road for sodas. She watched him standing with his head bent back, tipping the bottle to his mouth. He had worn a suit and tie to meet with the board of directors, but took the tie and jacket off afterwards; his white shirt was open at the neck and the sleeves were rolled up. He was tired, and more and more lately, when he was tired, he wore thick horn-rimmed glasses instead of the contact lenses. They made him look vulnerable, and older. He was still lean and a young man and still when she looked at him appraisingly, as now, she remembered his touch. But she had an inkling of how he might soon settle into middle age—spreading belly, baggy pants, thinning hair, beefy neck. Her flesh shrank at the idea of some potbellied meaty man crawling all over her. She had never chosen that. She had chosen Ivan as he was then, in Rome. Time, what it would foist on her, was the ultimate unfairness.

At home it depressed them to find the apartment a shambles of half-packed cartons, piles of books and records, dishes and pots. The early morning, when they set out, seemed very long ago. The years spent in that apartment were piled on all sides too, a weighty thickness of time surrounding them. They had a history, and history was more potent, even, than love.

It had turned suddenly hot. Caroline rummaged in a carton to find shorts and a halter. She heated last night’s dinner, and they drank cold white wine out of paper cups. Ivan stared at her strangely, long and intense as the very first time, but with a predatory glimmer. He stood up.

“Would you please get up?” he asked.

“What is it?”

“Just stand up. I want to see you.”

“But why? I haven’t changed.”

“I would just like to see you. Can’t I see you?”

“Ivan, I...I don’t like the way you look.” She stood up.

“You’re very attractive, still. You’re right. You haven’t changed a bit.”

“Attractive” was not his sort of word. “I’m flattered, but what is wrong with you?”

“You know,” he said, taking off his glasses—and without the glasses his eyes narrowed in the glare of the uncovered bulbs—“sometimes a certain body has a hold on you, it’s a completely irrational thing. At least for a man.” He shrugged. “I don’t know if it’s the same for a woman.”

“Are you talking about me?” She looked down at her own body, which seemed slight and harmless.

He took hold of her arm and shook it angrily. “Of course I’m talking about you. Who do you think I’m talking about? You know how many times I almost walked out of this place?”

“What am I supposed to say? Go, then.”

“I don’t want to go.” He pulled her by the arm. “Come closer. I want to...Right now.”

“Get your hands off me! What kind of a way is that? Let go of me, Ivan!”

He didn’t speak. His fingers met around her arm, a tight ring. She remembered that grip from the very beginning, from the afternoon he showed her the wolf.

“Are you going to let me go?”

He shook his head.

“But I don’t feel like it. What do you want? Do you want to see me struggle? Is that the game? Or are you out of your mind?”

He just stood there, gripping her arm. She knew him. He could keep that grip all night if he had to. “Okay, Ivan,” she said. “Okay. You win. Take your prize. But just wait a minute, all right? Just take it easy, will you?”

“I don’t need instructions. Shut your mouth and open your legs.”

“Pig!” With her free hand she smacked his face hard.

He shoved her to the floor and grabbed at her shorts. She tried to twist out of his grasp, but it was no use. He didn’t wait. It was rough and it hurt. Then he collapsed on her neck and he wept.

“Jesus Christ, will you stop crying? I survived.”

“I don’t know what happened to me. It must be the move, and...everything. God, how could I? I’m sorry.”

“All right! It’s not as if you’re a total stranger.”

“Are you okay? Did I hurt you?”

“Yes, and yes. What did you expect?”

“Will you ever forgive me?”

“Stop it, will you? I can’t stand you like this.”

“What came over me? I’m not that sort of man.”

“You can’t figure it out? Ask Jerome.” He was so heavy a weight on top of her, she could hardly draw a clear breath. “Please move.”

“I’m sorry.” He moved.

“Stop saying you’re sorry. I know you’re sorry. Do something.”

“Do what?”

“Do something for me now.”

“How can you still want me...?”

“I don’t know how.”

So they had come to this. She had no self left, only flesh, and she felt she might die of it, willingly. How much simpler to die now and not have to live with herself any more. As it faded she remembered the night in Rome when she was filled with panic thinking she would die if she could not have him, and how she had wanted to be obliterated. Now she knew what it felt like to be obliterated. She thought how love, to which she had surrendered, was a loathsome thing. She deserved it.

Ivan wasn’t ready to buy a house so they rented one, a small two-story frame house near the university. They spent the money they had saved in Boston filling it with rugs and soft furniture. On questions of style they agreed spontaneously. Ivan found butcher-block tables and enormous pillows and exotic posters, and he went in for plants—before long the living room was a jungle. He hovered over them, touching their leaves solicitously, and when he transferred them from smaller pots to larger ones he held the clumps of earth and roots in his hands the way a midwife receives a slippery, fragile newborn, with reverence.

