“Ninety-three Million Miles Away” by Barbara Gowdy

Barbara Gowdy’s wholly unique style permeates her short story collection, We So Seldom Look on Love. In “Ninety-three Million Miles Away,” housewife Ali relentlessly pursues an ever-elusive sense of personal satisfaction and accomplishment. Ali’s appetite for acquisition — for knowledge and talent, for fine clothes, and for the objective admiration of others — unravels her life with a reckless intensity as she learns that our personal fictions might be preferable to our truths, after all.

Ninety-three Million Miles Away

At least part of the reason why Ali married Claude, a cosmetic surgeon with a growing practice, was so that she could quit her boring government job. Claude was all for it. “You only have one life to live,” he said. “You only have one kick at the can.” He gave her a generous allowance and told her to do what she wanted.

She wasn’t sure what that was, aside from trying on clothes in expensive stores. Claude suggested something musical — she loved music — so she took dance classes and piano lessons and discovered that she had a tin ear and no sense of rhythm. She fell into a mild depression during which she peevishly questioned Claude about the ethics of cosmetic surgery.

“It all depends on what light you’re looking at it in,” Claude said. He was not easily riled. What Ali needed to do, he said, was take the wider view.

She agreed. She decided to devote herself to learning, and she began a regimen of reading and studying, five days a week, five to six hours a day. She read novels, plays, biographies, essays, magazine articles, almanacs, the New Testament, The Concise Oxford Dictionary, The Harper Anthology of Poetry. But after a year of this, although she became known as the person at dinner parties who could supply the name or date that somebody was snapping around for, she wasn’t particularly happy, and she didn’t even feel smart. Far from it, she felt stupid, a machine, an idiot savant whose one talent was memorization. If she had any creative talent, which was the only kind she really admired, she wasn’t going to find it by armouring herself with facts. She grew slightly paranoid that Claude wanted her to settle down and have a baby.

On their second wedding anniversary they bought a condominium apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows, and Ali decided to abandon her reading regimen and to take up painting. Since she didn’t know the first thing about painting or even drawing, she studied pictures from art books. She did know what her first subject was going to be — herself in the nude. A few months ago she’d had a dream about spotting her signature in the corner of a painting, and realizing from the conversation of the men who were admiring it (and blocking her view) that it was an extraordinary rendition of her naked self. She took the dream to be a sign. For two weeks she studied the proportions, skin tones and muscle definitions of the nudes in her books, then she went out and bought art supplies and a self-standing, full-length mirror.

She set up her work area halfway down the living room. Here she had light without being directly in front of the window. When she was all ready to begin, she stood before the mirror and slipped off her white terry-cloth housecoat and her pink flannelette pyjamas, letting them fall to the floor. It aroused her a little to witness her careless shedding of clothes. She tried a pose: hands folded and resting loosely under her stomach, feet buried in the drift of her housecoat.

For some reason, however, she couldn’t get a fix on what she looked like. Her face and body seemed indistinct, secretive in a way, as if they were actually well defined, but not to her, or not from where she was looking.

She decided that she should simply start, and see what happened. She did a pencil drawing of herself sitting in a chair and stretching. It struck her as being very good, not that she could really judge, but the out-of-kilter proportions seemed slyly deliberate, and there was a pleasing simplicity to the reaching arms and the elongated curve of the neck. Because flattery hadn’t been her intention, Ali felt that at last she may have wrenched a vision out of her soul.

The next morning she got out of bed unusually early, not long after Claude had left the apartment, and discovered sunlight streaming obliquely into the living room through a gap between their building and the apartment house next door. As far as she knew, and in spite of the plate-glass windows, this was the only direct light they got. Deciding to make use of it while it lasted, she moved her easel, chair and mirror closer to the window. Then she took off her housecoat and pyjamas.

For a few moments she stood there looking at herself, wondering what it was that had inspired the sketch. Today she was disposed to seeing herself as not bad, overall. As far as certain specifics went, though, as to whether her breasts were small, for instance, or her eyes close together, she remained in the dark.

