 
What others are saying about

### What Beauty

"Minus Orth's eccentricities... make him the iconoclast he is intended to be."

— **Publishers Weekly**

"I want to read this book. I must read this book."

— **Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award**

## What Beauty

By Mark Beyer

Smashwords Edition

Siren & Muse Publishing

a worldwide publisher

http://www.sirenandmuse.com

Copyright © 2012 by Mark Beyer

All rights reserved under international and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America.

This book is available in print at most online retailers.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

ALSO BY MARK BEYER

The Village Wit

Visit www.sirenandmuse.com to read more about all our books.

To Asia

CHAPTER 1

The shoes give her away. People are otherwise fooled. She can walk the streets in anonymity without the shoes, only there they are. A straw hat, a child's hat, covers the top of her head. She wears the hat in a manner to rival a queen's crown, its brim and crease smeared black, the weaving pitted, torn, warped. Her hair looks worse than the hat, if this is possible. Pigeon-gray with stringy curls. The curls, like metal shavings dropped from a die cutter, spill uncontrolled across her shoulders — and here's a nice bit of added veil — the ends stuck together in pasty dingleberries, reminding me of a low-traveling dog that picks up detritus with its shuffle gait. The hair alone makes her unrecognizable to all but fanatics. Added to this... this cast... is an old corduroy jacket fitted snugly over a yellow blouse, its original chroma, dark chocolate, yet visible at the armpits, though now faded to a weak coffee across the shoulders, sleeves, and along the frayed lapels. All for the middling look an Ivy League prof in the Sixties would have liked to affect; a forced, anti-establishment statement straight off the pages of _Life_ magazine, standing slack, effete, in front of a campus building, lacy vines in shadowy black & white; a grainy image. Maybe this coat is a twenty-five-year remnant accepted from the charity bin at some Skid Row mission. Or maybe it's been pulled from a dumpster behind a wrecked tenement in the Bronx. Grease stains spot the jacket's lapels like sloganeer badges, the narrow cord ribs are crease-worn inside the elbows, and countless finger caresses have smoothed the cloth behind the buttons to shiny halos. The blouse's collar curls up at the points, high under her chin, something a clown might invent using a lot of starch and imaginative ironing, a trick done to make children laugh (or cry). The linen blouse, a withered yellow found only on beach stones rattled by surf for an eon, disappears into the waistband of canvas trousers stained with white paint, like Christmas tree flock.

All very becoming on a grimy stewbum. But this get-up lacks the gestalt Karen Kosek needs. I'm certain of this; a certainty that touches me like religion touches others. I know this cannot be the Karen Kosek the world knows (or had once known) because she is none of these touchstone fragments. Except for the shoes, and... something _else_.

Seeming to be a bag lady and _being_ a bag lady are not the same. Go look at a bag lady and this becomes axiomatic: there's a sour, rancid odor ten feet around her — the stench of a sort that takes weeks to ferment; hair like matted sackcloth; watery eyes, blurred and vaguely unfocused, or else glaucomatous; pants crotch stained by piss, soaked and dried a dozen times (the root source of the reek?); green armpit stains of the perpetually unwashed, fading toward the edges and tinged white by perspiration salts; and the filthy skin whose grime penetrates the dermis so deeply you swear you're in the presence of animal hide (no way to forge this look by rubbing fireplace ash like it's a balm).

Yet here she is, in disguise.

Beneath her disguise, because it has to be that, I see Karen's hygiene and vigor. Her skin is bright, not so loose around the eyes and mouth for a woman of her age (fifty? fifty-five?) or what, otherwise, you'll find on the indigent, the drunken, the commonly diseased; her fingernails gleam in manicured gloss when she stops to adjust the grip on two plastic bags; when she takes a mere second to look up and into the sunshine, she smiles, and her teeth advertise money of a quantity that has no use for group dental plans.

And then there are her shoes: feminine loafers stylishly designed by a whole team of foot fetishists, with comfortable leather uppers to assuage the walker. Really nice. Karen Kosek is a walker; she displays the dachshund's gait, that meld of temperance and purpose, an instinctive potential for feistiness. Without this dog's pace, whose natural force kicks the cuffs high over her ankles with each stride, I could not see the shoes, and so not notice the woman. The shoes are the luster beneath the rum, the one piece that sets her apart.

That's when I knew who this was, where I had seen her before, the eyes, the chin, the nose. One moment I was watching some wretch of humanity walk beside Central Park's placid lake, giving sideways looks toward the boats in which tourist men rowed tourist women under Tuesday's sunshine, and the next moment I recognized _Karen K_ , her face emerged from a Malcom Drummand portrait. We walked towards each other, our shadows ruffled by the uneven spring grass beside the black asphalt lane. She stopped to put down her bags and, exercising her fingers, looked up at the sun and smiled. I found this disguise so incongruous that I laughed to myself. Then she picked up the bags and started her fast walk again. As she looked at the rowers I looked at her shoes; I think she saw me but it was through a blur of movement, feeling the wind of my pace when we passed shoulder-to-shoulder. No one else noticed her. To them, these springtime visitors to New York City, she was just a bag lady. Something to avoid, like dog shit.

Karen K's essays on art and books and photography made her famous among New York literati, and popular with most artists for her support of their... _what?_... reason to exist, as I understand it (this recognition, in a society that had been slowly devolving into kitsch and TV). Newsmen photographed her touring Greenwich Village gallery openings, smoking cigarettes near gurus holding forth in Brooklyn Heights parlors, or stepping from taxis outside the Houston Street art-house cinema, and drinking martinis at East Side cocktail parties. Encomiums were not what Karen Kosek was after, though. She was a prolific writer, and her new essays found spreads in the glossies. Then came a novel or two. In between, ubiquitous speeches and about-town appearances had made her so famous that she never needed to write another word if she didn't want to. And then she didn't want to.

Ten seconds go by, and then I turn heel to follow her. She's on a tear away from the lake, her shadow head now bobbing with her quickened pace. She's headed for the West Side path, a hunter on a scent, the scrounger dog of boyhood books and Lake District romantics. I speed walk to reel in the distance, and feel progress only when my groin aches. The sun bakes my hatless head. When I look at my feet to blink away the haze and glare, I find my clothes are not much different from Karen's — canvas sneakers spattered two-tone by clay and linseed oil, jeans torn at the knees and loosely threaded from a thousand washings, a denim shirt that's too heavy for the day's heat, and showing it under the armpits and across the chest. How telling is this for my own future? I put a hitch in my step to displace the image.

She holds a plastic Duane Reade bag in each hand. They hang low beside her calves. The bottoms sometimes scrape the asphalt path. The bags are old, or made to look old, heavily wrinkled and as filthy as her clothing. What lies bulging inside is a mystery, bulky and round. Baseballs or oranges, perhaps, neither of which you can buy at Duane Reade.

Foot traffic passes her from either direction. A few lazy bicyclists teeter through the thin crowd, crotch-to-saddle, toe walking their mechanical steeds. Dog walkers crisscross the path between us, as do nannies with children, and shuffling old men. There are too many people in the park for a weekday, I think, but then I remember where I am. Cities with a population of seven million cough people from their buildings on the minute, in all weather. Well ahead, but not too far that if I don't catch up she'll be taken away, looms New York's tonier Central Park West apartment buildings.

Architecturally, they are Old Europe designs mixed with New American bulk bridging the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The immigrants who flooded the shores of Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island, brought with them new attitudes and mentalities. Their education and religion, nationalism and optimism, helped to build the cities on the eastern seaboard and, especially, this island metropolis. The Kenilworth building is French, of russet brick surrounded by white limestone, and looks like a wedding cake. The Dakota, built in the 1880s, has steep roofs, gables, and dormers straight from Germany's Renaissance. Down the street, 55 Central Park West dominates its neighbors with its Art Deco _brique_ _massif_ — tinted purple at street level and rising gradually to yellow on the highest floors. The effect is a façade forever bathed in sunlight. These are the icons of the Avenue. In front of me walks a woman who had spent her best years studying the virtuosi of those immigrants, so she could walk in stride with their first-generation children, and bring alive a uniquely American mosaic. Something tells me, against better judgment, that she's headed for one of these buildings, dressed as one of the dregs that slopped pig shit in the hold of an immigrant steamer for the price of passage.

I have easily called her Karen K because that was her byline; it is how America came to know her, and, later, the world. She chose to be identified with the new pantheon of young writers invited into society from the Sixties' social revolution and Seventies' "let it all hang out" attitude (times I did not know as an adult and got second or third hand from my neighbors' older children, and family – cousins, uncles and aunts – or had to study in books, old magazines & newspapers archived on microfiche, and that era's old-new art fusion striving to ignite a forward-reaching age). It was the era of feminism, too, which showed women's strength in Technicolor along with their range of intellect, which tried to take center stage and would have but for the man's world America still was, which, patronizingly, focused on women's beauty and grace, sex appeal and housewifery; back then, Sixties' feminism wasn't filled with the rage, pissiness, greed, or militant anger that the Reagan-Bush White House has since encouraged in all Americans. Culture Wars. Class Warfare. Washington's political battles bleeding into the nation's living rooms via cable-news. There is much to go to war over, apparently. Karen Kosek, contrarily, wrote about ways to bridge the differences between the reigning perceptions of her day about what art was, and how to accept it on its merits. I imagine she had thought long about the connection her essays had with the larger cultural issues then stymieing America.

Seeing Karen like she is today, it's hard for me to imagine what has happened to her. She easily fits into the body of a character I find lurking on the edge of a Rembrandt etching that hangs in my apartment. This sepia-toned copperplate, _The Burgermeester_ , illustrates the pomposity and excess of a regional bureaucrat among the common people. At the center of the etching, the official is exiting his carriage parked in front of a guild house. The family coat of arms adorns the carriage door, its advertisement a privilege of conceit and warning to plebiscite bystanders. Rembrandt's governor is fat, a fact the artist marks exceedingly well by the angle at which the carriage lists against his, the governor's, girth as he hangs onto the handle while feeling a foot toward the ground. To the side of this large image stands a woman in the street (precisely, in the _gutter_ ; no allusion was lost on Rembrandt). She is old, hunched forward, forgotten by society – or nearly so. This is Karen K, rendered from a seventeenth century print to the center of New York City.

Whatever is on her mind, now, Karen's mind, I wonder if she is also thinking of her immediate future. Finding a bush under which she can sleep in late spring's cold nights? Is she weighing the alternatives to a life she has chosen, but now thinks it has moved against her? Does she consider what the tourists think of their day in America's metropolis, in Central Park? Up there in front of me, walking with purpose, she shakes her head, a move that, if I were able to betray her thoughts, shows she has made a decision. She steps beneath the tree line and becomes a shadow. I'm losing her.

I wonder also, in the moment I begin to jog after her, what she would do if I were to catch up and tap her on the shoulder for a hearty surprise greeting: "Hey, aren't you Karen Kosek, the writer? I just want you to know that I think your writing is great. Just great! Sorry to have bothered you. Have a _great_ day." And BAM! I imagine how precisely she would respond: "Thank you, young man. That's kind of you to say." The recognition of this kindness (which is not kind at all, but a simple expression of thanks) will show in her eyes as a twinkle, because she will not acknowledge — not need to explain — why she's dressed in this Halloween-in-the-Bowery costume. And, as a token of her disbelief at my seeing through this disguise, she will nod, a no-hands tip of her hat, then leave me stranded in the sunshine, gushing over my luck and her kindly farewell. The seriousness of this fantasy comes and goes like a child's wish to be on the moon to see if it is really made of cheese.

Fifty feet in front of me, Karen K crosses through the 77th Street park gate and catches the "walk" light. I slow up my jog because I don't want her to notice me. I see that I won't make the light because the blinking red "Don't Walk" warning has begun to flash as she steps onto the opposite curb. I hang an arm through the iron gate, using its thick, scabby black bars to shield me, and watch her drift away down the street as my racing heart slows to its normal thump-de-thump. Only her hat and the plastic bags are visible, sporadically, through the passing crowd. I walk out to the street to see where she might go.

She does not continue crosstown to Amsterdam or Broadway. As I've suspected, she heads south, steadfast in her shuffle, bags bouncing in her clutches. I follow for a block on the opposite side of the street. She stops at a red carpet beneath a green awning that links front door to curbside. The doorman steps outside. He towers over her. I see the silver dollar-size buttons of his maroon uniform shine through the distance and crossing traffic. He smiles, tips his hat up as he looks down upon the matte-hatted, grungy Karen K, and swings open a glass and wood door that would crush me if it fell from its hinges, which it could never do because it has hung on its nails more than a century at one of the most expensive properties in America. This faux rummy woman has just been given the niceties of a dowager matriarch, as if she'd just completed a jaunt around her palace gardens and is dressed as one does who is a member of her class and status. Why? What have I just seen? No one walks into the The Parkview on Central Park West and gets treated like royalty who isn't already America's version of royalty.

A woman stands beside me at the curb. She's short, with a round black face, wearing some red construction jumpsuit. A utility belt that holds a tape measure in a leather snap case is hitched low on her waist, gathering some of her belly fat above the belt. Her eyes reach toward me from her half-turned face. "What?" I ask. "You look like you just seen the Lord," she says. Her eyes round with an invitation to confession. "Oh, no, you're one of them," I think. Her lips peel back to reveal a smile that suggests everything will be okay. "No," I say, "the Lord is not, certainly not, who I've just seen." Down the block, the doorman stands under The Parkview awning, big in his uniform, imposing in height and build. They hire men for just this sort of job. I look down at the construction worker woman. "I saw a mirage," I say, "Just another New York mirage." The bright rounded eyes in the black face on the small body in the red jumpsuit turn away. She hasn't spoken to someone on the street in years, and look what she gets for saying It's a fine day, mister — what's your story? The light changes and I'm caught in the crowd, and must jump aside or move with it across the street.

Then the people change faces and clothes at the same crosswalk, a change that will take place hundreds of times today. I leave, keep to the sidewalk on this side of CPW, and stop when I'm across from The Parkview. I watch the bruiser doorman eye his stretch of sidewalk, the NYC people, the sunshine he blocks by standing under the awning. He, too, has a happy look on his face, a look that praises the day, his city, and his work.

I can only imagine the expression I had on my face, which the lady noticed and tried to draw me out. It comes to me how I must have looked, and why. Now I know, I tell myself, what the celebrity hounds in this city feel, afterwards. Okay, bag lady or not (or rich bag lady), this was my chance to meet that singular someone I could claim was worth speaking to, the words of the servile fan, "Wow, I'm glad to meet you!" The feel of my skin against the rare air through which I've passed makes me draw breath. This must be what I looked like, as a kid, the day I stood outside Wrigley Field with a home run ball I'd caught in the stands, and to Ernie Banks, "Mr. Cub" himself, when he came out through the players' gate to find me jumping up and down. I asked him to sign the ball above the rawhide bruise left by his bat. All of this over a fucking bag lady who is not what she pretends to be. Get a grip, I tell myself. Yet, I can't let this go.

Another long look at the doorman gives me the idea that he could be game for a bribe. He looks terribly happy, a-glee with the joy of life and work, ripe for suggestion. I don't want to get upstairs to her apartment. Nothing like that is on my mind. But a sawbuck-for-your-time, a wink-and-a-nudge question, is worth the money for some information: Karen Kosek's exit and return times. "So I can get her autograph." I would put on a smile as big as his, pull out the cash. Sure. He would say, "Why not, pal?" A quick check through my wallet says this idea (though not a plan) is better than staking out the place.

"Wadda fuck you aksin me, Whitebread?"

Henry has that mean look (despite the classic uniform of the heeled footman), the look of murder that sends a signal to your loins for girding, combat, and prayer. Before I can answer Henry's question — my eyes locked on his flared black nostrils, the image of an angry Spanish bull; I feel his breath when he leans close, his height of landmark skyscraper pedigree, afraid I might speak to the nose instead of his murder eyes — a bell tinkers behind him. He strides with easy grace, for such a big man, to The Parkview's glimmering glass-paned doors which I spied Karen K enter. Its reflection now shows Central Park West traffic passing colorfully behind us. With one hand, Henry (the letters stamped in silver emboss on his breast nameplate) pulls one door open. The reflection is erased, and out of a pale-lighted hallway walks a little old lady dressed in red, with white chiffon-textured hair. She walks along the shaded red runner and stops midway to the curb.

"Good afternoon, Henry."

"It's a fine day, Mrs Richardson." Henry's uxorious reply is a baritone salve to the street noise. "Spring flowers are smiling like the Mona Lisa. Cabs are running clean gasoline. And Mayor Dinkins claims all is right with N-Y-Ceee."

"That'll be the day," the old lady says, looking up with lucid eyes at her doorman. "Eddie Koch should not have lost that election. Dinkins is a one-termer. Just look at the man!"

"Mayor K will get another chance, Mrs R," Henry says. He steps forward and waves with a hand the size of a flag. Down the block, the first taxi in a line of four yellow cabs, gleaming under the sunshine but each with dents along their sides, starts its engine. The transmission drops into gear like an axe swung against oak. Henry offers the old lady his arm for the last few steps to the curb. She accepts the gesture like a proper doyen and says, "You take good care of us, Henry. Everyone says so."

"All in a day's work, Mrs R." He looks at the top of the woman's head, like a benevolent angel. "Happy to serve the finest people in the nation at the city's finest address. As Chaucer said, 'Purity in body and heart may please some — as for me, I make no boast.' "

The old lady laughs without showing her teeth. The cabby awaits his fare.

"I'm just off to Fairway Foods for soup and crackers. I'll have them deliver my grocery order later, so please be on the lookout. I may also stop at Zabar's today." She stops Henry from reaching for the car door. "Can I bring you back a bagel, Henry? Some cream cheese and butter? You must be a hungry beast from all the portering you do for us feeble widows."

Henry laughs like an actor from Showboat. "Buy the kosher soup," he advises. "Remember doctor's orders."

She wags a finger at him. "I'm sure you'll check my grocery bags, so I shan't try to sneak a can of Campbell's tomato past you." The old lady suddenly notices me because I've followed slowly behind them, off the regal carpeting, unprotected from the sun. I think maybe my sun-lit face and sweat-stained shirt have made me visible through her cataracts. She addresses me with a nod and says, "Do I know you, sonny? You look like one of the Carmichaels, from seventeen. The Baltimore branch, aren't you?"

I smile and begin to speak until Henry overtakes my voice with his bass.

"I'm afraid you're mistaken, Mrs Richardson. This man is here to inquire about summer work. Roof repair." His white teeth envelop the old lady and me, then when his head turns it is only me who sees the homicidal glare. Henry says, "He's not one to take no for an answer, though." The glare turns to the promise of Inquisitional torture if I speak another word. When he looks at the widow Richardson again, his face has morphed back into the doting major-domo, ready to help her into the taxi. But she isn't yet through with me.

"Persistence, young man," she says. "That's how to succeed. Hard work and a don't-take-no-for-an-answer attitude. It works, if you stick with it."

I tell her thanks, and my happy face moons for her and Henry. She ducks into the taxi. I wave good-bye when the old lady is safely in her seat and the door closed. The taxi pulls into traffic and Henry looks at me with a little laugh breaking his rose lips that complement his black face — so black it shines purple in the sunlight. Henry's force of character draws me back to his podium beside the doors. I try to assuage him with a little of the soft soap. "I liked the Chaucer quote, Mister Henry. Do you have another?"

"You hominy-skinned fuck-nut," he says, slow and low. "Now do you get it? If I let you through these doors to bother Ms Kosek, I'd lose this plum-tree career that nets me four large during Christmas week alone. I'd as soon cut your head off to fuck your windpipe in front of a Times Square lunch crowd." He leans on the podium and it squeaks in pain. His finger points at me, a digit emerging from the two-dimensional frame of an Escher drawing. "You'd better get my meaning, pal, cuz I don't want to see you again." He shows me his doctored set of pearl and gold-capped teeth. "Now fuck off!"

Safely behind the wall separating the park from the city sidewalk, my fingernails scrape old stone while I watch Henry move in a bustle. He reminds me of an officious butler attending to a veritable castle keep. He's the front line of an assault I'm not easily convinced I can make, anymore. I've lost. But just for now. Karen K's story is one I want to know, from her and no one else. If that's possible.

There's little room for me to maneuver here, and the half of me that says, "You've got better things to do," makes the thought of meeting Karen K no more possible than the letter I sent her, way back as a teen, made me think I would get a reply (though I had hoped, and had cared to wonder, if a writer answered fan mail like baseball stars signed home run balls). Why do I care? This is another story.

New York (NY) is a great city, a magnificent city. NY is big; it's a crowded city. As it is known, New York City (NYC) doesn't sleep. You're never alone here. You'll always find people on the streets, so you must get used to that or risk losing your sense of self. Although, without a friend beside you, NY can make you feel lonely. It is a hard city, like flint. NYC is a great big magnificent city with sharp edges.

Oddly then, from the air New York is much more imposing than when you walk its streets. Flying into NYC, Manhattan's buildings look too tall to stand on their own. You can't see the ground from the air because the buildings are so tightly packed together, like pencils in a cup. Without this sense of streets, no people or cars to give proportion, you lose the feeling that life moves below you as steadily as blood through veins. Likewise, the buildings reach up unevenly: black teeth in twilight, bloody fingers at sunrise, gold bars at sunset. Magnificent! The City from up high imposes itself on you, these uneven polygons of steel and glass and concrete. Yet, you can't see definition in the buildings from the air anymore than you can the streets or people, even when you learn from the in-flight magazine that the Empire State Building used ten million bricks. No system exists from high up to gage the city's breadth; its mass defies logic.

A hole has been cut in this pencil jar, this flat, unevenly topped rock. If you have a window seat on a plane and are lucky enough to fly over NY Harbor on a landing path to Kennedy Int'l, you'll see this perfect green rectangular hole cut from moth gray. Central Park saves New Yorkers from going insane.

I can say all of this with measured confidence because I'm a Chicagoan. New York has wonderful tests of survival, though not, as Blue Eyes sings, "If you can make it here / you can make it anywhere!" Fuck that. Try Tokyo, where you don't know the language. Try London, where traffic flows counter-intuitively to the American mind. Try Cairo, where sand blows through your closed lips and gets down into the crack of your ass, and a drink of tap water can kill you, one diarrhea flush at a time. By comparison, New York is a wonderful warm cocoon, a Petri dish of good tidings.

On the ground in New York City, the Avenues are wide, north-south routes. They leave no escape from the island-city for many miles. By contrast, the east-west Streets are narrow, cramped, and long; three times longer than the Aves, corner to corner. Residents used to warn visitors in the 1970s to avoid the Streets: if a mugger demands your wallet, you have far too long a distance to run to the nearest Avenue to yell for help (which you wouldn't get anyway). The light, too, is different between the Aves & Strts: brighter as you walk north, toward the park, or south to the World Trade Center; dim and shadowy between the Hudson and East Rivers. All streets are in constant motion.

Unless you've grown up in The City, you can become nearsighted by its height. Distance is measured differently here than in the Midwest or Dixie or Big Sky country. Those regions' sightlines stretch to a horizon so wide that you notice Earth's curvature. All of that is lost in NYC. New York has a building fifty feet from any which way you look: in Mid-town, Gramercy, Hell's Kitchen, Chinatown, Little Italy, The Barrio, Uptown or Downtown. Think of Wall Street and you get the picture.

You can find distance in NYC — by looking up. The buildings give you the feeling of leaning in on you, all around you, which is and is not necessarily an optical illusion. The sense of being a bug-in-a-jar hits you undiluted, and if the sun happens to be overhead, you want to run in case an evil kid kneels over the jar with a magnifying glass. This feeling is almost fun the first time it happens, when you look up at the buildings. Later, I noticed that only tourists and newcomers look up. Looking up is a good way to get run down by a bus. And people, always the people.

ThisIsNewYorkCity.

This man comes to NYC in the body of an artist. What does he seek that hasn't been found in the Prairie State metropolis of his birth? He doesn't know, can't put a name to it. Maybe he has found, as was suggested in the yellowed copy of the Earl of Chesterfield's letters he once carried with him, dog-eared until the corners flared, that the urge to explore is too great to pass by without a sniff; it's the same draw that pulls you into the open door of a breakfast diner. The idea of movement, to wade in and let go of the anchor chains of family, house, neighborhood — even love — is a way to experiment: the idea of art itself retells this story: a trial with life otherwise unknown or not yet found. None of these is redundant.

The artist finds a sliding scale. Chicago was his town, NYC is the experience; an experiment to look at life from below the rim, over the ledge, atop the table... the artist will use all the prepositions, some in new, if not unique, ways.

My friend, Zeppo, smokes Canadian cigarettes. He has them delivered to his apartment from a bodega around the corner at 1st Street and 1st Avenue. "In New York," Zeppo schooled me, "you can buy anything and have it delivered to your door. Anything." I trust Zeppo's experience. He's a true New Yorker: born in the Bronx, raised in Brooklyn, sent to summer camp on Staten Island, lost his virginity in a woman from Queens, and now lives on Manhattan (syllable stress on HATT). "Why Canadian cigarettes?" I asked. "Because," he told me, "They taste good." I chewed on this answer. "I didn't know Canadians grew tobacco." He said, "Who gives a shit? I don't care if Bedouins bring it through [something unintelligible] by caravan to some big ship flying a maple leaf flag. I just want my smokes." It's possible his passion doesn't come through in print as well as it had in person.

I've recognized Karen Kosek walking in the park because her photograph covers the rear jacket on the book she wrote nearly thirty years ago, about the time Vietnam was just becoming an American killing field. Too old for me. I have known her through her writing, those essays I read as a youth. No more, yet no less.

