“No,” Jake said. “But I’m not sure that artists see things the way I’m talking about. I would guess that an artist would have to think twice when looking at something—first to see it, and then to figure out how to represent it, though maybe real artists just see things once; I don’t know. But to see things the way I mean it, you have to really believe in what’s in the image, without thinking about it at all—just believing it. It sounds easy, but it takes a certain kind of person to see things like that.”

Jake drifted into silence. Leora felt awkward, remembering the dinner at his apartment, his reluctance to accept her compliments. She felt equally reluctant to accept his. She watched him as he turned his eyes away from her, then tried to cover the silence by sliding down further on the bed, until she was lying down on her pillow. From this angle she could see Jake’s face only from the bottom, and for a moment she felt as though she were a little child, looking up at a grown-up’s face.

“How did she die?” she asked.

Jake cleared his throat. “She had a rare form of cancer. It’s not worth explaining, really,” he said, and shrugged.

Leora suspected that it was worth explaining, that in the explanation there might be all sorts of other things she might find out, things that Jake thought were junk but that she might consider treasures. She let him breathe for a moment, and then changed the angle of her question slightly. “How did you hear about it when she died? Were you there?”

Jake slid down until he was lying beside her. He kept his face away from her, staring at the ceiling. “I was in the hospital with her,” he said after a long pause. “My dad and I were both there together. I made up a reason to leave the room for a minute, because I thought my dad wanted to be with her alone just then. I went to the bathroom, and I got lost a little, walking through all those hallways with all those rooms. When I came back, my dad was standing outside, and he wouldn’t let me go back into the room.”

He still didn’t look at her. But Leora turned to face him, staring at his profile. A strange light seemed to suffuse the area around his face in the dim room, like the faces in old portraits. A long time passed in the slow silence of that light, the two of them lying side by side, and suddenly Leora felt the way she had felt when she had seen that picture in his apartment, the air glowing gently with something yet untouched.