Did other people find her looks ambiguous? Claude was always calling her beautiful, except that the way he put it — “You’re beautiful to me” or “I think you’re beautiful” — made it sound as if she should understand that his taste in women was unconventional. Her only boyfriend before Claude, a guy called Roger, told her she was great but never said how exactly. When they had sex, Roger liked to hold the base of his penis and watch it going in and out of her. Once, he said that there were days he got so horny at the office, his pencil turned him on. (She felt it should have been his pencil sharpener.)

Maybe she was one of those people who are more attractive when they’re animated, she thought. She gave it a try. She smiled and tossed her head, she tucked her hair behind her ears. She covered her breasts with her hands. Down her cleavage a drop of sweat slid haltingly, a sensation like the tip of a tongue. She circled her palms until her nipples hardened. She imagined a man’s hands . . . not Claude’s — a man’s hands not attached to any particular man. She looked out the window.

In the apartment across from her she saw a man.

She leapt to one side, behind the drapes. Her heart pounded violently, as if something had thundered by. She stood there hugging herself. The drapes smelled bitter, cabbagey. Her right hand cupped her left breast, which felt like her heart because her pulse was in it.

After a moment she realized that she had started circling both of her palms on her nipples again. She stopped, astonished, then went on doing it but with the same skeptical thrill she used to get when she knew it wasn’t her moving the Ouija board. And then it was her feet that were moving involuntarily, taking her from behind the drapes into a preternatural brightness.

She went to the easel, picked up a brush and the palette and began to mix a skin colour. She didn’t look at the window or at the mirror. She had the tranced sensation of being at the edge of a cliff. Her first strokes dripped, so she switched to dabbing at the canvas, producing what started to resemble feathers. Paint splashed on her own skin but she ignored it and went on dabbing, layer on layer until she lost the direct sun. Then she wet a rag in the turpentine and wiped her hands and her breasts and stomach.

She thought about the sun. That it is ninety-three million miles away and that its fuel supply will last another five billion years. Instead of thinking about the man who was watching her, she tried to recall a solar chart she had memorized a couple of years ago.

The surface temperature is six thousand degrees Fahrenheit, she told herself. Double that number and you have how many times bigger the surface of the sun is compared to the surface of the earth. Except that because the sun is a ball of hot gas, it actually has no surface.

When she had rubbed the paint off, she went into the kitchen to wash away the turpentine with soap and water. The man’s eyes tracked her. She didn’t have to glance at the window for confirmation. She switched on the light above the sink, soaped the dishcloth and began to wipe her skin. There was no reason to clean her arms, but she lifted each one and wiped the cloth over it. She wiped her breasts. She seemed to share in his scrutiny, as if she were looking at herself through his eyes. From his perspective she was able to see her physical self very clearly — her shiny, red-highlighted hair, her small waist and heart-shaped bottom, the dreamy tilt to her head.

She began to shiver. She wrung out the cloth and folded it over the faucet, then patted herself dry with a dish towel. Then, pretending to be examining her fingernails, she turned and walked over to the window. She looked up.

There he was, in the window straight across but one floor higher. Her glance of a quarter of an hour ago had registered dark hair and a white shirt. Now she saw a long, older face, a man in his fifties maybe. A green tie. She had seen him before this morning — quick, disinterested (or so she had thought) sightings of a man in his kitchen, watching television, going from room to room. A bachelor living next door. She pressed the palms of her hands on the window, and he stepped back into shadow.

The pane clouded from her breath. She leaned her body into it, flattening her breasts against the cool glass. Right at the window she was visible to his apartment and the one below, which had closed vertical blinds. “Each window like a pill’ry appears,” she thought. Vaguely appropriate lines from the poems she had read last year were always occurring to her. She felt that he was still watching, but she yearned for proof.

When it became evident that he wasn’t going to show himself, she went into the bedroom. The bedroom windows didn’t face the apartment house, but she closed them anyway, then got into bed under the covers. Between her legs there was such a tender throbbing that she had to push a pillow into her crotch. Sex addicts must feel like this, she thought. Rapists, child molesters.

She said to herself, “You are a certifiable exhibitionist.” She let out an amazed, almost exultant laugh, but instantly fell into a darker amazement as it dawned on her that she really was, she really was an exhibitionist. And what’s more, she had been one for years, or at least she had been working up to being one for years.

Why, for instance, did she and Claude live here, in this vulgar low-rise? Wasn’t it because of the floor-to-ceiling windows that faced the windows of the house next door?