I had re-read _What Beauty?_ only last year, in an attempt to augment that first youthful absorption (some might say obsession) of KK's prose, a way to energize myself in these low weeks following a long winter. So striking were her ideas to my then eighteen-year-old mind. I remember those weeks vividly because they coincided with the Iranian students' siege of the American embassy in Tehran. Karen K had already, by then, pulled herself from the society that embraced her nearly fifteen years earlier, when her book brought her fame in one corner of society, and notoriety in another. After a dozen letters and one wild attempt at self-introduction, I never did get to meet, formally or by chance, the maestro of my art strings.

My name is Minus Orth. I'm an artist. My focus is sculpture. I used to paint in oils, but, several years ago, I misplaced my sense of color on the canvas. At first this seemed to me, and then became obvious to anyone looking at my art, that I was colorblind. Not literally, but in every other way. At about the same time, I wanted suddenly to be in direct contact with my material (which makes me think that one played into the other, although I'll never be certain). Unless I switched to finger paints, it struck me, I was always going to be four inches away from the art, attached by a paint brush and the hairs of a dead squirrel or ox. To touch clay or bend iron, and to chisel stone and run your fingers through the grooves (things I did in high school and loved), to shape these different earth materials into exactly what I had in mind (hardly the case in painting) led me back to creating art that I believed in. Most importantly, art that I trusted.

Sculpture has made me feel capable again, and I've sold more pieces than yet sit in the apartment I share with my girlfriend, like left-behind guests who expect more coffee before they hit the road. I'm still feeling my way into this rocky genre and, right now, I sense that a crossroads lies under my feet. It's the timeless conflict: what to do next. And this is not the only tension.

Some artists whom I know live from sales alone. I can't yet do that. Last year I had a semi-solo show called the semi-solo show of the artists three (lowercase title intentional; not so the irony, I fear in hindsight). For this reason — the make-a-living thing — I don't toss around lightly the term artist, and never with the inflection on the second syllable. In fact I hope never to be so inured by (of, in) myself. The work, though, artistry and sculpting, these you may call of me inured every day, for which I won't mind one damned bit.

I add to the monthly kitty by walking dogs. There's great need for such industry in New York City. We're a select group that won't be displaced by computers too soon. Dogs, too, are a select group: they piss and shit outside, among humans, without shame or even cognizance that what they do is out of the ordinary, by dog standards. In fact, look at dog owners the next time you're outside. These people praise their animals for doing what most of us can only do behind a locked door, with the water running to cover "digestive noises." So I ask you: who's the more balanced between the two species?

Dogs being dogs, they have immediate expectations. Once met, their demands become simple. The six dogs I walk also have keen ears for my palaver, as I fulminate over subject and method. ("I should carve wood like you dig holes, Chief." No response; too busy with paws in a hole. Find China, boy! Dig, dig, dig! Good doooog.) Some days I feel like the Pied Piper, other days like Elmer Fudd.

Life is much more feeling than action, I've found, even when you act: work, eat, play, think, shit, buy a stamp, bend down to smell a red rose poking between fence posts, make love in the dark while the blue flash of police lights dance across the wall, look at a menu with anticipation watering your mouth, kick a stone from the middle of a path, or stand on a Central Park softball field where the heady smell of grass clippings creeps up as you wait for the odd fly ball and watch the buildings that surround the park on three sides — 5th Avenue, CPW, 59th Street — each staring over the trees, pressed together like tribunes dressed in cloqué, and where you think, "Damn, I feel... something."

These indescribable moments are what make us human, and not gods.

CHAPTER 2

Belinda's voice slides across our shared pillow, and I know the dream I was in ended a moment ago. Its kinescope image is lost inside my loud last breaths of sleep, coming in short rasps that bring me fully awake. Most mornings I'm less aware of this sensation, the sounds of a steam locomotive starting from a dead stop, then building in pitch as if the juggernaut were leaving the station. Sometimes I imagine, as I rise from sleep to hear this noise, the white-gray puffs belching from its smokestack. By the time that I open my eyes, all is gone, as it is again today. The room is bright with a cool, aqua color. Belinda wants food, is what I heard.

Our heads lie at a good waking distance. We mumble "g'morn'n" to hide our breath, then kiss with elongated puckers. Outdoors, the city sends its engine rumbles and tool claques through the windows. Garbage trucks and delivery vans and the voices of workmen call short orders ("Back!" "Up, up!" "Whoa, now – whoa-whoa!").

Belinda's face is already active this morning. Her eyebrows wiggle hello, and her nose grips itself in a shrug. Then, from below the covers, a hand slithers up like a sea snake, tinged green-blue from light refracted by the bed sheets. Her fingers waver to mesmerize me, taunt me, until the mouth opens to bare teeth — her white-tipped nails. I feel them gently scratch my temple.

She has pulled her hair behind her left ear, dark hair that's long and straight, which she hates and wants to curl. I happen to like her hair as it is, only it's not my hair. Tousled around her face, it frames her eyes and nose inside an ellipsis that covers her mouth, much as a tailed animal does for warmth. Her open eyes reveal an intensity that shows she's been awake for some time. Belinda's irises hold the color of gold in twilight.

"Do you want to be alone?" she asks. My All-American Girl, giving more than she takes.

"No," I say, and blink until tears clear away the goop, or whatever one calls that viscous fluid... discharge comes to mind but this isn't right, and gives the thought a salty undertone I'm in no mood for. "Tell me something, or I'll fall back into sleep."

"You talk funny," she says in a half-whisper. The sea snake continues nibbling at my temple. "Don't New Yorkers say fall back to sleep?"

"I'm not from New York," I remind her. "Neither are you. What do Nebraskans say?"

"To sleep. We say fall back to sleep."

"Okay, it's settled," I mumble. "I do talk funny. It's morning. I can't be held to a standard. What time is it?" Her chafing nails have worked my brain back towards a doze, but this is not the time, so I shake my head and the friendly creature retreats to a safe distance. Once it's taken refuge under the sheet, its teeth glint mischievously in the soft light. I ask, "Did I hear you whisper 'omelet' to me?" Her eyebrows move in a stitch of mischievousness.

Somewhere it's been told to me that her patience is my reward. This isn't correct. Belinda's nature, with all its traits she bears like some uber-appletree ripens its fruit, intermittently, so you can eat all season long, such nature defies city life. Blaring horns across Times Square does not bother her, nor some skel's beggar-hand outstretched at Columbus Circle, or jackhammers spitting concrete shrapnel at her ankles, nothing can interrupt Belinda's purposeful stride or conversation. She tells me it's all theater and we're actors who have to hit our marks, must not miss our cues, and be ready to ad lib when the scene flubs. It's a great philosophy, I'm sure, and I'm lucky to have someone so aware and unaffected, and who loves me. Now she opens her hand — the sea snake becomes a springtime morning flower — and grabs the top of the blanket. Off fly the covers in a sharp hiss of fabric.

I roll over and sit up on the edge of the bed. Behind me, Belinda gives a piglet's squeal and I hear her footsteps dart across the hardwoods for dibs on the bathroom. The door shuts and, soon, water whinnies through the pipes. The wood slowly warms beneath my feet. I feel a chill in the air, something I don't mind when sleeping under the goose-down with another body to hold. Only now, in my pajamas, the temperature is startling. Our building's loft board, of which as lessees we're not voting members, elected to switch off heating between May 15 and October 1. We're into May, now, and the moisture I see on the inside window tells me summer is yet a wish.

Complaints, though, I have none. The bedroom has space, is quiet, and becomes airy when we open the louvered windows. These windows were designed for factory work. They start at my chin and rise higher than I can reach, which leaves the room perfectly suited for sleeping and stargazing, but not so much for looking out at the street. I don't mind, and Belinda, she won't look through a window unless a calamity happens; she says this is what helps her to avoid shopping along 5th Avenue. It took twelve panels of sheers to dress our windows. Now we don't feel anymore like we live in an old factory, but the oncoming summer light wakes us early unless we slip on eye masks. They sit on mannequin heads that I've plastered over, textured rough, and painted as twin tequila sunrises. I've set them on a pine mantel flush with the bottom sill. Little else is worth displaying because of its height and narrow shelf. We live on the second floor. From street level you can see the two heads at night, and they look (we hope) like a couple sitting up in bed, reading. In my hope of hopes, this fakery will work better than a watchdog, which is otherwise on top of a long list of forbidden accoutrements stated clearly in the lease manual.

I lower my chest against my knees. Vertebrae cartilage crackles, something I've only noticed since graduating from my twenties. Today is Wednesday, Belinda's busy day (tourists spend more "free" time at mid-week to take a horse carriage ride, an activity that breaks up the busy-ness of a NYC vacation); it's also the day I'm supposed to spend most of my time at the art co-op, where I rent studio space. Before I can get there, though, my friend, Peter, has asked me to stop round his studio. He wants to consult with me on some lighting ideas he has for his upcoming show. He doesn't want to be curated into accepting too dim or too bright or too white spotlights by the gallery owner. His list of don'ts is daunting. I've promised to bring my light meter because his is broken.

I stand and walk in a circle, feeling more alive with the warmth of blood in my veins and the cold hardwood under foot. The day has begun.

A faux black-lacquer Chinese objet d'art stands between the bathroom door and the loft door. I bought this for me when we moved in because Belinda's wardrobe bulged from the walk-in closet, so trying to share that was pointless. Our bedroom used to be the manager's office of this particular Gansevoort Street abattoir. It's an oddly shaped rectangle, retrofitted with the big closet, soundproofing, and the enlarged bath (Belinda: "modernized" and "fun"). The walls are brick outside and, because the building dates to the 1870s, everything is plaster-and-steel-lathe inside, giving texture and subtle shadows, like sunlight skipping across a low-tide beach. The oak risers and moldings have been scraped smooth and left blonde as a newborn's skin. We've painted the walls taupe, towards a mushroom tint, and inserted vibrancy through furniture and art. Our not-so-outlandish melding of possessions, once confined to two cave-dark apartments, now spreads through an arena-size loft given over to the descriptive Spartan senate.

I like to look at our space, feel it beneath my feet, and walk around to admire the things we own. In this respect, to be in it. To commune. This space, like other spaces, has its importance to me; capacity and scope and boundaries are my methods for finding perspective (a park bench, a window frame, manhole cover, sculptured food, trees & bushes, pots & pans on the rack). Out-doors is freedom, in-doors is confinement; each is charged with its particular, and unique, presence.

Details, details: the artist's curse.

I choose jeans and a brown knit pullover from the Chinese cabinet, and deposit my sleeping cottons on their shelf. I kick a pair of black Chuck Taylor's into view as Belinda exits the bath. I throw a kiss and admire her slimness shaped inside a pink bra with matching panties, down which three brown star-shaped buttons adorn a faux "fly." I hold my clothes across my arm to drape my underwear-covered dick for modesty, and take refuge in the bath. My toilet is quick and tidy; I don't waste time reading or toenail gazing. Only on Sundays do I dawdle, when I draw a hot bath in the claw-foot iron tub, and then I lie in soak; unmoving, unthinking, the dissembled creative energy released through my hot, open pores.

While digging through the pantry for a yellow onion whose skin is firm, I come across a box of Cap'n Crunch. I'd bought it at The Grocery Garage months ago, longing for sugarcoated nostalgia. It has since remained unopened. Not in the mood for eggs, I grab the cereal and the salvaged onion, head to the fridge for what it has to yield, and finally dump all on the cooking island. The light here is neutral except in the morning when, like today, a swatch of sun bastes the dining table through the only window cut at a normal height. Even then, it is unusually large, a good five-foot-square, with muntined panes. We honor the yellow-cream goodness with potted plants. I like to cook with fresh herbs, so the thyme, rosemary, and basil pots give the table an eclectic jardinière look. A Turkish kilim of Ottoman design, in red and black, sits beneath the dining table, just in case we forget ourselves and want to play footsie. The carpet's virgin wool is scratchy, but not dangerous.

Belinda believes firmly in the division of labor. She also prefers not to cook, one of my own deep passions. Therefore, she doesn't mind being the cleaner-upper. This does not give me license, nor do I take it, to use every hanging pot (the rack hovers like some crazed octopus) for seven-course meals, or even a messy spaghetti with bolognese sauce.

Cooking is my meditation: the precisely demanded movements of knife against red and pink meats, yellow and orange vegetables, requires that my soft-tissue hands guide the blade to success or failure. Such concentration leaves the imagination open to ideas whose nature I'm seldom aware of until they blend in with the sounds of life. Besides all this, I'm more the three-pot cook, in all honesty. Your meat, starch, and vegetables. The spices are how a cook creates the dish's flavor.

Two eggs get cracked into a bowl. I add pinches of thyme and rosemary – verdant islands in a cholesterol sea – a grind of fresh pepper, and two dashes from the lighthouse salt cellar (carved from authentic Cape driftwood we bought on a week's trip over the winter holidays — Who "winters" on Cape Cod? City slickers). I set the eggshells aside for plant fertilizer, and pick up a whisk. As my hand twirls to fluff the eggs, the weedy fragrances set my stomach into happy gurgling. Belinda once told me, soon after we'd met, that my hands were what first drew her to me. "They embody the rhetoric of the sculptor," she said. "All the little nicks become scabby runes." I think they resemble the skin on an acne-afflicted teen.

Belinda comes through the bedroom door humming a familiar jazz melody. She has twenty feet to cross before reaching the island, and each step is a luxury when you've lived for two years, as she had, in a three-step-to-everything apartment in Hell's Kitchen. She wears tan jodhpurs and black boots, with a woolen vest over a white tux blouse and bow tie. "I'm organizing coffee," she says between whistled notes, and plants a kiss on my cheek as she hums, making a resonant vibrato into a flat percussive cymbal through my mouth. She pats my tummy for good luck, though I'm no Buddha-belly in appearance.

"I'll have the usual," I say. "And thank you." My feet dance-step at the island as I grab a pan hanging from the rack. I astaire across to the stove to light a burner, and slide the pan over the flowering blue flame. Belinda scoots behind me without interrupting my pirouettes. She starts water in the espresso machine that her mother sent us as a housewarming gift. This is her territory. I have little patience for the temperamental machine. She moves from island to cabinets like the girl who hated her ballet lessons, taking cups in one trip, saucers in another, sugar last.

"I haven't told you," I say. "I woke up in the middle of the night. A dream, or so I thought. A bag lady asked me for change, and when I held out my hand with a few coins, she grabbed it and licked my knuckles. She had a green tongue."

"Gross," says Belinda, and sticks her tongue out. Pink, long, wiggly. "Makes you want to skip breakfast. Unless you got back to sleep and dreamed of puppies."

"Yeah, yeah, that's right," I say idiotically, unable to think of a good come-back. "Except this wasn't really a dream, but half a dream."

"How can it be half a dream? You can't be thinking of teaching at one of the missions again." Belinda believes in volunteer work, but only to the extent of keeping oneself safe: a crack-head bit me last year when I was filling in for a friend who taught clay sculpture to recovering addicts, yet unemployable and in need of something to do besides climb the walls of their half-way house, chased by the heebie-jeebies. The wound sent me to the emergency room for a tetanus shot. Five hundred bucks later, and the Downtown Community Center wouldn't even reimburse me. "I call that martyrdom à la mode, my friend and only true love," she says, only mildly mocking me.

"Aw... now you're just being sluttish." I can say this because there's no chance of getting her back into bed.

She twists around at the table with cups in her hand and fixes me with a silent, vulpine growl. "Tell me your dream, Sir Lance-a-Lot." Her pun comes from a precocious childhood devoted to driving her parents crazy with fear for, first, the loss of her virginity prior to marriage and, second, pregnancy by one of the town losers. Confined monthly to the house for punishment weekends when she was a teen, she locked herself inside her room with gothic romances, Bill Cosby comedy albums, and her mother's True Confessions magazine. She regularly snatched the magazines from beneath her parents' mattress for convivial reading in her punishment room. Later, at the dinner table, she recited the more salacious parts, re-formed as puns.

Her delivery here is different: not so cunning, and unsweetened.

"The dream came after the reality," I say, and decide to jump ahead. "Guess who I saw in the park the other day?"

She gives me a look of impatient indulgence. I don't know why. "Okay," she says with enough élan for a Hump Day morning before the first cup of coffee. "I'll stab your riddle with a fork: You ran point-blank into a pack of Chicagoans and found yourself arguing the lofty tastes of New York thin crust, Nathan's Famous, and Finger Lakes Riesling."

I don't think her heart is in this. She's almost sullen, and I haven't a clue for the fallen attitude. Could it be the "slut" comment? No — she's playfully adult and, as thirty approaches, less inhibited about damned near everything.

Behind Belinda's Midwestern congeniality lives a woman determined to — I'm quoting her — "outdo my Nebraska shortcomings" and "live up to standards" such as those Nebraskans who famously "left flatland in the rearview mirror" (a few previously named examples include Marlon Brando, Ruth Etting, and Johnny Carson, even though Carson was Iowa born). If she goes back home, it will be "only to reminisce with the locals" who didn't have the guts to leave and, thus, could attest to the wise move she made "to find, if not a better life, at least one more exciting." She won't argue that this is an elitist attitude, maybe even uppity, but nevertheless believes she "and every other inner-country transplant must overcome a lot." I take all of this to mean she answers questions no less ironically than that teenager who could make her mother blush, her siblings cringe, and her father laugh as only an insurance salesman must at the end of each day, whose gullet has been filled by the hard-sell and paperwork.

To this many-facetted motto I say, Here-here! Otherwise, I choose to let out a fat raspberry to quantify and qualify the motto because, as we both know, NYC is a dirty cesspool of possibility if (with many fs countable in powers of ten) you're able to pull yourself out of the primordial pool with legs already exercised for a marathon. Neither does it matter to Belinda that she isn't an actress, singer, dancer, or talk-show host like her forbearing Cornhuskers.

"I should be stabbed for the mere thought of meeting 'my people' on any New York street," I say, and let my legs wobble in mock death-throws. I recover, stand tall, and peer at her smirking puss. "Uh, you're wrong, sweet girlfriend. What happened was I recognized a writer that used to be famous. A beautiful art critic and essayist. Her writing was beautiful, anyway. She was the darling of New York for ten years. Maybe more. Then she stopped writing. Ran away, or something like that. Don't look bored! Listen, because here comes the good part."

"Oh, goody."

"She was dressed up like a bag lady."

"Wait," says Belinda. "You mean the lick wasn't a dream?"

"Okay, that was made up."

Her manner changes, stiffens. She asks, "Dressed as a bag lady, or she was a bag lady?" Stiffer, yet, but I think I'll play the indifferent bystander.

"See, that's the thing." And so I explain everything. Belinda stands with arms folded, her face setting more firmly as I wind on with descriptions of odors, stains, oranges in plastic bags, and Henry the doorman. She doesn't like what I have to say, which doesn't bother me so much as her failing happiness. All because of a joke dream? A bad story? Where has my squealing piglet gone? Something lies waiting for me, and I only can hope to be prepared when it comes.

"You followed a bag lady." She shakes her head in disbelief. "That's supposed to happen the other way around. And what's with storming the citadel? The doorman could have called the cops." My All-American Woman: available, feisty, but not a pushover. She's able to mix it up across the office desk as she'd once done on the field hockey pitch. But I'm no pushover, either.

"You sound a little testy this morning," I say.

"Do I."

"Bad dreams?"

"It should be so easy. Not as bad as yours, evidently."

"You don't have to be my adversary. Or my accuser."

"I'm your girlfriend. Your very words. Trust and control, remember."

I laugh, because the line is great fun. "Great-Grandma's words again?"

"You got it, brother. She was a homesteader. A Nebraska bug eater. Rubbed elbows with the Indians."

"I'm sure your grand-granny smoked a peace pipe in her day, but I'm not your brother." This gets half a smile. "Do you know what my grandfather said?" I ask.

"I think I'm about to learn."

"He said, 'Always protect your gonads in a fight.' It's practical advice."

"Are we fighting? I didn't know."

"No, we aren't fighting. He was just an old man giving pointers on battling grannies who've been bogarting the peace pipe."

"Okay," she says. "Good." It's a short okay, and shorter good. A one-two punch.

"I thought so," I say, some caution in my tone.

Then she says, "It has also been noted, 'Blissful love should be on guard / The thief of hearts, she lurks in men's eyes.' "

"Who wrote that?" I ask out of politeness, because I think I already know the answer.

"A poet," she answers. "A sentimental moralist. I was fourteen at the time."

"Hmm," I utter. More politeness. I want to say something cute, such as... Fourteen is a tough age — when you're thinking about boys, never been kissed, can't get away from mom... but I'm frozen by what might come in return. Then I'm back on my horse: "I know the bag lady thing is weird," I say. "It's one of those stories you read in the paper, never seeing it for yourself. So I wanted to get up close before her obituary appears in the Times." I was thinking of how this was possible. Belinda hardly notices, because whatever else is on her mind has taken over. She's usually an attentive listener, active with questions without a smart-ass tone. Today she stares off, fiddling with the coffee machine well after the two cups have been filled and still sit under the double-spigot. I try to bring her back by losing my indifference. "Karen Kosek's book once meant a lot to me. She said incredible things, at a time when the so-called teachers wanted names memorized, and dates regurgitated."

"And? Minus, okay, if you've found the female J.D. Salinger, or whatever, it's a great sighting. Sounds like you've hit one out of the park, there. So tell your friends, just... I - I don't get it. When you're proven right about this bag lady, do you plan on getting together for tea? She's just some crazy woman." Belinda has snapped this out, which stuns me. She makes as if to breathe fire at the coffee machine. "I don't have to care about her this morning, okay?"

"I don't think she's crazy," I say. "That's the point." This last word is ill advised. Belinda holds her temples by the tips of her fingers, pressed hard enough to make her skin go white beneath her nails, as though her brains will spill out if she should let go. This isn't about me, I realize, or my stupid story. "Forget it. Let it go. Doesn't matter."

I mean this because telling her once, even twice, is enough for Belinda. A third time and you'll get shots fired across your bow, because what she doesn't like is bothersome repetition. It's why we work so well. People that go on about books, politics, relationships, or especially medical problems, are offensive to us. She respects my desire never to hear so much about her Kansas City Royals baseball heroes. I gladly overlook the bottomless bag of sports clichés she uses for side-comments on everything from toilet practices to jury duty.

Belinda won't ditch the subject, though. "Hmm. Sounds oddly creepy, honey," she says. "The doorman is scary, too. Sure, it's a good story. Or dream. Which did you say it was? I forget. Wait, I remember. Ha! Silly me." She turns away. "I bet you have all kinds of things to tell her." She walks away, setting her back to me. I stare at her woolen vest, her jodhpurs, the high black boots that always remind me of Napoleon on his steed, painted by Simon Meister (more realistic, less stylized, than the portrait conceived by Jacques-Louis David).

I want to believe in the confidences we exchange. Thoughts, beliefs, the future as you see it match another's – dreams and fantasies, plans and schemes – these mean something to a relationship. Small and not-so-important or big-and-life-defining, there is intrinsic trust when you tell a secret to someone whom you love. Karen K has a secret, and now I own part of that. I've given Belinda its scent. Rejected! Fine by me. There shall be others to trade, and still more to shuffle away after a nod and smile that conveys either empathy or indulgence. Watching for signs of disappointment — the coming day, my snoring, our life — I step back from the edge of her emotion that's reached up to find a handhold.

My vanity is such that I think I know people, can feel my way inside their bodies, through their minds to the hidden corners where dreams stack up like cordwood, all to make the shadow of the person appear inside a block of marble, from which the chips fall away and leave what is the human of the moment. Except, I don't know people so well, not as I want to think I do. On Belinda, I've missed something that I should have observed (her silence; the way she's carried herself; a splinter in her voice), a problem I would have caught last night, only I was back late from the studio, tired. I'd misinterpreted her piglet's squeal as happiness, delight for the new day. What has set her off, I'll soon find out. I'm old enough not to push, play games, act hurt. I guess whatever has just happened comes out of the recent past. Now I have to catch up — when my naivety settles.

She faces me. "Sorry, Minus — honey, just... sorry. I love you, that's what you have to remember." I look at her, but she turns away to finish making the froth for our coffee. "I love you, too," I say to her back, so she has something to hear, and has for herself. Maybe it will help, I think.

I pour olive oil in the pan to coat the bottom, and drop in the sliced onions to a sizzle and pop, give them a flip, another, wait a minute as I smell the aromas mix, and then pour egg mixture over the veggies. The sizzle deepens and the yellow edges bubble and curl. I picture Karen K in the park yesterday, that depressive sight of the wasted life, even if it has to be fakery. The egg sets up. I use a wooden spatula to lift one edge, let the remaining liquid run beneath and in twenty seconds it's done and turned onto a plate.

"I got a call last night," she yells over the wail of the froth maker. The anticipation of this story makes me perk up. "Mom wanted to talk with both of us. She says hi, by the way. You were lucky to be out." I grunt a note of encouragement that gets lost in the sounds of gurgling milk. I add a sprig of parsley to her omelet and bring her plate to the table. Belinda has poured a bowl of cereal for me and placed a hungry man-size spoon into the dry Cap'n Crunch kernels. Belinda continues: "Dad just bought her a new car. Step-daddy, not the other lion of the pride. That got me to thinking while she talked and talked – I mean really, two calls per week? I'm not an only child, nor her favorite – I got to thinking about, or I remembered, Carley Slope, this girl I knew at summer camp for, like, three years in a row. We didn't live in the same town, and only met at camp. Summer friends, right? Carley was one of those fashion plates. I guess they call them shopping mavens now. Anyway mom is talking about car insurance and tire inflation and self-serve gas pumps, and suddenly I hear an Oh-by-the-way, did you know little Carley Slope died last year from brain cancer? I tell her, 'Umm, no mom, I didn't know' – but I'm actually floored by the coincidence of Carley coming to mind just before mom has blurted the news of her death. I hadn't thought of her, Carley, in like months. I almost wrote her a letter over Christmas! Now mom gives her death notice as if she's reading from the A&P coupon sheet. Balls sailing in from left field again, right? Just weird."

