Sex was everywhere at first, in words, phrases, half gestures, the simplest intimation of altered space. She’d put down a book or magazine and a small pause settled around them. This was sex. They’d walk down a street together and see themselves in a dusty window. A flight of stairs was sex, the way she moved close to the wall with him just behind, to touch or not, brush lightly or press tight, feeling him crowd her from below, his hand moving around her thigh, stopping her, the way he eased up and around, the way she gripped his wrist. The tilt she gave her sunglasses when she turned and looked at him or the movie on TV when the woman comes into the empty room and it doesn’t matter whether she picks up the phone or takes off her skirt as long as she’s alone and they are watching. The rented beach house was sex, entering at night after the long stiff drive, her body feeling welded at the joints, and she’d hear the soft heave of surf on the other side of the dunes, the thud and run, and this was the line of separation, the sound out there in the dark that marked an earthly pulse in the blood.

She sat thinking about this. Her mind drifted in and out of this, the early times, eight years ago, of the eventual extended grimness called their marriage. The day’s mail was in her lap. There were matters to attend to and there were events that crowded out such matters but she was looking past the lamp into the wall, where they seemed to be projected, the man and woman, bodies incomplete but bright and real.

It was the postcard that snapped her back, on top of the cluster of bills and other mail. She glanced at the message, a standard scrawled greeting, sent by a friend staying in Rome, then looked again at the face of the card. It was a reproduction of the cover of Shelley’s poem in twelve cantos, first edition, called Revolt of Islam. Even in postcard format, it was clear that the cover was beautifully designed, with a large illustrated R that included creatural flourishes, a ram’s head and what may have been a fanciful fish with a tusk and a trunk. Revolt of Islam. The card was from the Keats-Shelley House in Piazza di Spagna and she’d understood in the first taut seconds that the card had been sent a week or two earlier. It was a matter of simple coincidence, or not so simple, that a card might arrive at this particular time bearing the title of that specific book.