And what about when she was twelve and became so obsessed with the idea of urinating on people’s lawns that one night she crept out of the house after everyone was asleep and did it? Peed on the lawn of the townhouses next door, right under a streetlight, in fact.

What about two years ago, when she didn’t wear underpants the entire summer? She’d had a minor yeast infection and had read that it was a good idea not to wear underpants at home, if you could help it, but she had stopped wearing them in public as well, beneath skirts and dresses, at parties, on buses, and she must have known that this was taking it a bit far, because she had kept it from Claude.

“Oh, my God,” she said wretchedly.

She went still, alerted by how theatrical that had sounded. Her heart was beating in her throat. She touched a finger to it. So fragile, a throat. She imagined the man being excited by one of her hands circling her throat.

What was going on? What was the matter with her? Maybe she was too aroused to be shocked at herself. She moved her hips, rubbing her crotch against the pillow. No, she didn’t want to masturbate. That would ruin it.

Ruin what?

She closed her eyes, and the man appeared to her. She experienced a rush of wild longing. It was as if, all her life, she had been waiting for a long-faced, middle-aged man in a white shirt and green tie. He was probably still standing in his living room, watching her window.

She sat up, threw off the covers.

Dropped back down on the bed.

This was crazy. This really was crazy. What if he was a rapist? What if, right this minute, he was downstairs, finding out her name from the mailbox? Or what if he was just some lonely, normal man who took her display as an invitation to phone her up and ask her for a date? It’s not as if she wanted to go out with him. She wasn’t looking for an affair.

For an hour or so she fretted, and then she drifted off to sleep. When she woke up, shortly after noon, she was quite calm. The state she had worked herself into earlier struck her as overwrought. So, she gave some guy a thrill, so what? She was a bit of an exhibitionist. Most women were, she bet. It was instinctive, a side effect of being the receptor in the sex act.

She decided to have lunch and go for a walk. While she was making herself a sandwich she avoided glancing at the window, but as soon as she sat at the table she couldn’t resist looking over.

He wasn’t there, and yet she felt that he was watching her, standing out of the light. She ran a hand through her hair. “For Christ’s sake,” she reproached herself, but she was already with him. Again it was as if her eyes were in his head, although not replacing his eyes. She knew that he wanted her to slip her hand down her sweat pants. She did this. Watching his window, she removed her hand and licked her wet fingers. At that instant she would have paid money for some sign that he was watching.

After a few minutes she began to chew on her fingernails. She was suddenly depressed. She reached over and pulled the curtain across the window and ate her sandwich. Her mouth, biting into the bread, trembled like an old lady’s. “Tremble like a guilty thing surprised,” she quoted to herself. It wasn’t guilt, though. It wasn’t frustration, either, not sexual frustration. She was acquainted with this bleached sadness — it came upon her at the height of sensation. After orgasms, after a day of trying on clothes in stores.

She finished her sandwich and went for a long walk in her new toreador pants and her tight black turtleneck. By the time she returned, Claude was home. He asked her if she had worked in the nude again.

“Of course,” she said absently. “I have to.” She was looking past him at the man’s closed drapes. “Claude,” she said suddenly, “am I beautiful? I mean not just to you. Am I empirically beautiful?”

Claude looked surprised. “Well, yeah,” he said. “Sure you are. Hell, I married you, didn’t I? Hey!” He stepped back. “Whoa!”

She was removing her clothes. When she was naked, she said, “Don’t think of me as your wife. Just as a woman. One of your patients. Am I beautiful or not?”

He made a show of eyeing her up and down. “Not bad,” he said. “Of course, it depends what you mean by beautiful.” He laughed. “What’s going on?”

“I’m serious. You don’t think I’m kind of . . . normal? You know, plain?”

“Of course not,” he said lovingly. He reached for her and drew her into his arms. “You want hard evidence?” he said.

They went into the bedroom. It was dark because the curtains were still drawn. She switched on the bedside lamp, but once he was undressed he switched it off.

“No,” she said from the bed, “leave it on.”

“What? You want it on?”

“For a change.”