"So your friend died at – what? – twenty-eight?" I need confirmation on something she has passed by on her way to recollecting a paranormal incident. I've added a year to Carley's age (my guess) because it's a year ahead of Belinda today, which, if she's having death-comes-to-me thoughts, she's got a year to look forward to. It's not a joke, but it can help, if I need to exploit it within the next ten minutes.

"Yeah, I guess so," she says. "Twenty-eight, twenty-nine. Imagine that letter coming back to me, 'undeliverable to the dearly departed'."

"Or at least lately departed," I say, as a way to lighten the fallen mood that surrounds our breakfast, barely at the table. Her lips merely twitch in response; there's to be no humor after all, black or otherwise.

As a taunt, I might think, the sunlight at that moment intensifies through the window, shocking the green-leaf herbs with its yellow light so that I can see a blue edge around the thinnest leaves. Okay. If this is all I'm going to get from Belinda about her friend's early death, there's no point in me chasing a pigeon in a park.

I begin to turn away, but am caught by her jaw twitching uncontrollably, just below her little scar at the end of her chin she got from a roller skating fall as a kid. Her eyes fill with tears as she grabs the cups. I meet her at the space between the island and the table. She lets me place her head on my shoulder. "It's a senseless death," I say. "But it's not you. You're healthy as your horse, who's waiting for you out there." She nods. She shakes her head. She pulls away and goes to the table.

"It's not that," she insists. "Or it is. No – it isn't." She sets down the cups and looks at me. I find on her face bits of pain that have changed her normally happy spirit to doubt and frustration. This too I must let go, for a while anyway. Otherwise the emotions will come at me instead of from within her, whenever she finally wants to talk about death. She sits at the table and picks at a nail, one hand turning the coffee cup in a circle by the handle.

Belinda breathes heavily through her nose. "Okay. Enough. That's over. Something else now." She smiles at her omelet. "Bon appetite," she says in a calmer, confident voice. Then she rattles the business section of the Times.

I'm surprised, and happy, but far from content. History is not long for a person like Belinda. Not with how she lives so thoroughly in the present. To her, history comes in short bursts of powerful, shocking events, followed by strong emotions that can fuck up everything for the future (which is a longer consideration, if you change points of view). Her mother's insensitivity won't be forgotten. They barely speak now.

As I pour milk onto the cereal, I think that, as suddenly as an unanticipated gift, Karen K's enigmatic life has reached from some living grave, obscuro &etc, to touch me. This meeting was completely random. There's the wonder if, like so many random coincidences — a nearby one being how Belinda and I met — its randomness has some synchronicity. I might even accept Personality-Based Fate.

I glance at the front-page headline next to her dish: Democrats Pin Election on Man from Hope. "What's this?" I ask. My interest in politics tips toward the local: tax deductions, road repair, subway price increases, and restaurant health inspection stories.

"Some cracker from Arkansas wants to be our next president," she says. "Looks like Reagan's know-nothing VP is going to get a second term. All for going to war over oil."

"I'm almost sorry I asked," I say. She makes movements in her chair to warn me there's to be a rebuttal. I try to head her off. "Okay, enough current events for me. If I must think about what goes on out there, I'll have to become a real citizen. Spare me that, please?"

How she jockeys in her chair to point her entire body at me tells me she's to have her say. "I want to know why, if America is set on being the world's mercenary, why shouldn't it fix the price for a barrel of crude?"

"I don't know," I reply, because I don't. "Although I'm confident all politicians have only the people's best interests in mind." I flip to the gallery listings of the Arts section and fold the paper into a neat rectangle. I cringe at the discovery of yet another unknown artist from deep-woods America smiling into the camera. Where do they find these people?

"Minus Mouse, after every election the winners unravel what the losers have done over the four years they've held power."

"Done is right," I say. "Now, if there were accomplishments instead of things done to us...." I leave the thought for dead, the same way politicians leave the people who elect them.

"Doesn't that hit you as an insane way to run a government? You don't see sports teams doing that."

They'd do exactly that if they were losers, I think. Her fingers drum war beats on the table. I search the text for my lost place, and think with wonder, Every father's dream-daughter: be your mate's love, care for and accept care, but don't take shit from anybody.

"No, it makes perfect sense," I say. "To them, I mean." My logic makes no consolation.

The newspaper lies discarded between us, folded in halves and quarters. Belinda has only picked at her omelet, but I'm not watching her. Half the meal lies uneaten, cold. A darker yellow has risen in the egg as the moisture has leached away, evaporated into the dry indoor air, leaving the food plasticine. There was a time when I would get miffed at people, food guests, for leaving uneaten portions on their plates. Someone has invited and prepared delicious food for you, I would think, So eat it! I felt disrespected. Who doesn't like to eat? Obviously, some people, but they don't count. Such emotions and memories now lay buried, and these days the simple act of cooking is a pleasure itself. If the food goes unfinished, I'm of the mind to say, "The garbage can is ten feet that-a-way!"

To pass the time until she comes out of her funk (or fugue), I watch the light creep across the sofa and plank flooring. Our loft's open-floor design takes its southern light from a bank of high windows, louvered open and shut by an old chain and gear system. Sheers hang end-to-end, woven from a rose-colored lace, whose pattern stretches across the sitting area's second-hand, piney furniture whenever a visible sun drops below its meridian. These ghostly images give up vaguely human miens, in black or gray. Belinda wants to change the sheers now because "it's all just so spooky," but I'm in no hurry to borrow the nine-foot wooden ladder from the basement that I used to hang the damned rods.

Opposite the windows is a spot in the room owning a singularly unique feature: a wooden arch separates my makeshift "home" studio from the sofa and kitchen areas. Belinda had only one idea in mind when she saw it. "It's a shrine to all the slaughtered animals and the moo, oink, and baaa echoes rising out of the basement blood room." I couldn't refuse such eloquence. The Roman arch has fourteen-inch-thick maple timbers rubbed with beeswax that span eight feet and stand ten. Its aura is ecumenical, yet there's no reason for its existence in this building of butchery and cold storage. Except, of course, if you believe Belinda. We calmly decided that we couldn't know the answer for certain. This saved us from dreaming of neon hell, or worse, losing sleep.

Loft living is simple: unless you decorate, you get the contemporary verging on Hitlerian sterility. We've put art on the walls, some of my own productions. On the chance times I come with prospective buyers in tow, I use the greater loft room as a gallery. A handful of busts, and a few of my more unusual chiselings, sit on pedestals along the walls. So far I haven't found any need to hang a sign over the sidewalk door, but stranger things have happened. Between the sculptures hang our serial prints: German woodcuts, Dutch etchings, French lithographs, and American photography. We've focused on limited runs so they hold their value. The Rembrandt is a good example. I was able to buy it after a commission came my way, back in Chicago (the best time to invest, before the money is lost into bills and clothes and a frivolous vacation). I admire van Rijn's etching every day, his clean lines, his perception executed without flaw.

Below The Beegermeister are bookshelves screwed to the walls. The lowest shelf sags to the floor under the heft of fat-spine art books and museum catalogues, sculpture retrospectives and biography tomes tracing birth-to-death narratives of the masters, set between diminutive photos from their oeuvre. Higher shelves keep Belinda's university text collection — history, philosophy, business books, and more picture books on travel and architecture ("European City Parks" and "Mediterranean Ruins" and "Get Outside!"). And then there is Belinda's collection of sports books. She's fanatical for America's pastimes: football, baseball, hockey, and basketball. She hates soccer — too Euro-centric. Novels and cookbooks get a shelf, but except for some classics, the novels we read go out the door as soon as the last page is read, sold to second-hand stores or donated to hospice centers.

The floorboards in the great room are rough finished timbers. To slide through the room on our socks with a child's glee will cost us a trip to the splinter trauma ward at Mount Sinai or St Luke's Med Center. We've learned to wear shoes or slippers before venturing from the bedroom.

For the discount we get, much can be overlooked. Such little and big scars come with warehouse restoration. This isn't SOHO, that artist magnet from the dilapidated Seventies — post NYC bankruptcy, post blackout — where getting any paying tenant into the failed factory spaces at least kept the gangs from setting up crack factories, and the homeless squatters at bay. SOHO has been climbing as NY's "arts Mecca" ever since. Its buildings have space; but over the years, prices have risen like the executive elevators at the World Trade towers. This is how rents look from my dwarfish take-home pay and my meatpacker's address. SOHO is Manhattan's "hot property" this year and "location, location, location" is the mantra of RE mavens trolling the streets in color-coordinated cars and sports jackets.

The Meatpacking District (from West 14th Street south to Gansevoort, and the Hudson River east to Hudson Street) is the newest cheap-digs. I don't expect this to last, which is our incentive to buy or get out, even while the streets are still sketchy in daylight and starkly ghoulish after dark. The thing is, as luck would have it, when the BDSM cellars and gay palaces were closed down under Mayor Koch's AIDS scare campaign (invented to clean up the city to ensure tourists didn't somehow get cornholed without wanting to), empty buildings became plentiful, and residential zoning saved the day.

We see the bright side of Manhattan loft luxury growing in a seedy neighborhood. You play street-smart rules and cab it to the door after ten o'clock, pay an extra fiver for the driver to watch your back until the steel door closes out the hall light, and live to see another litter-strewn morning. Now we're three months into the neighborhood and we barely notice the grit. And since mid-April, four buildings on our block have showed newly lighted windows after sundown. We toast weekly to our three-year lease. We think this will be enough time.

Belinda catches me in the corner of her eyes spying on her from the corner of my eyes. She cuts another square of egg with her fork, stabs it, and quickly eats the morsel. I suppress a cringe. She replaces the fork and pushes her plate away. Okay, I think, the food is not the problem, and neither was (I'm beginning to think) the late Ms Slope's missed funeral. Belinda has been holding something else just below the surface, and whatever it is has got the better of her again.

Meanwhile, I've been staring across the loft too long and my Cap'n Crunch crackles less dramatically in its milk. I get another spoonful into my mouth and feel its crispy crunch has diminished to limp and soggy. Oddly though (thanks to emulsifiers and additives), the flavor has held (sugar & spice) and that familiar, gluey texture takes me back to my seventh birthday party, the year before Tang replaced real orange juice to celebrate man's creative dietary plan for his space launches and moon journeys. At the party we kids, a mix of little boys wearing colored shirts and little girls with ribbons in their hair, passed around two boxes of Cap'n Crunch, to the delight of my mother, who let us kids let it all hang out on our birthdays.

Belinda shuffles her feet. I hear her toenails scratching one foot. Her fingers come up from her lap and drum the tabletop. She moves in her chair as if it has burs.

"Minus?"

"Yes, sweetheart." The birthday memory scatters. I'm listening because I feel she's really ready to pop; mortality images at twenty-seven is yet a possibility – or, when am I (me, Minus) going to sell more work than one sculpture per month (for which I have a fast answer: As soon as I make something new and exciting and... as soon as I think of what that something is.) – or, let's move back to the Midwest. I'm ready for something new, too. Anything is possible.

Another spoonful of Cap'n Crunch re-assembles my seventh birthday in a flash, but another flash — Belinda's hand reaching over to cover mine — wipes it away for good. I find her eyes have grown sandy with melancholia, imploring me to a level of seriousness at which, I hope, I've just arrived. My face is set, waxen, but I don't have time to swallow before she says, "When are you going to ask for my hand in marriage?"

My head swivels in time to turn away from her, where I spew Cap'n Crunch across the window and not in my girlfriend's face. Choking follows. I drop my head and look into the cereal bowl. White mucus runs from my nose, which aggravates my gasping lungs. Belinda hops up beside me, yells for me to raise my arms as she begins slapping my back. I want to tell her that backslapping is no longer the preferred method to ease a coughing fit, because it can further lodge any obstruction in the throat. Except I'm in the midst of the said fit.

"I expected resistance," Belinda says above me. "But come on, Minus, take it like a man! We're in love –" slap-slap "– so betrothal is the logical –" slap, slap-slap-slap "– next step."

"I-" hack "thasss nod–" hack-hack "gimme th-thime...." I want to raise my hands in surrender, but they're already up. How does one signal "Stop!" in this situation? She stops. She starts to rub my shoulders. Then she shakes me like I'm a pinball machine that's eaten the ball somewhere underneath the 10x Bonus slot, and if she can only knock it loose without tilting the game, she'll score big. My right hand for some reason still clutches the cereal spoon. I drop this and wave my hands because, suddenly, the coughing has ended all by itself. I breathe again. My pipes sound raw, and are coated by viscous goop, but a few swallows take that mess down. Its slimy texture makes me instantly nauseous.

Belinda sits and draws a steady smirk through my recovery. In all the scenarios of marriage hints played in my mind, this reaction was never part of the plot. I'd hinted at marriage myself, a while back, but not in ambush. "I'm sorry," I tell her. "Not so Hollywood cool, huh?"

"I'll say." She straightens her vest and bow tie.

"That's not what I mean," I say, my tone both conciliatory and insistent. "You caught me off guard, that's all. Honey. If this had been me asking you in the middle of omelet chewing, I'd be picking herbs from your sinuses right now."

Belinda adjusts her tie again. "We've been living together for nine months, Mighty Minus. Babies are born in shorter time."

"Are you telling me you're..." I don't want to use the word.

"Do I look...?" She too hesitates on the word's threshold, as well as its implication.

My mind forces my mouth to wait three beats. "Actually," I say across a building, awkward silence, "you look like you could use an extra sandwich in your lunch pail." She doesn't smile, so I try this: "Let's get back to the marriage thing. Nine months is not so –"

"Nine months. Gestation. That's not counting our dating calendar. Then it's more than fifteen, sixteen — no, seventeen months. An elephant can pop something out in that time. We have to make something of this relationship."

"What's this about an elephant?"

"The gestation analogy."

"Oh – right." I feel confused. "Don't elephants take two-and-a-half years? Sorry. Just a joke." I nod and shrug and smile, hoping for time to think, only she's taken this as an urge for her to continue.

"It's about time you step up to the plate, boyfriend. Pick a bat. Get into the game and take a few swings."

Something drops and makes a splat. I look at the window and see a sight one doesn't get every day. The spewed cereal has stuck to the window, and in its spray I can make out a pattern. Several patterns, in fact, which drops me into the imagination of a child: I see a snowflake, I see an ice crystal, I see a naked treetop, I see Cassiopeia's brightest stars, I see the outline of a woman dressed in a beer barrel, I see cereal stuck to a window.

"Babe," I begin, "I think we ought to get to know each other's live-in habits a little better. Nine months is –"

"Nine months is plenty of time to know whether you want to spend your life with someone. You know my faults; you know my virtues. I certainly know yours. You don't seem so flaky and bizarre as you read how artists can be. And it's not nine months, it's seventeen! We're already living together. Before that I spent most nights at your place. You make me happy, Minus. I feel cherished by you. That says everything, in my playbook. I remember sitting with you at night and watching your eyes follow your hands as you chiseled rock into beautiful art. When you complained of fatigue I kneaded your shoulders and made you coffee. When you wanted my opinion, I gave it straight and you didn't cop an attitude. You've always taken my judgment seriously. It's that kind of feeling that I'm talking about. Because lady-friend critiques and bedtime partnership isn't what this is all about. So I would sit here after work and watch you sculpt and think how can I really help you and help me at the same time? You make me want to come home to you. All the help you gave me with Gretchen, and the carriage restoration. You're a beautiful man. You even cook for me! And you're not the jealous type. They're the fucking craziest. Okay, okay! No need for a list. What I'm saying is I feel loved, Minus." She takes a breath. I stare in dim amazement. "There's something harmonious with you and me. We get so much from each other. By being together... we enjoy life more. I've got a plan for us, boyfriend."

There's a lot in my mind, but I can't make the words come out. I finally say, "Well." This is clearly insufficient. But everything else would sound like a repetition of hers. I hope she sees this as we sit kitty-corner at the table, my eyes filled with emotion. Off to the side, I see something drop.

One of the orangey kernels has broken free from its hold on the window glass. I watch its drip trail creep down the window, leaving a white line like a ghost's tear. The stuck kernels need something more. More body. More kernels. My hand drops into the cereal bowl, swirls around to grab kernels, and when I take it out, I've got a wad tucked beneath three fingers. With a sharp flick my fingers fling the cereal against the window at about the center of the figure. They hit and stick, nearly all holding fast. A milk dribble limps below a kernel; it reminds me of a newborn releasing his mother's nipple.

"What are you doing?" Belinda asks.

I wonder if she's thinking that perhaps she's spoken too soon about the 'not so flaky artist' compliment.

My hand swims around the cereal bowl again. I throw one, two, three more handfuls at the window, successive bombardments that produce minute sounds; cannonball pops falling into a battle-fury sea. I scan the effect from the first to the second to the third. This has possibilities. I grab the box and pour cereal into the bowl, and add milk. My hand dunks the kernels under the milk to soak them. The milk feels pasty, the sugar on the kernels dissolves under my fingertips, forming a glue. Everything is warm and gross. I don't want to look at the mess; it's what I swallowed a few minutes ago.

I fling kernels randomly at the window. I try to hit the center. Once, twice, three times. Some kernels stick, others bounce off the window and drop onto the sill or into the potted herbs. One sits in the crook of a forked basil stem, the leaves twitching. On the window the stuck kernels have built a base. A woman wearing a beer barrel is the most prominent of my early imaginings.

Belinda sits silently beside me as I muster another fusillade. This is one of the things I like about her, and what we like about each other: let the moment carry on to see what happens. She pulls her chair next to mine, turns it around and sits with her chin on its back. She watches me work. The sun beating through the window has changed color in the half-hour we've sat at the table. It pours white light onto the newspapers, the empty plates, the herb pots, and makes odd shadows and colors through the cereal kernels. I throw more cereal. Milk flies from my fingers. Kernels bounce left, right, back at me. The mounded cereal has made arms, a head, one leg attached to a torso. I add more cereal to the bowl from the box, stir, throw; add, stir, throw.

There is duality happening on the glass. I think of it as my canvas or panel; a medium with chance solution. It isn't sculpture, not in any traditional sense. More like a frieze. I think I can take the method away from the glass, somehow. What if the cereal kernels were molten metal beads? How would hot wax stick? These ideas give me a bump like no drug I've sampled. Behind me, Belinda breathes her calm frustration.

"I haven't forgotten you," I tell her. "There's something here that –"

She pats my back. "Keep going."

More cereal makes the adhesion of the massed kernels stronger. But will it hold? It can't, not on the window. Not for long. Perhaps if I helped it harden with a hair dryer. Belinda's hand is on my shoulder.

"I'm a traditional girl, Minus, and I'll live in sin as long as the next woman, if it's to help. But then things change, as they always do, as they must do so's not to wither and die. Otherwise they will. Die, I mean. It's nature looking for succor, not the succubus choosing her next meal."

Belinda isn't usually one to issue a cri de coeur; she prefers a good kick in the shins.

"I love you Belinda. I can't tell you enough."

I have told her plenty, though, and my supply won't run out before our time runs out. No list of bests and loves from me, but I do love to be with her, and I like how we can be in the same room doing different things and, suddenly, take a moment out of the time-pie to say something sweet, off-hand, sexy, or just about the weather. Succor works both ways. Last week we made love three times in one day, the last in the hallway, where she hoped for the elevator to chime on our floor to bring on her "danger" orgasm. This is a sight that is indescribable, just to fit the term in all its metaphorical depth. But, do I point this out here, now, the contradiction between the traditional girl and erotically fun girl, without fostering misunderstanding? No. That would be a fool's argument. After all, I'm just as loony, and kept up my end of the playtime bargain outside the elevator landing. Propriety prevents me (and as a gentleman) from describing further... ahem... manipulations. Suffice to say that we had to fast-step-it through our doorway, but were yet in bare-assed view of the retired couple, Mr & Mrs Manders. To all of that (which to some is plenty), there is this to add: I don't plan on cleaning up this cereal mess for a day or two; not before I can sketch ideas for studio work. If my long-term commitment is to art, then I admit that all else is by experiment.

"So don't be bored. Take control." This is me talking, advice I give Belinda when I hear her return from the bathroom. She's behind me, somewhere. I hear feet pitter-pat on the floor, which is faintly childlike, or rodentine. I'm not sure which is better, worse, or not-to-matter. I say, "You have a day job that takes you around –"

"Clippitty-Clop! Clippitty-Clop!"

"– around the park, one edge to the next," I finish. Belinda's hackney coach is lunchtime and evening work; tourists; wealth-through-tips.

"Of course, that could be my second job, mister Artist Dude."

"Now you're talking. You know, you told me you came to New York with a reflex camera in your big brown suitcase. The time for using it is now, don't you think?"

Across my back, a sudden white-hot brightness rides before an explosive POP. Its intensity washes out the sunlight's last chard, cast onto the green basil leaves. The sound shaves the nerve ends on my skin.

"Like that?" Belinda asks. I hear her wind the film to the next frame. She kicks my chair to get me to turn around. Reluctantly, I comply. Her camera moves forward to home in on my nose. I shut my eyes, but the flash bursts through the thinly skinned barrier. I blink red-orange trails that remind me of summer sunsets on the Great Plains.

"Just exactly like that," I say. My sight echoes geometric shadows of burnt timbers. "Only with less angina-inducing effect to your subject, maybe."

"Candid shots suit me, not those stagy glam shots I see in Annie's pics."

"Annie? As in, the little orphan?"

"Leibowitz!" she exclaims. "Don't you know anything?"

"Some days I'm otherwise fooled," I suggest. My notebook is out to sketch, plot, graph, metaphorize (or rhapsodize) the glob of cereal stuck to the window. "Although I wasn't aware that you were on a first-name basis with Annie."

Belinda and I settle into an interlude. Our peace is quiet and subtle. I throw cereal; it hits the window. Camera flashes record the work. Our posterity. She hands me the camera so she can sit in the softer light that now comes through the window. I take three photos in fast succession; her hands move to different parts of her face. Cheek, chin, behind the ears. I hand the camera back and she wanders off.

"Sculpture seems a particularly lonely occupation," Belinda says. "I couldn't talk to film prints like you do to your sculptures."

"I don't talk to stone." My voice is insistent. The answer is intended to grab some reassurance from her.

"Don't be absurd, darling," she retorts. A small chuckle follows for emphasis. "I swear to myself, sometimes your verbal perambulations are going to leak into reality. It's a scary feeling. If the sculptures begin answering you, I'll become superfluous."

I turn around because I want to see the insanity in this woman's eyes that I'm certain to find. I only find the woman I wish to marry; whom I want to ask in my time; the (somewhat) traditional guy to his (other-ly) traditional girl. White light shoots from the camera, held against her hip like a sci-fi weapon. In the flash's afterglow, a brown spot with a spermatozoon tail leads my vision everywhere. When I look at Belinda her head is hidden behind the blind spot. Blinking is futile to make this monster go away. I'm afraid to see this as a sign; omen or otherwise.

"Superfluity is unlikely," I say. "Perhaps murder, though, if you don't put that bleeping camera down." She only performs a pirouette, nose pointed skyward, camera held at the end of the outstretched arms, and snaps herself in jiggling white light. "Anyway," I explain, "I haven't noticed." This is an emphatically delivered lie, which I think she senses. I say, "Not much, anyway." But this qualification is no less a lie.

"Okay, settled," she coos. "Any-who... cameras are the gadgets of friendly interaction. One can only converse with an actual person."

"Now you're just making cruelties," I say, and throw more Crunch kernels. The middle has fattened, like a rotund beach bather.

Belinda pouts at me in the window's reflection. "The joke is on me, dear-heart. Photography is just my hobby." She disappears from the reflected view, like she'd been an optical illusion. "I want something else!" she yells from somewhere unidentifiable.

"You have your carriage. You have Gretchen!"

"Not enough."

Not enough? This is news to me. Then again, so was her proposal.

I hear shuffling beneath the table, hands and knees moving across the big Turk carpet. Her hands touch my waist and her fingers walk up my ribs (she likes to count them). Then her warm-wet palms blanket the back of my neck, beside which she rests her chin on my right shoulder.

"Have I told you that you're speaking at the arts-culture roundtable?"

I let Crunch kernels drop from my hand into the bowl. My voice hovers above a whisper. "You got them to accept me?"

She nearly screeches a reply. "I told you I would!" Her lips touch my neck — or is this her tongue? "Your work got you chosen, Minus. That piece you wrote for _ARTFORUM_ –"

"That was not a piece. It was a letter to the editor. I'm no journalist or critic."

"Yeah, anyway. The committee liked it. They told me your critique of the critic is just what they expect from artists on the panel. They also want someone new (new-ish) to the city, and – I'm sorry about this, honey – someone who's not yet established. Their words." Her fingers trace my neck muscles beneath the skin. I dip into the bowl and throw cereal at the rapidly building mass. Their uniform shape, the kernels, make a landscape that is coordinated, balanced.

"I only had to do a little promotion," she says. "For what you are and will become. Lord knows the art grapevine is smug and snarky."

"Hmm," I say in grunt-speak. "So... you're my agent now?"

She grunts in response.

I begin to turn my head, but she joggles me just enough to keep the cereal montage in my field of vision.

"It's good," she says. "Keep throwing, Minus." She stops short of saying whatever it is she thinks it is; her words seem to float beneath the window like a caption. My hand pitches more cereal. "Very good. Seems so random at first –" She points, then lets her finger curl back into her fist. "It's amorphous."

