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trying to keep from smiling.
    You want more money, he said. This is natural.
    Well, I said.
    He offered another ten grand, half up front. But I must agree to finish by the end of the year. I must work on no other!
    No other, I said.
    I send, he said.
    I know, I said. Anon.
    Anon, he agreed.
    I got off the phone and screamed.
    Ahmad came running and I jumped on him and screamed.
    Shira, my ears! They are delicate mechanisms!
    Ahhh! I screamed.
    The New Life, it was about to begin!

PART TWO
    THRESHOLD

4
    NEW LIFE

    New Life! As when Dante, nearly nine, sees Beatrice for the first time and cries, Incipit vita nova! I, of course, had not come up with a word , much less a Latin exclamation—only a wild howling in my best friend’s ear. But the New Life! It was suddenly so easy to imagine: exchanging insights and recipes for tiramisu with Romei at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, the translation published to mammoth acclaim, authors calling, begging for my help. I’m booked till 2020! I’d say. Twenty years? they’d reply. You expect us to wait twenty years? Montale would call, Dante himself would call: I am sorry I disappointed you, I can see how foolish I was to have believed love ordered the cosmos, to have allowed you to think your love was sanctioned by the Divine!
    I could be magnanimous, finally: You ruined my life, Dantissimo, but I forgive you.
    I’m proud of you, he’d add. In Latin.
    Everyone would be proud! Ahmad would be proud! No more lectures about the UN. My father who art in heaven—his little girl! My mother who art who knows where? Who cared! My daughter? She’d be proudest of them all. I’d explain to her about Vita Nuova , Dante’s place in the Western canon, Romei’s place at the apex of the postmodern ridge of that canon, my place as a footnote at the apex of that ridge. Your mother, I’d say, has the mother of all opportunities. I love you when you’re amazing, she’d say.
    I would be amazing, the envy of grad students everywhere!
    It had been the cool kids in grad school who’d read Romei. As I labored over Provençal precedents, they read his work during marathon sessions of sexual experimentation, they assembled on his birthday to chant his famed response to Derrida, who’d once called Romei’s work seminal ( séminal ):
Who is this Derrida! What does he know!
Did he give up language! Did he learn to speak by reading!
He writes the language of lullabies! Fairy tales with happy endings!
This is the language of BETRAYAL !
    Much as I longed to participate in that chanting, not to mention those marathon sessions, I resisted Romei, reading him only when forced to by my adviser. Once I did, I couldn’t rid myself of him. He peered over my shoulder when I communed with Dante: Reactionary! he’d hiss. Hunter after truth! Believer in cosmic order! Ever stalwart, I shrugged him off and wrote not of his work but his life, his tendency to offer contradictory accounts of his past.
    According to his book-jacket biography, Romei was the devoutly Catholic son of a Jewish convert mother, considering the priesthood when the war broke out. When his parents were killed by the Romanian Iron Guard, he hid in a grain silo, tended there by a nun whose wimpled beauty caused him to reconsider his vocation. Still, when he left Romania in 1945, he chose Rome, hoping for new life in the shadow of the Pope.
    For two decades, he lived there in obscurity, interpreting for visiting journalists, appearing in a fantasy sequence in Fellini’s 8½ , writing unremarkable verse until, in his forties, he “burst onto the scene,” as they say, with Mother Tongue , a volume of iconoclastic poems so unprecedented, so bold in their treatment of language and meaning, so uncompromising in their conflation of loyalty and betrayal, they took Europe—or at least European poets—by storm.
    He followed four years later with Romance Language , poems that extended his explorations into the constitution (or lack thereof) of meaning by