The next morning she got up before he did. She had hardly slept. During breakfast she kept looking over at the apartment house, but there was no sign of the man. Which didn’t necessarily mean that he wasn’t there. She couldn’t wait for Claude to leave so that she could stop pretending she wasn’t keyed-up. It was gnawing at her that she had overestimated or somehow misread the man’s interest. How did she know? He might be gay. He might be so devoted to a certain woman that all other women repelled him. He might be puritanical, a priest, a Born-Again. He might be out of his mind.

The minute Claude left the apartment, she undressed and began work on the painting. She stood in the sunlight mixing colours, then sat on the chair in her stretching pose, looking at herself in the mirror, then stood up and, without paying much attention, glancing every few seconds at his window, painted ribs and uplifted breasts.

An hour went by before she thought, He’s not going to show up. She dropped into the chair, weak with disappointment, even though she knew that, very likely, he had simply been obliged to go to work, that his being home yesterday was a fluke. Forlornly she gazed at her painting. To her surprise she had accomplished something rather interesting: breasts like Picasso eyes. It is possible, she thought dully, that I am a natural talent.

She put her brush in the turpentine, and her face in her hands. She felt the sun on her hair. In a few minutes the sun would disappear behind his house, and after that, if she wanted him to get a good look at her, she would have to stand right at the window. She envisioned herself stationed there all day. You are ridiculous, she told herself. You are unhinged.

She glanced up at the window again.

He was there.

She sat up straight. Slowly she came to her feet. Stay, she prayed. He did. She walked to the window, her fingertips brushing her thighs. She held her breath. When she was at the window, she stood perfectly still. He stood perfectly still. He had on a white shirt again, but no tie. He was close enough that she could make out the darkness around his eyes, although she couldn’t tell exactly where he was looking. But his eyes seemed to enter her head like a drug, and she felt herself aligned with his perspective. She saw herself — surprisingly slender, composed but apprehensive—through the glass and against the backdrop of the room’s white walls.

After a minute or two she walked to the chair, picked it up and carried it to the window. She sat facing him, her knees apart. He was as still as a picture. So was she, because she had suddenly remembered that he might be gay, or crazy. She tried to give him a hard look. She observed his age and his sad, respectable appearance. And the fact that he remained at the window, revealing his interest.

No, he was the man she had imagined. I am a gift to him, she thought, opening her legs wider. I am his dream come true. She began to rotate her hips. With the fingers of both hands she spread her labia.

One small part of her mind, clinging to the person she had been until yesterday morning, tried to pull her back. She felt it as a presence behind the chair, a tableau of sensational, irrelevant warnings that she was obviously not about to turn around for. She kept her eyes on the man. Moving her left hand up to her breasts, she began to rub and squeeze and to circle her fingers on the nipples. The middle finger of her right hand slipped into her vagina, as the palm massaged her clitoris.

He was motionless.

You are kissing me, she thought. She seemed to feel his lips, cool, soft, sliding and sucking down her stomach. You are kissing me. She imagined his hands under her, lifting her like a bowl to his lips.

She was coming.

Her body jolted. Her legs shook. She had never experienced anything like it. Seeing what he saw, she witnessed an act of shocking vulnerability. It went on and on. She saw the charity of her display, her lavish recklessness and submission. It inspired her to the tenderest self-love. The man did not move, not until she had finally stopped moving, and then he reached up one hand — to signal, she thought, but it was to close the drapes.

She stayed sprawled in the chair. She was astonished. She couldn’t believe herself. She couldn’t believe him. How did he know to stay so still, to simply watch her? She avoided the thought that right at this moment he was probably masturbating. She absorbed herself only with what she had seen, which was a dead-still man whose eyes she had sensed roving over her body the way that eyes in certain portraits seem to follow you around a room.

The next three mornings everything was the same. He had on his white shirt, she masturbated in the chair, he watched without moving, she came spectacularly, he closed the drapes.

Afterwards she went out clothes shopping or visiting people. Everyone told her how great she looked. At night she was passionate in bed, prompting Claude to ask several times, “What the hell’s come over you?” but he asked it happily, he didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. She felt very loving toward Claude, not out of guilt but out of high spirits. She knew better than to confess, of course, and yet she didn’t believe that she was betraying him with the man next door. A man who hadn’t touched her or spoken to her, who, as far as she was concerned, existed only from the waist up and who never moved except to pull his drapes, how could that man be counted as a lover?

