The Suicide of Claire Bishop: A Novel

PART I: THE ESCAPE 1959

1.

Claire could not look at herself. She was not allowed. The artist had forbade it, touching the top of Claire’s hand with her own.

Not until it’s finished.

And it nearly was. The portrait was on the easel in the corner of the den, covered only in a purple, velvet drape cleverly propped out two inches so as not to touch the wet canvas. Claire stood in the center of the room, facing the back of the easel, tapping her fingers on her leg as if counting the seconds until she could look. The portrait had been Freddie’s idea of a gift for her thirty-fifth birthday. She’d hated him for it, until the painter arrived that first day.

Now the painter was in the kitchen, cleaning her brushes. Most nights the artist concealed the painting by knotting the gold-fringed drape tightly to the bottom of the easel. Tonight it hung loose. It was childish, this great pulse toward the painting. Come look at me, look at me. Not tomorrow or in ten minutes but now. It was a giddy desire. Desire for the forbidden, yes, but it was more than that. There was a secret in it, the way trees held secrets or the rusting fire escapes in the alleyways she rushed passed on Bleeker. The gleaming drape beckoned—just as the young painter always seemed to, though Claire must be mistaken about that: what could the girl possibly want with her? But Claire was a woman of restraint, respect for rules and boundaries. She would not look. She would look.

She circled the easel, circled it twice—a tiger. She glanced out the French doors into the hallway. She whispered the artist’s name to herself once: Nicolette. Something inside her could have pirouetted out of control.

She held the gold fringe of the drape. She lifted.

Nicolette entered with a fistful of brushes. Baby oil dripped from the bristles, greased her fingertips.

Claire dropped the drape, having seen nothing. Was she disappointed? Only, perhaps, at being caught. She wouldn’t want Nicolette to think her disrespectful. She knelt on the blue drop cloth below the easel, straightening it, looking busy. She billowed the pale blue sheet and it swelled with air. Her own private ocean.

I think I’ll head to the roof for a smoke before I go, the painter said, smiling down at Claire.

Claire, on all fours in her wool pencil skirt, looked over her shoulder. Nicolette held the light from the hall like a shawl draped across her arms. It was how light should work on a woman. She was beautiful, but she held herself protectively under that smile, as if no one had ever told her so.

Claire, certainly, was not going to be the one to break the news. She rose hurriedly, her wool skirt sticking to her stockings. I’ll come with you.

Claire hastened the artist down the hall, past the vintage settee they weren’t allowed to sit on and from which Nicolette grabbed the coat she’d thrown across it. Claire was terribly embarrassed of her wealth under Nicolette’s gaze—the native masks on the wall, from her and Freddie’s brief vacation to Cuba years ago, the glass case in the den full of priceless Italian porcelain clowns. Claire had the urge to throw the whole lot of them out the window. Nicolette, with her tight black pants and cropped dark hair—she could have been one of the Village Beatniks squatting in the next building over who always glowered at Claire as though she didn’t belong a toe below Thirty-Fourth Street. They knew, the all did, that she and Freddie had the means to live anywhere in the city—moving to the West Village had been an experiment to indulge Claire.

On the roof, the water tower hung in the dusk air above them, a suspended animal skeleton. A zebra, Claire decided. She’d only seen a zebra once, in Cuba, in someone’s yard. She sometimes found she missed that zebra. By the time she’d pointed it out to Freddie, it had disappeared—he’d called her crazy and hadn’t believed her. Just as well, she’d thought then, the zebra is mine.

The rusted iron hummed and swayed in the breeze. Claire had the sudden impulse to tell Nicolette about the zebra. Nicolette would believe her.

To tell the truth, I don’t smoke, Claire said. Freddie hates it.

The artist was busy rolling her own cigarette on the ledge, shaking loose tobacco from a small pouch like a regular dockworker, trying not to lose it in the wind. What Freddie doesn’t know, Nicolette said. She licked the paper, handed the finished product to Claire, and lit it for her. Her hand grazed Claire’s cheek. Nicolette smelled dangerous. They stood close together, facing north, peering over to the street nine stories below, sharing the cigarette. Rebellious. But the wind stole her smoke so quickly, it was as if she’d let nothing out.

I was up there last week. Uptown, Nicolette said, gesturing north toward the high-rises, "doing a portrait of this blubber-man. I was up on his roof, smoking, when I realized—I was in the view, I didn’t have a view. Nicolette held Claire’s gaze. Not here though, she said. Here I have the perfect view."

