I bought the painting at an estate sale in Harrowfield, the kind of town that exists mainly in the past tense. The estate belonged to a woman named Cecile Morrow who had died at ninety-three, alone, in a house full of furniture that had outlasted every relationship she'd had. The painting was listed in the catalog as "Victorian portrait, woman in red, oil on canvas, provenance unknown." Forty dollars. I paid forty dollars for it and drove three hours home with it strapped to the roof of my car.
It was a good painting. That's what I keep coming back to. Whatever else happened, it was a genuinely good painting — a woman in her thirties or forties, a red dress, standing in a doorway that opened onto darkness. The painter had skill. The light on her face was complex. Her expression was neutral, or nearly so — a slight curve of the lips that could be a smile or could be concentration or could be the way a face falls when it is not performing anything.
I hung it in the study. I liked looking at it.
The first change took me two weeks to notice, and once I noticed it I couldn't stop noticing it. Her smile was wider. Not dramatically — not maniacally, not movie-monster-wide. Just a few millimeters more of teeth. A degree of curve. I stood in front of the painting for a long time wondering if I had simply remembered it wrong, if the original had been smiling this much all along and my memory had flattened it.
I took a photograph. I compared it to the photograph I'd taken when I first hung it, the one I'd sent my sister saying "look what I found." The smile in the first photograph is smaller. The smile in the second is not.
I told myself: lighting, angle, the camera's interpretation of contrast.
The next morning, she was closer to the edge.
This is harder to rationalize. The composition of the painting — the woman centered in the doorway, the doorway centered in the canvas — was its principal feature. The centering was precise and intentional. In the morning, she was shifted right. Not drastically. Enough that the empty space on her left was larger than the empty space on her right. Enough that one part of the doorframe was cut off.
I told myself: I was remembering the composition incorrectly.
I took more photographs. Every morning for a week. Then I laid them in order and watched her move.
By Wednesday she was at the edge of the frame. The doorway behind her was mostly gone. Whatever darkness the doorway had opened onto was mostly gone. She had moved to the right edge of the canvas with the specific, purposeful slowness of someone trying not to be noticed moving.
And the smile.
I am not going to describe what the smile looked like by Thursday. I am going to say it was no longer neutral or nearly neutral. I am going to say that whatever the painter had intended, the expression visible in the painting on Thursday morning was not it.
Friday morning the painting was facing the wall. I had not turned it. I live alone.
I did not turn it back. I called a woman I know who deals in antiques and told her I had a Victorian oil portrait I wanted to sell. I did not tell her anything else. She came Saturday. She took it. She said she had a buyer who collected Victorian portraiture.
That was three months ago. I have not heard from her.
I drove past her shop last week. It was closed, shuttered, a for-lease sign in the window. The neighbor said she had gone away suddenly and left no forwarding address.
There are forty dollars in a jar on my kitchen counter. I have been meaning to throw them away. Every morning I walk past the jar and every morning I don't throw them away. I don't know why.
I don't look at the corner of the room where the painting used to hang.
I've been told this is a rational response. I have been told lots of rational things. None of them explain why, when I walk past the jar in the early morning, before I turn on the lights, I can hear from somewhere in the apartment, faint but legible, the sound of a smile that is getting larger.