Since the house had three bedrooms they could each have a separate study—Ivan’s sensible idea. Working at her desk in the evenings, Caroline had no one to turn around and talk to for diversion. It was better that way. The loss was easier to bear alone. And she could listen to music now while she worked; Ivan could not work to music.

Inspired partly by the room, which she painted white and furnished sparsely, Caroline resolved to devote herself to her work. Like a nun, she would renounce the joys of family and hearth. The students here were not as dazzling, but they were also not as tensely competitive. Their sense of wonder revived her own. She began an article about knotted spheres in four-space, difficult enough to claim all her attention. Falling asleep, dreaming and waking, she drew pictures of curves in her head; she could dress and scramble eggs and make coffee in utter absence from the physical world. Ivan was nearby, familiar and amenable, someone to eat with and go to an occasional movie with, to bring to math department parties. But she no longer explored him. As she had imagined long ago, the layers were endless, but since she had glimpsed the brutish underside she did not care to uncover anything more. About her own life she thought as little as possible. She saw it as narrowed to a single path where once there had been many, and she traveled it numb and alone. After their night of bestiality on the floor amid the mess of cartons, they mostly let each other alone.

The life they led together was outwardly mild, except for a series of peculiar accidents. Getting up from a chair in the living room one afternoon, Caroline lacerated the cornea of her right eye on a leaf of an avocado plant Ivan had grown from the pit. Gasping in pain, she asked a neighbor to drive her to the emergency room of the hospital. The eye healed, but she said his putting the plant so close to the chair was a deliberate risk. He was sorry it happened, but said the inference was absurd. A while later a small fire downstairs destroyed some notes for his book on the phases of Roman architecture. She must have left a cigarette burning, said Ivan. She was sure she hadn’t; it was faulty wiring in the old house. Even the firemen agreed. But Ivan persisted in feeling she had destroyed his book. He had worked on it fitfully for almost seven years, Caroline reminded him; it was not she who had aborted it. Anyhow, he should have kept the notes upstairs in his private study. Ivan raised the seat on her bicycle, using it when his own was broken, and forgot to lower it. Caroline fell, sprained her ankle and walked with a cane for two weeks. Soon after, she used his razor on her legs and left the blade on the rim of the sink. Groping the next morning without his lenses, he sliced a finger. It looked very suspicious, she thought, but they were accidents.

Once more she realized that Ivan, besides being intelligent, was prescient: you can have sex with anyone. Twice with a persuasive French professor, who plied her with home-baked brioches, and many times with her most brilliant graduate student, Mark. Mark was an amiable young man, unexceptional aside from his mathematical wizardry. Sex was not the best part of their affair, at least for Caroline. The best part was relief at being with someone who did not know her so well. He thought he knew her, but young and lacking the imagination of Ivan, he had no idea of all there was to know. She talked to him about her work, which Ivan did not understand, about the vanishing thread in the Minotaur’s cave that she still pursued. Late afternoons they sat together on his bed with multicolored pencils and paper, drawing pictures and making conjectures. They were working on a new knot invariant and constructing covering spaces. Mark was a wonderful find: he had flights of algebraic genius, while her flights were geometric. They complemented each other, and together they wrote a paper. She insisted he get top billing, and deliver it at the next conference.

The worst part of their affair was her getting pregnant. Mark arranged for the abortion locally—students knew all about such things—and she paid. There was no question; she cut off at the root any tenderness she might feel for it. This was no child of love, but an unwanted excrescence, like a fungus, to be scraped off her inner walls. Without any anesthesia, she felt her pain as a scraping that made an excruciating sound, like fingernails scraping frost off a window. The pain helped, recalling the pain of the other bizarre accidents, and yanking this one into that orbit of mutual injury, except this one could be caught before it harmed Ivan. There were some injuries too terrible to inflict. In topology, spaces might be infinitely twisted, tugged and pushed, provided that no shapes were snapped in two, or poked with holes, or forced inside out. That was the contract the mathematician accepted. She trusted Ivan would accept the same: no irreparable wounds. The underside of the marriage contract, in invisible ink. So she lied and told him she was going away to a two-day conference on manifold theory, and when he inquired on her return why she seemed so pale and wan, she said she had picked up a stomach virus that was going around.

She was easier with him after, and more companionable, and nearly forgave him for his assault, now that they were even. She could not forget how they had battled on the floor, but she dared to hope that someday she might recall it without shuddering, might even find a tenuous place for it in a large design, as yet invisible. Meanwhile, they spent time together like discreet old friends, avoiding difficult subjects. One evening she had a real stomach virus. Helpless, drained, her flesh like watery dough, she felt the way she imagined people feel when death is near. Her forehead throbbed, she was dizzy and she had just vomited in the bathroom.

Ivan helped her undress and spread the quilt over her gently. “Go to sleep now.”

