I taught them how to do this, when all of us were young. I do hope you enjoy our little local customs.

Scamander and Rosalie have spent their lives in service of this ritual, and they believe wholly in the symmetrical thinness of the edge of a teacup on the potter’s wheel and the edge of the tea as it freezes. These things are full of meaning for them, and they wrote a monograph on the subject when they were in the fullness of their faith. Their teahouse is situated in a small park between Seriatim Boulevard and Deshabille Street, a trapezoidal space with seven white stones in a pleasing arrangement under a larch tree, which was confused in its profligate youth and now drops chestnuts each spring. In order to reach it, one must dodge the traffic rails, which are well-greased and smooth here, and leap into the park before one is crushed by a carriage, motorized or muscle-drawn.

This, too, is pregnant with significance in the eyes of Rosalie and her husband, for grace may only be found briefly, and always in the midst of madness.

_______

Ludovico does not know he is meant to crawl, but it has become his natural locomotion, like a rabbit jumping. It is dark inside, as it should be, and he lifts his eyes to the crowded house only to see what he has so long wished to: a blond woman with a green scarf sitting calmly cross-legged as a deva. She holds the naked hand of another woman in hers, a woman with mad black hair and a stare like a lion flicking its tail.

_______

I have saved this for him. For us to watch, and for him to suffer. But I could not hold her back from him any longer. Perhaps I am overeager. I know you will forgive me.

_______

It is Lucia, of course it is Lucia, why should it not be Lucia? Why should this not be granted to him, this chance and this grace? If he would but ask Scamander about the coincidence of it, the old man would explain about discs of ice, and how they thin as the edge approaches. The place where air meets ice is fraught with possibility, and it is not for mortal men to inhabit.

Ludovico whispers to his wife.

“Lucia. Oh, Lucia. You’re here. You’re here.”

Her eyes constrict. She stiffens as if to run, but the ceiling is too low and it would be an impoliteness beyond bearing.

The blond woman beside her, who can only be Paola, coughs apologetically and Lucia nods to him exactly as a stranger just introduced might: meaningless kisses on the cheeks, a cold countenance, but she is shaking. As her lips graze the still-hot rim of her cup, her chimera mouth pleads without sound:

Please go. Let me have this.

But Ludo does not know the protocols. He is too full of tears and hope for that. He cries out, loudly, and the room freezes, the drinkers sneer, their lips curling back from sharp teeth. “Lucia,” he brays, “where have you been? What do you mean?”

Her eyes are liquid, enormous, a child caught out. “This is mine,” she whispers, mortified by him, his appearance, his disrespect. It will reflect poorly on her. “You can’t have it. Please.”

Ludo is beyond comprehension. He crawls to her on his knees, in humility, in shame, penitent. Begging to enter again his severe and monstrous idol.

“I didn’t want you here,” she hisses.

Paola snorts a little. She is too familiar with Lucia, behaving as if she is in full possession of the situation, and how dare she presume to know a thing about them? Ludo hates her immediately, sorts her past eel and mouse and into insect, devouring, soulless ant.

“He couldn’t have gotten here in the first place if not for you, my love,” she says gently, “so don’t be too angry. If you didn’t want him here you should have shut up your bedroom like a mosque. I did. I thought you would.”

Lucia rolls her eyes. “I was sure he wouldn’t figure it out—no one does from the first night, and what were the chances he’d find another one of us? He never leaves that apartment.”

“Figure what out?” Ludo is conscious of a great many eyes on him, but he cannot make himself move from his wife. She looks at him pityingly.

“This place, Ludo. Palimpsest. This city. How to get here, how to live here.”

At that, the patrons scramble to the tiny exit, a sudden riot of velvet hats and gold-soled shoes, shoving and squeezing through the little door, crawling desperately over each other to get out. They do not like it, they do not want to hear it, to know it.

“Lucia,” he says when the room has cleared. For him it is so simple. “Come home, please, I have missed you so much.”

She puts her hand on his head, an old gesture, not yet leeched of tenderness. Her hand and her voice are cold. “But it couldn’t have been only me. He’s here now, and this is very far from where I would have taken him. Who was it, Ludo? Who let you crawl into her like you come crawling to me now? Did you even know that’s how it works?” She stares spitefully at him, her hair piled up and strung through with tiny bronze feathers.

“Nerezza. And Anoud, later. It didn’t meananything. It was a way to you. She said it was. The only way.”

Lucia hoots haughty laughter. “That’s impressive. Nerezza’s like a sphinx. Awfully hard to pry open. Is that what you liked about her?”

“It wasn’t about liking.”

“But you do, I can tell. I was married to you. Was it eight years? I stopped counting.”

“What difference does it make? You left me. You could not have run further away from me. How can you be jealous?”

She looks at him blankly. “Do as you like,” she spits.

“I’d likeyou to come with me. Give me your hand, come home. It can be easy. I won’t reproach you, not ever. I swear it. It will be as it always was. You will lie on the couch the color of pecan shells and I will kiss your shoulder blades. It will all be forgotten.”

Paola puts a firm hand on his shoulder. “Save it. It’s over.”

“Who the hell do you think you are?” he shouts furiously. Scamander flinches in the corner of the teahouse and Rosalie clutches her tongs in the event of hysteria. “Who the hell are you to talk to us? You have no right.” He strikes the floor with his palm, and it is wrong, a tantrum, a childish thing, but he cannot help it.

“I’m hers,” she says simply. Her eyes slide into him, appraising, searching, and withdraw, finding him lacking, surely, small, an animal. “She lives with me in the real world. In a little flat overlooking a river. We have geraniums and a cat. We belong to each other, and soon we’ll find the last one of our Quarto, and then we’ll be able to live here forever. And you will only ever visit.”

“I met someone, Ludo, a long time ago.” Lucia sighs. She is trying to be kind and he recognizes that this is a trial for her. She can barely contain her scorn. She holds it before her like a shield. “A man with a funny birthmark. You know it by now. You have it. I’m sorry for that. Fucking him seemed harmless, an act performed outside our walls, and therefore unreal. You taught me that, that nothing outside us could be real. I believed it, I think. I believed it in Ostia. I believed it until him. And it washarmless, it was. You were so busy with that book, that Japanese thing. You didn’t need me. And to have a thing I didn’t have to share with you was rich and sweet. I was spread out under you so far and so thin, nothing of me was my own.” Lucia looks at her empty cup. “It is so beautiful and awful here, so much more real . . . well, more real than you. Than the story you told about us. This is my place, now, it’s not yours, it’s not. You have the world, this is mine.” Her voice had grown high and panicked, as if he were preparing to steal something from her. “You have Isidore and your glue and you have your brothers in Umbria and I had nothing, nothing but you and those stupid walls, and I was lonelyliving inside you, Ludo. You are not big enough for me.”