And so that was the first week, me trying to deny them this treat or that privilege and them complaining and me giving in immediately, buying them bomboloni in the morning and cornetti in the afternoon and them having no appetite for dinner at eight and demanding to stay up for the eleven-fifteen movie on Retequattro, the boys whining, So what that it’s rated red, which is how Tom and Teo fell asleep watching Basic Instinct, me thinking, Well surely it’s been edited for broadcast and certainly it’s been dubbed and really how much Italian can they actually understand, even with the fluent grandfather, the cognates. Like the language was the problem. I did keep my eye on my wine.

Finally, Artemisia sighed, one afternoon, I found him waiting for me outside my door. This was a weekday. The building was two stories. The front door opened onto a small landing and on the left side of that landing a hallway led to the door of the landlady’s apartment. On the right side were the stairs. Artemisia’s hands were moving as she spoke, sketching. He must have knocked on the front door and my landlady must have heard and let him in because that afternoon I found him sitting on the second floor. His head was bowed and his back was against the door to my apartment. I remember my cheeks were flushed. It was late March but still cold. I think my landlady let Virgilio in out of pity. She would not have wanted him to wait outside. Certainly that was why I let him in. By then it was clear to me that our relationship could not continue. I had not yet decided whether that meant it had to end or if its—its terms, the terms under which we were operating, if they might still be transformed. We had not had sex in months. Not since our first weeks in New York. By choice. By my choice. It wasn’t that he was controlling—that he was trying to be controlling. In the end this is not what bothered me. It was that his desire to control, she paused. This desire, it stemmed not from his power but from its lack. It was his desperation I despised.

[...] Artemisia looked at me then and our eyes met. She stubbed out her cigarette. The heat pulsing through my body, at that moment, I called it admiration. Admiration because Artemisia knew herself so well and I, at twenty-one, did not, had not yet settled on the governing narrative of my life. Had not yet realized the folly of governing narratives. The certainty of Artemisia’s voice, this is what I was responding to. It is what, remembering her story, remembering that summer, knowing that folly, I still, unwilling, respond to now.

Respond to but don’t trust. What I mean is that Artemisia seemed to know herself. Seemed because Artemisia was less master of her fate, captain of her soul, than she was a clever gardener. Sequestered in a domestic plot, she worked with the tools at her disposal. Trapped, yes, but in a hedge maze of her own careful design. How else to interpret her insistence that she had never wanted control? That she had, in her relationships with men, only ever wanted to be a child? How else to interpret her insisting all this to someone she barely knew, to someone who was still a child herself? Though sometimes I think in fact she did know herself. Sometimes I think one of the things she was trying to tell me was that she was unhappy in her marriage.