On her second-to-last day in Amsterdam, the conference was over, but Leora still had dates with the potheads that evening and the next. After she woke up at about noon—allowing herself to sleep off the exhaustion from the previous night’s ecstasy parties—she asked the concierge at the hotel what might be a good thing to see on her first free afternoon in Amsterdam. He recommended the Rijksmuseum.

THE RIJKSMUSEUM looks like a magnificent cathedral, a towering carved edifice rising out of the canals. Inside, Leora stumbled about in a daze from room to room, until, as if carried off by a gentle, unexpected tide of rising waters, she wandered into a gallery filled with paintings by Rembrandt.

The light in his paintings, of which the Rijksmuseum was blessed with an impressive number, made every scene look like a tiny refraction through a windowpane, a panel of glowing faces within the darkness of shiny golden frames. Rembrandt, Leora read on one of the translated museum plaques, had used models from Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter for many of his paintings, because he believed that they more closely resembled the characters in his biblical scenes. (For some reason, though, Leora noticed while looking at a portrait of Rembrandt’s son, he had not been able to resist naming his own child Titus—the name of the Roman emperor who had destroyed Jerusalem and sent the Jews into exile in Europe, thus providing the artist with his models.) Her favorite was a small painting, of profound depths of detail, called The Prophet Jeremiah Mourning over the Destruction of Jerusalem. A weighty title, not at all fitting for the delicate pain of that painting, the darkness encroaching on the timid patch of light, the pressure of the prophet’s cheek against his palm, the shrouded eyes with their white brows that quivered as they fought back tears, the thin veins stretching beneath the translucent, baggy skin of the single bare foot.

Leora almost wanted to leave the museum after seeing that painting, because she knew that after that painting there couldn’t possibly be anything more for her to see in Amsterdam. She wandered through the galleries, searching for the exit. But then she found herself stopping short in front of another tiny painting, this one by Vermeer, called Woman in Blue Reading a Letter.