Catherine’s in her canary-yellow dress. I watch her dark profile against the white wall. Suddenly Catherine stops walking and leans against the wall, her eyes almost closing in the sunlight.

Ernest is wearing eyeglasses, the kind that darken in the sunlight, become crystal clear indoors and in shadows.

Catherine casts a shadow and they are crystal clear.

“I want to go back,” Catherine says.

I know what Ernest is thinking. He is thinking what I was thinking when she first said that to me. His breath rushes out. I cannot tell whether it is relief or alarm.

I want to save him from embarrassment or from something worse. I speak up.

“Sure; why don’t we all go back to the States,” I say.

Ernest’s breath rushes in again.

“Is that what you want, Catherine?” he asks.

“Yes.”

He nods. She moves to start walking again. Out of her shadow, Ernest’s glasses darken. I think I can see his eyes behind them staring at me.

Catherine is upstairs napping in the peacock chair. Ernest and I stand downstairs in the storeroom where the trunks and boxes are. There is also fishing tackle and boating equipment left by the last tenants. The basement floor is stone.

“You’re quiet even for you,” he says.

“What?”

“Even for you you’re quiet.”

He touches my jaw. I am no shrinking woman. He kisses me, a short, tender one. He fingers the sweat along my hairline.

Finally, I move away from him, lift one of the boxes, and carry it upstairs.

When I go back downstairs, to carry up another box, Ernest has disappeared. I think about the Elizabeth Bowen story where the little boy believes that when one is not in the presence of certain people, they disappear, that they cease to exist in the world, and they only spring back into it when you’re in their presence again. When you leave them, they disappear from the world again. For two days, Ernest does not spring into existence. For two days he has disappeared from the world. Or am I the one who has disappeared because he is not here?

60

On the morning of the third day, I walk down to the beach. Ernest is there, sitting on driftwood. When I call to him, he turns. He has a two-day growth of beard.

“Are you all right?” I ask.

I sit on my knees beside him. I touch his stomach and feel something rough through his shirt. I lift his shirt and find he’s been wrapped in gauze.

“When did this happen?”

“A couple of ribs are broken, that’s all.”

“You should have broken hers. I’d have broken hers.”

“No, you wouldn’t.”

I rise to go back.

“Don’t go looking like that,” he says. “Don’t you go home with that face.”

When we return, Catherine is sitting in her peacock chair, wearing the de Kooning Bicycle-Woman smile. I am wearing my ambrosia mask for Catherine. But I am in a floating world, and I cannot help but look at Ernest with different eyes, and Catherine cannot help but see it.