“No.” She raised the pillows. “It will be better soon. I want to stay up. No, don’t go yet.” She caught his hand and pulled him down to sit near her on the bed. “Stay with me awhile. Talk to me. I feel so weak.”

She felt more than weak. She felt despair. She was afraid to be alone, afraid to think, for every thought became a pain that wound its way to the pounding center in her head.

“What shall we talk about?”

“I can’t talk. You talk. Anything. What did you do today? Tell me. Or tell me a story.”

He was silent for a while. When he spoke his voice penetrated, to diffuse warmth from inside her to her chilly skin. “Remember Lucca? Remember when we went to Lucca? We walked around and heard the music in the churches. It was your birthday, the festival of Sant’Anna. Remember?”

She nodded. She remembered. The words made her want to cry. In her weakness, they sounded beautiful, spoken like an incantation. She hadn’t expected anything beautiful. Tears might release the awful tightness in her head, but she didn’t want to cry while he was there. She pressed his hand.

“Remember we walked on the walls of the city?” Ivan said. “Stone walls encircling the city. It was raining, soft gray rain. The festival of Sant’Anna, your birthday. We walked on the walls in the rain. We saw Lucca. Remember? It was your birthday.”

“I remember,” she whispered. Saint Anne was the patron saint of pregnant women, a man in the tobacco shop had told her, while Ivan waited on the street. What was it like, a baby kicking around inside? Probably like the stomach cramps, an inner tormentor.

“Lucca.” He paused. His eyes were far away, seeing rain on the stone walls. “Are you crying, Caroline?”

“No. It’s nothing. I remember Lucca very well. I had forgotten.” She held his hand in hers, spread out his fingers and touched them, one by one. “Tell me some more about that trip.”

She was empty, waiting for him to fill her up, feed her with memories. He was silent again, then he laughed. “Remember Arezzo? There we were both sick. God, how sick we were.”

“We stayed in that little room for three days.”

“Yes. First I got sick and you took care of me, then we were both sick, then I got better and took care of you. We couldn’t eat anything. We just lay in bed and groaned.”

“We had them send up tea sometimes.”

“Yes. Remember how they looked at us? And the boy who brought up the tea? He wore knickers. They thought we were on our honeymoon. We didn’t leave the room for three days.”

“Finally we went out,” she said.

“Yes. You were embarrassed to pass by the desk.”

“We told them we’d been sick but they didn’t look like they believed us.”

“Then we walked, and we went to that restaurant up the hill and ate chicken soup with noodles. Our first meal.”

“I remember that,” Caroline said. “We pretended it was a feast.”

“Yes.” He held her hand in both of his and stroked it absent-mindedly. “Do you feel a little better now?”

She could tell he wanted to go back to his desk. “A little better. Tell me once more about Lucca, then I’ll let you go.”

“The second time around, you know, nothing sounds as good.”

“Just tell me.”

“Lucca. It was raining. A gray soft rain. We walked on the walls in the rain. It was your birthday, the festival of Sant’Anna. We held hands and walked. We heard the singing in the churches. Their voices—remember—were high and glorious, streaming upward, as if they could make the sun come out. You remember Lucca, Caroline, as well as I do.”

They could never part, she and Ivan. They were locked together, locked in the memory of Lucca. She let her hand fall out of his to the blanket.

He stood up and kissed her forehead, then turned out the light.

“No. Leave the light on.”

“Don’t you want to sleep? You look so pale.”

“I may sleep. But leave it on. I don’t want the dark.”

“All right.” He turned the light on. “Call me if you need anything.”

Lucca was a dream. Shifting around carefully, Caroline found a position, lying on her side with a pillow propped near her stomach, that made her body feel no longer there, anesthetized.

Besides beautiful, he could still be funny, he could be gallant, he could be intriguing, if she would accept these gifts. On a Sunday in early spring he came up with an intriguing idea. They were having hero sandwiches and Chianti on a blanket spread on the small back lawn. Ivan’s daffodils had just sprung: the square of grass was rimmed with shimmering gold.

“If I play my cards right,” he said, “and work through the summer, I can arrange to have about six weeks off next fall.”

“That’s terrific. You could certainly use a long vacation. You work so hard.”

“I thought maybe we could take a trip.”

“But it’s right in the middle of the semester.”

“I thought we might go to Rome.”

“Rome!” She looked up. Her hand, raising a glass, stopped in midair. “Oh, I wish I could.”

“Do it, then. Take the semester off.”

“How can I? It’s not even two years. I’m not due for a sabbatical for ages.”

“Just take it without pay. Don’t ask them, tell them. Personal reasons.”

“They’re not keen on personal reasons.”

“Listen, you’ve made yourself practically indispensable there, especially with the tutoring program. They’re getting a bargain and they know it. Don’t worry, I know how these things work. I’ll tell you exactly how to go about it.”

