Compared to Mommy is sick, Self-portrait is pretty tame. There’s still a definite look-away-from-the-picture vibe, but it’s not coming from where you might think. Lillian is lying on the bed. Her soft, pale body is like something slipped from a shell, and her face—with its crazy mixture of rebellion, invitation, uncertainty, and pride—is the most naked thing about her. Yet somehow, it’s not her body or her face but the photographs behind her that make you want to cover your eyes. The way they’re arranged on the wall, it’s as if Lillian sliced herself open and that’s what spurted out.

Pondering what might have been isn’t something I waste a whole lot of time on, but it has crossed my mind that if Lillian had never set foot in the Lacuna Gallery, she easily could have spent her life thinking of herself as a street photographer who did nude pics as a hobby. In which case, instead of writing this, I could very well be married with kids and a cocker spaniel named Good Girl in a cushioned suburb farting distance from Manhattan, getting my highlights redone, with all my naked-kiddie photos in a box marked “Miscellaneous” on a shelf next to Lillian’s cremains in my climate-controlled two-car garage. I’d be much happier, probably, but also a lot less interesting.

15. The reader, New York, 1953

Once Lillian showed me five prints of this photograph and asked me to pick the best one. When I told her they all looked the same, she made me look again. After a while I pointed to the middle one. Exactly, Lillian agreed, but why? I had no idea. She pointed to the bench the man was sitting on. In the two on the left, she explained, the bench was too light. In the two on the right, it was too dark. In the middle, it was perfect. Sometimes the eye can see what the brain can’t put into words.

PATRICIA STOKES: For a little while after the couch episode, Lilly and I were roommates the way I’d always hoped we would be. Not that she approached anyone’s ideal of a social butterfly, but for at least a few weeks she wasn’t allergic to the notion of visiting a bar. Then her classes began, and the fledgling butterfly returned to her cocoon. Lilly was either at the restaurant, at school, locked inside the john, or out taking pictures. She’d never done anything scarcely resembling her share of the housework, but now she hardly washed her own dishes. In those days I possessed a high tolerance for squalor, but even back then I had certain standards; plus, I was getting bored of being Lilly’s personal maid.