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believe, perfectly content. “I can’t keep my hands off you,” he said more than once when he pulled me to him. I would smile.
    I began to take a perverse pleasure in pretense. If I could not be truthful, then I would be the best liar in the world. If I couldn’t banish Tiberius Nero from my bed, I would try to make him completely besotted with me. It was a kind of game, really, and deep at the core of it was anger and mockery.
    Compared to many others, my lot was enviable. But some part of me cried out that what happened in our marriage bed was a violation. There were times when I lay there, as he spent his passion, and I wanted to scream. I did not want him. I did not want him.
    Once he bought me a pretty silver bracelet when I had not even asked for it. “It is beautiful,” I said as I put it on, and I kissed him.
    The happiness in his face hurt me. It made me despise myself because I was deceiving him. If I could have made myself truly care for him by an act of will, I would have done it. But that was beyond me.
    When we had been married a couple of months, he said, “I call you ‘dearest’ and ‘darling,’ but you always call me ‘husband,’ or else by my name. Why are you so formal, my little dove?”
    “Love is so new to me,” I said. “You must forgive me.”
    He laughed at what he took to be my innocence.
    “What do you wish me to call you?” I asked.
    “In our bedchamber, when we’re alone? Call me ‘my love.’ ”
    Afterward, that was what I called him, when we lay together. And that, more than anything, did something to my soul.

    The summer of my marriage was the time of Julius Caesar’s funeral games. It was a rare thing to hold funeral games—a way of honoring an extremely prominent person, and a way for the giver to ingratiate himself with the common people, who loved to be entertained. These games were given by Caesar’s great-nephew, whom he had adopted in his will as his son and heir.
    This young man had been studying in Rhodes. He arrived in Rome to claim his inheritance. Mark Antony, now consul, had found some excuse to keep back part of the money that he held in trust for him, and the two squabbled over this. There was a bequest to the soldiers of Caesar’s army that had also not been paid. The boy—he had been called Gaius Octavius at birth but now bore the name Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus—paid the soldiers out of his own funds. Some people found this disturbing. My father, for one, did not like it that as a result the boy stood high with the army. But my husband saw no harm in young Caesar’s gesture. “So what if he wastes his money, behaving like a show-off and a fool?”
    “Is that how he struck you when you knew him before?” I asked. He had met young Caesar several times when the boy was fourteen or so and he, Tiberius Nero, was an officer in Caesar’s army. “Did he seem foolish or arrogan t ?”
    “No,” Tiberius Nero said. “He was quiet and studious. No athlete, though, and no budding soldier. Pale and skinny, with a constant cough. And he had to be careful what he ate, or he’d throw up.” He grinned. “Really, I never saw a more pitiful specimen.”
    We were eating dinner alone, informally, at a small table at the edge of the garden. “You find nothing strange about him giving all that money to Caesar’s soldiers?” I said.
    “Well, it’s owed them,” my husband said. “And he was a rich young man even before Caesar died. Now he’s rich as Croesus. I suppose he’ll get reimbursed by Antony eventually.”
    “You think tha t ? I heard Antony has insulted young Caesar to his face. They loathe each other.”
    “Do they? Where do you hear all this, hmmm?”
    “From my father,” I said. “He is glad that young Caesar and Antony don’t get along.”
    Tiberius Nero chewed a piece of fish. “Really? Why does he care?”
    I was amazed that my husband did not know the answer to this question. In the two months we had been married, we had