He would. He knew how everything worked, and he would plan the perfect strategy for her. He should have gone into politics, only he was too reticent and would despise campaigning. “You really think...?” she said.

“Did I ever lead you astray?” With a cavalier flourish that recalled his younger self, he raised the straw-covered bottle.

“It’s too early to say,” she replied, holding out the wineglasses for him.

“Well, think about it, anyway.”

It was unlikely that they would fire her. With women making faint noises about professional inequities, it was an unpropitious time to let one go, especially one who could be outspoken and had credentials in so exotic a field as topology. The two graduate seminars could be deferred. As for the undergraduate courses—a stroke of genius: she would recommend Mark. It would lift his spirits—she had avoided him since the abortion—and it was safe. Mark was more than competent for the job, but not sufficiently entrenched to take it from her. Ah, she thought, drinking the wine, such fiendish tactics were not native to her. They had seeped in through Ivan.

“You have a devilish grin,” Ivan said. “What is it?”

“Just figuring,” she replied. “Just figuring. Oh, but we have hardly any money left. The house. How are we going to manage it?” They had recently bought the house. Ivan decided after a year and a half that it was foolish to keep paying rent; they should make an investment and build up equity.

“We’ll do it very cheaply.” He smiled. “Remember how to do it cheaply, Caroline?” A breeze ruffled the grass. The daffodils swayed this way and that in unison, like a row of dancers. Ivan reached out to pick a flower and put it behind her ear. “Remember?” he said, and his eyes, green and shining, held in untouched completeness the memory of everything that had happened in Rome, so that gazing into them, it was as if the surface of an ocean had become transparent and she saw all the buried treasure beneath, as well as hope, and the risk engendered by despair.

Ivan could hardly wait to see his old street. It was morning and the doors to La Taverna Romanaccia were closed, but the sign still beckoned, faded and a little dingy. Four filled garbage cans stood at the side door from which the horse used to emerge every night. Clusters of flies buzzed around them. Ivan’s ancient five-story building was the same—shuttered windows, broken cornice and spotted façade—as were the other weathered stone buildings on the square. The only difference was more people, a steady stream of them, all going in the same direction. Following, they found a large new five-and-ten-cent store around the corner and down half a block. Ivan frowned at the display of plastic household articles in the window. Then back at his front door, he said, “I bet she’s not here any more. Look.” He pointed down to the two marble steps at the entrance, dulled and marked with the scraping of many feet.

“She may be getting old,” said Caroline.

“No, she’d never let them get this way.” They stepped into the outer hall with its rows of mailboxes, unpolished. The paint was peeling and the floor was dusty. An empty Stop cigarette pack lay crushed in a corner. The inner door was locked. Ivan was morose as they went back out.

The portiera of the next building appeared carrying a string bag and, like Signora Daveglio, dressed in black, but without an apron. She was slight, with sparse white hair and soft features. Ivan stopped her. She did not remember him, but at the word “Fulbright” she gave an “Ah!” of recognition and smiled broadly. In answer to his questions she produced a swift flow of inflected words, and spreading her palms to the heavens, shook her head from side to side sadly. As she gazed toward Ivan’s building she repeatedly made a rolling, descending motion with one arm. Waves in the sea? thought Caroline. The ceaseless flow of life? Something like that. Ivan thanked her and she walked briskly off in the direction of the new store.

“Well?”

“She had a heart attack about two years ago,” said Ivan. “Very sudden. That was it.”

“Really? How did it happen?”

“You’ll never guess.”

“Scrubbing the stairs?”

“Very good. Preciso. She was at the top and she keeled right over. The pail spilled with her. The building has been going downhill ever since.”

“She kicked the bucket,” said Caroline.

“That’s right.” They were at the corner. Ivan turned to look at the building once more, shading his eyes against the glare of the sun. “The Communist Party has lost a loyal supporter.”

“She liked you a lot too.”

“Yes. She used to bake me these little pastries sometimes and bring them up after supper, to have while I was working. Sfogliatelle, they were called. They were very delicate, very light. That was before you came along.”

“I never knew she baked.”

“Yes, she was a great baker. Oh well,” he sighed.

They walked to the river. “Over there”—he pointed—“is the Castel Sant’Angelo. A fortress. Did I ever tell you? The Renaissance Popes used to take refuge...”

She listened politely, but she had heard it before. She had heard all that before.

Later, leaning against the balustrade, she said, “You know what I’d like to do, Ivan? I’d like to have dinner in that restaurant, Romanaccia.”

“What on earth for?”

“Just to see what it’s like. Don’t you ever have that feeling—you’ve looked at something from the outside for so long, you’d like to see what it’s like inside?”

“I know exactly what it’s like inside. Noisy, a long wait, the waiters snicker at you, the food looks better than it tastes, and they probably have the menu translated in some sort of quaint English.”