"Like a cloud," I whisper. "The image shows itself when you let the shape open up." My hand sends another fusillade at the sticky mass. "I like that. It builds a new reality with each toss." I look at how sculpture can take over from the image on the window. It assumes a shape in my mind that protrudes from this two-dimensional frieze: a mother earth figure. Could be of Minoan origin, or Egyptian. No, not from Egypt. Nor, I think, Greece. Somewhere around the Mediterranean, though. Carthaginian? Maybe. The options simmer like vegetable stew. I need to do a museum walk to eliminate repetition and the faint smell of shit, that odor of imitation. "Do you see a face in there somewhere?"

"I see Ullr," she says immediately.

"Who?"

"He's a God of Snow — or the snow god. Whatever. But he's Norse. You find his face woven into the center of macramé mandalas from the Seventies. Flower Power stuff. You can pick one up at the flea market for five bucks, these days."

"Ugh. I don't want that image."

"Oh, no, you don't want that." Her words are whispers of ghostly prescience. Then her real voice settles from the aether. "Don't worry, dear-heart, you're beginning something new here. Noodle around. You like that." She nibbles at my earlobe — coaxing me to throw more Crunch, make new art, start a long-view project, or to come off the chair and fuck her.

"You're getting me hard," I hear myself confess.

She sighs. "A lot faster than the cereal on the window, I hope."

"Can you give me more minutes, please? Before –"

She answers with a tongue bath across my ear, sending a thrill up my spine that breaks into a sprint. "Before nothing," she says. Her hot breath, redolent with rosemary, whirls across my cheek. "You're working." She steps away and into my view, doing a little prance. At the end she turns quickly and her head snaps to face me, causing her hair to fly across her face, where it holds as a screen for a moment and then drops messily to her shoulders. The act weakens me, and energizes me — I can't explain how the two work; no woman has ever before done the same for me.

Belinda has no obvious beauty; hers is a sudden storm on the senses that comes with a fast rain laid bare by revelation. Her contrasts — the lazy shuffle, loud belches in public (but beneath the hand), how she slurps her soup — make us the conventional couple. For all this she has wit that dazzles me, and her Heartland demi-drawl wants to defy an articulated speech pattern.

Work is work, and we both do it with focus and effort (even when she's teasing me, because I'm fooling around – noodling – and the fun-play can be fruitful to the further ideas). Nevertheless, we both know how to trim time from the business of life to make more time-space as a couple. Minutes make all the difference: coffee in the park, our feet up on the sofa with books in hand, a meet-up on the street between horse-carriage rides and dog duties for an eight-block walk. These help us escape from life's trappings and all the good work we need to do for the emotional side of survival.

"By the way," I tell her. "I've sold one piece already this month. So we're ahead." She tells me she knows this. The sale is on the books. "Okay, so there's rent in the bank. I guess we can keep eating food, too."

Belinda says, "You're too busy with your art to take time away for what modern artists need to be doing outside the studio." Her voice is toned to mollify. "If you're starved for examples, just look at what you're making now. Sure it's a mess, but you'll tidy up. Meanwhile, you'll look at it and brood, wonder about a thousand things. This is what you do. You need time to do it. It's how you work. I know this. What you need, then, is representation. You need proper New York exposure, Minus Mouse. I'm not even talking about gallery owners demanding color slides because they're shamefully 'too busy' to stop around and look at what you have with their own two eyes. That shit job is a job in and of itself."

"I don't mind knocking on doors," I say. "Pounding the pavement. It's against how things are done these days, mostly, but, you know, there's a certain tradition to that work ethic. It appeals to me."

"I know it gives you that needed sense of control over your destiny, honey, but today's market demands a modern approach to the biz."

"Did you have someone in mind?" I ask.

"I can't say yet. Well, sort of." Her look is pensive. "I need to let my thoughts fester. See which one turns into a boil."

Fester? – Boil? "Doesn't sound so positive to me," I say.

"No more for now. Make art. I want to watch you throw."

Splat!

We look at the window. The mound of cereal has fallen. We stare, defeated (I am) and exasperated (me, again). What Belinda feels is transmitted by a few tongue clicks, and a soft rub across my neck. A few kernels remain on the window, which has an opaque circle at its center, stretched down to the sill. The mess looks like someone has barfed; me, with this experiment.

"The FaceCards meet next week," I tell Belinda. "Viscount Bruce gave me a shout."

I'm under the table, cleaning up the cereal. I can no longer think of it as barf without feeling bile creep up my throat. "The viscount is hot for my subscription idea. And he's warmed the others to it. I've been given the go-ahead to talk with them."

Belinda cuffs me upside my shoulder. I've gotten used to Belinda's soft pats, cuffs, slaps, and pokes on my body. They are her behind-the-door expressions of our romance and friendship, something we Midwesterners "bless" each other with as often as shaking hands. I think it comes from a steady dose of Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam and the other LoonyToons characters, killing each other in a blaze of gunfire or TNT, and then walking spic-and-span clean into the next scene. Add to that the The Three Stooges, and you can see our penchant for "love taps." It's no wonder the Cornhusker State couldn't contain her.

I take her cuff as encouragement. My scheme has precedence.

She claps her hands, then stops and puts on a frown like she has just come across an empty treasure chest. "On the level," she says. "Can that low flush be counted on to come up with any real money?"

I raise a finger in counter point. "The viscount's Cy Twombly stares at me all night long from its spot above the fireplace. The frame alone could probably buy this loft. And as long as I come up with the sculptures, they'll play ball."

"Fair enough," she says. "Remember what Al Davis preaches: Just win, baby!"

I come out from beneath the table with my bucket and sponge. From somewhere, that out-of-left-field place she dislikes in her mom but otherwise appreciates from me, I ask a question that's been on my mind since the cereal fell off the window. "How much time do I have to pop the question?"

Belinda reaches over and holds my soapy hands. "Ohhh," she says, taking her time, "there's no deadline. I think – let's say I only beat you to the punch on this one, Mighty Minus Mouse. Maybe it was not so terribly romantic of me, how I said all that stuff. Sorry. A girl has to take her chances, too, you know. Sorry, sorry. You'll find your chance, too, honey."

I only half believe her confession. She's not been one, if my memory serves correct, to back away from an argument, an opinion, or desire.

She kisses me on the lips, and says, "I'll think of this moment when I write a muse's memoir." Her breathing is close to my ear.

I won't disturb her thoughts (and memory) of today with a comment that is certain to leave us both with the jitters for the rest of the week. I don't like to interpret her dreams, either; it's enough to feel all the beauty in life within a single day of being together. Whereas... a muse? I've never thought of Belinda as muse, mine or another artist's. Although she might well have been, back when she modeled for lots of (unidentified) artists. She doesn't do that for me; and I won't ask her. Scary thoughts come to mind, though: Is she moonlighting for another artist? A silly question, and it keeps me from saying something that would surely make her take back (for good!) her version of a marriage proposal. For a second I wonder how that could change the future, but that is too callow a move to seriously consider.

Nevertheless, time has served nicely to dispel my beliefs in anthropomorphic muses, and especially the living-breathing sort with smooth skin and honeyed lips (these don't exist either, but that's how we want to think of a muse). Eyes that draw you, and through you the delicate lines, pigmented on linen or chiseled into stone. Inspiration comes from somewhere behind me, and I don't ever want to look over my shoulder to see what's there. That's my version of spooky. So the question echoes in a chamber filled by two: Is Belinda's revelation equal to the first spoken 'I love you' of a relationship? I have no response to this question. Am I expected to say 'I love you, too!'? I have no response.

CHAPTER 3

Marshall lives in Sussex House. He takes care of a nice WASP family. His Rhodesian heritage makes him the perfect breed for the task, as the Ameses — Jack & Larissa, little Jack, and the seven-year-old twins, Mary and Christie (born on December 21), own to a busy lifestyle. Larissa is in the back room now, getting Marshall prepped for his walk. What she does to do this, I don't know.

I prefer to stand at the Ames's eighteenth-floor window. It's a spot that Larissa Ames often chooses herself, she's told me, to sit propped against the ridgeback's large, dog-body frame. She likes to scratch his floppy ears while admiring Central Park. From this height, the park is Alice's wonderland. The trees have a glued-in-place fakery found in diorama and model train landscapes. Bright green circles, the tops of oak and elm trees below, and the small spires of the fir trees, are each clouds in a pre-schooler's fantasy. They bunch in shady globules over walkways and the bridal path, bridges and people. Whenever I stand here, waiting with leash in hand, I half expect a vintage choo-choo to round the south bend, chugging along, rickety on uneven tracks, sending up iron-gray smoke plumes between the fat trees to pace its progress as the red cowcatcher joggles over the tracks like a divining rod.

The park is in its springtime flush, and the trees carry their fat-fingered buds like Gargantua does her hands. Walking its lanes, you can't believe that the park's grandiose space had few trees in the nineteenth century, when it was (1) a farm, (2) a potters' field, (3) a military parade ground &etc. Olmstead and Vaux, in their landscape design, manufactured everything, from the hills and the forests and the ponds and the meadows, down to the detail on each bridge's filigree railing. This was both a mirror held up to Manhattan's great state of human invention, and how nature could be the assemblage of all things for all people. Works of art composed materialis natura.

I turn from the window. This living room is not welcoming, despite the million-dollar view. I've grown to know it but not admire it. The Ameses' bookshelf is cluttered with curios, but lacks books. The two leather sofas feel oily beneath your legs, and whatever you do you can't help but slide down as if the seat has reclined, like a parlor trick. Their television is an enormous square box, too big for this small space, thus swallowing the viewer into its black screen (I can't imagine what the sensation is like when its gaudy lighted images chase themselves across the screen).

Today is a good example of how I battle displeasure with the environment. When Larissa disappeared down the hall, I filtered through their glossy magazines, neatly scalloped on the square glass-and-chrome table. Argosy, New York, Mademoiselle, The Economist, National Review, Smithsonian and others — though not one children's title is in sight. Are the children not allowed magazines? Are they banned from studying in the living room? A saving grace, so to speak, to this array of soporific titles, was one soft-porn couples' mag, Double Pleasure, that I found shuffled between Golf and Golfing (as if subscribing to one magazine for this most staid-of-staid sports wasn't enough). I took a fast-and-sly look toward the hallway entrance for signs of advancing shadows (human or canine) or the sounds of readiness. Then I slid the skin-zine out for a quick leer. The cover featured a mature couple kneeling nude on a bed, sandwiching a college co-ed half dressed in a cheerleader outfit. Just the sorts of playful pictures a married couple needs to jump-start their libidos after the long workday, I thought. And how appropriate to find its placement where the post-work cocktails are sipped while the kids have been marched to their bedrooms to finish homework before suppertime. Let the celebrations begin! Before I could properly peruse the finger-smudged pages, noises carried from the hallway rife with suggestion; clattered hangers, dropped shoes, a door closed too hard.

I slid the porno back in amongst its glossy group. A picture of Larissa pulling on jeans and a T-shirt came to mind. A small part of me wondered if she'd appear at the living room entrance, suddenly and unexpectedly, wearing a cheerleader outfit (and only half of the outfit, at that). It's my fantasy alone — and a bad one. If I were so brave as to confess its contents to Belinda, she would fold her arms and produce one of her thin-lipped, wondrous looks that question all of men's sanity, not merely mine, and suggest that I "save it for the bedroom, tiger." (I trust myself, and her character, that she would say this.) She'd be right, naturally. As for myself, I have but one excuse: my flirtatious nature is tucked into a libidinous fantasia of quasi-controllable images — entirely harmless because I am, if anything, a one-woman man. Case in point; I imagine pilfering the Ameses' copy of Double Pleasure to surreptitiously place among Belinda's stack of Workout, Glamour, and Horse & Tack, just for kicks. How long would it take her to notice? What would her reaction be? Would she see it as a gift, a suggestion, or an insult? I don't know these answers, which makes me wonder if, in fact, I know as much about her as is necessary to marry her, out of desire or pressure or circumstance. Larissa is a mere phantom, a dog owner whom I care less about than her dog. That's the truth. I only see her when I pick up Marshall, and wouldn't mind if I never saw her again. The dog is welcome in my life any time.

(I'm less than perfect, as anyone can see; I'm also nobody's fool, and know enough never to shit where I eat.)

Attacking these thoughts are the sounds of frantic, explosive movement far down the hallway and fast approaching me, the thrump tap-tap-tap thrump-ta-thrump of a big dog gaining speed. He rounds the corner at half gallup.

"Marshall, no!" Larissa Ames commands, but her voice is far behind the dog.

I brace myself for a collision. If this hundred-pound dog decides to jump at me, we'll both crash through the window and tumble downward, spinning and clutching air, down-down-down to our deaths on 59th Street among the taxis and pedestrians, the scout group from Philadelphia and the retirees from Cincinnati, for whom rain from the sky never assumes the bodies of man and dog.

"Stop!" I yell, and thrust out my hand like a lame TV cop. I crouch to absorb the crash. My signal and baritone bark penetrate his doggie enthusiasm in time. Marshall hits the hooks, his nails biting at the carpet runner, and like an Arabian prince he slides into my arms. He whines in greeting and I work his floppy ears between my hands. He's a red & wheat purebred with thick, wrinkly skin and a pearly disposition.

"Minus, you're a life saver." Larissa Ames stands in the hall entrance, arms folded. Her face is a plaster Minerva. She has on a blue dress and round-cut onyx choker. Bracelets pile up above a pair of thin wrists. Her face is darker than her bare arms because of the makeup she's applied. Her youthful face is yet smooth, but she's missing a chin and this damages any ideas of beauty and desirousness. Frosted hair at twenty-eight doesn't help, either.

"My own life, this time," I say. Larissa loves her big dog but Marshall runs her life, as do her children, being mostly nanny raised. In the four months I've walked Marshall, Larissa Ames has shown a wonderful courage to indulge her pet. I think her children are jealous, giving further reason for skirting her authority.

Her chinless face makes her look jowly, which she is not, thus making her head appear oversized, also a misperception. Nevertheless, I'd try my best to avoid a commission to paint her portrait; destined for the empty wall space above the winsome, faux fireplace. Live art subjects (particularly the ones who pay hefty prices) always make self-comparisons afterwards in a mirror. I've seen some frightening results, and they always lead to recriminations, animosity, estrangement.

Larissa looks stricken this morning. That's one of those phrases you're not sure has definition until you see it worn on a person. She shows an excessive amount of hip after three children, but she hasn't otherwise let herself go to the flabby side of motherhood. Her style is atypical of the Yuppie set, even those without children. Mr Ames is pure Wall Street up-and-comer. Larissa is the most bored woman I've ever met.

"What's on for today?" I ask. "Hospice, Salvation Army, or Bloomingdale's?"

She flips me the bird. "None, smart ass." Never presume a contemporary is without gumption that rivals your own. She drops her hands across a pouch stomach. "Jack somehow got me on a neighborhood committee. Improvement of the air, or some other impossible bullshit." Her smile is ironic. "Not so glamorous as the life of an artist." She sighs through the next breath and her words stretch like gum. "Committees keep me out of trouble."

Her eyes shift to her dog. Marshall has found a new place for his nose: my crotch. I grab his snout and steer him to the open window for an eighteenth-floor sniff. His nose dips between the crack and I feel his tail slap my thigh as the scents of New York kindle his brain.

Art isn't glamorous, I want to inform Larissa. It's only work of a different sort. The best sort, but also the sort that sees me doing the same work any office-bound chump must do: checking my household account sums; calculating the time it takes to finish the paperwork for an NEA or NY state grant; stealing five extra minutes for lunch; making small-change deals over the phone (while listening to an ex parte deal, somewhere behind the caller, where I'm not the topic of conversation); and, getting stuck in body traffic in the subway commute from dog walking to art studio, stuck shoulder-to-shoulder with Ben-the-Jew, who has recently eaten a sardine and onion sandwich, or Pedro-the-Chicano, who's just come from a two-hour sweat on the basketball court.

"Don't be so sure," I say.

Where barbers cut hair for eight hours a day, and lawyers give legal advice, and the bank teller takes money in and pays money out, and the airline pilot punches up vectors before taking off, I too must be technically precise. Creatively, besides. Not so easy a vocation, all the time. Sometimes I just want to be the carpet layer so bad I can smell the size in the fabric. Sometimes, Larissa's life doesn't seem so awful to me. At least my fingernails would be clean, not permanently stained by any number of chemical products with their medium-chances for giving me an organ-specific cancer. Still other days, there's always the dog's life that Marshall leads. Anyway, "creativity" (something the majority of people "want" in their work, according to a recent study by some Liberal think-tank for workforce stability, whose mindset is on "policy alteration of quantifiable goals") isn't all that it's touted as "fun" and "dynamic." It can be those, but hardly in synchronicity, whose flow is like the morning piss of an old man with a prostate density equal to granite. Besides that (whine, whine, whine?), critics expect me to be original and unique with every show, for the rest of my life! Of course, that's all I ask of myself, too. Needless to say (but worth the ink), in any job/career/profession and whatever the work, it is all about you. Don't let anyone take art away from you, is all I can say to myself each night as the sun fades behind the Jersey skyline.

"City Hall will love you," I tell Larissa, addressing her lament. I feel the desire to leave, quickly, with her big dumb dog in tow.

Her time-worn smirk, the lines cutting forty-five degrees from the corners of her mouth, reaches across the room at me. I wonder if perhaps "bored" cannot correctly describe the youthful Mrs Ames. I hope she doesn't think about – and this is my vanity – making a play for me. Even though our ages are totally within range, and getting caught is out of the question with Jack gone fourteen hours a day, and we've mutually commented on our attractiveness (helpful lies), I wouldn't want to lose Marshall over a fling with an unwrapped socialite dominated by ennui.

"I have to run, Minus."

"Loud and clear, Mrs A." I call this out as a soldier responds to rank. She hates this nickname, yet it often makes her laugh because... well, it just does. "Besides which, Charlie is holding the other boys for me downstairs. Marshall!" Marshall yanks his nose from the window and he steadies himself when I grab his collar. "Let's hit the road, you hound. To the service elevator, mutt!"

"That mutt cost us two grand," sneers Larissa. She pats Marshall's rump with calm affection as we rush past her to the door.

The hallway's white walls and dime-store art make me think that Mr & Mrs Ames could use a decorating makeover. But to suggest this would seem like I'm pandering for a sale. The Ameses have never expressed interest in looking at my inventory.

"Toodles, Minus."

"Tweedle-de-dum back at ya', Larissa."

"I met a woman the other day."

The four dogs look at me as if I've pulled raw bacon from my pockets. I have with me Marshall the Ridgeback, Pan the Samoyed, Boilermaker the Alsatian, and Chief the Chesapeake. A messy color palate and mixed media of barks, dusty paws, dog breath, and wet noses.

We've walked north on the park path near enough to 5th Avenue to hear the rise and fall of morning traffic moving south toward Midtown. At the zoo entrance the foursome take me left through a loamy spring grass patch and all the way across the park to the far side of the Sheep Meadow. They stop for a rest in the sun, tongues out to lap at the warm air, wiggling through panted breaths, saliva dribbling from the edges. Through the trees behind us I can see the top of the carousel.

"Let me rephrase that. I 'noticed' a woman. She doesn't know I exist. Not yet. What d'ya'll think'a'dat?" My skip into a West Texas drawl doesn't faze them.

Boiler makes a sound like he's clearing his throat. He has smart eyes and an active jaw. He won't "speak" for me on command, but I'm teaching him. The Petersons pay me extra money for each new trick Boiler brings home. I've been averaging twenty dollars tip per month. Already he's as nimble and sly as the Artful Dodger, or a Chinese acrobat. If he had hands, I'm sure he could juggle four balls by now. The end of this road is in sight, however, because even the smartest dog can learn just so much.

Marshall, meanwhile, is sniffing Pan's ass. Pan suddenly thinks a fly is trying to get some action, and his hips buckle. His snout moves around, teeth bared to warn. There's a scuffle, but my own low bark is enough to make them separate like shy fighters in the ring. Chief still thinks I'm holding bacon.

"She's disguised as a homeless woman. I have to find out why. She's this great writer – I think she's great, and was bold – and here she is, pretending to be an indigent scab. Beats me why."

The canine quartet starts to dance in place, showing me their angst. I click my tongue and they turn as a team down the path. I give the leads a double tug that keeps them from dragging me like a bucked charioteer. A half-block later Boiler and Pan pull up. They're in opposite hands to my leash arrangement, so while they sniff the ground in preparation to dump, I do a quick bracelet change with the leads. Marshall and Chief separate from the squatters. They come next to me, panting, tongues flapping like streamer flags in the wind.

The sunshine has brought dozens of people out to the Sheep Meadow. Blankets dot the scrabble lawn like a lot of dropped postage stamps. Girls have shed tops and sit in shorts, spaghetti straps, and sandals, while their boyfriends have gone topless but leave jeans on. A lot of white skin is on display, smelling of the Caribbean beach and coconut cocktails. Music rides the air. I hear a country tune, some hip-hop, and a slice of a Top 40 love ballad.

Pan and Boiler pinch off and start scratching at the earth. I let them clean their paws a moment, then tug them to my side and issue a command to the crew to sit tight. I carry pooh bags in my back pocket. Double-volume sandwich bags work best with these dogs; their dumps are twice the mass a human can drop. Marshall, Boiler, Pan, and Chief watch me while I crouch to clean up. Strolling tourists stop on the path to see what they see. I twist the bag ends into knots and grab the dog leads.

I say, "Let's go, boys!" and they leap into a trot. I follow at a dead run because they deserve a bit of a jog, even if New York's leash laws have become so punitive that big dogs rarely get the chance to run full stride without risking triple-digit fines.

Half of what I save on health club fees for all the exercise I get goes to treats and gifts for all my mutts (I've got three little dogs to walk in the afternoons). They all deserve the love. Extra love, by my estimation, because I've seen how their owners trouble themselves over their pets: kisses and neck rubs and rough-house play and dinner scraps hand-fed beneath the table. Their children see the dogs as friends, mostly, although I've noticed a couple of the kids couldn't care less. These miscreant igits walk past their pet without a glance, while its tail wags in happy anticipation, only to be ignored. I've asked myself, "Who does this to a friend?" I can't account for that kind of personality. Sometimes I don't understand a kid's world anymore.

With our bounding pace the crap bags dance in my hand. The smell becomes overpowering. I draw the leads to the right, towards a Dog Do-Do trash can near the Mall's entrance. The boys bear right like they're harnessed to a prairie schooner. I'm hardly a vision of athletic excellence, but I don't fear a heart attack. This is despite the thumping I feel in my chest, accentuated by the backpack slapping my spine with each footfall. My knees want to buckle.

"Whoa up there!" Another tug on the leads encourages the mutts to slow down on sunny side of the Sheep Meadow's tree line. The quartet looks at me with their sun-glazed eyes. "You're going to kill me," I tell them. I'm sure they want to answer. I lean over to hold my knees for support. Their chests heave like bellows. They nose in and I can smell meat breath and a pitter whiff of ass. "Good boys. Good dogs. Chief, I think you still owe me a dump." I deposit the bags in the trash and stand to the side. We're on the grass, the five of us. The sun is overhead and strong, which makes the shadows dark along the timberline. The fifty-foot Dutch elms arch across the Literary Walk, where life-size statues of dead white poets line a wide path leading to the Bethesda Fountain. Tourists are surprised to find Shakespeare and Byron keeping them company, along with other lesser-known Europeans.

The Bard's sculpture is an odd piece for me. It shows a forty-ish man of letters – book in hand, fingers keeping place as the writer contemplates the world, his art, &etc – dressed in padded trunk breeches, galley hose, a straight trim jerkin, and a leather overcoat with plenty of sleeve and collar. Quite the urbane gentleman, we are to believe. Now this is significant. He's neither young nor old; no wrinkles mar his male comeliness, though he owns to a half-bald pate that shines in bronze under the porous boughs. For me, this Shakespeare lacks resemblance to those few woodcuts attributing his historical appearance. The statue looks more like an actor who has played Shakespeare's repertoire of characters. An ageless man standing testament to those timeless plays.

People pass through the arched trees, lots of smiling walkers, couples hand in hand, children gripping string-tied balloons bobbing above their heads. Their clothes remind me of the time I opened my first ten-tub watercolor kit.

Someone walking hurriedly sideswipes me even though I'm standing well onto the grass. It's a woman. She makes no apology, doesn't turn around, but continues her march around a group of halted tourists taking up the center of the path. I see her from the back, a vagrant, wearing two overcoats. The tails of the inner coat hang lower than the green pea coat squeezed over the top of multiple layers. The stink she leaves behind putrefies the air. This can't be Karen Kosek, whose gray hair and upright walk I'd recognize again. Unless she has a wardrobe the likes of the Bard's oeuvre, which I doubt. There's something off in this one's stink, though, because it's nasty. Her shoes, too; some type of military boot with undone laces that drag along the ground. I look past her, out across the far side of the park, above the trees, at the windows in those high rises crowding Central Park West. Somewhere thereabouts, from one-in-ten-thousand chromium-reflected windows, I imagine Karen K stares down at all of us in the park. She laughs inside her charade, thinking she has fooled us. "Not all of us," I say aloud. Chief and Boilermaker look up, noses twitching leftrightleft in flex-O-snout agility to sniff out fear and food morsels, or just a hand to lick. I give them my palms and they start in with rough-tongued laps.

