On the windowsill across from his work table is a three-by-five-inch Plexiglas frame with a photo of Gwen giving Rosalind her first bath. He doesn’t have to get out of bed and turn on the light to see what’s in the photo. He’s looked at it so many times he’s practically memorized it. Sometimes when he’s at the table he’s taken the frame off the sill and stared at the photo for a minute or so. A number of times he’s looked at it through the magnifying glass he also keeps on the sill, to see if there was anything he might have missed in it. There wasn’t, the last two times, though he’s still trying to identify one object on the ledge behind her: an orange blob the size of a baseball. He once showed her the photo and asked if she knew what the blob was and she said that was a long time ago and it doesn’t look like anything she remembers using in the bath or shower. He just thought of something. Maybe it’s a sponge to drip water over Rosalind’s head after Gwen washed it. He also once asked her if she minded his keeping the photo in such a visible place and she said “Why would I? My breasts are discreetly concealed and my genitals and pubic hair are underwater. And who sees it but you and the kids and the cleaning woman every other week, and if a plumber has to go through the room to get to our bathroom, I’d want you to put it facedown. Besides, it’s as much a photo of Rosalind as it is of me, isn’t it?” and he said “No. I mean, it’s a sweet domestic scene of mother and child, but it’s my favorite of you. Although there is one of you I like as much. You’re at an outdoor cafe in Deauville with your boyfriend Hendrick, three years before we met. Your hand’s covering his, he’s got his other arm around your shoulder, you’re both giddy with happiness, so it’s not one I’d want to see every day unless I snipped him out of it, which’d ruin the part with you.” She looks beautiful in the bath photo, but there are others where she’s as if not more beautiful. Maybe he likes it so much because she also looks so happy in it, sitting in the tub and holding a calm-looking Rosalind halfway out of the water. It could also be something to do with her being nude, the only one he has of her that she let him keep. He did once have a full-frontal nude Polaroid of her when she was seven months pregnant with Rosalind, taken behind the cottage in Maine they rented, but she found it about ten years later when she was looking for photos for a family album she was putting together and tore it up. “It wasn’t only my ugly bloated belly and what seemed like pubic hair crawling up to my navel, but my fat face and thighs and cantaloupian breasts,” and he said “It wasn’t that bad and you looked so shtark and radiant in it. I used to pull out that photo several times a year to look at it and now it can’t be replaced.” Her back’s a few inches from the curved end of the tub. Her long blond hair, brown in the photo because it’s wet, hangs over her left shoulder into the water in a single thick strand she made with her hands. The ledge is at the same level as the top of the tub and has a number of things on it besides what he’s almost sure now is a sponge. Five bottles of shampoo and conditioner, a small bottle of Johnson’s baby shampoo, a bar of red soap in a plastic soap container, the bottom part fitted into the top; two hairbrushes, one, he thinks, for taking knots out of wet hair. Two identical tubes of something, one squeezed a lot more than the other. In fact, the second one looks unused and he has no idea what the tubes were for. A baby’s comb, a washrag glove, he’ll call it, that they bought two of — one for each of them — on their first trip to France together in June ’81. In the recessed soap dish in the tile wall above the tub, a bar of Ivory soap, which he always used — it’s still the only soap he uses — when he showered in the tub. The red one was Gwen’s, bought in a health-food store. A bath toy — a book with a plastic cover and pages — floated behind Rosalind in the tub. At the bottom right corner of the photo: part of a folded-up gray towel leaning against the rim of the tub, probably on a clean bathmat. How he came to take the photo. They were in the bathroom. The heat in the apartment had been turned up and the bathroom door closed to make the room even warmer. He was holding Rosalind, who was naked. Gwen took off her bathrobe and hung it on the door hook, felt the water with her hand, got into the tub — he’d filled it to about six inches from the top and dropped the plastic book in — and dunked her head in the water. “To make Baby less afraid of the water,” she said when she came up, and then wrung her hair and shaped it into a strand. “All right; I’m ready for Baby’s first bath and shampoo,” and she held her arms out and he handed her Rosalind. Then he got the idea to take a few photos. “Be right back,” he said, got the camera off the fireplace mantel in the living room, where they always kept it so they’d always know where it was, came back, got the camera set for shooting, held it up to them and said “Okay? A little smile?” She said “I’ve no clothes on; what are you doing?” and he said “Nobody but us will see it and this is a major event in her life.” “Just one, then, but I don’t want the flash going off in her eyes.” She splashed the water with her feet, said “Look, Rosalind, look.” Rosalind looked down at the splashing or maybe at the book floating past because of the splashing, and Gwen said “Take it now,” and he took three quick pictures with the flash but only this one came out.