“Still,” said Caroline.

“Oh, all right, if that’s what you really want.”

At night under the garish lights the dingy old sign looked jolly. Signora Daveglio was not outside in her club sweater reading l’Unità, but the horse was there, with its red pompons, and so was the Renaissance man.

“Do you think it’s the same horse?”

“How could it be, Ivan? It’s close to seven years. It’s not even the same Renaissance man.”

“No, this one is younger and taller. But he has the same costume.”

“You’d still like the costume?”

“If I had known they needed a new Renaissance man I would have flown over and applied.”

The restaurant was low-ceilinged and lit with yellow globes. Its red stucco walls were hung with paintings in the style of Caravaggio—faces miming intense emotion in lurid contrasts of dark and light. Interspersed were paintings of the ruins of the Forum and the Colosseum. The wooden tables were crowded with Germans and Swedes with loud voices. The waiters spoke English to the Swedes and to Ivan and Caroline. “A Martini or a Manhattan before dinner, signore?” Ivan asked for Campari and soda in Italian. On the menu the prices were outrageous, and below each dish, in parentheses, was a translation in quaint English.

“Oh, look at this.” Caroline laughed. “‘Noddles’ for noodles. ‘The large noddles covered in anchovies and a sauce of garlic, oil of olive, and parsleys.’ And look how they spell asparagus!”

Ivan glared.

The accordion broke out, a gaseous sound slurping and gulping through a rampaging arpeggio.

She hoped the accordionist would not play the tune. That would be sacrilegious. She remembered the curve of the tune precisely, though she had never learned its name and had never heard it played since the night they crossed the square with Signora Daveglio’s eyes boring into their backs, after Ivan made love to her on the lumpy mattress on the floor and said he wanted to marry her so she would always be there, and that they would not become like other married people. Ivan hummed it sometimes, but he hummed it off key.

The accordionist, approaching their table and drowning out the sound of human voices, was playing “Là ci darem la mano,” from Don Giovanni. Caroline knew it well. Don Giovanni was trying to persuade the innocent peasant, Zerlina, to sneak off with him. He says he wants to marry her, “Quest’ istante.” This instant. In the opera the melody was sweetly and irresistibly seductive. “Vorrei e non vorrei,” she says. I want, I don’t want. “Io cangierò tua sorte!” I’ll change your destiny. “Presto, non son più forte!” Quick then, I have no more strength. “Vieni! Vieni!” Come! But this accordionist was jazzing it up, converting the smooth lyrical line into a dinky common beat that unmasked the self-seeking Don, the fine lord, so that anyone, even the gullible Zerlina, would know enough not to trust his words. At last he passed on to other tables. The food, when it was finally brought, looked better than it tasted.

“I should never have let you persuade me,” said Ivan.

“Why don’t you just make the best of it?”

They did not linger. On the way out they squeezed past a party of Japanese men with cameras hanging from straps around their necks. Ivan stopped to give a few coins to the Renaissance man and Caroline patted the horse.

Ivan read in a magazine that thirty-five miles north of Rome was an outdoor hot spring sulfur bath, with swimming year round. Andiamo, he said. Let’s go! This spree in chilly November put them in an antic mood. In the rented Fiat Ivan played with the gearshift and explored the dashboard while giving a dramatic reading of passages from the operator’s manual. In his literal translation it became a zany comic text that had Caroline breathless with laughter. When they tried to adjust the seats, they bumped knees and heads and giggled wildly, and she had a fleeting vision of the two of them young and carefree forever, through a lifetime of madcap jaunts. Why couldn’t it always be this way? Whatever was wrong had vanished for the moment. Ivan must have felt the same, for out on the open road he put his hand over hers. “It’s not so bad, is it? With us, I mean? We’re having a good time.”

She clasped his hand.

First they smelled it, then they saw it. From outside, the bath was an austere rectangular building of whitish brick. They entered and reluctantly they parted—Caroline into the women’s dressing room, Ivan into the men’s—to meet again at the pool, shivering. The sky was bone white. The only other patrons were two stout elderly people who stood, immersed to the waist, at opposite ends of the pool. The man, whose sagging chest was covered with white hair, rubbed water over his flabby arms and shoulders.

“This is crazy!” Caroline said. “I’m freezing. And it stinks! Are you sure we should do it?”

“It’s warm in there. Come on. Time for your bath.” He yanked at her with both hands, teasing and pulling her to the edge of the pool.

“Don’t push me in! Don’t you dare!” she cried. “I’ll go myself.” She dived in. The water was warm. A steamy smell of decayed matter rose from the surface. Ivan dived in after her and came up pushing the long drenched hair back from his forehead.

“Doesn’t this feel terrific?”