The fourth day, Friday, the man didn’t appear. For two hours she waited in the chair. Finally she moved to the couch and watched television, keeping one eye on his window. She told herself that he must have had an urgent appointment, or that he had to go to work early. She was worried, though. At some point, late in the afternoon when she wasn’t looking, he closed his drapes.

Saturday and Sunday he didn’t seem to be home — the drapes were drawn and the lights off. Not that she could have done anything anyway, not with Claude there. On Monday morning she was in her chair, naked, as soon as Claude left the house. She waited until ten-thirty, then put on her toreador pants and white push-up halter-top and went for a walk. A consoling line from Romeo and Juliet played in her head: “He that is stricken blind cannot forget the precious treasure of his eyesight lost.” She was angry with the man for not being as keen as she was. If he was at his window tomorrow, she vowed she would shut her drapes on him.

But how would she replace him, what would she do? Become a table dancer? She had to laugh. Aside from the fact that she was a respectably married woman and could not dance to save her life and was probably ten years too old, the last thing she wanted was a bunch of slack-jawed, flat-eyed drunks grabbing at her breasts. She wanted one man, and she wanted him to have a sad, intelligent demeanour and the control to watch her without moving a muscle. She wanted him to wear a white shirt.

On the way home, passing his place, she stopped. The building was a mansion turned into luxury apartments. He must have money, she realized. An obvious conclusion, but until now she’d had no interest whatsoever in who he was.

She climbed the stairs and tried the door. Found it open. Walked in.

The mailboxes were numbered one to four. His would be four. She read the name in the little window: Dr. Andrew Halsey.

Back at her apartment she looked him up under “Physicians” in the phone book and found that, like Claude, he was a surgeon. A general surgeon, though, a remover of tumours and diseased organs.

Presumably on call. Presumably dedicated, as a general surgeon had to be.

She guessed she would forgive his absences.

The next morning and the next, Andrew (as she now thought of him) was at the window. Thursday he wasn’t. She tried not to be disappointed. She imagined him saving people’s lives, drawing his scalpel along skin in beautifully precise cuts. For something to do she worked on her painting. She painted fishlike eyes, a hooked nose, a mouth full of teeth. She worked fast.

Andrew was there Friday morning. When Ali saw him she rose to her feet and pressed her body against the window, as she had done the first morning. Then she walked to the chair, turned it around and leaned over it, her back to him. She masturbated stroking herself from behind.

That afternoon she bought him a pair of binoculars, an expensive, powerful pair, which she wrapped in brown paper, addressed and left on the floor in front of his mailbox. All weekend she was preoccupied with wondering whether he would understand that she had given them to him and whether he would use them. She had considered including a message — “For our mornings” or something like that — but such direct communication seemed like a violation of a pact between them. The binoculars alone were a risk.

Monday, before she even had her housecoat off, he walked from the rear of the room to the window, the binoculars at his eyes. Because most of his face was covered by the binoculars and his hands, she had the impression that he was masked.
Her legs shook. When she opened her legs and spread her labia, his eyes crawled up her. She masturbated but didn’t come and didn’t try to, although she put on a show of coming. She was so devoted to his appreciation that her pleasure seemed like a siphoning of his, an early, childish indulgence that she would never return to.

It was later, with Claude, that she came. After supper she pulled him onto the bed. She pretended that he was Andrew, or rather she imagined a dark, long-faced, silent man who made love with his eyes open but who smelled and felt like Claude and whom she loved and trusted as she did Claude. With this hybrid partner she was able to relax enough to encourage the kind of kissing and movement she needed but had never had the confidence to insist upon. The next morning, masturbating for Andrew, she reached the height of ecstasy, as if her orgasms with him had been the fantasy, and her pretences of orgasm were the real thing. Not coming released her completely into his dream of her. The whole show was for him — cunt, ass, mouth, throat offered to his magnified vision.

For several weeks Andrew turned up regularly, five mornings a week, and she lived in a state of elation. In the afternoons she worked on her painting, without much concentration though, since finishing it didn’t seem to matter any more in spite of how well it was turning out. Claude insisted that it was still very much a self-portrait, a statement Ali was insulted by, given the woman’s obvious primitivism and her flat, distant eyes.

