Phoebe came up for the weekend. The children were at a party at the club; Hugh went to bed at ten because he goes to bed at ten. Phoebe and I sat on the back terrace with the end of a bottle of white Burgundy and the citronella candles and the sound of somebody's pool filter three lawns away.

And I said it. Out loud, for the first time, to a person. I think I'm going to leave.

She didn't gasp. She didn't say "Oh, Caro." She put her glass down on the flagstones and said, "What are you waiting for?"

So I told her. The children. Mother. The gala in April, which I've agreed to chair. The house. Hugh, who hasn't done anything wrong. The fact that I'm forty and haven't earned a paycheck since the first Reagan administration.

She listened to all of it. Then she said, "Those are all things. I asked what you're waiting for."

I said the end of the summer. She said, "Why the end of the summer?" I said because the children go back to school in September. And she looked at me the way I look at women on committees, and I heard it, and I didn't say anything else for a while, and neither did she, and the candles burned down, and a car went by very slowly on the road with its radio playing "Kiss Me," which I seem to hear everywhere I go this year.

I don't have an answer for her yet. But I heard the question. That is new.

Fifteen years on Wednesday.

Hugh remembered all by himself this year. I know because he told me so, a little shyly, over the soup: he'd made the reservation himself, at the French place on the East Side where we went the night he proposed, and he'd gone to the jeweler himself on his lunch hour, and there was no card, because, he said, he didn't want there to be any confusion. He knew. He'd known about Mrs. Albee's handwriting all along. Pearl earrings. He'd chosen them because I'd worn pearls at the wedding.

It was worse. I want to be precise about this, because it's the ugliest thing I've written here and I think it's true. It was much worse that he tried. When the card was in Mrs. Albee's hand I could tell myself it was his neglect. Wednesday night there was no neglect. There was a kind man across a small table doing everything right, and me, feeling nothing but a very polite, very well-brought-up grief.

The children are home. Oliver is fourteen and taller than I am and eats standing up with the refrigerator door open, like his father did at that age, apparently. Eliza has cut her hair herself. We're pretending it's deliberate.

Home Monday. The house smells of lemon oil and nobody.

Hugh met me at the airport, which was kind; he'd come straight from the office and was on the car phone before we reached the Whitestone Bridge. At home he asked if I'd had a good trip, and whether I'd got to the Uffizi, and I said yes, and started to tell him about the Carmine, and the telephone rang, and it was Tokyo.

I'm not writing that to be unkind to him. Tokyo is his job, and he's good at it, and it paid for Florence. I'm writing it because I stood in the kitchen with my suitcase still in the hall and felt a sentence finish itself in me. It started forming in front of Masaccio's Eve. I can feel exactly what it says. I'm not going to write it down yet. I'm superstitious about sentences. Once you write them down they're true.

(From the notebook, typed up at home.)

In the restaurants they say, "Sola?" Alone? And the first night I said it apologetically, as if I'd forgotten to bring someone. By the third night I said, "Sola," the way you'd say "Bene," and the waiter, who was seventy if he was a day, gave me the table by the window and brought me a glass of something from his own village without asking. Nobody in Greenwich has ever given me a better table for arriving by myself.

This afternoon, the Brancacci Chapel. Masaccio's Adam and Eve being driven out of the garden. When I was in school they still had the fig leaves some later century painted on; the restoration took them off, and now they're simply two people, naked and ruined, walking out into the rest of their lives. Eve's face is an open mouth. It's the most honest face in Florence. I stood in front of her for so long the guard came and stood next to me, not to move me along, just to look too.

Walked back across the Santa Trinita bridge at dusk. The river was the color of weak tea. I realized I wasn't sad, and I wasn't exactly happy. I was here. I'd forgotten there was a difference.

(From the notebook.) For once I'm not on Greenwich time at all. I'm six hours ahead of it.

San Marco this morning. You climb the stairs to the friars' dormitory and there at the top, before you're ready, is the Annunciation: the angel with his rainbow wings, Mary on her little stool, the thin columns, that pale green light. I wrote eighty-one pages about it in 1983. I knew every crack. I had theories about the brushwork that I defended at a seminar table with my hands shaking.

And then down the corridor, the cells, each one with its own small fresco, painted for one man to live with alone. That was my whole argument, at twenty-four: that these weren't pictures to be looked at but pictures to be lived next to, day after day, until they changed you. I'd forgotten I believed that. I stood in the doorway of one cell for a long time and a guard asked me, very politely, to step back from the wall, and I found I was crying, and he said, "Signora," and gave me a paper handkerchief from his pocket.

I'm forty years old and I have lived fifteen years next to the wrong pictures.