“Yes, but what is that awful stuff floating around?” She pointed. There were blobs of it all over the pool. “It looks like shit.”

“That’s the sulfur, silly. That’s what’s supposed to do you so much good.”

“It still looks like shit. Floating shit.”

“Would you care to try some?” Ivan took a blob in his hand and came towards her.

“Get away from me with that! Yuk!” She fled underwater and darted away.

With impassive faces, the old people at their opposite ends watched them romping in the water. The white-chested man rubbed water incessantly over his arms and shoulders. The woman, whose broad face thrust forth from her yellow rubber cap as from a medieval wimple, lay on her back from time to time and floated without moving her arms or legs. When she began to sink she would right herself, and stare for a while before floating again. Coming up after a dive, Caroline saw two new people, a man and a woman huddled close together near the far edge of the pool, with their backs to her. Boy and girl, really, from the looks of them. He was stocky and curly-haired. She wore a black and white zebra-striped bikini, and her dark hair was coiled on top of her head and held in place by a barrette. She took a few steps away from the pool. For a slender, tall girl she moved with an odd heaviness. Her body didn’t click into position with the jauntiness of young women in bikinis. Her stance was odd too, tilted back and slightly arched. Ivan swam up behind Caroline and put his arms around her waist under the water. The boy put his arm around the girl and whispered in her ear. She turned around. She was hugely pregnant. The skin between the top and the bottom of her bikini formed a sphere tautly filled and stretched. Her belly button had popped out.

“Madonna! Is that the latest fashion?” asked Ivan.

Caroline smiled too, but her eyes had drifted out of focus. Everything blurred. The water, up to her breasts, felt suddenly hot.

The boy kept whispering and nudging at the girl, who kept turning away and retreating.

“Do you know who she looks like?” Caroline said. “Remember that woman Rusty, and Ed? The ones who left the baby alone? She has that same petrified look.”

“Yes, a little. I wonder what ever happened to that baby.”

“Suffocated, no doubt.”

Finally the young couple entered the pool from the shallow end. He held her arm going down the slippery steps. She swam off quickly, her long thin arms attacking the water, while the boy came over and began talking in a confidential way to Ivan. Smiling paternally, Ivan answered in a reassuring tone, and soon the boy grinned a farewell and swam away.

“What was that all about?” Caroline asked.

“She didn’t want to go in because she was embarrassed. She thought there wouldn’t be anyone else here on a Thursday morning. There usually isn’t. She didn’t bother to get the right kind of bathing suit because they’re expensive and ugly and in a month or so she’ll have her baby.”

“Oh.”

Ivan smoothed down her hair with long strokes. Under the water he ran his fingers along her bare sides, down her ribs, over her hips. He came closer, his eyes admiring. “Now you, in a bikini, are a splendid sight to behold.”

She turned away. “It’s all right, Ivan, really. You don’t have to.”

He swam off underwater, out of sight.

From opposite ends of the pool the old stout couple swam slowly toward the center, where they met and walked side by side to the shallow end. They climbed the steps in silence, wrapped white towels around their shoulders, and walked in silence to the exit, where they parted, she to the women’s section and he to the men’s. Caroline watched them disappear. She picked up a piece of the brown, porous sulfur floating nearby. It was light and papery, not solid as it appeared. It didn’t feel pleasant, but it was bearable to hold. Slippery and scummy, it draped itself around her open hand.

They tried to pick up their antic mood but it felt forced. The day was spoiled.

Since Caroline had never been south, they traveled into the Apennines, which Ivan said had a primitive, stark beauty. But on the way there was a mountain snowstorm, and they had to creep along a narrow road behind a snow plow for three hours. In Paestum they took an unheated room overnight to save money. It was November, but the snow was days behind them, and southern Italy was a warm place, they thought. The afternoon had been warm and drenched in sun, with the temple columns turning golden in the early twilight. Hours later a deep, dark midnight cold set in, an arctic cold. The air was thick with it. It crept inside their bones and nestled in their inner organs. Caroline’s nose was running. She forced herself to get up for one of Ivan’s handkerchiefs, but could hardly grasp it in her shivering fingers. She tossed their light coats over the blankets and brought their bathrobes back to bed with her. Even in fragments of sleep they kept the memory of cold; their dreams transmuted the theme of cold. Ivan moaned softly to himself. At about three in the morning he had an idea: there was hot water—they could take a shower. They fooled around for a while in the shower, tossing washcloths, but back under the blankets they froze again, waiting for dawn in grim silence, each resenting the other for having chosen the unheated room. In the morning the sun streamed in. Why didn’t we make love to get warm? Caroline thought, opening the windows wide. Why didn’t one of us suggest that? Was it just too cold for that?