There was no reason for her to continue working in the nude, not in the afternoon, but she did, out of habit and comfort and on the outside chance that Andrew might be home and peeking through his drapes. While she painted she wondered about her exhibitionism, what it was about her that craved to have a strange man look at her. Of course, everyone and everything liked to be looked at to a certain degree, she thought. Flowers, cats, anything that preened or shone, children crying, “Look at me!” Some mornings her episodes with Andrew seemed to have nothing at all to do with lust. They were completely display, wholehearted surrender to what felt like the most inaugural and genuine of all desires, which was not sex but which happened to be expressed through a sexual act.

One night she dreamed that Andrew was operating on her. Above the surgical mask his eyes were expressionless. He had very long arms. She was also able to see, as if through his eyes, the vertical incision that went from between her breasts to her navel, and the skin on either side of the incision folded back like a scroll. Her heart was brilliant red and perfectly heartshaped. All of her other organs were glistening yellows and oranges. Somebody should take a picture of this, she thought. Andrew’s gloved hands barely appeared to move as they wielded long, silver instruments. There was no blood on his hands. Very carefully, so that she hardly felt it, he prodded her organs and plucked at her veins and tendons, occasionally drawing a tendon out and dropping it into a petri dish. It was as if he were weeding a garden. Her heart throbbed. A tendon encirled her heart, and when he pulled on it she could feel that its other end encircled her vagina, and the uncoiling there was the most exquisite sensation she had ever experienced. She worried that she would come and that her trembling and spasms would cause him to accidentally stab her. She woke up coming.

All day the dream obsessed her. It could happen, she reasoned. She could have a gall bladder or an appendicitis attack and be rushed to the hospital and, just as she was going under, see that the surgeon was Andrew. It could happen.

When she woke up the next morning, the dream was her first thought. She looked down at the gentle swell of her stomach and felt sentimental and excited. She found it impossible to shake the dream, even while she was masturbating for Andrew, so that instead of entering his dream of her, instead of seeing a naked woman sitting in a pool of morning sun, she saw her sliced-open chest in the shaft of his surgeon’s light. Her heart was what she focused on, its fragile pulsing, but she also saw the slower rise and fall of her lungs, and the quivering of her other organs. Between her organs were tantalizing crevices and entwined swirls of blue and red — her veins and arteries. Her tendons were seashell pink, threaded tight as guitar strings.

Of course she realized that she had the physiology all wrong and that in a real operation there would be blood and pain and she would be anaesthetized. It was an impossible, mad fantasy. She didn’t expect it to last. But every day it became more enticing as she authenticated it with hard data, such as the name of the hospital he operated out of (she called his number in the phone book and asked his nurse) and the name of the surgical instruments he would use (she consulted one of Claude’s medical texts), and as she smoothed out the rough edges by imagining, for instance, minuscule suction tubes planted here and there in the incision to remove every last drop of blood.

In the mornings, during her real encounters with Andrew, she became increasingly frustrated until it was all she could do not to quit in the middle, close the drapes or walk out of the room. And yet if he failed to show up she was desperate. She started to drink gin and tonics before lunch and to sunbathe at the edge of the driveway between her building and his, knowing he wasn’t home from ten o’clock on, but lying there for hours, just in case.

One afternoon, light-headed from gin and sun, restless with worry because he hadn’t turned up the last three mornings, she changed out of her bikini and into a strapless cotton dress and went for a walk. She walked past the park she had been heading for, past the stores she had thought she might browse in. The sun bore down. Strutting by men who eyed her bare shoulders, she felt voluptuous, sweetly rounded. But at the pit of her stomach was a filament of anxiety, evidence that despite telling herself otherwise, she knew where she was going.

She entered the hospital by the Emergency doors and wandered the corridors for what seemed like half an hour before discovering Andrew’s office. By this time she was holding her stomach and half believing that the feeling of anxiety might actually be a symptom of something very serious.

“Dr. Halsey isn’t seeing patients,” his nurse said. She slit open a manila envelope with a lion’s head letter opener. “They’ll take care of you at Emergency.”

“I have to see Dr. Halsey,” Ali said, her voice cracking. “I’m a friend.”

The nurse sighed. “Just a minute.” She stood and went down a hall, opening a door at the end after a quick knock.

