It was impossible, finally, not to tell Calderwood and Brad and Johnny Heath that he was going to be away for at least a month and why. Jean conceded the point, but on condition that he swear them to secrecy, which he did.

Calderwood was mournful. Rudolph couldn’t tell whether it was because of his daughter or because he didn’t like the idea of Rudolph being away from the business for a month. “I hope you’re not being rash,” Calderwood said. “I remember the girl. She seemed like a poor little thing to me. I’ll bet she doesn’t have a dime.”

“She works,” Rudolph said defensively.

“I don’t approve of wives working,” Calderwood said. He shook his head. “Ah, Rudy—and you could have had everything.”

Everything, Rudolph thought. Including crazy Virginia Calderwood and her pornographic letters.

Neither Brad nor Johnny Heath was wildly enthusiastic, but he wasn’t marrying to please them. Enthusiastic or not, they both came to the wedding at City Hall and drove out to the airport with the bride and groom and Florence.

Rudolph’s first husbandly moment came when they checked in and Jean’s luggage was nearly a hundred pounds overweight. “Good Lord,” he said, “what have you got in there?”

“A change of clothes,” Jean said. “You don’t want your wife to walk around naked in front of all those Frenchmen, do you?”

“For a girl who doesn’t like the trappings of luxury,” he said, as he wrote out the check for the overweight, “you sure carry around a lot of supplies.” He tried to make it sound light, but he had a moment of foreboding. The long years of having to pinch pennies had made him fitfully careful about money. Extravagant wives had ruined men many times wealthier than he. Unworthy fear. I’ll handle her, if necessary, he thought. Today he felt he could handle anything. He took her hand and led the way toward the bar.

They had time for two bottles of champagne before they took off and Johnny Heath promised to call Gretchen and Rudolph’s mother and tell them the news once the plane was off the ground.

The days grew warmer. They lazed in the sun. They became dark brown and Jean’s hair turned almost blond, bleached by the sun and salt water. She gave him tennis lessons on the courts of the hotel and said that he had talent for the game. She was very serious about the lessons and spoke sharply to him when he didn’t hit out correctly. She taught him how to water ski. She kept amazing him with the number of things she could do well.

They had lunch brought to them at their cabana overlooking the speed-boat mooring. They ate cold langouste and drank white wine and after lunch they went up to their rooms to make love, with the windows shuttered against the afternoon sun.

He didn’t look at any of the girls lying almost naked around the hotel pool and on the rocks next to the diving board, although two or three of the girls well deserved to be looked at.

“You’re unnatural,” Jean said to him.

“Why am I unnatural?”

“Because you don’t ogle.”

“I ogle you.”

“Keep it up,” she said.

They found new restaurants and ate bouillabaisse on the terrasse of Chez Felix, where you could look through the arch of the rampart at the boats in the harbor of Antibes. When they made love later they both smelled of garlic and wine, but they didn’t mind.

They took excursions to the hill towns and visited the Matisse chapel and the pottery works at Vallauris and ate lunch on the terrace of the Colombe d’Or at St.-Paul-de-Vence, in the white flutter of doves’ wings. They learned with regret that the flock was kept white because the white doves drove off pigeons of any other color. When occasionally the doves did tolerate their impure fellows, the proprietor killed them off himself.

Wherever they went, Jean took her cameras along, and took innumerable pictures of him against backgrounds of masts, ramparts, palms, waves. “I am going to make you into the wallpaper for our bedroom in New York,” she said.

He no longer bothered to put on a shirt when he came out of the water. Jean said she liked the hair on his chest and the fuzz on his shoulders.

They planned a trip to Italy when they got tired of the Cap d’Antibes. They got out a map and circled the towns of Menton, San Remo, Milano for the Last Supper, Rap-pallo, Santa Margherita, Firenze, for Michelangelo and the Botticellis, Bologna, Siena, Assisi, Rome. The names were like little bells chiming in sunshine. Jean had been everywhere. Other summers. It would be a long time before he learned everything about her.

They didn’t get tired of the Cap d’Antibes.

One day, he took a set from her in tennis. She fought off set point three times, but he finally won. She was furious. For two minutes.

They sent a cable to Calderwood to say that they weren’t coming back for awhile.

They didn’t speak to anyone at the hotel except an Italian movie actress who was so beautiful that you had to speak to her. Jean spent a morning taking photographs of the Italian movie actress and sent them to Vogue in New York. Vogue cabled back that they were going to run a set in their September issue.

Nothing could go wrong that month.

Although they still were not tired of the Cap d’Antibes, they got into the car and started driving south to visit the towns they had circled on the map. They were disappointed nowhere.

They sat in the cobbled square of Portofino and ate chocolate ice cream, the best chocolate ice cream in the world. They watched the women selling postcards and lace and embroidered tablecloths from their stands to tourists and they eyed the yachts moored in the harbor.

There was one slender, white yacht, about fifty feet long, with racy, clean Italian lines and Rudolph said, “That’s what machinery is all about. When it comes out like that.”

“Would you like to own it?” Jean asked, scooping up her chocolate ice cream.

“Who wouldn’t like to own it?” he said.

“I’ll buy it for you,” she said.

“Thanks,” he said. “And how about a Ferrari and a mink-lined overcoat and a forty-room house on the Cap d’Antibes, too, while you’re at it?”

“No,” she said, still eating her ice cream. “I really mean it. If you really want it.”

He examined her closely. She was calm and serious. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Vogue isn’t paying you that much for those pictures.”

“I don’t depend on Vogue,” she said. “I’m awfully rich. When my mother died she left me an obscene amount of stocks and bonds. Her father owned one of the biggest drug companies in the United States.”

“What’s the name of the company?” Rudolph asked suspiciously.

Jean told him the name of the company.

Rudolph whistled softly and put down his spoon.

“It’s all in a trust fund that my father and brother control until I’m twenty-five,” Jean said, “but even now my income is at least three times the size of yours. I hope I haven’t spoiled your day.”

Rudolph burst into a roar of laughter. “Christ,” he said. “What a honeymoon!”

She didn’t buy him a yacht that afternoon, but as a compromise, she bought him a shocking-pink shirt in a faggy shop alongside the harbor.

Later on, when he asked why she hadn’t told him before, she was evasive. “I hate talking about money,” she said. “That’s all they ever talked about in my family. By the time I was fifteen I came to the belief that money degrades the soul if you think about it all the time. I never went home a single summer after the age of fifteen. Since I got out of college I never used a cent of the money my mother left me. I let my father and brother put it back into the business. They want me to let them keep using the income when the trust expires, but they’re in for a big surprise. They’ll cheat me if they can and I’m not out to be cheated. Especially not by them.”