Free The Last Lovely City by Alice Adams

down to the living room, where he could see the friends he still wanted to see, and she could more easily bring him trays. He complained sometimes about sleeping down there alone, and so Lucretia would cuddle against him, there on the couch.
    Unhappily, that is what she most clearly recalled of Jason, his dying. How pitifully thin he was, his eyes so huge and needful. His bony hands. She remembered less of his good jokes and general good sense. Their trips. Lovely Italian wine and, at times, good sex.
    Mourning Jason, a truly loved and irreplaceable friend, Lucretia mourned, too, what she felt to be the end of love in her life. By that time she was in her early fifties; even to think of love affairs was ridiculous, despite what she read here and there. And so she did something very ridiculous, or worse: she fell violently in love with a man almost twenty years younger than she was, a beautiful Italian, Silvio. Not only twenty years younger but married, and a Catholic, of course.
    Oddly enough, it was he who loved first. Or he who said it first, pressing her fingers as they held a wineglass, at lunch, in Fiesole. Looking up at him, she saw him laugh in a slightly embarrassed way as he said, “You mustn’t laugh, although it is a little funny. But I find myself seriously in love with you.”
    She did not laugh, but she smiled as she said, “Oh Silvio, come on—” even as her heart began to race, her blood to surge forward.
    She was aware that they looked a little alike, she and Silvio, a northern blond; some people must think them mother and son. Many people must think that.
    Lucretia was staying at a small hotel on the Arno, not far from Harry’s Bar; she had a penthouse room, with a lovely viewof the river. From her balcony, in early evenings, she observed the long ovals formed by the bridges and their reflections in the water. She and Silvio had drinks there the first night he came to call, quite properly, to take her to Harry’s for dinner. He was the friend of a friend; his wife and children were off at Viareggio. After they became lovers, they had drinks on that terrace every night.
    “You have the most marvelous skin in the world,” he told her. “Your back, and here. Like hot velvet.” He laughed. “My poor English. I sound like the TV.”
    “Your English is fine.”
    “You are fine. However can I let you go?”
    But he did. They let each other go at the end of Lucretia’s two weeks: a week of exploratory friendship, another of perfect love. Or, vividly recalled by Lucretia in San Francisco, that is what it seemed, all perfect. Beautiful, sexy Silvio made love to her repeatedly, over and over, at night, and then again in the morning, before driving off to his own house across the river. Just love and sex; they never spoke of anything foolish and alien, like divorce. Only, once or twice Silvio asked her, “If I should come to San Francisco, you will remember?”
    She laughed at him. “Always, my darling.” She feared that that would indeed be true. And she thought, Suppose he calls when I’m really old, too old to see him again, although I still remember? (She forgot that at that time he, too, would be much older.)
    In her pretty Telegraph Hill cottage, then, with the doleful sound of foghorns strained through her dreams, Lucretia often woke to a painful lack of Silvio, a missing of him that was especially sexual. And none of the obvious solutions to this crying need appealed to her at all. Only Silvio would do, and at times, at the worst and most painful predawn hours, she thought of flying back to Italy. To Florence, where she would say to Silvio what seemed at the moment to be true: I can’t live without you.
    Of course, she could and did live without him, and all the prescribed cures worked. She joined a health club and exercised fiercely; she walked whenever and for as long as she could. She intensified her efforts at work; she took on more assignments. And she thought, Well, that will have to be