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myself in the mirror, I was surprised at how good I looked. I pushed my lank hair back from my face and stared at myself unsmiling: a tall, slightly gawky kid.
    Yet not even so gawky anymore: I could see that, and I’d heard it, from girls (and some boys) at school. I lit a cigarette, sat on the windowsill, and drank most of the rest of the Jack Daniel’s.
    By now I had a pretty good buzz on. Outside, it was already dark, not twilight or sunset but that terrible full dark that falls like a fire curtain onto the islands in late fall. From downstairs echoed my brother’s idea of party music—Thomas Dolby, show tunes, Bryan Ferry crooning “Both Ends Burning.” I stared beyond the scrim of yews, the trees so black they were like rents in the sky.
    â€œYou don’t fucking scare me,” I said, and stumbled into the hall.
    There was no electricity at Goldengrove. Red had lit one of the gas mantles on the second-floor landing, and it sent a thin yellow gleam through the corridor. At the top of the steps, I recognized one of Simon’s lawyer friends, despite his face’s being hidden behind a rubber Ronald Reagan mask. A guy I hated, drinking a cup of tea between tokes on a joint. Before he could see me, I turned and staggered back down the hall. There was another set of stairs at the other end, a servant’s passage that led to the kitchen, and I hurried toward it.
    That was when I saw her. Standing in the doorway to one of those empty rooms where Simon’s friends were camping out: a woman nearly as tall as I was, taller even, wearing chunky lace-up Frye boots and some kind of long hippie dress. She was swaying back and forth, her hands catching the gaslight in a weird way so that her fingers had a gray-blue glow to them. I usually avoided my brother’s friends, but something in the way she was moving, the way she was watching me without seeming to look at me, made me stop.
    It was her: the woman in the painting. Her long red-brown hair covering half her face, her eyes shining out green, then gold, then green again.
    Green again.
    I stopped, staring. Somewhere in the room behind her, something moved, small footsteps on a bare wooden floor.
    â€œIs—is that a dog?” I said.
    She stepped into the hallway. On the wall a mirror flickered—I thought it was a mirror—a figure moving, a dark, slow rush like water flowing across the wallpaper. Her hand moved to take my chin, tilting my head back so that I was staring directly into her eyes, splintered with gaslight, shining yellow gold then green, always green.
    â€œYou are very young,” she whispered. Her eyes grew unfocused; her breath upon my face was warm and smelled of cider. “So young, too young.”
    I gazed at her wide-eyed, unable to move, unable to do anything until she began to tug off my jacket and let it slip to the floor between us. Her head tipped so that she was staring at me sideways; she began to move her hand through the air slowly, up and down, so that the light from the gas lamp flickered strobe-wise across my vision, slats of yellow light between fingers like cracked blue slates.
    â€œShadows,” she whispered. She looked and sounded like someone hypnotized. “See?”
    Then her mouth touched mine, and I grabbed her, pushing her onto the floor and gasping as she pulled up my T-shirt, then unzipped my jeans and tugged them down. I thought of nothing, not discovery nor who she was, nothing but how she smelled, of apples and smoke, and how she felt under me, solid and liquid, moving and still. I fucked her, and it felt like hours, but it was only minutes, a minute, before I came, the same song from downstairs just winding to an end, the dog just completing its circuit of the room, the woman crying out but not in pleasure, even I knew that, but in disappointment and what sounded like despair.
    â€œWhat?” I gasped, pushing myself up on my hands to stare down at her. “What,