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like it’s hardly been slept in. Just one corner turned back, and I carry the newspaper to the recycling bin the moment I finish the sudoku. Everything stays creepily clean because even though I barely leave an imprint, I feel too guilty to fire the maid. It’s like I think any minute the real owners of this house will be home and I’m going to have to get out fast.
    “I didn’t mean to upset you,” Elyse says.
    “You didn’t,” I say. “But that dance studio . . . it was so tacky, Elyse. All silver and blue and sparkly and over-the-top. It was like you took everything that’s me and created the opposite. I think I’ve gone and done something stupid.”
    “Well, thank God,” Elyse says. “It’s about time.”

CHAPTER THREE
    T HERE'S A PHOTOGRAPH of me and Elyse in my kitchen, above the desk where I stack my cookbooks, and after she and I say good night, I pour another glass of wine and wander over to look at it. It’s from our college years, the summer we spent in Europe.
    Our parents had bought us Eurail passes, the good kind with unlimited travel, and it didn’t take either of us long to figure out we hated the youth hostels with their hairy shower drains and Czech girls trying to steal our jeans. It was much better to sleep on the trains, so the nights when we couldn’t afford a hotel room we would just go down to the station around ten and climb on the first one that stopped. We were good at flirting with the conductors, and if the cars weren’t full, they sometimes upgraded us to a sleeper compartment. There were many mornings that summer that we would awaken with no idea where we were. Elyse would push aside the blinds and wait for the depot sign to appear. That’s how we went to Seville and Dresden, to Bern and Antwerp.
    It’s how we went to Florence too, and I pick up the picture that shows me and Elyse, standing in the Accademia, where they keep Michelangelo’s David. Elyse had been insistent that if fate had taken us to Florence, we may as well see him. She was an art major and had a somewhat old-fashioned idea of a European tour. She dragged me through an untold number of cathedrals and galleries and she repeatedly referred to an out-of-date, torn-up Fodor’s guidebook.
    The euro had not yet been invented, and we changed countries frequently, so the currency was always an issue. The side zipper pocket of my backpack held kronor and francs and guilders and pence, a jangling mass of European money that I would hand to shopkeepers to sort out and just hope that they were honest. The line to see David was long, so we decided to buy the special pass that lets you go in with small groups. This privilege cost something like a million lira, but who knew how much that was? It seemed like a gelato was a million lira, and so was a bottle of wine or a flight to London.
    But paying extra did mean we were shunted toward a much shorter line that wrapped around a little gift kiosk while the rest of the tourists glared. I wanted to rent headsets but Elyse said no, we didn’t need them, that I would understand everything if I just took a deep inhalation and let the art come inside me. It was August and by this point Elyse and I were really getting on each other’s nerves. I was tired of her lectures about observing and absorbing, and perfectly willing to pay a million more lira for some nice calm English voice to tell me what the hell I was looking at.
    “You’ll understand as much as you let yourself understand,” Elyse said, and I’d given her the finger while pretending to scratch my cheek. She was so sure, even then, that she would become an artist, which I guess she has, even though it’s hard to reconcile her hand-thrown Hopi pots with the grandeur of David. “My queer little bowls,” she calls them, stressing her southern accent on the word “queer,” but there’s pride in her voice too, the pride of someone who has never once wavered, who has always known precisely what she wants out of