After the news from Colorado on Tuesday, I couldn't sit still. Wednesday morning I got in the car and drove three hours to Eliza's school to watch her play forty minutes of lacrosse in a cold wind. She saw me on the sideline in the second half and her face went through three expressions in about a second: surprise, mortification, and then, very briefly, before she could stop it, gladness. I drove home on that last one.

"Mom, why are you here?" she said afterward, holding her stick like a bishop's crook. "I was passing," I said. It is three hours from anywhere I have ever been.

Hugh said it was irrational. It was. It was the most rational thing I've done all year.

I've booked it. Florence, the second and third weeks of May. A small hotel on the south side of the river that I found in a guidebook from 1983, which is apparently still there and still has, the woman on the telephone assured me in careful English, "the terrace, signora, always the terrace."

Alone.

Hugh took it better than I'd braced for. He said, "Why alone?" and I said, "Because," and he waited, and I didn't have a second sentence, and he said, "Take Bitsy, she'd love it," and I said no. He shrugged and said he couldn't get away in May anyway, which is true; he hasn't been able to get away in May since 1986.

The news every night is our planes over Yugoslavia and the long lines of people walking out of Kosovo with their bags. I watch it in the study after Hugh goes up. I don't know why it makes me think about luggage. I seem to be thinking about luggage a great deal.

Forty on Sunday. Hugh gave a dinner in the city for eight, in a private room, with a cake shaped like a stack of art books, which I suspect was Mrs. Albee's idea and which was, I have to admit, rather wonderful. Everyone made a toast. Every toast mentioned my "grace." I began to feel like a hymn.

Monday I went up to the attic and found the boxes. Four of them, marked C. — SCHOOL in my own firm capitals. Three chapters, typed on the old Olivetti, and a fourth in longhand, and hundreds of index cards, and the photographs of the cells at San Marco I'd bought from the museum shop with money I didn't have.

I sat on the attic floor for three hours and read. The girl who wrote it was insufferable and brilliant and completely sure of herself. She used "one" a great deal. She thought she'd be famous. I wanted to shake her and I wanted to be her, and I could not work out, sitting there in the dust with my reading glasses on, at what exact point I had agreed to stop.

I brought one box down. It's on the desk in the library now. Mrs. Duarte dusted around it very carefully this morning, as if it might go off.

Went into the city yesterday to see Phoebe's new apartment. Two rooms on the fourth floor of a walk-up on the Upper West Side. The radiator bangs. The bathroom door doesn't close unless you lift it. She bought all new dishes at a discount place on Broadway, white, eleven dollars for a set of four, and she served me tea in one as though it were Meissen.

The kitchen sink is under a window, and the window looks out at a brick wall about six feet away, and if you lean to the left you can see a slice of sky and a water tower. She stood at that sink washing our two cups and humming, and I stood behind her in my good coat and felt such a violent pang of envy that I had to go and look at her bookshelves.

I have four sinks. I have never once stood at any of them humming.

Her lawyer is a woman of sixty who, Phoebe says, "eats husbands for breakfast and then asks for more toast." Grant is being decent about it, mostly. They have no children and not much property, and Phoebe says it's astonishing how quickly a life comes apart when there's nothing holding it together but habit. She meant it as reassurance.

A year of Thursdays with Dr. R. Fifty-odd hours on her gray sofa in the carriage house in Stamford, looking at her one plant, which is doing much better than when I started.

I reread last year's pages this week. I hated them: all that wit, all those careful little sentences, like a woman doing needlepoint on a sinking ship. I thought about taking them down. I've left them. Dr. R. says the needlepoint was the point.

Today she asked me a new question. Not "What do you want?" She's given up on that one, or pretends to. Today she said, "Whose permission are you waiting for?" And I opened my mouth to say "No one's," and a whole procession went by instead: Mother, Hugh, Hugh's mother, the children, the women on the committees, the man at the club who holds the door, my father, who has been dead six years.

I didn't have an answer. I wrote her a check anyway. I'm told this is progress.

New Year's Eve at the club. Hugh was asleep by twenty past twelve, in his tuxedo shirt, on top of the covers. I sat in the window seat and watched a last few fireworks over the harbor and thought about Phoebe, who spent the evening on a friend's sofa eating Chinese food out of the carton and called at 12:02 to say it was the best New Year's of her life.

Everyone is talking about the year 2000, whether the computers will stop and the lights will go out. Hugh's firm has a whole floor of young men working on it. I find I'm not frightened of the lights going out. I'm frightened that they won't, and that it will be 2000, and then 2001, and I'll still be in this window seat.

No resolutions. I've been resolving things for fifteen years. This year I thought I might let a few of them dissolve.