At the end of our summer, Ezio did not ask me to stay in Rome, and I didn’t volunteer to. Vague though it loomed, some undefined destiny seemed to await me in New York, and I was eager to encounter it even though this meant leaving him. On the day I left, we kept taking pictures of each other with my camera, then asked a taxi driver at the airport to take more of us together. Back in New York, I would lie on my bed and stare at these as if trying to reanimate that day. I looked back at myself, dark-haired and tanned in my yellow sleeveless linen dress, exuding happiness though about to leave for New York, and at Ezio, a blond Italian with his domed forehead and lovely smile, dressed in the rumpled blue summer jacket he wore to do the tours for Roma di notte, both of us young and joyful and about to part. In one of the photos Ezio is hugging a palm tree; in another we have our arms draped on each other’s shoulders, for he was only a little bit taller than I am. I sent him a set of the pictures, and we wrote back and forth about them. They were precious, these pictures, capturing something both tangible and ineffable. Yet I had left him to board my plane, and he had driven home in his Fiat to his mother, maiden aunt, and younger sister and his elderly prodigal father. And surely a day came—who knows how soon thereafter—when he sat again in the Villa Borghese and plucked a laurel leaf for some other girl.
Given all odds, the relationship should have ended as a summer romance. Apart, we kept writing letters—weekly at first and then less frequently. After a while I started dating other men in New York, gave my party with Helen, and ultimately started an affair with a man who visited occasionally from Boston, while Ezio, in Rome, fell into a number of casual involvements. When I went back to Europe the next summer, I based myself in Paris and went to Rome only briefly. Seeing Ezio wasn’t the same, and I returned home with no expectation of a shared future. But then—I can’t quite say why, perhaps just because nothing else was happening and I found it hard to form another meaningful relationship with a man—I invited him to New York for Christmas, and we started up again. By that point I had begun graduate school at Columbia, and he was headed to England to spend the spring semester at Cambridge. In May, when I was done with my classes and needed only to prepare for the MA exams I would take in August, I joined him abroad. We lived in an old house outside of Cambridge, where you had to put shillings in the meter to keep the heat going and we were always running out of change in the chilliest hours. Then going back with him to Rome, I rented an apartment with spare furniture and marble floors, and he drove his little car back and forth between his family and me. We weren’t thinking of marriage yet were trying to be together as much as our respective commitments allowed. In Rome, as in Cambridge, I found libraries with all the books of English literature I needed.
Our last stretch together was a semester that ensuing fall of 1967 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ezio by then was working for the Bank of Italy, which sent him to study with a prominent M.I.T. economist. I rented an apartment for us in Cambridge, a few blocks from the Harvard campus, and then commuted each week by bus to New York to attend my classes, crowded into two days, at Columbia. Neither of us felt we were where we belonged. Ezio would meet my bus when I returned from New York, and I remember taking the Boston subway in the cold fall evenings back to our apartment on Trowbridge Street, where Ezio in my absence had never washed a single dish. For Christmas my mother wanted me to come to California, but she wasn’t prepared to pay his ticket as well. “If you go, don’t come back,” he said to me. I was standing and he was sitting on a sofa as he said this. Shades of Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle. I went