I love it up here. Claire averted her eyes, blushing. It makes up for everything else.

Even Freddie?

What a question to ask! She should be furious. Why was she not furious? I wouldn’t have this view without him.

The wind grew louder than their voices. It hit Claire’s ears rhythmically, beat her clean like a rug.

I don’t know why, Nicolette said loudly, but I used to imagine all the skyscrapers were ladies waiting to go dancing. She laughed into the wind.

I like that, Claire said. Ladies waiting forever.

The last of the setting sun charged off the west side of the buildings and they let it blind them.

Don’t you want children, Claire? Since that whatever disease isn’t hereditary. It’s terrible when the smart ones don’t.

It was a wonder, the information Nicolette had extracted from her during their sessions. In order to paint Claire, Nicolette had said she had to know her. There were people Claire had known for years who knew nothing about her parents or her childhood. But to this perfect stranger, Claire had found herself describing her grandmother’s operatic voice, the disease Claire once believed she’d inherit, the grounds of the asylum. There was something thrilling about the interrogation. No one had ever demanded Claire talk about herself. And yet the conversation had felt natural, or at least as natural as posing for a portrait; both were made of the same intimacy. She’d let Nicolette crack into her like a crab shell.

And in return, Nicolette had listened. The artist had closed her eyes and listened. She’d seemed, almost, to swoon.

But Claire wasn’t posing on the couch anymore. Why don’t you have children then? Claire said in answer.

In the settling dark, it seemed Nicolette was pushing something over to her with her eyes, but Claire didn’t know what, or how to receive it. Then the painter looked away.

It’s getting late, she said. I’m expected.

Who would be expecting Nicolette? Did she simply want to leave? But it was none of her business. Nicolette was hired as a painter, not a confidante.

Claire nodded. I think I’ll stay up here a while.

Nicolette shrugged and turned to go. As she was about to exit through the large metal door, the superintendent, Tomasz, appeared in the lit threshold. Claire saw him turn and watch Nicolette’s backside as he held the door for her. Striding across the tar rooftop, Tomasz tipped his hat at Claire, or perhaps he was only holding it against the wind. She pocketed Nicolette’s matches, left on the ledge.

Mrs. Bishop. His Polish accent was curt. He winked as he shook a cigarette from his pack of Golds.

She felt he’d caught her in some illicit act. She blushed crimson as she always did in his presence; it was out of her control. On more than one occasion she’d sensed Tomasz watching her. When she was above him in the stairwell once, she swore she caught him looking up her skirt. It was shameless, but she didn’t mind; she was still doing something right.

Months ago, when Freddie was away on business, the shower had started leaking from the valve. She’d called Tomasz to take a look, thanking him profusely. Both of them angled together in the cramped powder room, but when he’d tested it, the shower no longer leaked. I tried it myself before you came, Claire insisted. He said there were easier ways to get him up to her apartment. The nerve. She’d demanded he leave immediately and had been too embarrassed to ask him for anything since.

His match went out with the wind. She hated him for his shoulders, his handsome face. She tried to hide her red cheeks with her hair. She would tell him proudly that she could not stay to chat, that she must retire early to prepare for yet another day of sitting for her portrait.

Instead, she pointed uptown. I sometimes imagine the skyscrapers are ladies waiting to go dancing. Isn’t that silly?

She laughed and looked away, afraid he’d catch the lie. Then she struck one of Nicolette’s matches and cupped her hands around his, nearly singeing his fingers. Tomasz held her eyes, nodding to the beat of the wind. What stiff ladies, he said.

She laughed as if she cared. Her stomach hurt.

Claire tried to go about her evening as usual. She fed the cat, made herself a martini, dusted the breakfront, polished her silver and fork collection. She tried reading from an art history book she’d checked out of the library for Nicolette’s benefit, but knew she’d nod off if she read another page.

She tried to push the painting, unlocked, untied, from her mind. But then she found herself sitting again on the couch in the den, as if still posing, facing the back of the draped canvas, and beside it, the blank wall above the mantel where it would hang. Claire tipped back the last of her drink and was feeling terribly light. Had she forgotten to eat supper again? Freddie was dining out, as he often did, with a colleague from work. Or someone. That woman from work. Claire worried he might be meeting Nicolette. It was a stupid worry, she knew, and yet she wouldn’t be surprised. But Nicolette had such a queer nose. Freddie could never love a girl with such a queer nose. And even if he could, Nicolette didn’t seem keen on him, or any man. Claire, however, could appreciate the queerness of the nose. It was exotic. Ethnic, even.

