He wasn’t even curious about what she did in there. He wasn’t curious about her, period. Did he consider her a trophy wife? She was only a few years younger than he was, but she looked better than a lot of women her age. A little hair color and a lot of hours with a personal trainer went a long way. Well, if she was a trophy wife, he was a trophy husband. He would always be a trophy husband since the trophy aspect of husbands had to do with cash value, but what was going to happen to her? At thirty-nine, her chrome was starting to lose its shine.

She opened the door, then went around the room turning on the light boxes that hung at intervals on the wall. Each was topped with a mammogram film. Some were of single breasts, but most were a pair, two films side by side, like globes of the world with land masses and seas. They were painted in a rainbow of colors, and she’d named them: Red Sky at Night, Orange Storm, Sea Change.

Something was wrong with her, to want to paint breasts. She felt that deep within her in a clammy, embarrassed way, but she couldn’t help herself. It was like an addiction. Worse than shopping.

She ought to have stuck with watercolors of sailboats and sunsets, like her mother used to make. She and Kaye used to sit side by side in beach chairs with their palettes and easels when Kaye was little. Kaye was the one who emptied the dirty water in the sea and brought back fresh cups to dip their brushes in. Her mother was really talented. Kaye had a few of her paintings framed in the guest bathroom even though the decorator disapproved. That was a normal pastime, something you could tell people you did. But this . . .

She’d had the inspiration during a mammogram several years before. The doctor had shown her the films on a light screen, her right breast and her left. “Such frequent screenings are overkill at your age,” she told Kaye, who was thirty then. Kaye, lost for a moment in the symmetry of her own breasts, had snapped to. “I’ll get them every month if I choose,” she said. Her mother’s breast cancer had been fast and virulent, leaving Kaye motherless at eight.

She’d painted dozens of films since then. A technician at the radiologist’s had given several hundred to her, as many as she wanted, when the office moved from film to digital images. They didn’t care what happened to them as long as the patients’ identities were stripped off. What was she going to do with them all? Keep painting them, she supposed. Maybe one day she would find she’d had enough of breasts and she would be able to move on to something normal, like fruit.