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Ninety-three Million Miles Away
    A t least part of the reason why Ali married Claude, a cosmetic surgeon with a growing practice, was so that she could quit her boring government job. Claude was all for it. “You only have one life to live,” he said. “You only have one kick at the can.” He gave her a generous allowance and told her to do what she wanted.
    She wasn’t sure what that was, aside from trying on clothes in expensive stores. Claude suggested something musical—she loved music—so she took dance classes and piano lessons and discovered that she had a tin ear and no sense of rhythm. She fell into a mild depression during which she peevishly questioned Claude about the ethics of cosmetic surgery.
    “It all depends on what light you’re looking at it in,” Claude said. He was not easily riled. What Ali needed to do, he said, was take the wider view.
    She agreed. She decided to devote herself to learning, and she began a regimen of reading and studying, five days a week, five to six hours a day. She read novels, plays, biographies, essays, magazine articles, almanacs, the New Testament,
The Concise Oxford Dictionary, The Harper Anthology of Poetry.
    But after a year of this, although she became known as the person at dinner parties who could supply the name or date that somebody was snapping around for, she wasn’t particularly happy, and she didn’t even feel smart. Far from it, she felt stupid, a machine, an idiot savant whose one talent was memorization. If she had any
creative
talent, which was the only kind she really admired, she wasn’t going to find it by armouringherself with facts. She grew slightly paranoid that Claude wanted her to settle down and have a baby.
    On their second wedding anniversary they bought a condominium apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows, and Ali decided to abandon her reading regimen and to take up painting. Since she didn’t know the first thing about painting or even drawing, she studied pictures from art books. She did know what her first subject was going to be—herself in the nude. A few months ago she’d had a dream about spotting her signature in the corner of a painting, and realizing from the conversation of the men who were admiring it (and blocking her view) that it was an extraordinary rendition of her naked self. She took the dream to be a sign. For two weeks she studied the proportions, skin tones and muscle definitions of the nudes in her books, then she went out and bought art supplies and a self-standing, full-length mirror.
    She set up her work area halfway down the living room. Here she had light without being directly in front of the window. When she was all ready to begin, she stood before the mirror and slipped off her white terry-cloth housecoat and her pink flannelette pyjamas, letting them fall to the floor. It aroused her a little to witness her careless shedding of clothes. She tried a pose: hands folded and resting loosely under her stomach, feet buried in the drift of her housecoat.
    For some reason, however, she couldn’t get a fix on what she looked like. Her face and body seemed indistinct, secretive in a way, as if they were actually well defined, but not to her, or not from where she was looking.
    She decided that she should simply start, and see what happened. She did a pencil drawing of herself sitting in a chair and stretching. It struck her as being very good, not that she could really judge, but the out-of-kilter proportions seemed slyly deliberate, and there was a pleasing simplicity to the reaching arms and the elongated curve of the neck. Becauseflattery hadn’t been her intention, Ali felt that at last she may have wrenched a vision out of her soul.
    The next morning she got out of bed unusually early, not long after Claude had left the apartment, and discovered sunlight streaming obliquely into the living room through a gap between their building and the apartment house next door. As far as she knew, and in spite of the