Claire steadied herself and edged toward the painting. She tiptoed to the front of it, where Nicolette had sat for three days, staring at her. Could she have left it untied on purpose?

On that first day, as Claire sat rigid on the couch, she had asked Nicolette what, exactly, she was doing with her charcoal fragments and sketch board. Nicolette replied that she wanted Claire’s face in her muscle memory, so her likeness would become subconscious. The idea was outlandish, until it was not. To be memorized, to be known like that, had made Claire feel skittish and elated, dizzy.

She smoothed out her skirt. She wanted to see herself like that too, to know herself.

Claire lifted the drape.

There Claire was, and wasn’t. Her body was severed across the canvas. Severed and repeated. Repeated and mutilated. A woman, and the body of a woman. Claire at every moment of her life: a young girl, then elderly, then her current self with dirty blond waves done up in rollers—all unmistakably Claire. Claire falling from a bridge.

It was a portrait of a dead woman. Nicolette had killed her.

She pressed her fingers to the windowpane. Three floors below, children were running between lampposts just lit, a stray dog barking madly at them, though Claire could only see the barking, not hear it. They shuffled around an old man who stood very still in the middle of the sidewalk. An umbrella spidered out of the bushes beside him. The man looked at it, and she at the man, and the treetops in Washington Square moved to a breeze she could not feel. She swayed with them. She leaned on the wall behind her for support. The floor swayed like some long forgotten ocean wave. She felt seasick. She dug her fingernails into the palm of her hand until it throbbed.

When she returned her gaze to the canvas, it hadn’t changed.

It was not a portrait, but it was of Claire. There was Claire, fixed to canvas many times over. Claire falling. Again, Claire falling. Claire falling from a bridge.

It was not nice to look at. It was almost ugly. Or maybe it was beautiful. Avant-garde. Maybe she wasn’t smart enough to understand. Freddie had told her as much. That was years ago at the gallery opening of a friend of his—she’d embarrassed him, saying loudly, drunkenly, how awful the paintings were. Like children’s drawings, she’d said. The artist had as little taste in color as he did in propriety. It simply wasn’t her cup of tea.

But this was another matter. So what if it was art? Claire was smart enough to know that a person should not paint this instead of a portrait when commissioned to paint a portrait. This was something else. It was Claire falling from the Brooklyn Bridge. It was Claire dead on the street below, her very own street—not the East River, but the cobblestones of Sullivan. What did that mean? Who was Nicolette to paint her this way? Whatever it was Nicolette had seen in Claire was obviously a mistake. Nicolette was mistaken.

Claire slammed her body into the wall behind her. She was made of rubber.

She wanted, with a sudden and foreign fury, to hit herself.

2.

When Nicolette had asked Claire to talk about herself during their sessions, Claire had spoken about her father.

Ernest Gabelmacher stepped off a dewy boat named the Susquehanna in June 1922. It was the wettest crossing in a decade, or that’s what the captain, who’d taken a liking to Ernest, had told him portside on their one dry stargazing night. Ernest was likable in any language and was aware of this fact, but that did not mean the captain could help him find a job; it was not a good century to be German in America. But, the captain reminded him, there were steps one could take. Soon you won’t be so German.

Ernest had ten thousand Papiermark to his name—five thousand in his pocket, five thousand sewn into his suit. This, he learned his first night in Albany, rounded out to just over two dollars. He arrived in time to hear Warren G. Harding deliver the first ever presidential radio transmission. In a deli, customers gathered around a homemade crystal receiver. Ernest pretended his English was solid enough to understand, applauding when the others did, jeering when they jeered.

This was also the day Ernest met Elsa, the girl working the counter. A transplant herself, she could spot one of her own a mile away. She laughed loudly. You cannot understand one word, she said to him in English fringed with a southeastern German accent. The other men turned to Ernest and play-punched him in the gut. Ernest had no choice but to burst out into the only English song he knew: Toot, Toot, Tootsie, beginning to end, making Elsa out to be the liar.

Elsa was seven months pregnant before Ernest had scrounged up enough money to rent a room in a farmhouse in Ovid, New York, a small town proud both of its working-class bent and newly built theater with a quaking chandelier. The owners of the farmhouse were off on fishing boats most of the year, and Ernest promised Elsa that someday the whole house would belong to them, maybe even the whole street.

