Though Clare remembers little enough of the writing of “The Lift,” she does recall thinking something like, This is what happens to girls who don’t have fathers. All the same, even as she knows that she at one point thought this was her story, a story about her, she now disagrees with herself. Because this isn’t what happens to “girls who don’t have fathers”; it’s what happens to girls who have too many fathers. And the story isn’t in fact about that, about Eloise, the girl. Eloise doesn’t really matter. It’s a story about Richard Lehren, about reading Richard, about how we cannot really determine Richard’s motivations, because Richard’s own comprehension of himself is so paltry. He is led forward by fantasy; grasps at soft things and believes the world is a smile turned in his direction. Richard could be one of Trudy Elwil’s various husbands, lovers, and associates, but he might also be a version of Clare. Indeed, he is perhaps the embodiment of Clare’s own weird existential virginity, if not that of almost everybody. He is Clare before anything happened.

“Goodbye, Richard,” Clare thinks, exiting the document. Today she is managing to feel less sad than usual about her lack of production. She’s amused to have discovered herself here in her own story, for she is more and more convinced that it is, indeed, she. It’s a curious self-portrait her past self seems to have hidden on behalf of her present self, in plain sight.

Clare is supposed to write while she is here and decides, for this reason, to pretend to try. She knows that, as usual, nothing will happen and so doesn’t feel concerned. It’s been like this for months now. Clare opens a new document and observes the cursor at the top of the page, how it appears and drops out of view again like a pulse. Clare has had an idea for a story. Or: it’s not so much an idea as a memory, a short vision of being in the Musée d’Orsay her last year of college when she had gone to Paris for a few days on a whim and had not informed her father of her presence there. She’d wondered once during those days whether she might see him by chance but never did. She remembers this. At least, she remembers walking through the Orsay and viewing Gustave Courbet’s small canvas L’Origine du monde, The Origin of the World. She remembers thinking—as she now also thinks—that this painting looks nothing like anyone’s cunt.