Take, for example, the love of the painter Dora Carrington for the writer Lytton Strachey. No matter that she knew he was gay (no matter that he once proposed marriage to Virginia Woolf), or that he was thirteen years older than her. A scandal from the start, theirs became a legendary story. Indeed, it is not for her painting but for her endless, hopeless love of Strachey, how it shaped her life, how it caused her death, that Carrington is known (that kind of woman’s story). For seventeen years, she was devoted to him. Not even her marriage to another man could separate them; all three had to live together. But then the man she married was not her but his object of desire. Having agreed to the marriage, she wrote a poignant letter to Strachey, lamenting the fate that made it impossible for the two of them to become man and wife. Then all three went to Venice on honeymoon together.

When Strachey died, of stomach cancer, Carrington survived less than two months before shooting herself. In the stomach. She was just shy of thirty-nine. Not her first suicide attempt. “There is nothing left for me to do,” she had told the Woolfs the day before. “I did everything for Lytton.”

She didn’t have a gun in the house so she went next door and borrowed one, like a cup of sugar. A rabbit gun. (“Like some small animal left” had been Virginia Woolf’s parting impression of her.) The wrong weapon for the job, it seems: meaning a long, slow, painful dying.

D. H. Lawrence, so obsessed with the subject—and so confident in his authority on it—that he wrote a whole novel called Women in Love, accused Carrington of hating “real” men. One of the novel’s women in love is a caricature: pretty, deceptively innocent-looking Minette Darrington is really a deep-down lascivious pervert. And not an artist as Carrington was, but (twist of the knife) an artist’s model.

In a short story written many years later, another caricature that Lawrence appears to have based on Carrington is gang-raped and she commits suicide.

VI

I went again to visit my friend. The treatments had failed. The tumors had spread. She was back in the hospital.

I booked the same room where I’d stayed before.

As you’ll see, my host texted me, our household has a new member!

A young cat, eyes the color of bourbon, silver gray and sleek as a seal.

I shouldn’t have let the grandkids name him, she said. Now he’s stuck with Booger.

A rescue cat. They found him trapped in a dumpster, she said. Badly dehydrated and just skin and bones. They didn’t think he’d survive. But look at him now!

Nine lives, I said, thinking of my friend. Badly dehydrated. Just skin and bones.