Later, Ernest would tell Claire these stories while she did her arithmetic on scraps of wallpaper in the evenings. She knew his life by heart. But it was difficult for Claire to speak to Nicolette about her mother. Elsa was always closed and private, and Claire never thought of her outside of the confines of Claire’s own life, with brief cameos in her father’s. Elsa seemed not to exist until Claire was born.

For most of Claire’s school years, Ernest was out of a job because of one war and then another. He took work as a traveling salesman—trousers door to door—and as a talc worker until it proved poisonous and he watched his friends die. He couldn’t serve in the military with his talc-weakened lungs, and no one would hire him once tensions in Europe rose. He was naturalized, and all of his savings went to war bonds to prove his loyalty. They changed their name from Gabelmacher to Gabler. But none of it helped or hid his accent at job interviews, and the dream of the house, and the street, evaporated in the night. Elsa took the reins and found work as a silent seamstress, playing mute so no one would know she was German. When she came home each evening from the small factory, she would yell just to hear her own voice.

Every Sunday of Claire’s childhood (while Ernest got to stay home and listen to Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy), Elsa took Claire, dressed in their Sunday best, to visit her grandmother at the Willard Asylum. This was, to Claire, the opposite of a church. Claire’s grandmother had Huntington’s, or that’s what she’d been told—a hereditary, degenerative disease with the power to change your personality, to rob you of motor control, to riddle your mind with hallucinations. Black magic, she thought as a child. Her grandmother would often mistake Claire for Elsa. Whom she mistook Elsa for, Claire would never know. During each visit she would tell stories about training as an opera singer and she would sing an aria or two for Claire. On laundry duty, she would get into trouble for writing lines of poetry on the bands of other patients’ undergarments.

The hospital was a large site not far from Ovid, with Gothic-style buildings as old as any in this country but which somehow felt slap-dash, fake. Grass green enough it seemed painted on. While her grandmother’s personality changed shape, the hospital never altered. Time was different there. The grounds didn’t change with the years. There was no progress, no war.

When Claire was thirteen, she came to understand what the word hereditary meant. She began spending her days in the public library, missing school, hiding away in the stacks with texts on lobotomy and psychosurgeries newly discovered. It was at least warmer there than her classroom, where they couldn’t afford to fill the potbelly stove.

According to Elsa, Claire’s grandmother had her first hallucination when she was twenty-four. This was what Claire decided she could expect as well. Elsa had not inherited it, and so it must have skipped a generation, making Claire an even more likely candidate. She imagined she would suffer doubly so. She would hear voices. She would be locked in an asylum, visited by people she didn’t know. She was the author of all the odds.

One very sunny day, when every book glinted back at her like tin, Claire realized how much time she’d wasted sitting inside a library. And how little time she had left. Time with her mind, before it became unrecognizable, before she was someone else, like her grandmother.

That was when Freddie, the golden-haired entrepreneur, came to town on business. Not quite seventeen, Claire would have been drawn to anything polished in her ashen little Ovid. She liked the way Freddie leaned forward, intimate with anyone who spoke to him. How he loosed his shoelaces rebelliously when he thought no one was watching. How he took the matter of making Claire smile very seriously and wasn’t afraid of the volume of his own laugh. When the draft call came, it did not take much convincing for her to make a home with him.

In this way she left her family for a man she was forbidden to marry before she turned eighteen. Her mother grew silent even at home. Her father was so hurt he fasted the day Claire left and refused to see her off. He blamed Freddie more than her, saying the boy should know better and that Freddie had a spoiled face. But Claire was intent on growing up then and there, wed properly or not. When her mother asked why—why so foolish, why so young—Claire could not tell them. None of them knew the fear whipping around inside her. She never knew how to explain.

They took a one-bedroom bungalow in Croton-on-Hudson, hemmed in by manors overlooking the river. Such urgency shaped their short time together before Freddie’s deployment, and he only knew the half of it. They were so new then, getting to know one another as quickly as two bodies could. She wanted him always, the thought flitting in the forefront of her mind, written across his arm as she kissed the length of it: would she still recognize him when he came back? Would she still be here?

Claire turned eighteen the week before Freddie was deployed and they married in a rush. We’ll last through this war together, Freddie said in his vows. What more do we need to know?

Claire did not tell her parents of the marriage until after he’d left.

Freddie’s yearlong service morphed into four and no one voiced any resentment. Armed with Ladies’ Home Journal, she made a home for the two of them by herself. And, like other women, Claire found work during the war. She was a bus driver, transporting men too old to serve from their bedroom community down to the Bronx, where they caught the train to the city. Her cheeks, and other parts, were raw from pinching. But she liked her job well enough. She wore a transit company cap that was far too big. She was quite a good driver.