All this put them out of sorts, yet they tried to be considerate, like traveling companions thrown together by war or natural disaster. Caroline missed her work. In the middle of the night she woke in strange rooms obsessed by a problem she had left unfinished, involving a higher-dimensional knot. If only she were alone in her office with a pencil and blank paper. She had purposely left all her notes and pictures at home, and now regretted it. There was little she could do in the dark but ravel and unravel what was already accomplished. In daylight there was too much space to think. While Ivan raced around the hairpin turns she shut her eyes and thought about her life in broad, difficult ways, what she was doing, and how, and to what purpose, ways she hadn’t thought since the bleakest moments of her despair. She thought about great imponderables like hope and time and injustice, destiny and death, but her mind was not accustomed to such blurry ascents and she fell back repeatedly. She was trained for the exquisite conjectures of mathematics, which fitted the fine intricacies of her brain like microscopic tongues in microscopic grooves. She loved these conjectures, even though she knew that in the course of daily human life they did not matter. It was precisely for their gratuitousness that she loved them. The larger questions mattered a great deal, and she feared she was missing them somehow, as ancient weavers working on a segment of tapestry missed the grand design. Ivan was not missing them. With his lateral vision and his feel for history he was seeing them and suffering them in his veiled way. Because of her? Was she his useful paradigm of the obstacles of the world? Or in spite of her? Or was she irrelevant to what he was suffering, to his experience of life? Too inconsequential, a nuisance? Maybe she should get out of his way, then, and let him live and suffer in peace.

They returned to Rome two weeks later, at nine in the evening, to find the lobby of their small hotel deserted. Ivan rapped on the front desk and called, “C’è nessuno?”

The gray-haired owner rushed out from the small apartment off the lobby. “Gli americani,” he turned and called back. “Sono tornati.”

His wife, the padrona, rushed out too, followed by the bellboy and the chambermaid. They were all shouting. The padrona was in tears.

“Signore, signora,” she cried, running to them.

“Ma che c’è?” Ivan asked, setting down the bags.

The Italians encircled them with horrified faces.

“Il presidente, il vostro presidente Kennedy è morto,” the woman wailed.

“Oh no,” said Caroline.

“Sì, sì, è vero! Assassinato.”

The six of them crowded into the owners’ tiny living room to watch television. The padrone poured out six small glasses of a colorless, sharp-smelling liqueur. Anisette; it stung. The television coverage was live from the States—Ivan translated for the Italians. The instant of violence was replayed again and again: the President had a ragged hole in the side of his head, his wife’s skirt was spattered with blood. Not long ago, Caroline remembered, she had lost a baby too. The Italians cried, but Caroline and Ivan were too stunned to cry. The padrona brought out bread and cheese. No matter what happened, she said, people had to eat. During the war, during the Occupation, during the horrors, they always remembered that they had to eat to keep up their strength, though good food was scarce then. On the mantelpiece were framed photographs of three young people. The younger son was off working in Switzerland, their host explained through his tears, their daughter was married and living in Turin, and the oldest son had been killed in the war, by the Germans.

When, two days later, they walked past the American Embassy, a classical white building set back from the street on a bright green lawn, they found the high gates barred. Locked outside, Americans stood about quietly in clusters of twos and threes. Caroline and Ivan stood for a moment with them and walked on. A block away vendors were hawking their newspapers, shouting words Caroline could not understand. People rushed over to snatch up the papers.

“What could it be this time?”

“I can’t make it out. We’ll see.” Ivan bought a paper and leaned against a lamppost to read. “The man who they say shot Kennedy was shot himself. In jail.”

“It can’t be, Ivan. Calm down and read it again.”

He read it again, and showed her the picture on the front page. “That’s it. It’s what I said.” His face was slack and drawn. They had not slept. “My eyes hurt,” he said, handing her the paper. “Hold this. I want to take out my lenses.”

They left early, no longer in a holiday mood. Pacing and muttering, Ivan tossed his clothes into the open suitcase on the bed. “Now we’re in for it,” he groaned. “Now we’re really in for it. Before was bad enough, but now...”

“A brutto periodo.”

He turned on her furiously. “Will you please stop saying that stupid phrase? Do you have to trivialize everything?”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry, Caroline. I’m upset.”

“No, you’re right. It was a stupid thing to say. I’m sorry.”

They stared at each other, piles of clothing in their arms. “This is ridiculous,” said Ivan.

Yes, it was. Now they were in for it, she thought. They were really in for it, because it was clear that this marriage had nowhere to go. Over. End of an era: presto, swear in the next life before the body cooled. Shocked out of numbness, she found she was exhausted by grief. Non son più forte. She couldn’t hang on any more. For what? His ploy of rekindling from nostalgia had failed. They came for nostalgia but they got horror. She had been through all the ugly spells she had strength for. Nothing lasted. Even an elected emblem of stability...Look at him, a hole in his head, brains all over his wife’s skirt. Crowds weeping. Surely she could face so small a shattering, in the scheme of things, as leaving Ivan.