"That's right, boys," I tell them. "Mizzz Kosek can't fool everyone all the time. And I wonder if she can be fooled." I see a route to a plan. Silver buttons shine from its center. My watch reads ten-thirty. If we walk the winding paths and clear out through Artisan's Gate, where I can spray-wash their paws before heading across 59th Street, the boys will have gotten their money's worth. "Here, you guys. Come – come now. Let's go look at the big birds and then start on home. Sorry, boys. We'll pick it up another day."

They lead me toward Christophe Fratin's Eagles and Prey. Fratin sculpted in sand-cast bronze. He made his career on animal sculpture, and often humanized his models. His Ape with Basket looks a lot like Bigfoot, out picking berries. By contrast, Eagles and Prey is a grand, enormous sculpture of the late animalier style. Two eagles with spread wings have pounced on a horned sheep. Talons tear through hide. The sheep's face is the classic portrait of resignation to death's struggle, all the fight sapped from its terrified eyes, its mouth agape for the approaching release. To what release, the animal is probably more certain than most humans sneaking up on retirement. Score one for America's manifest destiny: an imperialist motif from a French artist.

I walk around the statue and wonder, in this brief moment of intellectual repose, if I should try sculpting animals. Hell, I already have a pack of models who would gladly, I think, hang around nibbling on kibble while I sketched them in various states of agitation. These mutts might look terribly sporting in bronze cast, frozen for all time on the heels of a rabbit, teeth bared and eyes flaring, tails curled with the strain of imminent capture. I can almost hear the rabbit's heart thumping like raindrops on a corrugated awning. The reverie of imagination is enough for me, though, to the point where I'm already drained of enthusiasm. I'm not even sure if I like animalier, to speak the truth. Which is different, I feel certain, from admiring what beauty the work portrays.

I corral the dogs and chorus, "Look at the boyds, pups, look at the boyds." My cobbled New Jersey accent isn't something I use amongst my Jersey friends. Chief looks back for a moment. The others have their snouts to the ground. The dogs aren't in the mood for more stopping. They know they're headed home for a long day in a small room, closed off from their favored society. My backpack straps dig into my shoulders like harness ropes.

CHAPTER 4

People who claim the Bible has no significance in contemporary cities have not spent much time in NYC. Here you can witness all manner of sins, find commandments (given and broken) written on stone, learn of generations and genealogy, experience plagues, see miracles and mayhem.

People of biblical importance or insignificance populate this great City. Their names pepper the language of private worship and public business, in all their forms. Speech, writing, advertising, broadcasting, gestures, and graffiti. Poly-lingualism flourishes! When you enter New York City, you have come upon the modern Tower of Babel.

To absorb the flavors of its languages is the equivalent of working all your life in a spice factory.

125th Street: Giselle Parking Garage, Watkins Health Foods, Fata Hair Braiding, Melba's 125, Mobay Uptown, St Nicholas Deli, Kass Repair, Fishers of Men, Jimbo's Hamburger Palace, Coen's Optical.

East Village: La MaMa, Do Kham Tibet Emorium, Built by Wendy, Tim Dark Hair, Veronique Maternity, Dixon Place, Jin Soon Foot Spa, KGB Bar.

Meatpacking District: Miguel Saco Restorations, Faicco Pork Store, Ujamma Black Theater, Daniel Scuderi Antiques, St Mark's Comics, Nanette Lepore Women's Wear, Arnold Hatters, Pappadrakas Good Eats.

Battery Park: Jumbo Philatelic, Fong's Sewing Machine, Gabes House of Flowers, Goldsil Coin, Annie's Dollies, Xiao Hong Yu Novelties.

Midtown: Ethan Fiks Guitar Studio, Pescatore Seafood Co., Toga Bike Shop, Biba Schutz Gemologist, Azi Uniforms, Sam Oliveri Newsstand, Cha Cha's House of Ill Repute, Aldik's Santa Displays, Le Du's Wines.

Morningside Heights: Ajo Lumber, Cool Matt's Sex Shop, Winston Heating Oil, A. Singh Discount Mart, Petqua Ny Aquatics, B Driefus Electronics and Radio, African Condiments & Specialties, The Clay Hand Gallery, Marx & Engels Paints.

In this metropolis of voices and cultures, East meets West, North meets South, the Russian trades with the Pole, Arab sells to Jew, White buys from Black, Indian meets Pakistani for lunch. Commerce transcends ancient hatred, rivalry, cheats, and land-grabs. While the great City enjoys streets paved with gold, there shall be no war, strife, or enmity among tribes, races, or ethnicities. This is, after all, the United States of America.

The stoplight at East 61st Street and 3rd Avenue blinks red, not quite given up but mortally wounded. The toes of my black high-tops hang over the curb. I'm among thirty pedestrians at this curbside starting block, and more stack up behind us as seconds tick like pile drivers for the disruption this snafu has caused our lives. The eight-inch drop from the curb feels like an abyss. Drivers honk their horns to demonstrate their freedom and protest the inconvenience. They're protected from the real world behind safety glass and steel, even as they represent the modern day oxen. Traffic streaming off the nearby Queensboro Bridge gets funneled onto three streets, and here it inches forward at the pace of a beast. Gleaming bumpers kiss front to rear down the street, two streets, three streets. A single patrolman, who doesn't look old enough to shave, tries to manage our intersection. His hands wheel and his whistle shrills, body in the gesticulation of a cartoon character. These are an affront to the reality of traffic movement, somewhere between little and none. A cool breeze comes up from south 3rd Ave, and with it there floats lightweight trash. An opaque hotdog wrapper grabs the cop's ankle like it's an angry poodle, the corners shivering with hate.

Even on this spring day, the air feels thick, made thicker by the choking exhaust fumes of so many cars. I check my watch. Ten fifty-three. The big dogs are safely back home. With a last pat on Chief's head and a rub through his soft Labby fur, I calculated four hours before I needed to be at Amsterdam Avenue to give the small dogs their turn. That pink-bellied threesome gets a full hour, from anytime after two (never before). Sometimes I wait till three, like I'll do today because plans have changed. Peter's studio was on my mind as I walked the big dogs, until that bag lady's stench led my thoughts to Karen K again. Now I think that if I can get across the park in twenty minutes and execute my plan, make my play, I can still get back to Pete's for an hour or so.

Over the traffic cop's uniform blues and fitted cap, he wears a reflective chartreuse safety vest. He looks overheated under the sun and the crucible of engine exhaust. The car horns blare again, always begun by one asshole, until there's the practical bedlam of a Stravinsky opus. It's illegal to blow your car horn in Manhattan, a good law because one only needs to imagine how society would disintegrate if people used the horn for every emotional fury as they inched their way across the island. The traffic cop looks for the violators, though they are well back from the intersection, hidden somewhere behind the hundred-count windshields reflecting blue sky and gray skyscrapers.

"Come'on gumshoe," someone caws from the crowd. Like the car horns, this gets a crescendo of replies. "Yeah!" and "Jeez-Louise!" and "This is just like Philadelphia!" (even though it's not). Part of me wants to turn and explain that "gumshoe" is a nickname special to detectives, not greenhorn traffic boys. This is a bother and provocation I don't want to pursue. My backpack hangs from my right hand; my thumb is hitched over the pocket holding my wallet. My other hand slaps beats against my thigh. I have to find a florist. I have to hope for fast delivery. I must wave my credit card like Dillinger.

This traffic snarl is the cop's fault. He's given the avenue cars more time than a regular light, and people, the crosswalkers, are pissed. We're now a ten-wide gang piled up ten deep. Facing us across the intersection is a like-minded group. We're not yet a mob. How these two walls of pent up impatience will mesh without bodily injury is a mystery of city life. The cop's whistle blasts a double shrill to halt 3rd Ave traffic, but the oxen are slow to discipline, and a two-handed flourish shows his frustration and anger, until finally the crossing is clear. Our turn. The cop is waving us through when, arbitrarily, every light turns green.

To be silly is to make something happen, often enough. Sometimes silly is all we have. My move from Chicago wasn't silly, because I had a choice and options: stay and (maybe) thrive; move and take the greater risk for its greater reward, in my life and for my art. So far, each has made a "happening." To flush out Karen K, I have to "pull a silly."

She once wrote, "The love of roses in modern society is a misnomer, given their rarity to Renaissance people, who knew of the flower's difficulty to grow well. And so its beauty, when cultivated to bloom, sent poets to weep verse from their ink quills, forced a gentlemen to make noticed his love for wife (or mistress), and enticed women into dangerous acts to procure them by the armload."

Of all the still lifes painted by Florence's tint pioneers, and Impressionism's erotic effulgence, Karen Kosek celebrated the rose in sculpture: wood carvings of the 1590s, steel blooms of the 1950s ("the rust most closely resembles a petal's texture"); Eco's Italian porcelain bouquet, and Lindermann's rose-petal ice cream cones (handed out to children at the 1937 Reich's Exhibition in Düsseldorf).

The Peruvian Jorge Echeandia's "7 Roses of Whycuff" was her declared favorite. Sculpted in coal, the material's depth of refraction make you believe (not fool you) that the roses are breathing, or caught in a breeze, or in the act of blooming. It is said the impression changes with each viewing. She praised the Peruvian's audacious craftsmanship in making this effect from coal (not since replicated). She also celebrated Echeandia (partly) because his sculpture went unfinished, and would remain so. Evidently, he suffered a heart attack when, trying to complete the planned eighth and ninth roses, the sculpture cracked along a fissure he hadn't noticed, from the vase's lip to base, taking away a third of its mass, and two of its roses. I think the story of Echeandia's death is apocryphal, although the broken sculpture is fact.

I learn that nine florists exist on Amsterdam Avenue between 87th to 65th Streets. Eight of them turn me away when I make my request. I hadn't thought finding black roses would be so difficult (it turns out not to be), but more difficult is asking the florist to let me crack the vase in such a way, and send the package wrapped in black tissue. Two florists call me a "creep." One asks if I "even know the symbolism" and blah, blah, blah. The ninth barely bats an eye, and I get my gift wrapped for delivery, which I pay extra to do that immediately.

The yellow and green delivery van pulls up to The Parkview at 12:43. I stand behind the park wall and witness Henry accept the wrapped flowers from a guy dressed in a jump suit that matches the van's colors. When the van pulls away, Henry takes the flowers to his podium, extracts the card (!) that I wrote, reads it, and then looks left and right down the block. I duck behind the wall.

When I raise my head after a safe interval, Henry is tearing open (!!) the paper wrapping. He takes out each flower and places it on the podium. Then he upends the vase, looks at its base, runs his big hand inside, and turns it over and around and around. Convinced it's not a bomb (this is my only explanation for his actions), he replaces the flowers in the vase and wraps them up (not as nicely as the florist had, in my opinion). I expect him to take the flowers inside, where he'll phone upstairs, or better yet, deliver them tout de suite to Karen K. But he doesn't do this. Instead, he turns around, opens a large square box, a concrete pillar box with an iron lid – a garbage container – into which he dumps Karen's flowers and my card. I can almost hear the breaking vase, as it must do, when it hits the bottom of the container. I unmistakably hear the metal top clatter when Henry drops that. He claps his hands, brushing off any leftover residue.

Before I can stop myself, I'm running out of the bushes and around to the nearest gate, a good clip down the path to the nearest gate, and out I come from hiding, dashing across the street. Before I know it, I am at the door to The Parkview, and I open it. Before I can enter, though, two men block my way. Henry is as wide as the door when he comes through, against me, followed by a man who is his equal in size, but white and bearded and wearing a dark suit and dark shirt and dark tie.

"Stand where you are, please, sir," the man orders. I look at Henry, who's mute. But he's there, and he's big, and he blocks the door while the bearded guy takes the lead. The man has stepped around Henry and is close to me, but not so close as to be unable to react if I should... what? — throw a punch, I assume he's thinking. But, no, this is a civil matter, and he's civil, polite, diplomatic.

"What is your business at The Parkview, sir," the man asks. I've done as he's commanded, and stand where I am. To be truthful, I've backed off, but I stand my ground, and am half squared up, prepared to defend my self. There is, I think, justification for me taking this position. I can sense they know what's to come. There's nothing more I can do but explain.

"I sent a package to Ms Kosek, whom I know lives in this building. It held flowers, this package, a sign of my... affection for Ms Kosek. She's an author whose work I know well. He, Henry, did not deliver the flowers to Ms Kosek. I know this because I watched him from across the street when he threw the flowers into that trash can over there." I point at the can for clarification, possibly for effect only, because my hands have found it hard to stay at my sides. From their stances, the positions they've taken up outside the doors, I realize more is going on here than I first thought. "I think Henry has probably already told you something about me," I say. "Who, may I ask, are you?"

"Henry has told me everything, sir," he says, in correction. He's motionless, except for his eyes, taking me in, moving slowly from my face to my hands, my clothing, my hair, back to my hands. His hands hold steady in front of his belt, four fingers around the opposite wrist, a wrist as thick as my forearm. I have to look up to address him. His eyes peer down the length of his nose, as dark as shotgun barrels. He says, "You say you know Ms Kosek lives in the building, and that you have affection for her work. We know that you actually don't share acquaintanceship with her. You see, sir, The Parkview does not allow unregistered friends, uninvited guests, or strangers onto the premises. That includes packages sent to residents. And for your information, if it helps you to understand the situation better, I am the house detective. You may call me 'Sir'."

"Jesus," I say. "A private Dick? I didn't think you guys existed anymore, outside Bogart movies."

The man ignores this. "Residents of The Parkview live here for the privacy the building offers. They pay for being left alone, if that's what they choose. You understand."

"I do. Naturally," I say in bewilderment, because What is natural about a bag lady living in a luxury apartment building? Instead of this question, I resume a line intended to mollify, convince, persuade. "I wish I could afford the same luxury. Well, I sort of – never mind. You see, I'm not trying to upset Ms. Kosek. I merely sent a package that will make sense only to her. You see, the roses were black and they relate to something she once wrote about –"

"Do you have a job, sir?"

"Excuse me?" I say, incredulous of his tone, so bland and cop-like, Dick-speak, that I don't feel the true menace behind it. I blurt out, "That has nothing to do with this, and none of your – of course I work! Listen, he – Henry – has tampered with the mail system. Do you examine all mail that comes to this building? I think the postal inspectors would –"

"It's the middle of the day, sir. Why aren't you at work?"

"I could be taking lunch. It could be my day off. Your question is irrelevant. Just what are you insinuating? Listen, I'm interested only in inviting Ms. Kosek to accept a gift. You do know she dresses like a bag lady. Could I be upsetting her charade?"

Henry and the Dick glance at each other. No matter. I'm tumbling now. To hear my own voice, the words and sentences, is painful.

The Dick says, "That's not my business, sir, and therefore it's certainly not yours. The residents of The Parkview pay for security, peace, the chance to –"

"The package! The flowers! You stole someone's mail! That's a federal crime and –"

"The package was delivered by private courier, sir. It's not U.S. mail. Therefore it falls under the guidelines of The Parkview's package acceptance procedures, and the wishes of the residents. That package was not a purchase made by Ms Kosek. She did not give notice of its pending arrival. She doesn't accept anything that she hasn't already told us to expect and which she has previously made arrangements for its delivery. We know our residents, sir. Their safety and their security, and their rights, all supersede your claims. Good intentions are not recognized. Only the rules and residents' instructions apply here."

"She wrote about black roses," I say. I need to explain why I'm harmless, not a crank, and not dangerous. "She liked a Peruvian sculptor's work. He carved coal roses. Seven of them, but there were supposed to be nine. It was her favorite of all artworks. She wrote about what it meant to her, this sculpture. She said, 'There is no subtlety or aggravation in art that isn't already within the artist. So, too, in the people that seek art; they are the reflection of what they find.' She means, I think, that we – that we must –"

But here I stop. I stop because even I don't know why I'm telling them this, not here, not when the trip was pointless as soon as my hi-tops hit the pavement. Henry, at least, raised an eyebrow halfway through my – my rant. For the first time since I've been standing here, I feel the sweat dripping down my back and arms. I sense that my forehead is wet, shiny, the signs of a troubled person. The sweat, my guilt, is pouring out of me.

They think I'm some version of David Chapman, that I'm planning to kill KK when she steps outside, like Chapman assassinated John Lennon, coming home with Yoko from recording what would be his final album. The Dick again trades looks with Henry, not long, but they've decided who's going to do what if they must make a move on me. Perhaps they're about to strike first. Neither takes his eyes away from me, keeping my hands in view. Their stares define crazy — I'm the nutcase, not Karen K, their house bag lady. Through their stares they see a killer, and they wonder if I'll start quoting "Let it Be" or "Octopus's Garden" or perhaps another obscure, obtuse quote from Karen Kosek's work. It's possible I will. I recall her book very well, and everyone knows at least one Beatles song by heart.

"It's time to leave, sir," says the Dick. Henry seconds this with a firm nod. Neither smiles.

Under the circumstances, I leave.

I lean against the Central Park curtain wall again, my body out of sight while my head is chinned over the crenellated rubble. This spot is further down Central Park West, and I think I've shaken the Dick's, and Henry's, interest in me. I felt their eyes on my back as I walked off the carpeted runner, and all the way down the block, until I was a half-click away.

I can now just see Henry from my position. Often he's covered for a few seconds by a passing van or a bus. He stands with vanguard poise, looking south and north, back & forth like this, over and over. The Dick is unseen, faded into a back room where, I imagine, he has closed-circuit television monitors trained on all exits, the elevators, and common hallways. I'm happy that I'm not a cat burglar, with all the headaches of figuring out how to break in, and then get out safely with the stolen jewels and the banded packets of cash heisted from wall safes hidden behind portraits of husbands, wives, grandfathers, and beloved daughters lost to disease before they've reached puberty.

When Henry turns his head forward I duck below the crown. Creeping away through the bushes, I realize my black rose ploy was a long shot, at best. So I can't get into Karen K's mind by bribing the staff or sending a surreptitious gift. I suppose that I should have known better. A dumb mistake I don't want to repeat. As the dowager had suggested, though, persistence earns the worm. But it's time for me to get over to Pete's place, and I follow the path into the park.

The asphalt path, pitted by age and weather with bits crumbling off the edges like stale birthday cake, leads along a serpentine route to the Sheep Meadow. Few paths in the park run straight. Mostly they meander like a dog pulled by its nose. Sometimes you don't notice how wildly the paths bend, twist, elbow, arc, snake, zigzag, swerve, braid, or kink. Benches line both sides of this path, placed end to end. They're painted shamrock green, helping the path's contours to pop off the living canvas.

Then, suddenly, prismatic light catches my eye. Off to the right, in the grass behind the benches, a white flash edged by color has winked at me for attention. I wouldn't bother to stop, only the colors (scarlet and crimson trimmed in emerald) draw me to a stop. I back up and look across the patchy mud and grass. Litter has strewn from an overloaded canister, marring the triangular patch's beauty. Paper cups show the bruise of rejection; a Taco Bell bag has been flattened by rain, its bottom torn out by a hungry animal; two Styrofoam plates lie fused with a brown smear. Beyond the trash lies my hidden gem in the new-growth spring grass, its winking prism a signal, a call for rescue. A quick scan for a cop's presence down the path shows me three toddler-aged children hooked onto their mothers with spiral lanyard cord, red and blue and white, while up the other side four old men walk slowly, but talk with exaggerated gestures and interjections as they teeter-totter in this direction. I rest a palm on the bench riser and leap with lifted legs over the back, but my legs flail as I lose balance at the crest. I land on my ass and feel a watery imprint fastly wet my pants seat. Quickly rising on a swatch of soft earth free of mud, I crab-walk left and right, looking for the same angle reflecting the colored light. I hunch and squat, rubbernecking. There! Past the shredded fast food bag and a crumbled cup, a tuft of grass, the color of radioactivity, rises amid darker lawn.

I step over the trash and kneel beside a pair of eyeglasses. One lens is missing, its empty ocular frame bent inward, v-shaped, as if struck by a rock or the flat edge of a knife. The remaining lens points in the direction of the path at a thirty-degree angle. Its tint is red or rose or wine; the colors flow through this narrow spectrum when I move my head. Rose-colored glasses? Why not. A long scratch bites into the alloy of the black metal frame along the right temple, from earpiece to hinge. Both nosepieces and guards bend acutely inward, pinched together to accommodate the narrowest of noses. Of the grass surrounding the glasses, five long blades shoot out through the empty lens ring, now vaguely rhomboid. I must get lower. My knees fold until I'm settled onto the ground, where the spring rains soak through the denim with cold shock from ankles to knees. I bring my face down level with the grass, feeling acutely like a Muslim called to prayer. The audible noise of moisture seeping into soil is an oddly sucking sound, as if the black soil is a lung in desperate tubercular respiration.

Back on the path, where the children and their mothers and the four tottering men have converged behind me, I hear two high-pitched, see-saw voices ask mommy why that man is kneeling in the wet grass. One mother tells the child to look away, that we don't see vagrants. "What's a vagrant, mommy?" The old men clear their throats one after the other, perhaps harmonizing for an impromptu barbershop ditty as background music to my unfolding documentary. For this I pull my Leicaflex from the bottom of my backpack.

I slide the camera from its protective silk bag (last Christmas's present from Belinda) and put it to my right eye while the left stays naked on the glasses. The lens oscillates with pitch variations to find one angle that will feed off the fanned array of reds and a separate, aural, chromium-rich beryl. Wetness seeps around my elbows when I lodge them into the grass to form a bipod. My jacket has pulled up from my waist in back, and a cool breeze prickles across my lumbar. The 50mm Carl Zeiss lens opens a crystal window onto the discarded spectacles. I focus on the glaring tri-color reds and a razor slice emerald edge, painted as a tongue touching the lips of a fair-haired lass.

I shoot nine images before the film runs out. I don't have a spare roll. This roll was the spare. This sucks. This sucks. Nine isn't enough. I slip the Leica into its silk bag. From another compartment I grab my hardcover spiral sketchbook, and pull three colored pencils from a pink fish-head pencil holder. My body assumes the pose of a penitent Christian, or a beggar with hat in hand, and now it's almost certain that I'll get a cold from the dampness on my legs, arms, and bare head; my Chuck Taylors have sunk into the earth beneath my ass. They squish when I move, as I must to keep the circulation flowing in my feet.

The first sketch I do quickly to catch basic perspective and geometric shapes; colors filled from edge to center with increased pressure to achieve tint distortion. The second sketch absorbs my eye, and I deliver details onto the page with attentive clarity: grass blades cross like waving beachfront palms; polyurethane nose pads yellowed by skin oils; a triangular chip in the tint painted onto a standard lens (which may be the cause of color saturation departure); teeth marks on the plastic earpieces. I hope to use the photos and sketches for a sculpture, pull out the perspective by a ratio of twenty, paint the stone. Spray paint, or airbrush. Metallic, I think. I can also use aluminum casting. Many methods jump through my mind while I decide to make a third sketch, an all-color perspective. My pencil hand works furiously atop the page, fanning the paper, grazing its texture using only the edge of the blunted pencil tip. My hand, robotic, moves methodically.

Light and time invade my focus. I should be with my friend by now. Pete will be waiting. If time were a commodity, I wonder accusingly, I'd be in debtor's prison. I refuse to waiver from the object, though, not before I finish. The last touches of pencil barely graze the paper.

Then I'm up off my knees and onto my feet. The sketchpad gets secured. The plastic fish gulps the pencils. I police the area once over before I walk away. Stop. Think. You're moving too quickly. The spectacles are too good. I retrieve them, hold them in my palm for a moment, wondering about their history. Then I crush the frames into a tight ball. When I pass a trash can further into the park, I drop the glasses in and hear a splat at the bottom among shifting garbage.

CHAPTER 5

Peter N is black. I point this out for two reasons. One, I don't like living life as if it were a David O. Selznik production; two, Who ever heard of living in a city without having some friends that don't share your skin color? This is the subtle difference of the human comedy, as practiced in America, that appeals to me.

After Peter got noticed in NYC for his artwork, and just before finding regional fame with his steel-cast "DownTown" sculptures, he lopped off all but the first letter of his last name. The change was made for good reason. Peter shares a name with a hugely famous cum-shot king. That other North had found celebrity and riches for his statuesque erections, and a certain notoriety for performing in sex scenes with an underage anal queen. Not quite the two-peas-in-a-pod story we want to know about, but at the junction between modern life and Cable-TV news, we all must make do.

Peter's home studio is in Alphabet City, at Avenue D and 12th Street. By the time I've walked across town to the old tenement building, sweat has beaded on my brow and is dripping from my temples. What I must resemble now (after dog walking, Henry & The Dick, kneeling in wet turf) is a horrible joke, because this grime and mud and the odor rising off me is what I cringed from when I had followed Karen K. I use a hand to mop my forehead, tossing the sweat into the gutter as I round the corner and stop before ascending his porch steps. Pete owns the basement and first floor in the corner of this brown brick monstrosity.

The basement windows are frosted. Lamplight shows bluish behind the glass. In the upstairs windows I see the curtains have been thrown wide, but lack symmetry: in the left frame a white panel has been pulled to the edge, while its sister bisects a paint-splattered pane; the right frame shows the panels held open by white rope sashes, pregnant bellies sagging towards the center. I ring the bell twice, wait, then twice more.

Peter N's name change brought quick jokes from friends; accusations of not "living up to size" was a favorite, and quickly overused to boredom and even self-mockery, because how many people have a twelve-inch cock? Peter N's critics flung harsh denouncements, however, claiming the change was "pretentious" and playing to the Hip-Hop fashion of the new-style MTV crowd. "As if they bought art," Pete laughed. This criticism brought on a counter charge (not from Peter) of racism. He asked his art friends what protocol he should follow. I counseled a lie-low approach, to stand above the critics. The consensus was that he would look better if he let the press talk themselves to tears while he rode the free marketing wave, and all the jealousy would collapse on itself.

