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By Root 2290 0

the half wall that helps define the boundaries of the kitchen, we pass back through the central living area, which empties into a dim chute of a hallway (32); at the mouth of the hallway the hardwood flooring ends and the dun gray carpeting begins; this short hallway has four doors: two on the left, one on the right, and one at the very end. The door on the right leads to a small room that a Realtor would call .5 of a bathroom (33): mirror, sink, toilet, shower, and tile floor of the same pattern as the kitchen floor. (I apologize that I have not bothered to render these things in detail.) The door at the very end of the hall leads to the master bedroom (34), or in our case the mistress bedroom, I suppose: Lydia’s room. A wooden four-poster queen-size bed (35) dominates the room; the headboard is pushed flush against the south wall; the bed is probably made and draped with a down lavender comforter. Directly opposite the bed a bookshelf (36), fully stocked with dense and difficult volumes on academic subjects, lines the north wall. The bed is flanked on the right by a sleekly architectonic designer lamp that swivels on a long stalk (37) and on the left by a plain wooden bedside night table (38), and to the left of that, in the corner of the room, stands a sturdy chest of drawers (39). Two more windows in the east wall of the room look onto the street, treated with dark red curtains identical to the ones in the living room. On the south wall of the room hangs a framed print of Charles Demuth’s I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold. On the bedside night table are an alarm clock (not pictured) and two more framed photographs (40, 41).

The first photograph, vertically oriented, shows Lydia standing in an unknown location, and standing in it with a man, both of them barefoot, their toes partially buried in the wet sand, on what looks like a beach. The wet sand is a jumble of footprints. This photograph is also a synesthetic one, its image easily implying sound and smell, the skweee-skweee of seagulls almost audible in it, the brackish seaside air almost olfactible. On a rocky hill in the background behind them stand three whitewashed stone windmills, each successively smaller than the next as the ridge they’re built on curls into the distance, each windmill with a thatched conical roof and a pinwheel fashioned of rickety wooden spokes. The sky is blue, fading toward the horizon into dusky orange and then purple, and the light on the ground, on the two people themselves, and on the white trunks of the three windmills is sharp and golden, and the shadows are long. The shadow of the anonymous photographer stretches far into the frame across the golden sand. Lydia wears a breezy white shirt and a pair of white pants with a drawstring waistband, the bottom hems of which are rolled up to her knees, and her feet and ankles are covered with sand; the man is also wearing white pants with the bottom hems rolled up, in his case not quite to the knees, and below a line in the middle of his shin all his leg hair is flattened wet against his skin and speckled with sand particles. Lydia’s blond hair is whipping erratically in the wind, although one of her hands is caught in the act of trying to tuck some of her hair behind her ear. But the other hand? The other hand is wrapped around the waist of the man beside her. And the man beside her? I’ll admit that he is probably handsome. I’ll admit that his physique is somewhat Adonis-like, that one might consider him tall and the possessor of arguably chiseled features, that his skin could conceivably be described as tanned and robust. I’m also willing to concede that one of his perceivably lean and muscular arms is depicted in the act of insidiously wrapping itself around Lydia’s torso, and that if one looks closely, the tips of his fingers may in fact be, as is not unequivocally deducible from the image before us, digging slightly beneath the waistline of the pants that Lydia wears in the photograph, where they may or may not be in the process of deftly stroking the ridge of her right hipbone. I’m also perfectly