The books that mention Anais’s sexuality both quote from one letter she wrote to a friend in 1968.

It’s not that it’s very important to me, Harold, but I do wish, actually, that you hadn’t alerted me to this. It’s not worth my thinking about. Except that I wonder if it’s possible, anymore, to say anything and be understood. [ . . . ] I assure you that if I have produced something unholy, I did not mean it.

Esther first read this when she was twenty-one, in Kitchen Witch. Her forehead sweaty, pressed against a train’s leather seat back, nauseated from the thick rosy perfume of the woman in front of her. Her impulse was to shut the book very quickly, as if to keep something from escaping, her palms pressed against either cover. Anais’s rigid eyes peered between her fingers, and Esther reopened the book tenderly, turning that face against her thigh so she couldn’t see it. She felt as if the air were pinching her, flat hands on all sides of her body; she felt laughed at. There was no more of the letter offered in either book, and though Esther emailed the biographer asking for a complete scan, she never received it.

Esther would have liked to come to D.C. years ago. But there was school, internships, and a lack of funds. Now she’s an administrative assistant at a local college and makes just enough money to afford this trip, provided she splits the hotel with Cora.

Esther has only been with Cora five months, but it’s been a promising five months, Esther’s thoughts about her sticky and glowing like honeycomb. Esther’s still not sure if it was a good idea to bring Cora along; it’s not exactly a romantic first vacation together, sending her girlfriend out to wander the city while she pores over a dead woman’s ephemera. Still, Esther can’t deny that she’s glad; Cora has a coaxing, cheerful warmth about her, and it’s nice to know that whatever Esther finds here, she will not be alone with it.

Esther believes she will find something, though she is not, she tells herself, looking to catch anyone in a lie. It is only that she does not trust that a biographer would catch a belying turn of phrase, a bit of subtext, a hint. Those ellipses have been undoing her for three years.

* * *

The first story Esther showed Cora was “The Stoddard Woods Angel.” It was their eighth date, and Esther watched Cora read it while sitting on the arm of the love seat in her apartment, looking over Cora’s shoulder in the awful, rubbery silence. The story was only six pages, and Esther tried to see if she lingered over descriptions. “The Stoddard Woods Angel” was beautiful, and that was part of why Esther had chosen it, the other part being how blatant it seemed to her. Of Anais’s stories, this one felt particularly clearheaded about its own meaning, its obliqueness thin and diaphanous as silk, almost a flirtation. Esther wanted to see recognition in Cora’s brow and the curl of her fingers.