The Sunken Cathedral by Kate Walbert

Simone,” he said. But that was wrong; none of them were here for that; they were here to paint, to replicate the model’s stance, to see in the way one must see to be alive. We are here, then, to be alive. To live. Ironic, Sid Morris thought, given the circumstances. This all in the span of gathering his thoughts, of attempting to picture Simone’s face in his mind’s eye though he pictured only a fur coat too heavy for a woman as old as she, too heavy for him to hold at that dinner a hundred years ago, or maybe last week—time folding in on itself at his age, weightless, fleeting.
    “Devoted wife,” Sid Morris continued. “Kind mother,” he said, rushing it closed as Veritas rose up to accuse him of everything.
    “Amen,” he said. “Amen,” the gathered said, the model’s amen especially loud, almost strident as she dropped her robe and resumed her position on the claw-footed divan, a droopy slouch, one leg crossed over the other, head back as if in ecstasy. As if in ecstasy, Sid Morris had earlier instructed. You know ecstasy, right, dear? he said as the model looked back bored at the dirty old man.
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    I . The powders were caked in tubes or pressed into compacts from the fifties, their plastic clamshell lids and palm-size mirrors flecked with black. How many times had her mother seen her own face in these, and now only Katherine looking back, a stouter version of her mother, more her father’s build, stocky, short-waisted, but in this mirror none of that, only her face, pretty like her mother’s though not as pretty, not nearly as pretty, she thinks, dumping the tubes and the compacts, the dried-out mascaras and spent lipsticks, the beveled-glass bottles of perfume—some nearly empty, others almost full—and the one her father gave her mother every year for Christmas, her mother pretending she had no idea, squealing like a little girl—into a cardboard box she believed she would throw out but on which she later wrote with Sharpie, MOTHER.

XVI
    B ut it appears Sid Morris has no intention of leaving. They sit in the dark backyard in twin wrought-iron chairs, white-painted, rusting, their springs long sprung. Hold still, he says, balancing his cigarette in the old clamshell on the matching table and propping Marie’s cast in his lap. It had been Sid’s idea to paint her cast, to make her an original Sid Morris. She listens to him now and tries not to breathe as directed. She has taken more for the pain and the wine, too, so the pain is a muffled bell she detects in the distance: someone late for dinner. Sid Morris picks up the cigarette again, inhaling then flicking ash, the smoke dribbling from his nose, its familiar smell sharp, nostalgic in a way that surprises her.
    Next door the movie star’s floodlight, fixed over the movie star’s back door, lights his forsythia and birch like museum pieces, his backyard awash in contrast, treasure and not, pools of ink its corners and on its roof, unseen, the movie star declaiming—this his late-night habit, Marie has explained to Sid Morris. You get used to it, she says. (The need for space alone: the baby, the new house, new wife.)
    “Alas, sir,” they hear, and then, “Horatio,” or something. Is it Horatio? Could it possibly be, Horatio? Or maybe, Mercutio? He has moved through several tragedies and now, apparently, is to finally appear onstage. He hopes she will see him.
    They stand near her front stoop. That close she feels how the movie star is buoyed by extra air. She has just returned from the fruit vendor, a plastic bag of plums looped to her wrist. People who pass turn to be sure he is who he is though they do not quite believe their eyes so they turn again, and then again.
    “And those?” Sid Morris is asking.
    “Privets. Abe liked topiary. He used to sculpt them: that one’s a chick.”
    She had led Sid Morris to the back door—his suggestion, the backyard, he needed a smoke, fresh air—and pushed up the policeman’s bolt to the