My painting, its luminousness, retreated, it went away as I lay sick. I thought, briefly, I might lose it and not find it again. This filled me with a sudden, bleak, despair. For an instant I felt bereft, as though something crucial to me, or someone, had died. Perhaps, then, I slept.

I’d wake, and remember again the two rooms, the two garden rooms, because there were two now. His; and mine. I thought of my own, the studio, I thought of it as abandoned, the many canvases stacked and idle, abandoned brushes, the paints in their tubes, unopened ones, and used ones, bent and twisted, some fallen to the stone floor. And his room: he. Was he still reading, and reading, as before? The thought brought me pain. I imagined his bent, dark head. I felt, then, deep compassion for him, for his situation. I tried, I tried again, to forget about it, put it out of mind. And then I’d sleep, again.

Emily and Howard were alarmed, they were alarmed I didn’t eat. Howard called the doctor. Sidney was our family doctor, he lived not far away. He came, he listened to my chest, he took my temperature. It’s really just a cold, he said. Just a cold. Drink fluids. Take aspirin to bring the fever down, go to sleep. I will, I said. I will. I didn’t, I didn’t take aspirin. I’ve mentioned before: I’ve never taken a drug.

I recovered. I emerged at last from my room. We opened the curtains. Emily made my bed with new linens. I was weak, and thinner, but I was fine. I promised Howard I would eat and gain weight, and Emily now brought me glasses of cold milk on her tray. The milk was full-cream, we had it delivered in bottles every morning, I remember the cream on top, and the silver foil seal that was its lid. I’ve not seen milk like that since. The milk tasted so pure. Like a time long ago. I drank; I drank milk. In the evenings Emily warmed it, and brought me a cup, the milk warm with tiny bubbles. Perhaps I’d not had milk to drink since my childhood, perhaps that is true.

But I didn’t go near my studio, I was almost afraid. I felt that I might not find my painting there, that it might be vanished.

A COUPLE OF WEEKS LATER, Howard and I were invited to a party. We had invitations to parties often, but we didn’t often accept them. Should I say, I didn’t often accept them. Howard would happily have gone, but I didn’t like parties, sometimes they ruffled me terribly, for days afterwards. The noise, and the obligations, the obligations to speak to people and present a good face, I felt it a great strain.

Howard warned me, this time. Jack Benator, Howard’s colleague and partner, who had arranged Joseph’s stay at our house, would be at the party. I knew Jack, but had not seen him since Joseph had come to stay with us.