He recalled the face of her ex-husband, whom he’d never liked, and whom he no longer had any need to call “brother-in-law.” A dry face, which seemed to value nothing outside of the everyday, nothing he couldn’t touch with his own two hands; the mere thought of those vulgar lips pressed greedily against her body, those lips that had never mouthed anything other than the trite and conventional, filled him with a kind of shame. Did that insensitive oaf know about her Mongolian mark? He couldn’t imagine their naked bodies twined together without its seeming insulting, and defiling, and violent.

She stood up, holding out the empty cup, and so he stood up too. He took the cup and put it down on the table. He then replaced the tape in the camcorder and readjusted the tripod.

“Shall we go again?” She nodded and walked over to the sheet. The sunlight was now a little weaker than before, so he turned on one of the overhead tungsten lights, the one directly over the sheet.

She shed her clothes and lay down again, on her back this time, looking up at the ceiling. The spotlighting made him narrow his eyes as if dazzled, although the upper half of her body was still in shadow. Of course, he’d seen her naked body front-on before, when he’d accidentally disturbed her in her apartment, but the sight of her lying there utterly without resistance, yet armored by the power of her own renunciation, was so intense as to bring tears to his eyes. Her skinny collarbones; her breasts that, because she was lying on her back, were slender and elongated like those of a young girl; her visible ribcage; her parted thighs, their position incongruously unsexual; her face, still and swept clean, open eyes which could well have been asleep. It was a body from which all superfluity had gradually been whittled away. Never before had he set eyes on such a body, a body that said so much and yet was no more than itself.

This time he painted huge clusters of flowers in yellow and white, covering the skin from her collarbone to her breasts. If the flowers on her back were the flowers of the night, these were the brilliant flowers of the day. Orange day lilies bloomed on her concave stomach, and golden petals were scattered pell-mell over her thighs.

A thrilling energy seemed to flow out quietly from some unknowable place inside his body and collect on the tip of his brush. He wanted only to draw it out for as long as possible. The light from the tungsten lamp only illuminated as far as her throat, leaving her face in darkness; she looked as if she were sleeping, but when the tip of the brush grazed her skin her tremulous quivering told him that she was wide awake. Her calm acceptance of all these things made her seem to him something sacred. Whether human, animal or plant, she could not be called a “person,” but then she wasn’t exactly some feral creature either—more like a mysterious being with qualities of both.