A minute goes by with no movement behind the door. I press the bell again, and look down the street. The few people in sight hold plastic grocery bags, sagging backpacks slung over one shoulder, or attachés. All mind their own business. I notice a gray-sheet tabloid newspaper, flattened on the sidewalk, its edges fluttering in the face of a wind jet. Then the paper begins to unfold, fluidly at first, until the fat innards catch the wind and change to galleon sails. The wind doubles and quickly pulls apart the billowed broadsheets, carrying them into the air, fluttering like runaway kites, some rising quickly, with a few turning over and over. Down the street they all go, airborne, comically, and one sheet wraps around a man's head from behind. He reaches up and tears it away, and watches the other sheets settle to the ground as the breeze lightens, then stops. He crumbles the paper in his hand, and tosses it at the base of a nearby tree before resuming his pace. The air smells of onions, its source unknown.

A rustle behind the door snatches back my attention. The door begins to rattle as three locks get sprung, and swings back to reveal Peter's head in the space, though sticking sideways and far higher than I anticipate a head should be. Headphones dangle from his neck, out of which techno beats bite the air with needle-prick intensity.

"Minus Orth!"

"Peter N! What's going on inside there?"

"Wendy likes purple," he says. "I'm an obliging boyfriend, so –"

The door arcs wide and he shows me a house painter's brush sticking up in his right hand like a flaming torch. Some kind of plum shade shines on its bristles. I see that he's standing on a ladder. The brush reminds me of a mean French tickler I once saw in the display case of an Uptown S&M shop. The paint tint is more blue-black than reddish purple; the tongue of a chow, a giraffe, a Bactrian camel.

"You know I hate white," he reminds me.

"You're referring to paint, I hope."

I squeeze through the space between the door, Peter, and the ladder that's taking up most of the foyer. He holds the brush high as I duck inside. The door closes behind me, and I'm standing in yellow-blue light as cheery as any country kitchen, lit by four bare bulbs in a chandelier stripped down for cleaning. The latex paint odor is powerful here.

"Lord-ee, Minus. You're late. And what's happened to you? Did you sleep on the street last night?"

The run through the park has dried only the frayed cuffs on my jeans, and my knees and shins are still wet through. I'd scraped my sneaker soles of mud, which now I kick off onto a mat inside the hallway leading to the back of the apartment.

"I was taking some photos and, you know, had to make some sketches, also. There was this really neat pair of sunglasses, throw-aways, or, maybe a fight. I couldn't disturb them, so I had to get low."

"Sort'a like kneeling in the urinals at Grand Central," Peter says.

"That would be a rude comment at another time," I tell him, "but right now I know what you mean." I glimpse myself in Peter's mirror, hanging between two coat racks mounted on the wall. There's an awful suggestion in my appearance. Peter shakes his head and laughs, waving that brush demonically at me. He climbs down from his four-step ladder and says, "Hey, did you bring lunch?"

He's joking, of course, and tells me that he wants to finish up the foyer before we get started on the lighting. He sends me downstairs as he retakes the highest ladder rung, bucket in hand and pulling his headphones over his ears. By the time the pads are in place, the side of each earphone is streaked purple, while his shaved head shines with polka dots, like some rare rainforest tree frog. When he slaps that monster brush against his thigh to the music's thumping beat, I sidestep the splatter and flee into the narrow stairway.

Its darkness takes away my sight for a moment, only to be readjusted, when I walk into the studio, by primary and secondary colors slashing across the room in broad strokes. The space is naturally lit by street-side windows. I find two stools in the middle of the room along with an easel the size of which rivals the cross at Golgotha. One seat is for the artist, the other his model. Over this centerpiece hang Peter's photo floods and reflectors, a home-designed rack that, when lit, illuminates the studio to perfect northern-light diffusion. It's a tradition most artists still follow.

Canvases stand against three walls, stacked twenty deep in careful rows. Each is a five-by-five square, Peter's preferred picture size. These semi-completed canvases start at the far corner and go to the street-side wall, along which the frosted windows run end to end. A double washbasin takes up one corner. It's a battered, steel object so heavy it could serve duty as a bomb shelter (I helped Peter drag it down that dark stairway). Its industrial-grade spray nozzle hangs from an extended pipe like some lethal swamp snake.

I hear voices that lure me to the windows, feeling the cold cement penetrate my stocking feet. I look up at the frosted panes; no shadows loom outside on the sidewalk. I wonder at the sound. Peter has built pinewood utility shelves beneath the windows, stacked higgledy-piggledy with brushes, cans, glass palates, and hundreds of paint tubes. It's Baum's Munchkinland, after Dorothy has opened the door of her black-and-white farmhouse. The voices break across the room again. Still the windows are uniformly milky. Then the sound's source becomes clear: Peter is singing to himself upstairs. The voice is a low chant, a chorus sung in a loop, almost a mantra. The sound moves overhead, across the floor, becomes faint until, suddenly, I hear it in the stairwell. Peter's footsteps are soft toe-plants on the wood runners, not the heel drops of a construction worker. Suddenly, he bursts through the gray shadows, sees me staring, and stops his singing.

"Keep busy, Minus, will ya? I have a few things to find before I forget about them, which'll get me angry at myself later for not doing what I need to do now."

He passes me with a focused stare and turns on the power nozzle over the sink. I meander to the canvases beside the stairwell door. Since I've been given the okay, I flip through the paintings, and after a moment pick out four canvases from their stacks and place them across the back wall. Two of his paintings reveal visceral colors. Visceral, as in red meat diet, a bit of white gristle inside nicely charred fat, and shiny wet blood from a fresh cut down the center. I'm describing the imagery, not the scenes on the paintings. Behind me, Peter rummages through his paint cans and tubes.

I take two of the paintings and stand them on top of the stacks, so they are at eye level, more or less. I cover the bottom row of paintings with a drape cloth so my focus stays paired to the chosen two. Then I step back to watch their imagery unfold. My cold feet warm in the presence of these gifts.

These are not Dante's hell, but sandbox games between despots; camp stories told by Hitler to Stalin, spoken in jabbing whispers amid the flashlight glow of their shared tent; they are Bosche's playful-sexy forest people, dancing in Armageddon's last light, bodies blazing but not on fire, hair burning but not aflame; Bacon would smile at the deep shadows on faces in such pure form of birth's head-stretching agony; Lucien Freud might weep. I'm touched in a place that makes me want to blush.

OHHhhhooooo.

The sound comes from my chest and belly. It's hardly human, more a primate from that eighty-thousand-year genetic separation.

"Happy-happy," Pete says from behind me.

"They belong in a museum," I say, because it's true.

"Hey, thanks!" His appreciation strikes an intentionally flat chord. It's my praise. It embarrasses him. He prefers technical terms and specific likes or doubts. He says, "You might have hit on something, though. Lately I've been thinking that a private collector would not want to risk sanity, hanging it in a home. My agent is talking with the Tate. The one in London."

I stand in candid ebullience, marveling at this man's ingenuity and vision and technique. Peter comes beside me, holding paint tubes cradled in his shirt that he's pulled out from his pants. He squats beside a low table and begins stacking deformed tubes one-handed into some order. Then he looks over at me. Except for my bellow and the amateur's comment, I've not said a word. Peter must find this abnormal, because I'm otherwise chatterbox talkative in his studio. This is our space, our time as friends, time to be free and open, to talk art and theory and process, in candor and without the eavesdropping critique of non-artists. It's stuff that most people don't get, and find boring and insulting because they can't speak the same language. We can be jargon filled, critical, or completely out there; art-house banter; pretentious because we can be; because it helps to mix the stale thoughts, or purge them to make room for new thoughts.

Today is different; I know why, but Peter doesn't. Some of my silence is the effect of his canvases, their bouts of balance, color, perspective, and whatever else I see here. Strong art ought to do this to everyone, regardless of the method or material. But I can't get anything like this into the pieces I've worked on lately. The distinction between painting and sculpture doesn't matter to me, not at the moment when I'm struggling. You can only try to strangle the idea, just to see if it has an afterlife. You hope it doesn't (but sometimes you hope it does). Thinking like this, I wonder, How much is too much thinking, trying, not letting it happen? Artists can over-control the work, no matter how clear the idea. Peter shows indulgence for me because, as much as he can speak of the virtues of an artist's process, he'd just as soon not become its drunken whore.

"You're working on something," he says. The shadow of a long-gone lisp plays on the back edge of the sentence. Peter lightly slaps the side of his cheek.

I come out of my trance. "I'm always working, Pete. Finishing has been the problem. Selling is a problem." I'm conscious of breathing again.

His head shakes. He reaches his hand out from inside the pile of tubes and points a long index finger, stained with yellow paint. "No, no. You've got something. What have you discovered, Minus?" I see a line from his eye to the yellow fingertip. It ends at my forehead. "Is it the meaning of life? Or just how to make it shine from stone? Tell me!"

He's right. Without thinking too hard on it, as I've watched his paintings' movement, I've been wondering where the cereal throwing might take me. I mean, something that has visual context and isn't abstractionist metaphysical bullshit. A mouthful, I know, but this is what you do from the moment any idea strikes, down to the last touch of the sanding cloth: question, doubt, sleep on it, act, react, re-sleep on it, and re-react (or start over). I want dimension, but it has to be recognizable. I need form that questions my humanness; but not my existence. I tell myself this often enough.

Lack of ideas isn't the problem. It's likely I can make a case for the opposite. Ideas flood my imagination, crowding the frame with bulk and weight, where my eye is unable to rest on single objects. I liken this to looking up into falling snow until I spot one flake, high above, and then stick my tongue out to catch just that snowflake, and no other. All the others that touch your tongue don't matter, and all the effort — physical, psychological, universal — puts a plug on anything else. I liken it also to cataclysmic sexual interruption: the parents returning home. That's the idea. I liken it to a four-week vacation in the mountains, where it's just me and my pup tent and a fishing rod, and then coming back to stand on a Times Square subway platform at the rush-hour. I also liken it to death.

Peter's question nags me into asking my own. Do I tell him?

"Don't tell me," he says.

He's read my expression: artistic xenophobia. This information won't turn his face into a pile of hurt. He knows I'll fess up later, when what I've got (what I think I've got) makes sense to me. Which now it doesn't. "How did you know?" I ask.

Peter says, "You're thinking way too hard. You look like I do when I cross a mirror after a special day. I'm always covered in paint. Makes me look like one of those wax crayon etchings we did in the first grade. Except, you aren't covered in paint. The color is coming from beneath your skin. It's like you have a sunset and moonrise happening inside your chest. Quite beautiful, actually. But it hurts. Am I right?"

He smiles, and his teeth offset his skin, something he does to both accentuate White-America's standard dislike of blacks, and to play-act the black-face Al Jolson, which far too many people don't get because they're culturally illiterate, a subject we get onto often with our shared TV-generation roots.

If Peter's telling me I'm going after "unique" too hard, I know at least I'm working. Still, I'm not willing to talk about my Cap'n Crunch moment, if that is his ploy. He finishes his tube organization while teasing me with "hmm, mmmm" and "looky-at-the-nooky" — bullshit-phrases aimed to embarrass me. I'm not buying, and when he gets this he shuts up. He picks up a glass palate and heads to the double washtub. The spigot rushes full blast while he stands waiting. When steam rises from the spray, he backs off on the water pressure and immerses the glass palate in the hot bath. "Think into it, bro," he yells above the sprinkles and water rush. "Then work the idea like you know how. I see a spark in your eyes that's been too long in coming." His head whips around and his white eyes in the middle of that face are round and high beamed. "Not that you haven't been doing outstanding stuff."

Now he's flirting; I can play precocious.

"I've got something, N. I don't know what, yet, but I want a cycle to take shape, to take me somewhere I haven't been before or even think I've imagined."

"You aren't waiting for inspiration, are you?" He shuts off the water and grabs a towel from a trio hanging on an iron rod beside the washtub.

"What?" I say stupidly, because I've heard him just fine. I turn to his paintings and let my chin sink to my chest. "No, no," I say. "Not more than what's already come. I need to be in the studio. Put material together. Throw it together." Belinda used the right phrase — Keep throwing!

"Good, good, that's good. Guys like you and me don't need muses fucking with our minds."

Pete is spot-on. Just what I've needed to hear, and I'm glad Pete is the man who's said it. Work (working) has always solved the riddle. (We're talking about art here, of course, not cost analysis.) Last year I devised a whole color chart after spotting a bad Bondo job on the tail fins of a 1957 banana-yellow Cadillac. I kid you not. Often enough, getting to work can be that simple.

I don't believe in epiphanies, either, maybe less so than the muse. Epiphanies don't exist to the artist that has done his homework and — and especially — makes something out of nothing, if for no other reason than because it is possible. Start a piece and follow it to some conclusion, logical or illogical. Some days, one is as effective as the other. Because what you thought was the end of a project can turn into the beginning of the real work you'd been looking for all along. Everything that is discovered in the process of making art, I believe, comes from some preparation, not by accident. Whether you know it or not, that proverbial thing that is "just around the corner" is, in fact, only a few steps away. I also leave room for serendipity.

My head comes up. "Funny," I say, "I just heard –" But I think about the words just coming, and change my mind. "No, it's not so funny. Not to me. You be the judge; Belinda said something about muses this morning." I describe for him her "musing," but leave out the circumstances. I make a point to highlight my contra leanings from the whole physical muse-dom. When I think I've made sense, I close my mouth. Peter turns reflective. He stares away, at something on the wall or maybe through it by a hundred miles. As though he alone hears some sound.

"Yeah," he says. His voice is soft, like a kid whispering to a friend in the treehouse. "Sounds like something a muse would say."

"False images," I say. "Muse myths become a bit creepy, and – what's the pop-psychology phrase these days? – create co-dependence. I got tired of praying to graven idols, which muses are by any definition. Anyway, from what I can see, muses and artists equal nothing... Actually, I don't get it. Is a muse envious of her artist?"

Peter nods. A bit too sagely, though, and I wonder what's to come spewing from his mouth. "She can't do what he can," he says. "This is the muse I'm talking about, not Belinda in particular, if you know what I mean. Wendy, too. No matter.

"The muse can't make herself rise above what she is in life. This leaves her with one fallback: use her living appeal — you know, the thing that makes her wanted by artists — to absorb adulation from other non-muses, or hatred and wrath sent out by competing muses. Jealousy, fear, hate, even revenge plays a part, I think; beauty does this to women, and it works against other women. Men too, but we get into fights to let off the steam. First, I mean. Seems to work fine for swinging dicks. That other stuff, that's all different, artistic envy and jealousy. It's not worth talking about. Say, I've been meaning to ask, what're you reading these days?"

My eyebrows flash. (Julia Child for her lessons on herbs; Marcus Aurelius and his speech elocution; Ovid's doomed love verses; Whitman's present continuous verbs; Epicurus on "the good life"; and coffee table ditties on art Impressionism, Romanticism, and Classicism. The books are stacked like leftover fish bones on my studio tables. A month of reading, two months.) I say, "Not much, Pete," to which he opens his mouth to respond, but closes it and peers through shaded eyes.

Then he says, "Pick something up, dude." It's in his tone that he knows something about me I've just told him without admitting it. I must have flunked the eyebrow test. Peter takes this lightly, knowing I'm private at the early stages of a project; private is a word he understands as xenophobia. He stays with the subject: "I've found reading eases my working mind after a day around paint fumes. An art book can do the trick for you; some critic you can argue with through transom thoughts."

"Hmm. Critics...." I spread my fingers, flex them like a pianist, or a street thug.

Peter laughs. "Yeah, yeah. Fuck'em." He rummages through a box of tools, picks up a shiny palette knife and, as afterthought and mirrored in knife's sliver of reflection, sees himself and the purple polka dots on his head. He picks one away, winces, and puts the knife down. "I meant to ask," he says to me now. "How's Zeppo doing? I haven't seen much of him in the last few months. Not since his assemblage thing over at that Queens gallery. Is he okay?"

"Yeah, yeah. Fine. Speaking of a man and his muses. The guy has models around all the time. No, don't give me that look. An artist paints, and models are his whatever whatever. So it is like it is, he has new models in every week. Sometimes two or three at a time. I feel like I'm working in the same studio as Klimt. A couple weeks ago I heard him use the term octotych. I took it to mean he's got something linear going on."

Peter folds his arms. "Hmm. Sounds biblical. If I know Zeppo, it'll be 'Old Testament meets Times Square.' Not so far off, anyway, don't we know. Tell him I said 'Hey!' — will you? Okay. I'm done down here. You want to go upstairs and have a sandwich. One of my specials. I'll open a bottle of beer for you."

"What about the light meter?"

Peter stops. I watch his face wrinkle. "Oh – yeah, of course. What was I thinking? Bring that puppy this way and I'll explain what I've got in mind."

I roll my eyes because, but for all its purpose that got me here in the first place, I should be at the Beehive throwing cereal at wire dummies to see what sticks and what stinks. All the stuff we've been talking about!

While I dig into my backpack, Peter saunters to the far wall and uncovers four paintings under burlap. I recognize them. They are part of a twenty-three painting motif. Each is an impasto with contrasting colors. The layers are so thick in spots, I wonder aloud how it hasn't slid off the canvas. Peter uses the phrase "patience and hope," which sounds like a long sigh, although the breathing doesn't follow the words. He's worked on them for more than a year.

For the next forty-five minutes, while standing on the ladder he's pulled beneath his photo floods, he switches between a stack of colored celluloid filter sheets, placed on the ladder's paint tray, from which he holds up to one light aimed at each canvas. He alters the spotlight between two pre-set angles, and changes the intensity as the light is trained on or just above each canvas. Meanwhile, I work the light meter. Until he's happy with the readings I call out, he shuffles between filter colors. Each is a gradient of rose or orange or purple. For every change he likes, he pencils the information into a notebook. Sometimes he makes a quick decision ("Next!"), but several of the color changes transfix him, and I stand immobile for many minutes. My role is that of the judgmental viewer (average time looking at a museum painting: 3 seconds); the experienced eye of the visiting artist; the studied attention of the professional critic; and the "truth-telling" curatorial intern. Each utterance I make gives Peter some idea for how his work can hang just right, and no righter, for the show. When he's satisfied that all he has done is all he can do, I stash away the light meter. He promises lunch a second time, and my stomach gurgles its appreciation.

Upstairs in the kitchen, with cold beers in front of us on the chop-a-block island, Peter forms a puzzled look and says, "Did I ever tell you that my childhood dream was to matriculate at Juilliard?" He's spreading mustard on a slice of rye bread. In the background, Cole Porter's "Night and Day" plays from a small box radio. "I kept my plan a secret for three weeks. Didn't tell a soul. Then I sprang it on my parents one evening at the dinner table. I made this little masterpiece with my plate of spaghetti. I called it Red Worm Trail of Tears. We were studying Indians in school at the time, so the influence was obvious." He folds thin ham slices on one bread slice, and tears lettuce for the other side. "It was a vague stylistic rip-off of Jackson Pollack meets Freddie Kruger. My parents applauded. And while they twirled their spaghetti onto forks, using that Italian method we'd all learned from watching The Godfather, I declared to the world that I was going to photograph my plate and use it on my application to Juilliard." He finishes the sandwich with a grind of pepper and puts the halves together. "They eased me down from that mountain high real quick. Life's not been the same ever since."

"How does a New York kid not know that Juilliard is a performance school?" I ask.

"So shoot me! I hadn't seen Fame yet. Besides, Momma didn't want me to hear swear words or see Irene Cara's titties." He picks up the two plates on which he'd piled potato chips beside the sandwiches.

I follow him to his kitchen table beside a window overlooking a small garden in the courtyard. I notice Pete's girlfriend, Wendy, working outside. I hadn't known she was home. Wendy is kneeling in mulch, her pale arms stained black up to her elbows as she takes pansies from a flat and works them into holes dug in an arc behind a red-brick, serrated edge. Her face is stained by dirt marks, like a hobo, so light in places that they could be done by pencil, cross-hatches to give shadow, curve, definition. Peter is as inured to her presence outside as an old tabby sitting on a ledge watching birds dance in its yard. He puts the plates down gently and slides a chair out for me with one foot. "So that's what for," he says. I sit and we stare across the corner of the table at each other. We eat in silence for a while. The crunching potato chips, and our lips syphoning beer from the bottles, comfort us.

I have to ask. "What the hell are you talking about?"

He looks over, brows stitched, then his eyes roll up for a second to work over the question. He's got it and says, "Dude. I was fourteen at the time. I was in love with two things: watercolor paints (black and yellow), and Playboy centerfolds. Cut a bitch some slack, can you, please?"

Whenever Peter N talks street, or tries to, he's never able to clip his natural politeness. It's like watching some After School Special actor-dad trying to reach across a generation with nomenclature he can't commit to memory. I have a ready answer for him.

"Right on, G. You gots'ta come crib'n widda homeys. Catch us up sump kitty an'a coupl'a'tree forties! Knows whats t'i mean –"

"Hey now!" Peter jumps in. "I think you had better not say the next word, Minus." He uses his spatula to emphasize the reprimand. "Don't think I didn't grow up getting razzed by my Philly relatives. They called me Coat of Arms."

"The breast patch thing?"

"It's called a school emblem." He shakes his head in disgust for the memory. "Bunch'a wannabe niggas."

I make a face. "Pete, come on, man. You don't have to use that word around me. I come from Chi, and you get a whole head full of it living the white-suburban life. Those bozos wouldn't know cool if they laid their dicks against a light pole in winter."

"No, you don't get to use it for that. Hell, at least I'm black! Even if I'm not street."

Peter calls himself a "Jefferson." Not by namesake, but through the power of television. His family moved from Queens to the Upper East Side in the mid-Seventies, when being black in NYC was beautiful — at least according to blacks themselves, if not especially linked to the sit-com send-ups scrubbed clean by the networks for family viewing. More or less. His psychologist mother and chiropodist father enrolled their precocious man-child (with a crew cut and a slight lisp) into an East Side prep school. This was years before crack cocaine began to eat away at what had been a perennially surging "minority" community (poly-sci speak for anyone not WHITE) that some culture critics had cited as the "New Harlem Renaissance." Peter lost his lisp within a year or so, and found art class was the only thing that made him happy.

"Hey, Minus. Do I look old to you?"

While I've known Peter for several years, I've only seen him regularly since moving to New York. Peter is my age, almost exactly. We nearly share a September birthday. He works out; lifts weights at a Bally's near Battery Park, runs around its indoor track. His baldness is the product of a hereditary recessional hairline that he's taken control of, not allowing it to be the other way around. Peter looks good. But what does age have to do with anything else? I can only feel it in myself.

"Pete," I say. "I gotta get going."

"Keep arting, Minus."

CHAPTER 6

When New Yorkers want to escape the masses, the choking car exhaust, the bird-shat park benches, long cinema lines and over-priced restaurant meals ("Home of the $10 hamburger!" boasts a Theater District diner sign), the noise and the smells of four million bodies descended on this small island every day (many unshowered from the night before), NYers escape to their apartments and lock the door. No medieval redoubt must have felt as safe. While it is not entirely quiet inside a NYC apartment — neighboring sounds can be a trickle or a deluge: thump-boom music, marital disputes, truck horn blasts, drive-by gunfire, EMV sirens, energetic sex behind a common wall — at least NYers don't feel crowded.

You can't escape New York unless you leave New York. You are an equal party to this great City's magnificence. Anyone (you!) that leaves NYC still has NY with him (you again). At the fattest part of Manhattan island, a walk between the collaring rivers, the East and the Hudson, will take under an hour, if you're a good jaywalker. Yet, you're on an island. Sure, you can go to Brooklyn or Queens, only they, too, are on islands. More accurately, they are part of the same island, a very long island.

To find change, therefore, New Yorkers like to get out of their city at the weekend. They take trips — a Cape Cod bed & breakfast, the wooly Poconos forests, Mauntauk's fishing boats, walks along the South Jersey shore — to commune with nature, find space, shed people, and exalt in (if that's what one does) the silence of their own thoughts. Any of this can spell the feeling of coming unhinged.

The five million other inhabitants stay home to ride subways and buses, sit in coffee shops and bars, shop at the markets, walk the gum-strewn streets, or go to work for the sixth or seventh day that week (the true Clydesdales of the City). Some even choose to lie on a blanket next to mine on Central Park's Sheep Meadow. They are content. I'm satisfied, too, but wish they would move over another six inches.

People do go insane — all cities have insanity — but NY (my experimental city) has insanity within arm's reach, from Battery Park to the Bronx Zoo, Chelsea Piers to Rockaway. This affliction comes from crowded solitude, I think. At least, this has been my observation on two occasions. This solitude is humiliating, and you feel its scratch (somewhere near your liver) when large groups are at play. I wonder which of them, the solo flier in the flock, is feeling lonely while the rest of the group circulates around and within its tight formation. You can spot the soloist by his body tics, the jailhouse smile and rubbery glances, her driftwood movement from person to person. All this being my NY truth, I'm passionate for its awes and... the other things. The great City drops all manner of possibility before you.

I think a human shall find insanity in NY without having someone to call his own. To hold, to talk with as a friend, understand her desires as she understands yours. I had someone long before I noticed the insanity option. Belinda is my girl, my sanity barometer. We met on my third day in the City; she had transplanted from mittleamerika several years before me. Between us, we agreed we weren't looking for someone because NYC was such an ocean, and so we said good-bye that day. From the next week onward, we became inseparable. I can't explain why. Not exactly why. Which is helpful for one's sanity.

You can get used to all NYC has. All of it. And if you don't, you become one of those transplants who re-transplants: to the prairie, the mountains, the farm, or another city.

