I couldn’t stop picturing Lonnie at camp—easy to see the smooth-skinned gangly girl from the photo album nervously knocking back a swig of vodka, sputtering a little, laughing, tucking a lock of greasy hair behind her little tan ear.

Inside the museum she picked William up to show him the half-survived busts from ancient Greece. She imitated their faces and he looked back and forth from the statue to his mother, smiling. “Wow,” he said in his small voice—he’d picked the word up earlier that week and had been using it constantly.

In the American wing every painting she paused in front of was a reflection of her: the nude with round breasts splayed on the floor, her hair spread out around her head, one arm held over her face as a perch for a parrot. The dark-haired woman in the coral dress scowling, her mouth open in disgust. Even the pale woman in the low-cut black gown, her face turned to the side, revealing the tender pink of one ear seemed somehow to reflect Lonnie, if not in actual appearance, at least in authority.

We paused for a long time in front of John White Alexander’s Repose. I felt embarrassed to tell Lonnie “It’s you,” though the mouth, the bored expression, the nonchalance that somehow suggested intense eroticism, was exactly the same. I silently let her and the painting have their moment of recognition, wandering into the next room to study Frieseke’s Summer—a nude lounging in the dappled sunlight of a tree, while another girl, fully clothed, sits upright, just watching.

Peeking back around the corner, I realized she was gone.