The war was there, in the bus, because she was there. But the rides were jolly and no one ever spoke of what was happening abroad. If anyone questioned her, Claire was prepared to say her maiden name—Gabler—was English, not German. But no one ever asked. She played music in her bus on the transistor, never the news. She tried not to listen to the reports unless her friends, also military wives, told her she must hear a certain story. She frequented the movies and became a master at bridge. The war was an interruption to everyone’s plans, but Claire never had a plan. It had nothing to do with her—Freddie’s absence and her new job seemed somehow far removed from invasions and sneak attacks.

Freddie’s letters were full only of jokes he’d learned from the other boys. He spent most of the war in India. When Claire asked him about the war, he said sharply that he wasn’t allowed to talk about it. This would have made sense to Claire had it not been for the defensiveness in his voice, as if he were protecting himself from being scolded. It gave her the feeling that Freddie didn’t understand what he’d been doing, what he’d been fighting for.

When Claire had to give up her job, she thought of taking work elsewhere. But Freddie held her close and said she’d only been playing a role while he was away and now he wanted her home where he could find her. Working seems unnatural, don’t you think?

Through the war, Claire had lied to Freddie that she could not bear children, that she’d been warned it would pose terrible health risks and might even kill her. She did not tell him her real fear, that she would pass on a monstrous gene, and worse, not be around for her children, the way her own mother had been alone.

But Freddie was determined they visit the best doctors to see what could be done. Claire obliged, and in the course of discovering that she was perfectly healthy, it became apparent that Freddie was not. Trauma he’d suffered during the war—in fact, a wrestling match with one of his Army buddies—had caused groin damage far worse than he’d previously thought. All of this, of course, came as a relief to Claire.

The closer Claire came to the dreaded age, the closer she grew to Freddie. She’d never felt so powerful as she did in bed with him. She moved as if she owned both their bodies. She loved sitting beside him in the cinema, the smell of his collar, how rare he liked his steak. But mostly, she loved doing nothing more than lying in bed with him and wasting the day away unclothed. She ignored the thoughtlessness of his late-night work meetings, how cold he could be, how forgetful of the parties she planned. How was he to know that her time was running out?

Every day after her twenty-fourth birthday, Claire performed a mental tally of her faculties. Everything was in working order. In fact, she was much quicker than Freddie at learning Spanish for a business trip to Cuba she didn’t have the heart to tell him they’d never take. But no initial signs presented themselves.

Though Claire assumed that the symptoms would appear soon enough, she thought it prudent to ask her mother, as nonchalantly as possible, to repeat the details of her grandmother’s health. The trip home would also be a chance to say goodbye. While Freddie was staying in the city on business, Claire returned to Ovid for the first time in many months.

Her father had never completely forgiven her for leaving against his wishes. Since the war, he’d managed to open his own woodworking and restoration shop, and when Claire returned, he spent most of his time there, away from home. Still, she visited him, and made a game of heckling the one old Irishman who still protested outside the shop. Ernest’s only response to him was to hang a sign in the window that read, I’m an American-German so I know my wood, even though Germans weren’t particularly known for woodworking.

When Claire asked Elsa how her grandmother was fairing, Elsa said, She died. While you were busy.

Why hadn’t her mother told her? Instead, she asked, Was it her Huntington’s Disease or something else?

Her mother gave a strange laugh. And then she said, She never had Huntington’s.

Apparently, they’d lied to the authorities so her grandmother would be allowed to remain in the hospital, a loophole for hereditary diseases. In fact, her condition was the result of a head injury she’d suffered on the ship that brought her to America. She died of pneumonia in the end.

Claire didn’t say a word. She walked over to Elsa. And she slapped her.

How quickly it all changed. Now she was frozen in Freddie’s arms. What was supposed to have been a fleeting handful of years was now a life.

Here was the man who didn’t move her. The transformation was like a loss of consciousness, but Freddie didn’t notice. She hated the smell of sweat under his collar, the way he sniffed his food before he ate it. She hated the way he moved against her, clammy and rough. His attraction to Claire petered off as well, connected as it was to hers. Now she turned a blind eye at how often he missed the last train north, stayed late at the office, slept weekly in the city.

Twice, Claire was caught shoplifting from the grocery store in Croton—potato chips, a magazine, peppermint-flavored chewing tobacco. Once, Freddie caught her skinny-dipping in a creek by their house. Claire splashed him as he stood on the bank in his suit.

