The following is an excerpt from the story The Things of Italy That Could Be Told:
Clayton sat at the top of the same hill as the woman but that did not mean he had a place of equality with her. Only time, not the fact that he had come upon her eating a homemade lunch, could determine that. He spoke an American English, befitting where he was from, while she held her perfect Italian in reserve to meet him in his native tongue. He didn’t tell her she was beautiful—that was understood—but he did tell her he had been on a park bench in the town down below, and while it was hard to rank memorable moments, he said, it was also certain that the old men gathered about on a weekday morning, one wearing Nike sneakers, were a poignant reminder of things to come in his own life. Not that he was asking her to vitalize him—he had other resources for that—and, to be blunt, sexual favors were not the thing, since desires of that kind had begun to mitigate themselves in causal connection with increased incapacity. What he needed to say, and what needed the effort of a reminder, was that it was still important to be seen and heard, that much as he might like to be, he was not above the tourist hordes with their endless snapshots committing their lives to memory, that in fact he was not unlike anyone, that was how strong his affection for the truth had become, that just the previous night he had been in a restaurant within earshot of two couples of very different nationalities, and to hear them talk on the subjects of the day, to try to make contact where only the empty spaces reigned, was not eliciting of contempt but rather embarrassment, and in that way the trap gets sprung, we fail to find warmth on the surface of things and yet cannot escape shame when we seek to go deeper. The woman—her name was Isabella—had no choice but to stay within her Italian essence, and she did it well, shaping and containing him in the way that a woman must, with her rich history to back her up. Clayton never once said he was in love with her, though clearly she could see it was so, the American man in his early fifties struggling up the hill and looking younger than he really was and adhering to the value that he placed on honest communication, if only he could chip away at the chatter to get to the deeper thing, which might only be that he had been alone so long that the touch of the flesh might seem like an aberration.
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