So it began—with all the old obsessions, the unreasoning desire, the hunger. By the second evening their roles had been established: Gray as the quiet observer and confidant, Dunbar as the perfect fool, Zelle as herself. They dined with obscure friends along the river, then sauntered through the botanical gardens. Margaretha at times made jokes at Dunbar's expense. He did, they said, seem to invite them. Dunbar pretended not to notice.

Toward that midnight they moved on to a table at Maxim's, where Gray found himself reliving a drama he must have witnessed a dozen times before: Zelle in a circle of admiring friends, clinging to the arm of a lover who would finally pay the bill. The stories were the same, mostly creative anecdotes of her adventures abroad. Then came the obligatory goodnight kiss, followed by the long walk through damp streets to his room.

His studio had hardly changed since those first days with her. There were still those furtive sketches on the wall, still her letters in a drawer. Then again there were moments when it almost seemed she had never left, moments when he almost felt her watching from behind the oval mirror.

Ordinarily, after a night on the town Gray would spend an hour on the balcony with a beer and a sketch pad. After this particular evening, however, he wanted absolute solitude. He wanted the windows shut, the door locked. He wanted the light from only one small lamp.

He slipped her photograph out of the drawer and laid it on the drawing table. Although he had several photographs, he nearly always returned to the original: that compelling portrait of a naked girl astride a bicycle. He would study the face, jogging old memories and feelings. He was careful not to look at it too often, out of fear of exhausting the impact. Or building it to intolerable levels.

It was almost dawn when he finally put the photograph aside. Pigeons clustered on neighboring roofs. The air outside was heavy and still. Hot winds from the south were due at any time. Now and again he thought he also heard the distant whine of trains, each one calling him away from her. He knew he should have left her long ago, collected his things and left without warning—forwarding address unknown. On arriving in London he could have looked up one or two old friends with connections to respectable galleries. Then, over the course of five or ten years—five or ten years of normalcy —she would have become just another memory of long limbs in a twisted bedsheet.

But it was useless, all useless; knowing that whenever she called he would come. He would come on the odd nights as an escort. He would come as a friend to amuse her lovers. He would come uninvited as the eternal voyeur, silently watching from a corner table as she wasted her time with the ones like Charles Dunbar.