To please Bethesda, I kept to the house as much as possible. For long hours I did little more than sit beside her in the garden, holding her hand while we reminisced. It was in Alexandria that I had found her. I had been a young man, footloose in the world. She had been a slave, hardly more than a child. At the first sight of her I was hopelessly smitten, as only a young man can be. I was determined to purchase her and make her my own, and I did. When I returned to Rome, I brought Bethesda with me. It was not until she became pregnant with Diana that I made her a free woman and married her so that my child would be born free. Why had I waited so long? Partly because I feared that such a drastic change in Bethesda's status would also throw our relationship out of balance; she already wielded quite enough power over me as my slave! But our marriage and the birth of our daughter had only strengthened the bond between us, and freedom had strengthened Bethesda's character in every way. Where before she had seemed willful, she became strong willed; where before she had seemed petulant, I came to see her as fiercely determined. Did these changes take place in Bethesda or merely in my perceptions of her? I couldn't say, and Bethesda was the last person to ask. Paradox and irony held no fascination for her.

When we reminisced, it was not to remark about subtle states of mind or the way things changed but stayed the same. Our conversations served to remind one another of a vast, shared catalogue of people, places, and things. The mere summoning up of these memories brought us a shared pleasure.

"Do you remember the beacon atop the Pharos lighthouse," she would ask, "and how we sat on the deck of the ship the night we sailed from Alexandria and watched it dwindle to nothing?"

"Of course I remember. It was a warm night. Even so, you shivered, so I held you next to me."

"I shivered because I was afraid to leave Alexandria. I thought that Rome would swallow me up."

I laughed. "Do you remember how awful the food was, on that ship? Bread like bricks, salty dried figs-"

"Nothing like our last meal in Alexandria. Do you remember-"

"-the little shop on the corner that sold sesame cakes soaked with honey and wine? The memory makes my mouth water even now."

"And the funny little woman who ran the shop? All those cats! Every cat in Alexandria came to her shop!"

"Because she encouraged them," I said. "She put out bowls of milk. The day before we left, she showed us some kittens, and you insisted on smuggling one of those kittens on board the ship with you, even though I expressly forbade it."

"I had to bring something of Alexandria with me. The Romans should have thanked me for bringing them a new deity! Imagine my surprise when we arrived and I saw not a single statue of a proper god anywhere in the whole city, no falcon-headed Horus or dog-headed Anubis-only images of ordinary men and women. I knew then that you had brought me to a very strange place indeed…"

At some point we would both realize that we had had this exact conversation before, not once but many times over the years; it was like a ritual that once begun had to be pursued to its conclusion; and like most rituals its mere observance brought us a curious comfort. One memory would lead to another and another, like links in a chain that wound around and around us both, cinching us together at the very center of the time and space that encompassed our two lives.

And then… the shadow of her illness would pass over Bethesda. The corners of her mouth would constrict. Her brow would furrow. Her hand would tighten, then loosen, in mine, and she would say that she was suddenly weary and light-headed and needed to lie down. I would draw a deep breath, and it would seem to me that the very air was thick with worry and repining.

I began to feel like a prisoner in my own house. Small irritations grew into unbearable torments.

Androcles and Mopsus drove me to distraction with their constant bickering. One day I yelled at them so sharply that little Androcles began to cry, whereupon Mopsus began to tease him, which drove me into such a fury that I barely restrained myself from striking him. Afterward I felt so ill that I had to lie down, and found myself wondering if I had fallen victim to Bethesda's complaint.

Hieronymus, whose mordant wit had always amused me, began to strike me as a pretentious buffoon, always prattling on about Roman politics, a subject about which he knew next to nothing. One night, losing my temper over some particularly sarcastic observation of his, I remarked on the prodigious quantities he was able to consume at every meal, at my expense. He turned pale, put down his bowl, and said that from that point onward he would take all his meals alone, after the family ate, dining upon our scraps. He left the room, and nothing I could say would persuade him to return. This was the man who had taken me into his home in Massilia, sharing everything he had with me.

Davus, who had saved my life in Massilia, earned my wrath one day by knocking over a tripod lamp. Trying to pick it up, he tripped and stepped on it and damaged it even more. When he was done, all three of the bronze griffin heads were dented and the pole was bent. It was-or rather, had been-one of the most valuable objects remaining in the house, something I had counted on being able to sell if the direst need arose. I told him that his clumsiness had robbed the household of a month's worth of food.

Even with Diana, I became short-tempered. I found myself arguing with her about her mother's illness and what to do about it. Our disagreements were over small things-whether Bethesda should drink hot beverages or cold ones, whether or not she should be kept awake during the day (so that she might sleep more soundly at night, I argued), whether to heed the advice of a physician who had told us that the blood of a sparrow would be beneficial to her-but the words we exchanged were sharp and bitter. I accused Diana of having inherited her mother's worst traits of stubbornness and wrong-headedness. In a cruel moment she accused me of caring less about her mother than she did. I was cut to the quick, and for several days would hardly speak to her.

I looked to my son Eco for relief. Like Meto, he was my child by adoption. Unlike Meto, we had never had a falling-out of any sort, yet over the years we had grown apart. This was only natural; Eco had his own household. He also had his own livelihood, following in my footsteps, and although we had occasionally consulted one another professionally over the years, Eco had grown increasingly independent and kept his business and financial affairs to himself. Increasingly, he also kept his family to himself. Eco had married up, into an old but faded family desperate for fresh blood, the Menenii. His wife and Bethesda had never really gotten along.

The afternoon I invited Eco and his brood to my house turned into a disaster. Menenia said something to offend Bethesda-some nonsense about the women of her family "staring down" illness rather then submitting to it-and Bethesda promptly retired to her bed. Eco's golden-haired, eleven-year-old twins, who took after their mother, took shameless advantage of Mopsus and Androcles, ordering them to fetch this and that. When Androcles muttered a remark about "losing their heads someday"-a bit of inflammatory rhetoric he had picked up in the Forum, no doubt-Eco was appalled and insisted that I punish the boy like the slave he was; and when I refused, he took his family home. Goaded by his brother, Androcles gloated about his escape, whereupon I finally did deliver a few sound thwacks to his back side. Everyone in the household went to bed miserable that night.

In the past, there had always been someone to whom I could turn in troubled times, even though he was seldom present. Confused, unhappy, seeking solace, I would have locked myself away in my study, taken up my stylus, unlatched the cover of a spare wax tablet and rubbed it blank, and set about writing a letter to Meto. Knowing he might not read my words for many days-secretly fearing he might never read them, for he was a soldier and often in danger-I would nonetheless have set down my thoughts and feelings to share with my beloved son; and having done so, I would have felt a great relief and a lightening of my spirit. But now, by my own decree, that avenue was closed to me. In those dismal days, how bitterly I missed that source of solace!