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the city from the plague. Tintoretto, Angelo said, had spent almost a quarter of a century decorating it. It was the kind of information that could easily have been plundered from any guidebook and the cruel thought occurred to her that perhaps he made a habit of picking up female tourists of a certain age.
    The most renowned of Tintoretto’s paintings, The Crucifixion, was in a small adjoining room and they stood there for a long time staring at it. Sarah had never known quite what to make of religion. Her mother was a lapsed Catholic and her father a lapsed atheist, now teetering in his seventies over the edge of agnosticism into an as yet amorphous realm of belief. Benjamin had always denounced any form of religious belief as a convenient excuse for not thinking. And though Sarah was less zealous in her skepticism, her attitude on this—and so many other issues—had been infected by his.
    So perhaps it was, again, some futile, half-conscious attempt to excise his influence, to mark herself out as an independent mind, that she allowed herself to be so moved by the painting. It was a tumult of suffering and beauty, each cluster of characters busy in its own drama. And the nailed Christ, winged and crowned with light against the stony sky and gazing down from his cross at his executioners, radiated such serenity that Sarah found herself filled with a confused and nameless longing.
    Behind her glasses her eyes began to brim but she managed to keep the tears from spilling. She was sure, however, that the young man at her side noticed. He had been saying something about Tintoretto’s habit of putting a self-portrait into his pictures but he broke off and walked away a few paces to study another painting. Sarah was grateful. If he’d tried to touch or comfort her she would certainly have lost control and started to sob. And she had done enough crying these past few years. It mystified, even slightly angered, her that a mere picture could bring her so close to the brink and she used the anger to chastise and compose herself.
    Stepping again into the sunlight was a relief. They wound their way to the Grand Canal just in time to catch a vaporetto to the Rialto Bridge where Angelo said he knew a good little restaurant. Venetians ate there, he said, not tourists. It turned out to be a modest place, halfway along a narrow alley. White-coated waiters, all of whom seemed to Sarah curiously small, scurried between the tables with trays stacked with fresh seafood and steaming pasta. The one who took their order did so with a curt politeness.
    She told Angelo to choose for her, that she liked almost everything. He ordered a salad of sweet tomatoes, basil, and buffalo mozzarella and then some grilled whitefish whose name meant nothing to her but which, when it arrived, looked and tasted a little like striped bass. They drank a whole bottle of white wine which he said was made from grapes that grew along the eastern shore of Lake Garda. It was cool and creamy and Sarah drank too much of it and began to feel a little light-headed.
    She had never felt comfortable talking about herself. It was a subject about which she felt there was nothing to say that could possibly be of interest to anyone. Of course, after Benjamin left, she had gotten a lot better at it. Iris and the handful of close friends who rallied around her hadn’t given her much of an option, urging her to explore with them the failure of her marriage, examining every wretched corner and wrinkle of it until there seemed to be nothing left to say and they all grew sick of it.
    And yet long before that, almost as long as Sarah could remember, when she and Benjamin had been—at least, as far as she was concerned—happily married, she had developed a simple technique to avoid revealing too much about herself. She would ask questions instead and soon discovered that the more direct and startlingly personal the question, the more likely it was that the person asked (especially if