I call my Dad at least once a week. He sits in a chair most nights, a spot where he can fall asleep under the television's watchful blue-glow stare. Dad says he prefers to watch sports or a movie thriller, or even some cable-news hate-speak program, because he despises sit-coms and finds dramas ridiculous and sentimental. I can't blame him. Mom died two years ago. Only part of me is able to understand such grief.

Dad's chair, a green upholstered recliner that creaks when he sits in it and groans when he pushes himself out of it with both arms, sits next to the house phone, a black and white cordless model that gets left off the charger stand enough times so that the battery runs down sometime after I call, so we're often continuing conversations from the day or two before.

Dad likes to tell me about the Chicago weather, his way of preparing me for what NYC will get the next day or "1 day + x hours" later. He's convinced this is exactly how the jet stream works. "It's all about the consternation of calculation," he says, and deliberates for me weather forecasting statistics. Dad also says things like, "So, how are the dogs?" and "Well, I've cleaned the carpets again" and "When's the last time you talked with your sister?" None are as random as they sound.

Dad is a mathematician, which is to say he's a tad analytical. This is how I got my name. I have to be glad his favorite arithmetic calculation wasn't "multiplication." His name is Carl, which goes with our basic ScandiWeegie heritage (my looks, however, take after the German side of the family; I was teased with "the little Panzer commander" in childhood, among other Hitlerian references in our wop, polack, Mick, and kraut suburb). In Dad's world, there is always just one right answer to any problem. Given all of that, and that is a lot, he carries a terrible streak of wit buried just below the surface. Ergo, my name.

Tonight I dial Dad's number while Belinda washes the plates and flatware from our fresh gnocci feast. I'd crossed streets at a vegetable stand on the way home and, looking at what the old guy wearing a Mets/Yankees cap (two hats cut lengthwise down the middle and sewn together) was selling from his wagon — red apples and leafy greens pulled from their roots, and yellow peppers and purple grapes — gave me the idea to add spinach to the dish. Belinda took extra parma shavings, and I loaded up on a left-over iceberg wedge. We shared a light ruby cabernet. Now, the smell of wine is nearby, sitting shallow in the glass by my side, my lip marks around its rim wrinkling the light passing through. Garlic odors hang on the air. Belinda stands with her back to me, her shoulders rolling with each dishcloth swipe, while I lean my elbows on the island edge, watching her being domestic. The bulb light spots her from above like a club singer.

I hear Dad's voice on the line, sleep-awakened and rough from snoring with his head thrown back on the chair. It's not eight o'clock yet back in Windy. We say our hellos as he wakens and coughs. He spits, too. I trust that that has gone into a cup or napkin on the side table.

Dad says, "What's thirty-two times one-hundred and four?"

"Some big-ass number, Dad. What do I care?"

"Come on, Minus. Humor an old man."

All our telephone conversations begin this way, his form of male bonding. I tell Dad my answer: 3,327.

"Wrong... Wait, wait! How can you be one number off? You're always just one number off. That boggles my mind. Math is an exact and sweet science, but always being one number off? The odds are out of this world. Do you know? Can you plumb the odds? It can't happen!"

"I thought boxing was the sweet science?" I like to tease Dad away from his first trail scent.

"Are you trying to give me a migraine?"

I walk away from the kitchen island, away from the sight of Belinda's swaying hips, to go sit beneath the wooden arch. I've thrown down a drop cloth to practice chisel work on a block of white marble (a "mistake"), which I've placed squarely on a wood pedestal. Here I take a seat on the floor and lean against the stone. It radiates its cold core out and through my shirt. Belinda remains in view but only from the shoulders up. Above me, the arch seems a celestial frame.

"Maybe I miss the right answer on purpose," I say into the phone.

"If you're wrong in math calculation," Dad says, "you're usually way off. Such precision, even in error, would demand genius no mere math kid could possess." I hear a touch of pride within this accusation.

His assumption of a teaching voice is both attractive and repelling. The contradiction is on the order of something one must grow up with to appreciate. I can imagine him sweeping his hand through the air, a professorial move that holds drama and, so, is memorable to the class. For the record, I was never a "math kid."

"But you're always just one away," Dad repeats himself. "That's the definition of stupefaction. Seriously, son. Mind boggling."

"So get a government grant to study my oddity," I say. "We can spend six months together cruise fishing in the Bahamas. You can quiz my one-off math mind while we struggle with tarpons and sailfish."

"That's not a half-bad idea, son."

"My gift to you, Dad."

"Ah, but you can't be away from your work. Can you imagine trying to chisel marble on a rocking trawler? Ho! And the damned boulder would sink the frigging boat anyway, right? Ha! Ha!"

That's Dad, surgically removed moles and all. (I capitalize "dad" because this man is Dad to me, not a "dad from down the street" we all knew from our childhood neighborhood. Neither is he Dr. Carl Orth, the name he's known by his pupils, the public, his dentist, and the DMV.)

"Have you spoken to your sister?" he asks.

"No," I say quickly. When you tear off a bandage on a wound that just won't heal, you do it fast.

Mary Catherine is three years older than me. Not a big difference, except that she wed young to a man much older, named Donald, already gray at the temples at thirty-four, heavy around the shoulders (but not the gut, thus giving him a top-heavy appearance that made you wonder if he might tip over, capsize). Mary Catherine was out of the house too soon, in my parents' opinion. I sort of agreed, but today for different reasons than then. First, she focused on the American Dream, and was heartbroken when her older husband left her for his secretary. Talk about cliché, right? Not too fast: Donald's secretary was male, and they now own a chain of car washes in Santa Barbara. Second, MC decided the next step was to travel a religious path for "self-examination and psychological protection," as she wrote her reasons to me in a short reply to my (admittedly ill-advised) shorter letter ("What are you thinking?" was one of my queries, as I recall). Never the best thing a young divorcée could fall back on when she already had the house in Glen Ellyn that gay-Donald left behind by court decree; she had a Ford Bronco (same decree); she had a job with State Farm Insurance. Then Mary Catherine began dating a nice gentleman named Daniel (equally gray templed, but with a happy smile and better center of gravity) that she'd met at a Sunday ice cream social on Chicago's lakefront, where the church had set up a tented revival area next to the picnic benches dressed in white linen. "Beware white," Dad said jokingly, after she had described it to us, standing outside mom's hospital room in her last days.

"We haven't spoken for a couple months," I say to Dad. Belinda has finished the dishes and comes to sit with me. Our legs stretch out side by side. She takes my wine glass and drinks from it, leaving a lip imprint the shade of dried rose petals. I talk into the phone. "Mary Catherine tells me 'art is the devil's handy-work.' How do I respond to this person anymore? The last time I heard words like that was in an American history class. We were studying pre-colonial Puritans. Joseph Cotton. Or was it Cotton Mather?"

"I get those two mixed up myself," Dad tells me. His equanimity is laced with that singular Midwestern irony we used to call dry-rot (no need for a laugh or a double take). Dad is joshing me, of course. I'm used to being joshed. We are a family of joshers. Or were. Mary Catherine has given all that up. She used to be the best josher of the bunch. The Bible leaves her no room for joshing, not in her suddenly changed and ever-diminutive worldview. Odd, because in my reading of that book Jesus was the biggest josher-character in all of literature. He had to be, considering his foil was the vengeful God of the Old Testament.

"Find some common ground," Dad suggests, not for the first time. "Mary Catherine will always be your sister."

"Our shared genes are as close as I can get to her these days, Dad. I don't know why she's grown vindictive. Religion is supposed to be soothing, n'est cest'pas? It's not like we make fun of her. I just don't understand why she's coming from the corner she's put herself in. Probably I shall never know. She takes every word so seriously. All I'm left with is... c'est la vie." Dad hates when I use my little French.

"You take your art seriously, son, as she takes her calling. I hear elitism when you speak about such and such."

"Hey, guilty as charged, pop. But I don't spit fire'n'brimstone for dropping church (not that I ever went regularly) — nor do I go around proselytizing Rembrandt's love for you if only you'd open your heart to him." I suddenly think I could do this very thing, which frightens me a little. The difference between my sister and me, however, is that I don't consciously act on an urge to spread the Gospel of Art.

"Go easy, Minus. She's in a phase."

"She's thirty-six years old, Dad."

I hear a caustic double-click. Dad's call-waiting has invaded.

"That must be her now, Minus. Can we do this again in a few days?"

"Of course, Dad. Get some real sleep tonight, huh? I love you."

"Sure. I'll roll into bed right after –"

I hear a kick-clunk... kick-clunk and I miss the last of his sentence.

"Okay, Dad. Tell Sister-Sister that Minus says 'Word Up' from New York."

Dad laughs. "She might like that." He can take a joke.

I switch off, letting him move onto his other child.

Belinda reaches for the dead phone and lays it on the corner of the wood block. For a moment I look at the incongruity of wood and rock and plastic phone, and think of incorporating the modern with the classical. I blame this on the hour of night because I don't practice art fusion. It's enough to live in NYC, finding French-Mex or Russian-Irish restaurants. Belinda takes my hands and we hold each other. From a safe distance we must look as people who are in love look at each other, with all that time in front of us, and wanting no other person in the world.

In surprise, the words "Yes, let's get wed!" are on my lips. But I don't say them. How I answer her proposal is more important than when. She smiles and sort of sniggers. For a second I think she's on to me. "How is he?" she asks. This isn't Belinda being polite, she likes Dad. "Okay, but...." "But?" "He needs a friend," I say. Belinda arches her eyebrows. Uh-oh, I think. Besides her caring nature, she also loves to play matchmaker. Age of subject is no barrier because she's able to find a suitable date (if not mate) for a friend from somewhere in a crowd standing at the deli counter with ticket in hand, minding her (his) business and only wanting nine ounces of Scottish lox. Suddenly they find the idea that love might be just around the corner. Her last success was Peter N and Wendy. Thinking of that match gives me an idea.

"Does Wendy have an older sister?" The thought of dad with a younger woman — one nearly my own age — makes us laugh.

"Is it out of the question?" Belinda is thinking already of the possibilities, funny or not. "Distance doesn't matter as much as personality, size, mid-life temperament, dowager-type wealth, or shape. Chicago or Honolulu — what's the difference?"

"While I don't think he would be offended, floating the idea might frighten him."

"You don't know your dad so well, is what I think. He would be terribly flattered."

"Okay, I get your female intuition and sense of getting busy. No, I do. But I think I'll suggest a colleague from the university before suggesting we help him with a fantasy gift. Please?"

Belinda assents. "How is Peter, by the way? And Wendy?"

I tell her about my adventure in light meter-land, lunch, seeing Wendy in the garden ("barely a cameo"), and Peter's lofty encouragement. His words had that quality of the master to the pupil, I tell Belinda, which, upon reflection, irks me. Is it the success of the artist that gets into their heads, or the idea that their work is better, or that their ideas are better and so the work will always be of high quality (higher than yours), which makes them say things so naturally what should not be so natural (like, to give advice or criticize)? I shouldn't want to care. But sometimes I do.

"I hope I don't get that way," I tell her. Deep down, though, I think I already have. Completely unwarranted, of course. And what makes the difference between him and me? This isn't a question I ask Belinda, because no answer is necessary. It's the success, actually. Which means I'm jealous.

Belinda asks me to repeat what Peter told me, and, after listening, says I'm overreacting, but that I'm not so wrong. It's a cheering analysis. "He's your friend," she reminds me. "Otherwise, that's just Peter. He can't help himself."

"Okay. Sure. Hey, speaking of phone calls," I say, to get off the subject. "I talked with your mom just before you got home. She was calling to talk to me, so –" It's been more than a week since the Carley Slope call, but her expression informs me that my subject-changer wasn't necessary.

"My mother calls when she knows I'm out," Belinda says. "Except when she wants to tell me that someone has died." She yawns and waves off my mounting protest, which must show in my eyes long before speech is able to catch up. This is the last she will speak of the subject, her wave implies. Basta! Belinda's nonchalance kills me. This is real, not subterfuge. She can go a month without talking to her Nebraska folk. "She'd rather talk with you," Belinda says. "I think I'm right, because with you she gets reality."

I'm able to see inside Belinda more with each new MotherCall. This comes from having, by increments, understood the difference between what is said and what is heard, the same stories told from both sides versus what I already know of Belinda's background. Alice is a woman I've known by voice and photographs only (she's asked me to call her Alice, not "Mrs" or, god forbid, "mom"). Even the photographs were something of a chore to get hold of, because I had to ask twice and give Belinda the excuse, I've spoken with the woman nine times and I need a face to match the voice (to which Belinda answered: "It'll match, but not fit.")

Alice's natural speaking voice is high and fluid, confident and chatty (with humor attached like a pet's leash). Whenever I answer the phone to find her on the line, she's already talking as though the last conversation hasn't ended. But this is only normal, perhaps, something we know and see in others or, less likely, recognize in ourselves. What is not normal, however, is that Alice has told me things about Belinda I shouldn't have learned from anyone other than Belinda: when and under what circumstance she got her first period; a list of bratty tantrums like the description of different nails and screws a hardware salesman relates in detail to you; tales of sisterly conflicts, rivalries, and loitering animosity; grammar school grades and early girlhood crushes; and then there were the teenage boyfriend failures. I hadn't asked for secrets to be revealed, and, mostly, the information came as a surprise. What I mean by this is, in the middle of a story about the latest hometown happenings in Cornville, NE, Alice would shimmy into the conversation some sideways memory of her daughter: "My friend, Claire... I've told you about Claire, the mousy neighbor who raises nettles in her front yard... she was over for coffee and a cordial the other night, telling me about her brother Albert and his playboy lifestyle. Seems Al has got his hands full down at the high school again. Not with the students, mind you, but the secretarial staff! I can only imagine. And Claire, she couldn't keep her eyes off the portrait of my girls hanging over the fireplace... you know the one I'm talking about [I didn't]... which got me thinking about just what little bitches those girls could be to each other at that age. Back in the day, you understand. Belinda and Rebecca fought like cornered polecats, right up to the time they got their periods. Nearly on the same day, too. Belinda became a woman early, which Rebecca didn't like at all. She claimed Belinda had stabbed her own palm with a fork and rubbed the blood on the inside of her thighs. All in a day's battles, I guess. They traded barbs like old men over a checkers board. This that and the other, before they were thirteen years old. Later, Rebecca's peerless beauty upset her younger sister like all get-out, and you have to believe rivalry grew like Claire's nettles. I mean, we're women and pretty and smell nice, but what lurks under the ironed dresses everyone sees on Sunday morning isn't hardly the truth of a week gone by, now is it, Minus? But Claire, you know, she's just the pill that choked the horse, because her three boys haven't married well... town girls, horse-faced and all and with good childbearing hips but without charm... And Claire wonders how life is outside the county...."

What scorched my ears in all of that was Alice's "peerless beauty" comment that described Belinda's sister. Sisterly rivalry maybe, or maybe a rivalry helped along by mom. If it was the latter, and, if such choice words had been leveled at her daughters in their teens ("thrust" might be a better word, or even "parried" against a teenager's sharp tongue), there's no doubt what sabotage had razed sibling love. This explains why Belinda looks askance at the phone whenever it rings. This explains why the name Rebecca is not heard in our house. Not that I've noticed so much between the two of us, but a good jolt of adulthood will scare mom & dad's influence to some back room of the mind, and if one's lucky it will seldom peek through the keyhole — like an old aunty banished to the attic. Alice's voice in all its guises says much about her past, whose details remain unknown to me (Belinda is yet, I'm loath to say, an unreliable storyteller on this subject).

Belinda drinks more of the wine and curls her toes through mine. She hands the glass to me so that I get the last swallow. Before I drink, I ask, "Don't you tell her the truth about your life? She's your mom, after all, and you're an adult woman living your own life. Far, far away. So what's the problem? You never know, you might just blow her mind." Such questions I understand are unfair because of what I know (or think I know; I am aware of the difference) but I nonetheless probe her psyche for further clues to my lover's essence.

"I said reality, Minus. She doesn't want to hear the truth."

Sometimes I wonder about paintings that show several people in obvious conversation, or having just finished talking and then — think takes them over. I often daydream about what might have just been said between such characters. This is the full invention of art, I tell myself, and then feel a mental kick for not having lived in the centuries when realism ruled one's chisels and brush and palette. Those people in the paintings, the ones I wonder about, have spoken the words that Belinda and I have now traded. Sometimes, life is that simple.

Belinda sees that I'm thinking hard, and knows that if she doesn't take me away, I'll brush the phone off the block and take up hammer and chisel until the wee hours. Little does she know that if I were to tell her all that I knew (and how I'd come to know it), I'd be the banished aunty.

"Want to go fool around, boyfriend?"

Her smile, its invitation to... everything... wipes my mind clean. Almost wipes my mind clean. We leave the phone were it stands and race to the bedroom. I grab her hips as she reaches the foot of the bed, pull her back, and get onto the mattress first. You win, I say. She smirks. "Show me my prize."

"Minus, wake up." Belinda jostles me through half sleep. "Honey, open your eyes." She pushes me, rocks the mattress until the bed squeaks with a familiar rhythm. But that's not what's happening. "I have to talk to you."

"It can't be morning," I say through a pasty mouth. The light is silted black. "I can't see the wall. I can't see you."

"Turn over," Belinda says. "I'm right beside you. You don't want to know what time it is. Time doesn't matter. You don't want to see me. We don't work rat-race hours, so you can sleep again in the morning. Have an afternoon nap. Just concentrate now, okay? And wake up."

I turn over. In the darkness I do see Belinda, sitting cross-legged, her hands firmly cupped around her knees. Has she been meditating? I shake my head to spread some sense across the outer edges of my brain.

"Listen to me for a moment, two moments," Belinda says. "Are you awake? Good. Listen. What I've got in mind is to help the horse — that'll be you — that can break mid-race and finish strong. Take the reigns of a spirited –"

"You'd better not say animal," I protest. She's talking hysterically. Never listen to a hyperactive at three o'clock in the morning, their minds are filled with the poetry of their dreams.

"No, no, darling," says Belinda, practically in a purr. Her fingers run up my nape hair, around the back, and onto the crown. The feeling stimulates nerves all the way to my toenails. She takes a handful of hair, and another. "Okay, so I did see you as an animal. Sorry. But horses are so beautiful and powerful. Very good imagery. Anyway, you're also the wind that runs before the force that is you. I'm talking about what you make when you chisel and grind and sculpt. The business side of you, that's my angle, my edge. It always has been! I woke up from some dream that I can't remember, but the feeling I had — have — is that I've been the one all along that can do this."

"Do what?" I ask, in the tone of a simpleton. I'm still a little foggy on facts here, and her ode to me has confused my own reasoning. Her words have flown at me like bats agitated in a cave. "Hey, can we turn on the lamp?"

I feel her body shift on the bed through shadow and blackness, and then the bedside lamp pops on with overly bright yellow light. We blink at each other in silence, and dust away the glare. Belinda draws herself close to me again. Her hair is a tumble of dark strands. She sits on her knees in her pajama pants, the legs pulled up to show calf, its tawny skin smooth because she shaves her legs at night.

"Okay," she says. "As I was saying, your arms are the sculpture's life force, your fingers its delicate nerve ends firing upwards from its depths... just follow me; this is fun... you have the touch that makes it something. This is your voice speaking to the world, and it needs to be directed at the right people. They must be made to see you as this, this, this guy who makes great art. Because you do, only they don't see the package. Without the package to start their imaginations, in this market, there's less chance to notice the art. Do you see what I mean?"

I think of many emotions to use for objection. One: outrage. No art without packaging? That's wrong! Yet, in a breath filled with time to ponder, I understand how right she can be. All I need to do is walk into a middle-of-the-block art gallery to find the weird, the quirky, the obvious, the strange and insipid. That's enough. Only then, it's not enough. Not for modern art, which only gets more outlandish by the half year. Art is sliding the way of the Hollywood movie: one violent thriller must top the previous hit, your next sex scene dirtier, raunchy. Now sculpture is unnatural (even when it's meta-figurative): terra cotta dogs in rabid frenzy; broken glass bottles fused together on steel rods à la Alice in Wonderland. I don't want to take this path (never had). That's not me, nor how I see the world, as though it's coming apart at the seams. (I'm simplifying the art world, here, a necessary argument to keep brevity as it should be: girth without breadth. Nevertheless....) Okay, so now there's room here for affirmation. Her words have sounded like a beautiful combination of Renaissance sensibility and Twentieth-Century pragmatism. Business is business. Unexpectedly, a simple counter argument comes to mind.

"The art is the commodity," I say, using the voice of a survey course instructor. "Not the artist."

"Says who?" Belinda responds, in the voice of the willful student. "No, you're right. But let's look back a skosh; people identify the art with the person. Take Warhol. Good art? Sure. Now see the weird hair, big nose, and hear his funny voice. Suddenly, his soup cans and Marilyn and Mao take on real form. Look at Dalí. Freaky guy, plus freaky art, equals freaky recognition. Your precious Rembrandt, too. His self-portraits made self-love honorable in art. As you can tell, the product identifies the artist, and so looks back to the art."

"Sweetheart. I'm not a bottle of soda pop," I point out, needlessly perhaps. "Even if I were, I'd have to taste good. You know what I'm talking about. The art. It's the art, not the packaging. It can't be the package. The art has to be good. It has to be great; well, maybe not so great anymore. Anyway, I know mine's good... and will be better. You know it's good. They need to look at the art before they can see what makes it good."

"They do? Do they? Have you seen the shark suspended in Jello or whatever?"

"Hirst. He used formaldehyde."

"I can make a case that, in fact, they hadn't looked at that. Besides, he was already famous for his curatorial work before the shark thing. Otherwise –"

"Hold on," I say. "That's only part of it. Or might be part of it. Jesus, now you have me thinking dark, cynical thoughts."

"Not cynical," she fires back. "Realistic."

"Maybe. Okay, maybe. But back to me. They won't look at my art because... because – because – because. Who knows why! They know, or maybe they don't know. It's a question! This isn't anything new to artists, it just happens to be happening to me. Right now. Not, not, not in the future. The near future."

"Exactly!" She yells this to me with her head thrust to the ceiling. I wonder if our neighbors are getting all of this. "That's the spirit I knew you had inside. Now it's time to sell your work by showing it and selling you as part of your art: the past you, the present you, the future of you, and the future of your art. Maybe the future of art itself. Product. Packaging. Marketing. Minus-Appeal. I'm thinking out loud here, so work with me."

"Sounds ambitious," I say. "But wait a second. I thought you had people in mind. Experienced agents. My assumption was you had a Plan A, because you said you were going to ask around. Call in some markers. Your art model IOUs, so to speak. Something like that."

"Not exactly like that," she says. Her voice is filled with irony. Her head bobbles in thought. I know the look. She has to tell me something bad. "What I'm proposing is Plan A-dash-a. A small difference. You see, I did make phone calls, lots of them. Not all exactly IOUs. And I dropped in on people. No one wants the job."

"Oh," I say. "Great!"

"No, listen. It's fine. It's not you, it's them. It's not your work. They just have more than they can bite off right now, is what they say. Look at the market! Maybe, I suppose (they supposed, too), if you were established, there would be talk. But that's all their bullshit agent talk, too. What they mean is that you aren't known for something. See? That's the marketing thing all over again; the name that bears recognition gets the spotlight before the work is even seen. I mean, come on, Minus, look at the Times' best-seller lists. The same names selling the same stories to the same readers. Art can take a lesson from that. Maybe it already has, in decades past. Yeah, I think it has.

"So let's get you known: for your art, your mouth, your attitude, your views on something. Something that makes a noise! Listen here, because here's the deal. I've worked in the arts; I know people — they've moved around, but haven't died or left for Paris or London. And, it's time I put my college degree into action. Minus, this can work. Art prices are crazy high these days. Museums can't compete with collectors on the old stuff, but they can for young, new artists making art now. The number of millionaires tripled in the eighties; billionaires grew by a factor of five! Where have they put their money? ART. Galleries now stand shoulder-to-shoulder from here to Bangkok. We're in an art glut, and still they want more."

She's done some work on this already, I realize, but all those facts don't account for the art that is either good or not-good-enough. I've read these same things in the trade magazines. She reads about it in the NYT business section. Which is true, or truer? I don't know. What is good art, though, in the world of money with no eye for the aesthetic, is what money says is good. Or the popularity polls. Or both. Which of the two leads the other might be the real question.

"Belinda, do you really think this is the right — wait. I'm not suggesting you couldn't do the job. More importantly, though, for us both — do you want to be an artist's manager? And what about Gretchen? The coach business has taken off. You've built a good business with time and money, all to get established. Now that you have that, you're saying you want to start over at something you –"

"And years and years are all that's in front of me." She bobs her head some more. "The coach business is good money. Could even get better. The overhead, though, is the camel's back. That can only get heavier. And lately, in the middle of the night, I've awakened from dreams that have me sitting on that seat behind Gretchen, in the cold, with snow falling on my shoulders, and I'm shivering. I can't stop shivering. I wake up with the sniffles. The Age of Dickens is not what I had imagined when I saw myself driving that cab. I'm not sure what I imagined, after imagining myself into buying a horse and the hansom cab. Whatever that was and has turned into, I don't want to be found frozen to the seat. You'd have to peel my boots from the footboard, crack my fingers inside their gloves to pull away the reins –"

"Okay, okay. You've set the scene, Ghost of Christmas Future. But so how long would you last as an arts agent? My arts agent? The pay might be great — sky's the limit! — but the hours will suck. And the work is routine. You know some of these gallery types. Their middle names are No and their business cards say 'Don't call us, we'll call you.' The only gratifying work in this business, if you ask me, is making the art. Everything else is no different from a sundry office job."

