“Richard, how goes it?”
“It’s another day in paradise.”
That was a repetition of Richard’s throughout my time at Beal. Intended to be ironic, he and I both knew Beal wasn’t paradise. He and I both knew it wasn’t hell either.

Willie’s new to Rome. In town with his companion Anne, an artist with a one-year residency at the Crest Foundation, they have an apartmentino on the second floor of a giant villa that fifty others live in with them. It’s a neighborhood southwest of the Vatican with good markets and restaurants, a big park he jogs in and an old-world Italian bar down the hill in Trastevere…