The house was a pigpen when she bought it in the forties. Doors falling off, roof caving in. She’d spent the thirties falling in love, not with a man—her husband had had an affair and she a nervous breakdown—but with a landscape. Red cliffs, and purple hills, and scrubby green cedars. Her husband died an old man in 1946. She buried his ashes at Lake George, where he could hear the water run, and retreated permanently to the desert after that. War had left the whole world in disrepair, and even this corner of it, remote as it seemed, was not left untouched.

The house wasn’t a Spanish house, or an Indian house, or a Mexican house. It had adobe walls, viga-and-latilla ceilings, and a hand-hewn wooden ladder climbing to the roof, which looked down on a central courtyard. On the picture windows she’d insisted, because an artist needed light. The doors all clung firmly to their hinges now—one in particular featured in several of her paintings—and the ceiling, with the addition of the skylights, gave merely the impression of having fallen in. It was a New Mexican house on a sedate Sunday evening. Her house. Home.

Her younger sister had gone back to Beverly Hills, and except for Cook, who hardly seemed to draw breath, the artist once more had the place to herself. As much as she loved her sister, the woman chattered constantly and her departure was never anything but a great relief. But the house wouldn’t remain quiet for very long, as she was generous with her time, and the next visitor was always only a letter or a polite request away. Soon there would be some photographer—she seemed to attract them like flies—stalking her with a camera. Where were the days when she had posed nude for her husband, her breasts hanging like ripe fruit for all the world to see?

Nobody would think of taking such photographs of her now. Now they photographed her on her morning walk, her evening walk, sitting with her rock collection, or climbing the ladder to the roof. She might pose in front of the chimney or while writing letters, while brushing the dog, or standing in front of the white skull of a cow, a horse, a ram on the wall. Portraits of the Artist as an Old Woman. She adored skulls, bones, stones, and shells, but she was far from any ocean now.

Guests she tolerated graciously, but an unannounced visitor brought out the worst in her. She wasn’t often in need of a plumber, but when she was, she expected a single individual to report for the job. The last one had shown up with a friend, not a colleague but some tagalong. While the plumber fixed the kitchen sink, his friend whistled, very badly, and asked to use the bathroom with the house’s water still turned off. Cook had taken fiendish pleasure in directing him to the outhouse in the yard. “Watch out for rattlesnakes,” she’d added cruelly, to her own delight.

* * *

It was Monday morning, and the moment Cook showed up she would express the usual surprise at seeing her employer still breathing. She, artist and old woman, cooked for herself on Sundays, which was Cook’s day off. She was no bad cook—bright soups and hearty breads were her specialty—but the ingredients had to be fresh, and so, with Santa Fe fifty miles distant, she’d long since planted her own garden. Goat milk she procured from neighboring Franciscans, and one of her sisters sent walnuts and dates. She employed a local gardener so as not to spend whole days pulling weeds, which would leave little time for painting or for anything else, such as getting her old muscles massaged on the third Monday of every month. It was one of the few extravagances in which she indulged—before the sun was up and Cook was back on duty...