Staring at him searchingly. The genial creased face, as big and round as a sunflower? The murky-brown bloodshot eyes?

Of course, this is a person of color. In ancestry, if not in the (obvious) hue of his skin.

He removes the Tigers cap. Graying-dark hair, oily. Receding from a blunt forehead. You can see—(L.K. can see)—that this hair had once been thick, wavy.

“Vanny was what people called me. Including you, dear.”

“Vanny …”

Does the name sound familiar? L.K. remembers a man—a young man—named Vanbrugh … Is this Vanbrugh?

“And you, you were—Lavinia.” In a flat, jeering voice he has named her, exactly.

L.K. is stunned by his hostility. Realizing too that she has had too much of the powerful drink, a mistake.

“Lavinia Kohl. Yes?”

How diminishing it seems. To be found out, named.

“Y-Yes … How do you know me?”

“How I know you? Of course I know you. All these years, I have known you—hated you.”

“Hated me? Why?”

“You left me for dead. You assumed that I was dead.”

“What? N-No … That isn’t possible.”

“You came to my studio, on the first floor then. You saw me collapsed on the floor, you ran away.”

Vaguely L.K. recalls: the young artist with a studio on the first floor of the Durant. Her lover, briefly. One of her lovers. It had not been that important—had it? No one would remember such a fleeting relationship.

But this man—this middle-aged, heavyset man who calls himself Vnn—is not that individual, certainly.

“You arrived, Lavinia Kohl, you let yourself into the studio, you saw me collapsed on the floor. You panicked and left and never called for help. You left me for dead, and in fact I did die.”

Seeing the bewilderment in L.K.’s face, Vann laughs.

“But then I was revived. Because someone else interceded and called an ambulance.”

Vann has come to sit beside L.K. Closer. She has not the strength to pull away,

“My heart had stopped and was shocked into beating again. No thanks to you.”

L.K. looks at Vann pleadingly. Her nostrils pinch at his sharp, accusatory smell. What is he saying?

“You didn’t want to be involved. You were married—you were thinking of your marriage. Your safe, ‘white’ life. You saw that I’d collapsed, you had no idea if I was going to die within minutes, you simply fled and told no one. I suppose you thought that I would never know, since I was unconscious, and if I revived—I wouldn’t know what you had done. But I knew. I was told. By another artist on the floor, who’d discovered me. She’d seen you running out—she’d seen your face, she said. How frightened you were. How guilty.”

It is a bad dream, this memory. Though perhaps not a memory, but only a bad dream.