Why don’t you come in with me? Or are you scared?

Get out of there, Claire. You look mad. You’ll catch your death.

You’ll catch yours first, Claire said. He turned to go. Why are you dressed like that?

I’m going into work.

It’s Sunday. Claire climbed out of the water. She was shivering. Freddie took off his jacket and draped it around her.

I think we should move, Freddie said.

Claire dropped his jacket to the dirt. Because I’ve embarrassed you?

Freddie sighed. Where, tell me, will you stop acting like a child?

To her parents, the city might as well have been another country. She spoke to Elsa and Ernest less and less, and only about the weather or Ernest’s health, resigned in the knowledge that her parents and Freddie would never know why she was the way she was.

But Nicolette knew. Humming over the portrait, the artist had said, as if diagnosing Claire, You lived your life afraid you’d go mad. She leaned in close to the painting. And now you’re disappointed.

3.

The sound of coming home and shutting doors. Freddie taking off his coat. Freddie standing mockingly in the kitchen doorway. She mixed herself a drink like she was mixing herself.

Is that for me? he said, eyeing the drink in her hand.

She took a sip. Of all the nights for him to return at a reasonable hour.

He started toward the den. Claire tripped after him into the hall, splashing gin on his suit.

What in the devil, Claire?

You can’t look at it, she said. Another sip.

Look at it?

The painting. We’re not allowed until it’s done.

I was heading to the shower. What’s gotten into you?

Claire lifted her glass to her lips in answer. The handsome, stupid man. Eyes like steel ball bearings.

Freddie grinned. You’ve seen it, haven’t you? You little cheater, he said, so pleased with himself to have figured her out. If you can look, I sure as hell can. I’m the one paying.

We’re not allowed, she said again, lifting her hand as he brushed passed her to the den.

Oh that’s garbage, not allowed. It’s our painting. Yours. We can do what we like.

She followed Freddie to the corner near the canvas. Claire faced the back of the easel. He lifted the drape by a gold tassel.

What’s this? he said.

That’s it.

That’s it. This is not it. What is this? A prank? Did she say anything?

Say anything?

To explain it.

No, I don’t think so.

You don’t think so.

I don’t think so.

They stood facing one another, the painting between them. She set her empty glass on the coffee table and straightened her back.

I think you should apologize to me, Claire said, surprised as Freddie by the words.

Apologize. Freddie grinned again. Apologize for what?

Claire didn’t know. Her own head was stamping down her neck. She straightened her spine again. Were you sleeping with her?

Freddie stopped grinning. Don’t be stupid. Nearly a whisper.

Claire’s eyes started to prickle. She would not cry. What does she mean by it?

Don’t ask me. How should I know? He looked at her shoulder instead of her face.

Fine. I’ll ask her. She’s coming back tomorrow.

The hell she is.

We’ll have her back tomorrow and see what she says, Claire said firmly.

Freddie squinted at Claire like he couldn’t quite see her. Do what you want. I won’t be a part of it. And I’m not paying her, either. This is not what we’re paying her for. He paused, softer. You’re already pale as a feather. I mean ghost. I don’t know what I mean. You should eat.

Freddie let go of the drape, brushed by Claire, and sank into the couch where she’d posed only hours before. It was dark now and Claire saw she’d forgotten to shut the curtains. She pointed, and Freddie leaned over the arm of the couch and closed them quickly. At least he still had that kindness left in him. She was afraid to leave the windows open at night. He always said her fear was irrational and she said it was her grandmother’s fear—unexplainable, and deeply, deeply German. You look out the window on a moonless night and see what your grandmother saw.

She sat down beside Freddie on the couch and let him run his hand up and down her arm. She imagined it was black and moonless outside and the neighboring buildings were crumbling floor by floor. She didn’t look to find out.

Nicolette kissed Claire’s cheek as she stepped through the door at exactly eleven o’clock on the morning of their fourth session. Claire felt the autumn cold on Nicolette’s lips. She stood stiffly, not leaning in to return the kiss. She wished she’d formed a plan before being bombarded by Nicolette and her lips, parading in as if nothing were wrong, as if she hadn’t painted a devastating, insulting—but perhaps it was best to wait.

Nicolette rolled and lit a cigarette, then set to work at the easel, barely acknowledging her. The painter hadn’t smoked in the house before, but perhaps Claire telling her Freddie hated it had changed that. She wore tight black pants and a black blouse tailored just above her waistline. When she reached up, the pale skin of her waist showed. She was so tiny. Claire