FROM HER WINDOW, high above the world, the widow spots them, the child and her photographer, entangled in the shadows of the shrubbery. And as she watches them, she feels the briefest flicker, like the singe of a match tip's flame: quickly, now, before it's gone! She tugs upon the bell rope that dangles beside her: a photograph must be taken; the moment must not be lost. Yes, here is the hind of her nighttime hunts; she has tracked it down at last.
Then she laughs at herself, at the futility of her agitated summons. For how can he take the picture, when he is the picture? All of her efforts, if she is to be truthful, are marked by this same sense of impossibility. The more furiously she pursues, the more surely it recedes, this fugitive scene, visible only when glimpsed askance, out of the corner of her rheumy eye. Her latest project has been a failure; she had hoped that this marvelous invention, this alchemy of chemicals and light, would assist her in her pursuits, but now, as her eyes graze over the photographs, she discovers that they offer her nothing. And if they do, it is only by accident: in one picture, the fringe of the carpet is caught between the man's toes; in another, the child's mouth is open, as if she is about to speak: these are the details that prick her. But they are scarce among this series of tableaux, lovingly arranged, though ultimately of no poignance or excitement to her.
Once she had been interviewed by a scientist, who was anxious to include a grandmother in his study of libertines, already several volumes long. He had amused her with the exacting nature of his questions, and his demands that she should include even the most scabrous details in her accounts. She had teased him, she couldn't help it, so strenuous were his attempts to manage her perversions, to render them immobile. What you must finally recognize, she said, what you must understand about my predilections (the scientist leans forward: at long last, the secret!) is that my desire does not take; it turns, as milk does.
For that reason, she feels only a little sad when she finds, slipped beneath her door, a note written in an elegant hand:
Please forgive me. I have left in search of a Faculty of Medicine who might take interest in my unusual condition. I plan to donate my body to Science, so that I can say my life has been of some use to Humankind.