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unlocked the large closet where Caroline’s paintings were stored.
    The first two he brought out meant nothing much to Anne; she made polite, graduate-student comments on the landscapes and still lifes. Then he brought out one called Flowers. The background was a brownish red; the flowers, on a dark green table, still wrapped in blue paper, seemed hastily laid down. They were full of the energy bestowed on objects by a just completed motion: they had been put down almost carelessly, angrily. And the colors of the flowers, purposely almost unnatural—magenta, cobalt, scarlet—effaced the notion of flowers as things that were in the world to decorate, or to domesticate. They thrummed with an almost animal life; they might be dangerous.
    Ben showed her another one, called Jane. A woman in a black suit sat in a restaurant. Before her on the table were a cup of coffee and a book. Reading, she leaned her head on her hand—she was wearing an emerald ring. Her hair was the center of the composition; wound around her head, a dense curve, definite and tender, its line shaped the foreground. Around the woman sat the other diners, sketched in lightly, as if they were figures in a dream.
    Seeing those paintings, something grew in Anne, something she’d lived with since but hadn’t known before, a push or a desire, like the hunger for a definite but hard-to-come-by food. The paintings made her greedy to be with them, to speak of them: they belonged to her. She saw in her mind a catalogue with the early and late paintings next to one another on the page. She imagined all that she could say, all that could be said by simply comparing them slowly, painstakingly, using everything she knew now, and all that she would learn.
    Then she heard Michael and Ben talking behind her. Michael walked toward her, took her hand. “We’re going to be in France next year,” he said.
    Michael had a Strafford grant. He was going to change places with Hélène.
    Anne looked at Ben. “I’d forgotten,” she said. “We’ll be in France next year.”
    “Think about it for a while,” he said. “You could see each other at Christmas. The whole separation would be only eight or nine months.”
    “No,” she said. “You’ll have to find someone else.”
    “Take this to look at, just for fun,” said Ben, handing a morocco-bound book with the word Diary stamped on the front in gold.
    That night, while Michael, exhausted by the drive from New York, slept, she read the journal for the first time.
    “I must leave, and I will,” Caroline had written at twenty in her journal:
I know what I want to paint, the miracle of atmosphere, invisible, and pure, yet full of conduct, action. And the clarity of water, now the color of pebbles, then suffused entirely with the mood of blue summer. This cannot be seen, only revealed by a film of reflected sky. And the long line of grassy pasture, great trees without undergrowth, snowy geese, bending necks here and there, spreading wings or lowering yellow bills. All this I must set down—but how? Now I paint like an ignorant farmer’s wife, or worse, a lady. But what have I to look at? Pictures of gravy-colored skies with leaves the shade and textures of Brussels sprouts, birds like mashed potatoes, utterly unanimated, without the slightest sense of creatures drawing breath. I will prevail over Papa; I will not relent.
    In the back of the diary, Ben had taped an envelope of photographs. The first picture was formal: at sixteen, Caroline stood over her father’s left shoulder, a daunting, judging girl, taller than her brothers, her foot ready to tap impatience on the carpet, or to walk away. The father, in the center, dominated the scene with his serious, formal whiskers and his broad manufactured chest. Next to the father was the mother, looking as if every other word her family spoke might do her injury. On either side of the father and the mother sat small brothers, ready to take the father at his word. Over the