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The windows are full of weather. Rain flings itself at the glass and clings on desperately as it slides down, buffeted by snatching grabs of wind.
In the wide, snag-toothed sweep of the Colosseum, she ate her last peach, a map of the city spread on her lap. She went to the pink-walled house where the famous young poet died, climbed up and down the Spanish Steps, soaked her feet in a fountain shaped like a boat.
She can’t stop thinking about him. Not in any constructive, intelligent, coherent way. But whatever she is doing or supposed to be thinking about, her mind slips sideways and just repeats Jake, Jake to her, over and over again. She’s never fallen for anyone the way she has fallen for him. It’s almost like a disease, an altered, weakened condition. He deprives her of herself, makes her exist in a kind of stupor, a daze, a state of Jakeness.
Travel strikes her sometimes as an almost suspiciously easy bargain: a new life in exchange for cash. Surely there should be something more Faustian, more binding about it? How can it be that easy?
