When she thought about all this before, it was before, then, truly. It was before the accident, and she had truly been in Paris.

She had not told her father she was coming to his city. She had had the idea that she would wait and see. What, she thought, if I see him, just by accident? What if he spontaneously appears?

She does not know now if that idea is what inspired the trip, or if the idea came to her later, after she was there, crunching through the Jardin des Plantes, etc. What had come first? Clare cannot now remember.

Also—and this is the greater problem, perhaps—Clare cannot remember if she did see her father when she was standing there, in Room 19, in the Orsay. She tries to go back to the moment, but the moment is already a story. She tries to go back to the time before the accident and know what she knew then, when things hung together in an order, but she is unable.

What had she known then and there, in her last year of college? Had she really seen her father, or was it all a convenient ruse for plot?

She had planned to visit Paris in the spring. In Paris, she had been inspired with an idea for a story while staring into a mysterious and often (as research informed her) veiled painting. She had returned to the U.S., yes. This might be what had happened.

But it might also be the case that she had planned to visit Paris in order to write a story, and then what she had planned to write had in fact occurred. That she had thought she might wish to write this scene, in which her estranged father appears, and her wish had summoned him. Or, her wish was no different from the writing. Thus was she able, as in a realist painting, to write from life, because there was no difference between writing and life. Thus did she encounter what Courbet might have termed “real allegory,” a portrait of the world that is completely accurate yet not devoid of symbolism. The allegory is real, because there is allegory in the world.

Clare had graduated. She had returned to Paris. It was summer. She returned to the scene of a nonencounter—because she needed to know, which is to say, what had happened. She called her father and they met.

Clare wants to force herself to tell an ending. She wants to get there fast. But in the search for ending, the beginning disappears. It is sucked up into a pale void.

She remembers researching the Courbet painting in spring, after she got back the first time, before the second trip. She remembers realizing that she couldn’t write the story, not without her father, because she did not know where it begins.

At least, this is what she thinks she remembers.