“You ask most people on the street, they couldn’t even tell you what Communism is, but they’ll tell you we’ve got to fight it, wherever. We’ll be fighting it in space soon, I guess, because they’ve got that commie-naut up there right now turning somersaults. This whole Harry Truman containment idea is just foolishness. And I say that as a man who spent six months throwing shells at Okinawa—which I’d do again tomorrow, God knows, if they needed me to. But this whole Vietnam thing is getting out of hand. This whole Communism thing. It isn’t even about Communism anymore, it’s about money. We have to have Japan, so we have to have Southeast Asia. So what are we doing? Sending air-loads of boys to a jungle halfway around the world to get shot to pieces. Half of them probably couldn’t tell you what Communism is.”

“What is it?” Teresa asked, dropping Matt’s wrapped sandwich into a paper bag.

“What is it?” Uncle Phil took his finger off the newspaper and cleared his throat. “It’s the red without the white and the blue. It’s you standing in a breadline, instead of making a sandwich in your own kitchen. Are you sure you couldn’t use a few bucks, just till payday?”

Watteau was French, she imagines writing. His first name was Jean-Antoine, and he lived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He painted religious pictures and military scenes and elaborately costumed women enjoying the outdoors. I was one of his models. I know that sounds strange, but the likeness is undeniable. He put a sickle in my hand, draped a sheet over my body—

Matt, a phantom in underpants and T-shirt, is standing in the doorway to the bedroom, watching her stare at the blank page.

“What’s wrong? Do you feel sick?”

He shakes his head no. His blond hair is standing up in wild corkscrews around his scalp. He walks over to the television and turns the knob, staring at her.

“No television,” she says.

“It doesn’t work.”

“You should be in bed.”

“Nothing works,” he says. “All the lightbulbs broke.”

“You don’t need them when you’re asleep. Can’t you sleep?”

“Is Uncle Phil mad at you?”

“No. We just had a discussion, that’s all.”

He turns the television knob on and off, watching her. “Are you writing Dad?”

“No.”

“Let’s call him.” He crosses the room to where the telephone sits on a brass-legged table that came with the apartment. He has the receiver in his hand and is suddenly wide-awake, obstinate, his head tilted back and his eyes gazing at the phone, one little finger hovering over the dial.

“Matthew,” she says, “put the phone down.”

He waits another moment, then drops the receiver back into its cradle. “It works,” he says.