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representing a young woman, her hand upraised, sitting at a table. (Saint Ursula 889–891?) The saint (?) is looking to her right, toward the lighted candle, and behind her a treasure, including a royal symbol signification unknown, is barely illuminated in the candlelight.
     
    At this same time, coincidentally, in Margeeve’s art history class they had taken up the study of French seventeenth-century painting—cursorily, for it is not considered to be of much interest, though of more interest lately because the Getty Museum buys French painting, which it seems American museums didn’t used to do. I suppose the gloomy religiosity of Italian painting went better with the neo-Gothic mansions of the nineteenth-century American millionaires, or else the French emphasis on nymphs and people in swings having fun offended our ideas of seriousness, back then. But French painting is in fashion now.
    Armed with this new interest in French painting, Margeeve replied to the Getty that their description did indeed sound like the picture Roxeanne had taken to Paris with her, and presumably still had. She noted parenthetically to Dr. Manchevering that they had always thought her daughter Roxeanne resembled the woman in the painting. Daughter Roxeanne had given it to her French husband as a wedding present. A correspondence (unbeknownst to Roxy in Paris) had developed, in which the Getty lady hoped to borrow Saint Ursula, or at least to see it. She mentioned the possibility it was by a student of the French painter Georges de La Tour, and the Getty was planning an exhibition of his works.
    The painting was hanging over the fireplace in Roxy’s apartment on the rue Maître Albert, and before that had hung for years in Roxy’s room at home in Santa Barbara, but now has been crated and sent to Drouot, the auction house, for sale, breaking Roxy’s heart, for she loves this saint and used to tell her her secrets. Inside an ornate gold frame, Saint Ursula regards a dark future of proposed matrimony. She would rather be massacred. The painting is listed in the catalogue as “Sainte Ursule(?)” by “un élève de La Tour.”
    In physics class (dumbbell physics) I learned about how the displacement of atoms means that the existence of anything affects the existence of everything, and that’s how I imagine the painting of Saint Ursula, dislodging matter, making waves since the unknown seventeenth-century artist painted it.

6
    The affairs of ordinary life cannot be forced to fit in with all our desires. It was sometimes awkward to have my every step marked out for me in advance and all my moments counted.
    —Constant, Adolphe
    I T IS A truth universally acknowledged that a young American person not fully matriculated must be in want of a job; Americans in Paris fell upon my neck like swains, with a plethora of paying tasks.
    The Cafe Flore: I am keeping my rendezvous with Ames Everett. That was Ames Everett de-buttering his toast in the prologue, for I see him doing this as I approach. An elegant, rich, fattish gay person was how I had categorized him.
    “Good,” he says. “What will you have? Menthe à l’eau? Perrier? A drink? Coffee.”
    Having never had it, I choose menthe , which proved to be mint-flavored green mouthwash.
    Ames explained that he would like someone to walk his dog Scamp every afternoon. People have never told me why they don’t just hire French people to do things like this, though Stuart Barbee told me how much a Frenchman would have charged to paint his dining room—six thousand francs, more than a thousand dollars, amazing indeed. I paid myself twenty-five dollars an hour and it cost him $250.00. So one explanation is that it’scheaper to hire Americans; also, I had an idea that language counted, even among those who speak perfectly good French. Of course language would count when it came to sorting literary papers, as I do for Mrs. Pace; she on the other hand complains that I am too young. When I had to ask