Ali pressed her fists into her stomach. For some reason she no longer felt a thing. She pressed harder. What a miracle if she burst her appendix! She should stab herself with the letter opener. She should at least break her fingers, slam them in a drawer like a draft dodger.

“Would you like to come in?” a high, nasal voice said. Ali spun around. It was Andrew, standing at the door.

“The doctor will see you,” the nurse said impatiently, sitting back behind her desk.

Ali’s heart began to pound. She felt as if a pair of hands were cupping and uncupping her ears. His shirt was blue. She went down the hall, squeezing past him without looking up, and sat in the chair beside his desk. He shut the door and walked to the window. It was a big room. There was a long expanse of old green and yellow floor tiles between them. Leaning his hip against a filing cabinet, he just stood there, hands in his trouser pockets, regarding her with such a polite, impersonal expression that she asked him if he recognized her.

“Of course I do,” he said quietly.

“Well –” Suddenly she was mortified. She felt like a woman about to sob that she couldn’t afford the abortion. She touched her fingers to her hot face. “I don’t know your name,” he said.

“Oh. Ali. Ali Perrin.”

“What do you want, Ali?”

Her eyes fluttered down to his shoes — black, shabby loafers. She hated his adenoidal voice. What did she want? What she wanted was to bolt from the room like the mad woman she suspected she was. She glanced up at him again. Because he was standing with his back to the window, he was outlined in light. It made him seem unreal, like a film image superimposed against a screen. She tried to look away, but his eyes held her. Out in the waiting room the telephone was ringing. What do you want, she thought, capitulating to the pull of her perspective over to his, seeing now, from across the room, a charming woman with tanned, bare shoulders and blushing cheeks.

The light blinked on his phone. Both of them glanced at it, but he stayed standing where he was. After a moment she murmured, “I have no idea what I’m doing here.”

He was silent. She kept her eyes on the phone, waiting for him to speak. When he didn’t, she said, “I had a dream . . .” She let out a disbelieving laugh. “God.” She shook her head.

“You are very lovely,” he said in a speculative tone. She glanced up at him, and he turned away. Pressing his hands together, he took a few steps along the window. “I have very much enjoyed our . . . our encounters.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not here to –”

“However,” he cut in, “I should tell you that I am moving into another building.”

She looked straight at him.

“This weekend, as a matter of fact.” He frowned at his wall of framed diplomas.

“This weekend?” she said.

“Yes.”

“So,” she murmured. “It’s over, then.”

“Regrettably.”

She stared at his profile. In profile he was a stranger — beaknosed, round-shouldered. She hated his shoes, his floor, his formal way of speaking, his voice, his profile, and yet her eyes filled and she longed for him to look at her again.

Abruptly he turned his back to her and said that his apartment was in the east end, near the beach. He gestured out the window. Did she know where the yacht club was? “No,” she whispered.

“Not that I am a member,” he said with a mild laugh.

“Listen,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I’m sorry.” She came to her feet. “I guess I just wanted to see you.”

He strode like an obliging host over to the door.

“Well, goodbye,” she said, looking up into his face.

He had garlic breath and five-o’clock shadow. His eyes grazed hers. “I wouldn’t feel too badly about anything,” he said affably.

When she got back to the apartment the first thing she did was take her clothes off and go over to the full-length mirror, which was still standing next to the easel. Her eyes filled again because without Andrew’s appreciation or the hope of it (and despite how repellent she had found him), what she saw was a pathetic little woman with pasty skin and short legs.

She looked at the painting. If that was her, as Claude claimed, then she also had flat eyes and crude, wild proportions.

What on earth did Claude see in her?

What had Andrew seen? “You are very lovely,” Andrew had said, but maybe he’d been reminding himself. Maybe he’d meant “lovely when I’m in the next building.”

After supper that evening she asked Claude to lie with her on the couch, and the two of them watched tv. She held his hand against her breast. “Let this be enough,” she prayed.

But she didn’t believe it ever would be. The world was too full of surprises, it frightened her. As Claude was always saying, things looked different from different angles and in different lights. What this meant to her was that everything hinged on where you happened to be standing at a given moment, or even on who you imagined you were. It meant that in certain lights, desire sprang up out of nowhere.