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of sedans, into the backs of station wagons; they tell themselves their griefs must be unmanly. But in bed, that night, exhausted from the drive, and enervated by the highway food, Sal says to Rose, “It will never be the same,” and she says, “No, it never will.” Bill will not allow himself even that observation. But when they arrive at Miranda’s dorm, he sends the others out to lunch while he and Miranda arrange the collapsible shelves he has built for her; she can fold them up and store them in the closet; then unfold them in case the shelves provided by the college prove inadequate. You never know, he says. You never know.

Adam and Miranda leave their families to take their places in the world. Joined, they believe, hand in hand, forever, on a path that will stretch out the whole length of their lives. If you told them that the chances of this were quite small, that there were boulders and thickets and ravening animals they would encounter on their way, they would look at you blinking, puzzled, befuddled. Adam would go silent, but Miranda would stand straighter, look at you, her gray eyes going dark with disbelief at this display of folly, and she would say, staring you down till you agreed with her or at least pretended to, “You ask if we know where we’re going? Of course we know where we’re going. Why do you even ask?”

Monday, October 15

SANTA CECILIA

“What Are We Getting but Glimpses”

It is raining, and they both agree that it is odd and somehow wrong for it to be raining in Rome.

“In Paris, rain would be perfectly acceptable,” she says. “In London, it would be expected. But here it seems like a cheat, a kind of mean carelessness, maybe even a dirty trick.”

“I’d like to show you a place that’s lovely even in the Roman rain,” he says.

There’s no reason not to. The rainy afternoon is open; what she might do if she were not with him is sleep. And surely that would be a waste.

They agree to meet at the Largo Argentina, which seems to her like a child’s version of an archaeological dig, false, a wrongheaded offering to the tourists, a half-baked distraction to make them feel they’re doing something important. She watches the people waiting to change buses; she thinks there must be fifty that stop here. She thinks of the word “hub,” such an ugly word, so un-Italian, the grudging vowel barely wedged in between the h and b.

They cross the river into Trastevere, thinking guiltily of Valerie, though neither of them wants to mention her.

Miranda has no idea where she’s going. Adam keeps turning up smaller and smaller streets; and they are passing Roman houses, medieval houses, Renaissance palazzi insulted by graffiti, a shop selling cakes as large and beautiful as hats, an English bookstore, a cobbler, the predictable pileup of tourist schlock: bags saying I LOVE ROME, sunglasses, soccer shirts.

They enter the courtyard of a building: rose-pink, even in the rain. The rain seems to have freshened, rather than diluted, its light stone. Through the complicated arch they see an urn: classic, restrained, unornamented, the source of the fountain’s water, rising up out of an oblong of alternating black and white. Rosebushes surround the fountain, and (how can this be, Miranda wonders, this late in October) one with three salmon-colored roses, and three others, each with a single flower, buttery in the half-light.

Dim, Miranda thinks as they walk into the church. The light is dim, and the dimness is pleasurable, it has a luxurious thickness, as if it weren’t really light, shouldn’t properly be called light, but some other thing she can’t find a name for.

“I come here because Saint Cecilia is the patron of music,” he says. “Perhaps because of Handel: I love his Ode to Saint Cecilia’s Day. Lucy’s conservatory is Santa Cecilia, and so she wanted to come here for good luck. And then she was upset. She hadn’t, somehow, known the story. She hadn’t thought of it before: the cult of martyrs. As it turns out, when she was martyred, Cecilia was very young. I hadn’t realized that she was close to Lucy’s age, brutally murdered