There is time to pause. The narrator is dying. The narrator is remembering the progress of a life to this moment. The narrator is both the object of contemplation and the contemplating voice.

Sitter and subject are not one in this novella built upon scenes of posing for a picture, scenes imbued with retrospective reflections. There is a fluidity in the identifications. The emerging images mediate the evolving relations between the characters. Those relations include relations to themselves. It is not as if the novella builds upon the thematics of mirrors. There is not a sense that the other is a reflection, in the optical sense of reflection. Rather, the encounter with the other is an opportunity to reflect. The other serves as a model. Not necessarily a model to imitate. But very much a model upon which and with which to meditate. Whether they are posing or painting, the characters are all modelling.

Models take time just as modelling occupies time.

As I sit in my armchair, reading Flaubert, later, the image of this woman, the one May is painting, comes to me again and again. I discover a yearning to be close to her, to be present as she comes closer to the surface. It's like watching someone swim toward you, only it's much slower, and you see her at first underwater, a moving blur, and you wait for the moment when you'll see her arms, and then her face, her hair streaming wet in the light.

Her. The sitter. The painter. The subject of the image. A theme of refracting reference is reprised in the Garden chapter where a image of a couple becomes the screen of projections from the past (Lydia and Thomas) and anticipations (as Lydia becomes aware of the relation between Mary and Edgar) and something else entirely (Lydia's own relation with Edgar). "[...]what am I to do with this other picture, arriving in my life during one dazed moment in the middle of a summer afternoon in our garden in [...]"

In such a fictional universe there is more than one emerging. The narration proceeds very much like a musical ricercar since the objects that are created by Mary become the focal points of a knot of stories and the one story of Lydia's passing becomes embodied in several objects -- the letter and the embroidered pillow case -- to move on out into the world. The reversal is subtle, gradual just as one would expect in a fugue where each figure is "simply present in this [moment], filled for the moment with [its own] color and shape."

This is, for me, a novella of betweeness. A little moral tale reminding me that to appreciated a pictoral form or a story made of words there is much work to be done to respect what is there. How simple to interpolate. How difficult to find the mature grace to refrain.

In other ways, this is a novella of the delicate task of trading in symbols. Consider the formulation from Kenneth Burke's "The Poetic Process"

Yet we must not consider the symbol, in opposition to style, as outside technical form. The technical appeal of the symbol lies in the fact that it is a principle of logical guidance, and makes for the repetition of itself in changing details which preserve as a constant the original ratio.

Ratio. Five chapters. And not just five chapters. Chessman has created a delightful device to preserve a ratio of complex relations. Each of the chapters has an epigraph which is a segment from the novella itself. Furthermore, given that the quotation-epigraphs sometimes halt in mid-sentence, the epigraphs can be threaded together, and in such a reading they even loop back upon themselves: "In my dream, I walk [...] and we walk through the high grass, among the fireflies, through the gate and past the barn, and the garden, towared the house, and I can see light inside, and Ella's at the front door, waving us in for bed, and". Ratio of the recursive from the singular to the plural and to the singular again, or rather back to a more particularized singular. Like reading the morning paper at whatever time of day in whatever quality of light.