Late as usual, they boarded the plane out of breath, with the engines already whirring. Ivan had left a book in the hotel and insisted on dashing back. As they took off Caroline was making plans. She could get an apartment. He could keep the house and the car. He could have the TV. He could have the furniture. There wasn’t much she needed, only the phonograph and records—he didn’t care about music. She could live simply, like a Quaker or a hermit. A mattress on the floor. Ironic, how Ivan had turned out to be the one with accumulations—plants, books, magazines, prints, ties. She bore him no malice; she liked Ivan a lot. They could be friends. How banal, how unoriginal: they could be friends! But sooner or later everyone’s destiny was banal. Why strive to be forever original? It was arrogance. Even an arrogance as finely wrought as Kennedy’s could be shot down in broad daylight by an ignominious gunman, not even an anarchist.

They expected to find the country in a shambles, but everything was running smoothly. Disturbingly smoothly. They unpacked, Caroline got back to her higher-dimensional knot, Ivan collected his plants from the neighbors. She called Mark to see how the courses were going. No, she didn’t want to meet for lunch, but if he had any trouble he could get in touch. There was no hurry about her leaving. They were both shaken up, Ivan more practically so because a change in presidents meant a change in tone and eventually, as waterfalls trickle out into rills, a change in the flow of money for the arts. When things calmed down she would announce her plans. Meanwhile, winter came and she returned to work. A smooth ease settled over her, now that she had accepted her unoriginal fate. The pervasive bleakness of the land seemed to relieve her of private bleakness, and knowing her life with him was temporary, she began to regard Ivan from a great distance, to think of him in strangely objective ways. He is really a very good-looking man, she would think. He is really a very intelligent man. And very good-natured too. How fortunate to have known so fine a man so intimately. Such thoughts in their absurd formal expression, as if he were dead, made her smile to herself. Ivan caught her at it in the supermarket.

“What are you grinning at?”

She decided to tell the truth, silly as it was, since it was all over anyway. “I was thinking of your vocabulary, when you write. You use a lot of good words. I mean, sort of picturesque words.”

“Oh, come off it, Caroline.”

“No, really, I’m quite serious. Like the review you did last month. That book about the origins of Art Nouveau. That was a really good review. I liked the words. Tracery. Aperture. Patina.”

“They’re not so remarkable. If you read a lot of other criticism you’d see. In fact patina’s gotten too common.”

“Maybe. But still, to get them all in one paragraph...”

He pushed the cart along with a shrug. But she could tell he was silently pleased, and confused.

She was waiting for him after work, standing under the movie marquee watching others buy their tickets. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. Her blood raced with indignation. He was later and later every year, pathological; he didn’t want to be anywhere he had promised to be. Appointments, even, were coercive! He was crazy! She worked out a lateness coefficient and started to calculate what proportion of her life had been spent waiting for him, and how correspondingly good it would be soon, very very soon, never to wait again. With the figures multiplying in her head, she looked absently at the clusters of people approaching the main intersection a block away. At the corner they stopped as a body and waited for the light. A man caught her eye, who had detached himself from the crowd and paused to look at a display of books on an outdoor table. His profile was partly hidden from her, but she could see that he was tall and lean, and he wore a corduroy jacket. She liked the concentrated way he stood there, wrapped in a private calm, as though he could never be late and in a rush, never overworked, never taciturn. He inspired the first visceral flicker she had felt for a man in some time. Ah yes, someone like that. When he turned from the books to cross the street in a confident, unhurried stride, her first impulse was to laugh at herself. But on second thought it was not at all funny. He bent to kiss her on the cheek. “Sorry I’m late. I had to finish something up, and then the bus was so slow that I got out and dashed over. Did it start yet?”

In the movie she reached for his hand. He put her hand on his knee and held it there, the way he used to at the many movies they had gone to in earlier times. This was an Italian film about love and politics, something for everyone. As the couple on the screen embraced Ivan put his arm around her. She leaned her head against his shoulder. In the public darkness they performed mild rituals of touching that she remembered from high school, tentative gestures ventured by tentative children who knew each other only slightly, emboldened by the dark. When they came out there was still a vestige of light in the west. They faced each other on the street, blinking. Caroline was overcome with desire. He stroked her cheek slowly, perusing her.

“Do you want to go out to dinner?” he asked. “Or home?”

“Home.”

They were caught up in a rush of passion that went on for weeks. And why not indulge it, since it would all be over soon? They were not talking about their angers and failures, working out differences and devising compromises as friends did who went to marriage counselors, a procedure Ivan regarded with disdain. They were at each other like cats. They confessed that they felt old and lecherous and didn’t care, they had been through too much to care. In this rampant excess, born of the loss of faith and with no reasonable future, Caroline became pregnant. She was thirty-one years old.