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brightly lit Metro-North train platform. Christine had asked me an awful lot of questions about Neil. Had she heard something about him while researching Clare Barovier’s confinement at Briarwood? Had she maybe even visited him? Christine had, I knew, a bit of a crush on Neil. It would be only natural for her to ask about him while she was at the hospital, but then wouldn’t she have told me if there were any change? I remember suddenly the question she’d started to ask me:
But what if Neil were well again …?
Had she asked because she knew he
was
well?
    I check my watch: eleven thirty. Christine often stayed up late, sometimes working through the night when she was excited about a project. Maybe it wasn’t too late to call after all. I go inside and dial Christine’s number. When I get her machine I speak into it and give her a minute to pick up but she doesn’t. After I hang up I notice there’s a message on my machine. I hit the replay button, expecting that it will be Christine, but it’s not. It’s a man’s voice that I don’t recognize, identifying himself as Nathan Bell, a graduate student in Christine’s program at Columbia.
    “Christine gave me your number in case I needed to reach her over the weekend,” he says, “and I was wondering if she were still there.” There’s a pause and I think the message is over, but then his voice resumes. “She didn’t show up for her classes today. When I went by her apartment today to feed her cat it looked like she never came home.”

I TRY C HRISTINE’S HOME NUMBER TWICE BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP, BUT ONLY GET HER answering machine. In the morning I try her again but when she doesn’t pick up I call Nathan Bell.
    “She missed a meeting with her dissertation adviser and her senior seminar,” he tells me.
    “That doesn’t sound like her at all.”
    There’s a silence that lasts so long I think we might have been disconnected, but then Nathan Bell asks me a question, “Look, you’re her oldest friend, aren’t you?”
    It takes me a moment to answer. I’ve never put it that way to myself but I guess it’s true. Christine never mentioned any friends from highschool and although she seemed to know everyone in college, I was the only one you could really call her friend. Well, Neil maybe—but she’d met him at the same time I had during junior year.
    “Yes, I guess I am,” I finally answer. “Why? Do you think something’s wrong?”
    “I wanted to know if
you
thought there was anything wrong. How did she seem this weekend?”
    “To tell you the truth we didn’t get to spend that much time together. She was pretty much in demand all weekend—” I don’t mention that I avoided most of the reunion events, “—and by the time we hooked up after her lecture we only had an hour before she had to catch her train.”
    “And how did the lecture go?”
    “Great—you know Christine, she’s a performer.” I picture Christine standing in front of the window twirling her hand in the yellow light. Thinking about the window prompts me to wander down the spiral stairs to the studio, where the window has been laid out on the glazing bench, waiting to be dismantled. I notice again how the Lady’s hand is tangled in her own hair and I realize that Christine’s gesture with the light had echoed the Lady’s pose. “It was like she had really absorbed her subject,” I tell Nathan Bell. “I remember once when she was writing a paper on John Everett Millais’s
Ophelia
and she read that he made Elizabeth Siddal pose for hours in a full bathtub. Christine decided to see how long she could stay in a bathtub. She managed five hours and came down with pneumonia.”
    Nathan Bell laughs. “Yeah, that sounds like Christine. When she talks about a painting it’s like she’s walked into that world and chatted with the subjects—whether it’s one of Brueghel’s villages or a de Chirico streetscape. It’s part of her brilliance, but I wonder sometimes if she