"That's how you would see it. After all, you're just the artist. You should see it as all of that. That'll keep you focused on your art. Meanwhile –"

"Meanwhile."

"Meanwhile, someone like me –"

"Someone like you, or YOU – capital letters?"

"Me. Look, I've been trained in sports and media management. A fucking gold mine, but filled with packs of swinging dicks. The industry just doesn't like women — unless they type one-hundred words per minute and take dictation in shorthand. No thank you. The art world is different, yet Art hasn't much difference as a commodity: you make people see the product the way you want to sell it. Hold back, please, on that 'art as purity' look, okay? How do you think Dalí became the only surrealist to make it big? Marketing! He sold himself along with his art. Charlie Chaplin did the same thing in film. Erica Jong did it in publishing. Shall I go on? Art has never been only pure, if it ever was that at all. Maybe for the cave wall scratchers. Artists have been in it for business as much as beauty. Do the names da Vinci and Michelangelo ring a bell? Okay. Now we're in the Nineties, and if the Seventies and Eighties taught us anything, it's that perception needs to be massaged. Jesus Christ, people have even started liking Nixon again, all for writing a book on diplomacy. Give me a break."

I ask myself, as I look at this beautiful demon in front of me, Is it her diminishment of art itself that bothers me, or the commercial sense she wants to apply to me? I'm not sure that I should care, as long as I get to make the art that I want — and be successful for that. Although could I be accused of –? No. That's not a thought for me to have.

"What about the art?" I ask again.

"Yes. Keep saying that," she says. Her voice is calm, the voice of reason. "That's good. The art is the perception."

"I know that," I say. "That's why I asked."

"That's the beauty of the plan," she says. "In a couple of weeks you're appearing on that arts panel. The 95th Street Y is a great stage on which to be noticed. Don't plan, just be you. You'll say profound things. You'll say outrageous things. You'll get press. Then, in the summer, there's the sculpture symposium. More press. Especially if you win. You're in a good place to break out, Minus. That's what I'm saying."

"My art needs to break out!" It's my turn to yell. Only, there's something else here (among all the other unspokens). "And in three years? Five years? I need staying power from a manager, Belinda. Question: will you get bored, or tired, or feel like you're frozen to the seat? I'm sorry if this sounds cruel, but I have to ask."

She doesn't miss her cue.

"Take your fat-ass lava lady that slid off the window, and make her into a life-size whatever, however you dream up the art that you do. That's when we'll see our future. You'll know where your sculpture is taking you. The art takes care of itself. Meanwhile (yes, again: meanwhile: all part of the plan) –" She takes a fast breath to continue, before she passes out. "– I'll find you buyers. Like those face card pals of yours."

"That's true," I say. Her words are both harsh and reassuring. Reassuring, I think, for their push against my self-doubt. She's jarring me loose from the frame, or anchor, or root, of... something of which I'm not certain exists. If that makes sense. I'm not sure it does, though.

"As for the future," she continues, "it's the 'ole hens in the henhouse story: don't count them too soon. What I'm saying, mister draw-a-blank, is that we can hire someone who can open castle doors. Later. First things first. Slay the villagers."

I'm not so sure of her mixed analogies, but the story sounds like a good story to live as a character. The protagonist, of course, or at least one of his rivals.

"I guess it can work. It's worth a try."

"Minus. Honey. My job is only to promote you, while you make your art speak to the world. There, that's how this conversation began. These are not in contradiction. That is my point."

Her gesture is catching, and I catch myself bobbing my head to the music she's playing. But....

"You don't mind getting back into that scene?" I ask, with the bite of seriousness.

"What scene?" She plays it fey, but she knows what's implied. "So I did some modeling. No big deal. I've told you most of that. The best part was the education I took from it all. Only I didn't exactly know it — recall just how and with what — until like yesterday."

I remember what she'd told me, and I don't remember. It's funny how knowledge is ephemeral, much of the time; I know a lot and yet very little for certain. It often feels as gut reaction more than stored information.

"Minus, I can do this. The connections, my business sense. It all adds up to the same thing, except for mountains of experience and a bucketful of haughty opinions about what is good." She frowns and, in a forced tone of mock conciliation, says, "Not to be indelicate, but I can hardly do worse than you have, all alone."

My neck stiffens. "That was indelicate."

Silence.

"Sorry about that," Belinda says, her tone penitent. "My thoughts came out wrong. No worse than your questioning my staying power. Let me try that again. You need a voice from the field to speak their language for you. I was there, I know how they talk the business of art. So you talk art, I talk the biz, and we'll find a happy, nutty center."

"Okay. Because you say you can do that, I think so, too, because I've heard you. But, can you do that? For real?"

"When you sit for hours as a model, you hear everything. Words, words, deals, deals. After a while, you might think they're selling soap. And with all the art that's out there, and all the bars of soap, they might as well be. The difference is, your soap must smell good and make people feel clean. No better or cleaner than the next soap, only just as popular with as many people. It doesn't even matter what the reason is for their preference. Sure, I'm simplifying, but that's business. Sell sand to an Arab, and make an artist buy his competitor's work. Business. Supply and demand is hardly the key to success anymore. It's image. Get in, make your name, make great art, make your money, and, then, keep making art if that's what you want to do."

I lie back, linking my hands behind my head.

"That's an incredibly commercial take on art," I say, more to myself, but then, it's out there between us to cut up and parse. Only, there's something more on my mind. "I'm sorry, but I must always ask more of myself."

"Good. Better!" She again takes my words to use for her own advantage. "I'll use the same for my motto. Then you'll see, because I know you don't see, now. You can't. Okay. I need to prove myself. I shall. Every day."

"Just what kind of business did they teach you at Nebraska?"

"The kind that works. It gets the job done, because the job is there to be done. Money in the bank, people talking about you, etcetera etcetera. Chuck Close: you know him — he's got the look and the name to match his art: the faces of everyday Joe's and Jane's in close-up, put onto giant canvases. The most common idea imaginable, and he's a fucking star!"

I hadn't known she'd thought so much about art. When I tell her this, she asks me, soto voce, what I think she does all day while riding on the back of her hansom cab. Yes, but... okay. And... so... sure. Her offer is magnanimous, but that word comes with a price tag.

"Not to be indelicate," I say, "but we need to sign a contract. Areas of influence, percentages, terms of agreement." I smile. She returns it just as I predicted she would.

"Right," she says. "I think we both agree that simple is better."

"Lawyers are simple, my love," I say. "You pay them cash, and they shark for you." She gets my drift. "But I think that we can write something up on notebook paper. For now. Before that, tell me more."

She doesn't frown. She doesn't avert her eyes. She leans into me with an aggressive gesture of confidence and forethought.

"I wouldn't have it any other way, boyfriend. Partner. Now, understand. The top people must be excited into backing you. Think of it as going into a pigsty rubbed down with clover flowers." She rubs my legs but no cricket chirping plays through the room, so she nibbles on my ear. "Now think of me as the clover." She rubs more. "You need sales, but patronage would be okay, too, for now. You know, to give you time to create something spectacular. Which I think you can. Will you?"

The issue of a challenge.

She's right, and that kind of rightness is its own job and has its own hours. Patronage? She's thinking of the FaceCards. Her imagery of business action makes me think of a not very traditional girl. How do I tell her that my pound-the-pavement, door-to-door style, is what I really like about showing my work? I don't say anything. Old fashioned methods aren't appreciated. Most of the time.

"I can handle the fastballs, Minus. The curves, too — no major leaguer can make it without hitting a curve ball every now and then." She sees me taking in another sports analogy, her go-to lessons on life. Some people use New Age affirmations ("The universe loves me") to make themselves get out of bed. Belinda has her gym bag full of pep talk one-liners. There's something else in her eyes, too, about the work, an unknown expression to my cataloged history of her ticks and gestures, the moods, the heat within surrounded by charred edges.

"Let's do this," she says. Her hand comes forward, no longer the sea snake but a paw (bear is too big for her, but... fox?). She waits for me to shake on the deal. When I take her hand in mine (really, though, it seems the other way around) the light in her eyes has changed again. It hasn't returned to the Belinda I know, but has moved onto a third being. Her grip on my hand is dog-bite tight.

The idea swills in my stomach, or maybe this feeling is the wine, one glass too many and then woken up to this. Nevertheless, and I don't know if it's her argument, or the Karen K fiasco, or even the Carley Slope mini-meltdown, something in me lets doubt slide from my shoulders, and I agree to her plan.

CHAPTER 7

The freight elevator takes me up to the art cooperative with beast-of-burden dedication. Its space is ideal for over-size canvases, lanky sculptures, wholesale-shopping booty, and one-ton stone blocks. The impedimenta of a busy art studio. When the door slides up, I find the room streaked in slanting sunlight through the skylights. Dust floats on the illuminated air, and the room gives off caustic smells of oil paints and thinner. Under these usual odors I get slapped by a whiff of ozone, peculiarly pungent. I look up, over the cable and canvas framework that divides our separate studios. A white cloud hovers high overhead, up close against the skylights. So then, this can't be ozone. My next thought is that the room is on fire.

"What in all hell?" I say, feeling my ready-to-work attitude frazzle.

"Dats what I'm saying," answers a voice. I step from the elevator's metallic echo and find Vendulka lying on a couch.

"Is there trouble?" I say, ready to help, but more concerned with safety than playing Frank Fireman.

Vendulka shakes her head. "Some ax'dent. Nothing about to worry, they say. But, you know." She takes a second, and bites a nail down to the quick. "Hey, where the frick has you been? We wondered if you leaved town for holiday."

Her speech makes my brain hurt. "Just around, Vendy. Arting. Dog walking. The usual." The noxious cloud is staying high and, on second look, I notice someone has opened the skylight windows. Only a mist, or haze, hovers down here on the floor.

She shrugs a sudden indifference. "Yeah, this is how I thought."

Vendulka Drakulikova is a Slavic émigré from the Krkinose Mountains, along the Polish and Czechoslovak border. She takes English language lessons twice a week, night classes, at a Berlitz school on 21st Street. She's asked me to correct her grammar, but I'm shy to do that over and over and over and over. I don't want to discourage the conversation we already have.

She lounges on one of the three leather sofas we've shoved close around a television. A game show flickers, casually dressed contestants smile or frown, one gesticulates at the camera, and a sudden eruption of ringing bells brings the audience alive, followed by a buzzer and a loud groan from the losing contestant. The TV sits atop a box refrigerator, its rabbit ears wrapped in foil and wound tight with wire, which sticks out all over, like cattails gone to seed. The set gets decent reception from the broadcast channels, though since the Yankees have signed with a cable station, only a handful of games get played on the local UHF station, WWOR. So few of us hang around, anymore, after the good light has bled away and work becomes pointless. Vendulka is eating cereal from a big cappuccino cup. I'm wondering if it's Cap'n Crunch, when a thought strikes me. Binny, the co-op co-owner, insists the fridge contents be exorcised once a month. This, at least, I agree with entirely.

"Who's on fridge duty this month, Vendy?"

Vendulka gulps a mounded spoonful of cereal. Milk dribbles down her chin. She chews and swallows, then points the spoon at me.

"It's your turn, Minus." She draws her head in a quick nod that I should come closer. When I squat beside the couch, she whispers, "Queen Bee calls for crash meeting." I wonder why she's speaking softly. Crash meetings are a Binny-and-Alfred special. It's anyone's guess what "issues" the agenda will list. Vendulka curls a finger to draw me even closer. I'm trapped in the gesture of gossip.

"Some of us hear that Aspen dealers is coming for a SOHO tour next week." She nods sharply. A milk droplet falls from her chin and lands between her breasts, quickly disappearing down her cleavage. Vendulka doesn't seem to mind. My eyes hurt not to follow its path.

She's made an odd comment, odder than what I'm used to hearing from her. The cooperative has only six members: Binny and Alfred (Queen Bee and Her Consort), Bert, Vendy, Zeppo, and me. The Honeycomb Drones is my name for this sorry Rock'n'Canvas band (I see myself playing bass).

"Vendy," I explain, " 'some' doesn't really leave anyone out of the loop."

Her expression fights through the tribulations of translation. "What does this 'out of the loop' mean?"

"You know," I say, "like not being in on the info."

"This is more difficult. Idioms I don't know good. You can explain?"

I heave a sigh. Teaching English is hardly my strong suit. For a second I think about using this idiom, too, just to blow her mind (and why not throw that in). I try to be kind, and informative. "They both have to do with having information, or getting it, and sharing it. Who has info and who doesn't, and to who you want to give it."

She smiles and nods vigorously. "That's brilliant, Minus! But I think the grammar you want is 'to whom'."

Just what I need. A foreigner entranced by comprehension and guile.

"Okay," I say, "I can't claim to have invented the language. So, now, is this Aspen thing a secret that's not for sharing?"

"Fuck that I know," she says. "I just wanted you to... be on the loop." She makes a healthy, sexy-mouthed smile, an image that tempts response. I merely nod. I want to get away.

"Okay. I'll see you at the powwow table, Ven."

Vendulka wiggles her fingers good-bye at me. Slavs must do a lot of this, because her fingers like to point, wag, curl, wiggle, and twirl. Loving this woman would have to be something savor-full. I know who wants this very thing, too, after a long, long, and only half-hidden desire. I step gingerly into the center of our co-op. Down at alley's end, I see that my tent folds are open, waiting, beckoning. I hear mixed tenors and a soprano voice deep within the room, hushed but furtive; people at work, in conference, a buzz of industrious action, even a cabal discussion may be afoot.

Alfred and Binny's art cooperative is on the top floor of an old seamstress sweatshop, a popular business in the early 1900s for the moneyed industrialists, who gladly hired young women newly arrived on steamships docking daily at Ellis Island and Fort Clinton, to sit at sewing machines six days a week. Al and Binny bought this space in the mid-Eighties at rehab prices, and christened their co-op The Beehive at SOHO. Six of us share the "honeycombs" (Binny invented the nomenclature, kitschy but catchy), divided into four-hundred-square-foot studios tucked behind tent canvas strung on guy wires. This leaves a wide, front-to-back alley, used for colossal canvases, installation piece noodling, and free-space to roam and pace and shed anxieties. A long community table sits in the center for our co-op powwows, brown-bag lunches, and after-hours drinking. Eight pyramid skylights follow the alley's course, helping spread natural light. A half dozen bulb-and-lamp fixtures hang from the ceiling, only now wrapped in a mysterious fog. The Beehive is as close to a commune as one can get on Manhattan Island, inside a converted factory, surrounded by millions of dollar-wise capitalists. It's a perfect place to work, populated by imperfect people.

Our honeycombs are neither hexagonal nor made of wax, but we store our honey and raise our larvae in them, if I may be boldly heretical and coin a corny art analogy. I can't joke like this in front of Binny. She's a California transplant and misses all its nature and fresh fields and, I can only imagine, those Pacific Ocean sprays that once perfumed her hair.

My cell is at the end of the alley, for which I must walk the length of the community space before disappearing behind its walls. A Florentine studio of the Renaissance this is not. We work alone, and use each other sparingly. But for the shared craft tools (You got any Cadmium yellow?... Can I borrow a T-square?) or to shoot the breeze to stave off self-doubt from staring at a piece too long, the outsider who drops by for a peek might well think we're accountants or editors, or else a typing pool on its coffee break. That's how the work plays out; socially, there are factions, cliques, and a "democratic" junta.

My sneakers squeak on the cement floor. Voices coil from a center honeycomb. When I come abreast of its open curtain, across from the powwow table, I catch movement in my peripheral vision, the king of fast-quick jerks that startled insects make. I stop and look in. Binny, Alfred, and Bert stare back at me, standing triangulated in velum light. Their gazes strike a vaguely Gothic motif, or maybe Inquisitional — the Elders meeting with a rat whose finger is poised to accuse the first he sees, all for the price of coins jangling in a leather purse.

"Hey," I say. They hey me back. Nothing else.

I walk on and feel more than see their heads turn back into their huddle. Voices follow me step for step. Fuck this, I think, so I stop, retrace my squeaky footfalls in the unnatural speed of video reverse, come to the same spot beside the powwow table, and peer at the three of them through the lingering haze. This time Binny, Alfred, and Bert turn their heads as a three-necked monster would, with curiosity and a rising temper. No Hey, this time. I've overpowered them with suspicion.

"So..." I pause. "What's up?"

No expression from them. Binny wears green surgical pants and a matching top, both two sizes larger than her middle-years girth. I notice her white apron, stained with butcher-blood red paint, is loosely tied at the back, the frayed ends hanging nearly to the floor. She's pulled her graying hair behind her head into a long, frizzy ponytail. Her eyes show equal amounts of fatigue and alertness, giving her the appearance of a zombie because of her pasty, mottled skin (too many hours in the hive, no doubt). Alfred is in jeans and a button down shirt, patterned in red tartan. His beard is trimmed on the sides, but hangs down in front, pointed, the visage of a nineteenth-century Russian anarchist, I've often thought.

I say, "Should I fear some unnamed toxic syndrome because of this cloud? I might call it a campfire gone awry, but the smoke tastes foul."

Their heads rotate toward some center point between them, as though someone behind the back curtain has pressed a button to make the three-headed beast move. Bert's is the monster's voice, if the monster is short and slight. He says, "Botched experiment, Minus. No problem. We opened the sky-vents, and plugged in a few fans." Bert whirls his hand, as if I'm an idiot in need of a gesture to understand the mechanics of twirling blades. When he shrugs a dunce's non-answer, the leather vest he's wearing catches the light from above, a sort of glare one sees only from crash victims holding something up for rescuers to see.

Bert Thong is Vietnamese. He's five-foot-four and carries stocky shoulders over a porcine body, stuck onto bantam legs. His first name is Bertrand, awarded by Catholic parents who escaped Saigon in 1969 with their six-year-old son. If that isn't a smile on his face, then he must have just stubbed his toe. Its pattern reminds me that many (I'm not an "all" person) Vietnamese have a similar mannerism, like his Vietnamese friends who come by the co-op to play phaodat. When I told this to Bert a while back, his expression changed: he smiled wider, showing small teeth shaped like a vole's. I feared he had just labeled me a racist. Instead, he accused me of pulling his chain, and said of my pie-balled question, "We don't notice our own kind, you moron. Should I suggest you look like you've got a pole up your ass just because you're white? No one wants that shit pointed out to him!" Bert told me that's what art is for. Of course he's right. He's the second most gifted among us drones, Queen & Consort. Only he won't accept his métier as figure drawing, so he meanders and punishes himself by producing derivative meta-art.

Bert ogles me from between Binny and Alfred, and begins explaining more about his mishap, as though I've asked for details. "I had something cooked up with dried ice to make this super-cool effect on the canvas, actually it's a panel but – not worth going into. It's just cee-oh-two fluff dissipating, dude. Sorry. Nothing to call the CDC over."

"Hmm," I say. "I'll save that for the listeria I'm sure to find bubbling out from one of those leftover cartons in the fridge."

Alfred and Binny exchange a look; Al grins, like the shit in his mouth tastes good. Binny clenches a hand and knuckles Bert's hip sharply. I slowly look at them one at a time. Nothing. There's nothing here. "We're sort of busy, Minus," Alfred says, and for effect (I think this, but wonder if it's really a marriage-partner thing.) Binny nods, as if Al's words are exactly what she would have said if he'd just kept his mouth shut and let her speak.

To let them know their behavior is its own punch line to a bad joke, I grin, but their faces only reassemble into the leers construction workers give female joggers who dare to pass the job site. Behind them, I notice three art pieces standing draped in secrecy by white sheets — fitted bed sheets, whose elastic corners curl at the bottom, exposing shined copper, the angled shape of which is impossible to see the connection with what remains hidden.

"Then I won't keep you from your productivity. Good luck," I say, and walk on.

When I signed on at this hive, there was, I had felt, a promise of connection to other artists, people who came with different disciplines and had varied backgrounds, opinions, and age-related adventures to tell. A great mix for convivial argument, right? But over the months, after learning about these people — fine as casual friends — any thoughts I had toward serious connection, or collaborative work, lost its appeal.

I winnowed the problem down to a matter of focus, and its importance for our work (in some cases, its scarcity): those not in one's field of vision get passed over. This is about as much as I see in myself, is what I made out by comparison, if comparison is of any value. These minor disappointments, along with others in life, I try to take in my stride. To date, I've achieved satisfactory results.

My honeycomb isn't messy. It shows the clutter of the per se artist-at-work. A wood table with aircraft carrier depth takes up the majority of the floor space. Topside, the table is a dusty mess. Below decks are my supply stores: hammers & files & chisels, plastic tubs of clay, canvas tool bags, and never-to-be-finished experiments. Art books and novels are stacked on block-and-plank shelves along the sailcloth walls, like kinetic building bricks. Nothing newly created lies on the tabletop, a virtual desert in art's landscape and sense. Maybe this is what Binny, Alfred, and Bert were whispering about: a scheme, one whose hatching finds me relieved of my rented space. The thought is not so silly, but, I admit, unlikely to visit me as more than a ghost image. I can add the admonition, "Get yourself together!" The fact that Cap'n Crunch trips a celluloid memory is something that buries my fears under hope. I whisper to myself, "Okay, you can begin anytime now."

It's dark beneath the tabletop, and peering into these shadows, I smell opportunity coming through the solvent odors overriding the dust mites, hovering like interstellar galaxies. My hands reach deep into the disorder of cans and power tools and hammers, where I feel the prick of a feather (a Tyrolean cap), caress Beethoven's bust (a gift of "inspiration" from mom), rustle a wooden box filled with hand tools, get caught in the rough chicken wire, rolled and tied with twine, and feel a stack of plywood blanks that, long ago, I cut into small squares (badges of forgotten ideas). I pull out the chicken wire, the box of tools, and the plywood plates.

I reach across the wide table and draw a big circle, as far as I can stretch my arm. I slap down palm prints for eyes, and a wriggling worm for its mouth. My trepidation has a critic's face. Karen K wrote about artistic play, and likened it to the writer's notebook, a personal room in which anything goes. "Just see where it takes you, pally," she advised.

My left thumb taps across four fingertips, and wiggles itself to make number five. I lay out wood plates in a long row. One, two, three, four, five. Behind the simple math lurks a central, though soft, motif. Five is good. Don't over-tax your imagination with so many choices; hold to the theme first dreamt.

I walk around the table and, from the opposite end, unroll the chicken wire and flatten it across the surface. The smiley face gets splintered. Inside the large roll I find wire rods I'd cut from dry-cleaners' clothes hangers, each about a foot long, bundled with simple twist ties. I spill them out over the chicken wire, where they fall like pixie sticks. Now I have skeletal material. But what shape? Anything human will do, or even human-like. This is only play. My feet shuffle nervously as I stand, belly pressed against the table. I keep my hands moving in the air, molding, figure-modeling, playing.

Used copy paper lies on my stool. A sculpture, one of my spheres in maquette, dents the pile's center to keep it all in place. I showed the full-size sculptures a year ago last November, over the Thanksgiving holiday. The gallery sold five, and had me pick up the remaining four a couple months later. Those look at me from across the table, resembling (when I let my mind really fly loose) a group of aliens whose heads have been lopped off and stuck on pikes to warn the indigenous people against collaboration.

Such was not my intention when I was sculpting them, but critics wanted to interpret the spheres as globes. I also read of "lead balloons," "mandalas," "human ova," "fatty leftovers from a liposuction lab," and "testicles." I could only chuckle at their imaginative conclusions, but when they asked me to respond, I told them, plainly — truthfully — that I had only looked for textural shape in a geometry-obsessed world, and that the cycle focused on the medium of sight. One critic referred to the "music of the sphere" — apparently in reference to atomic physics or some higher mathematics few readers caught on to, of which I could not count myself.

What took the cake was a minor critic writing for the Gallery Guide column in the Arts section of The New York Times. She wondered if I hadn't had in mind globe enthusiasts who'd gone blind. She floated the term "Cartographic Braille" in her article. Oi!

I liked the phrase, actually, but felt she'd really missed the intent of the spheres, even though I'd explained it again and again. Globes, sure, if you will, but not worldly, planetary, and never... #!*@&%!.... See here: another critic mentioned "Earthly apocalyptic visions" — a phrase whose triteness I thought showed journalistic and critical inexperience.

I've since stopped reading the criticism of my work. Who am I to believe? The critics who love my work? The critics who hate it? I couldn't hope to be myself if I heard so many opinions of who I was or thought I wanted to be.

A word about art explication. I don't want to explain my art to people, but occasionally I must. Figure it out for yourself! I want to say. That goes for books, too, and films. My stock answer to the question, "So what does it mean?" is a casual (but not effete), "It's a mirror; stand closer." Which is another way of saying, "Whatever you see in it, that's where you'll find its meaning" (which is effete).

People must understand that artists are no different, more or less, in intelligence or worldly insight than the next Joe and Jane of a similar age and background (though we artists hold vanity like a torch). Artists know how to make the world look pretty, or desperate, or fun. Therefore, we all should want to find the answers to art, as we must in life, in that sack we all carry over our shoulders, filled with the experiences of living inside a unique personality. I believe in this like few other ideas available. Of course, the critics get their say, too; but watch out, or you'll begin supplanting your opinions with theirs. The "Cartographic Braille" label is a good example. Recall the difference between the child and the adults in Andersen's tale "The Emperor's New Clothes."

Tell me, then, how do I explain this to the average viewer? Or to the critic? I could easily hear the answer for my effort: That's not how I would react! Or the imitable, I don't see it!

Yes, I can only wonder, Of course you don't.

Within those first NYC weeks after I'd moved from Chicago, where insecurity of position was my only anchor to reality, and provocation to explore my new neighborhood and City, I read many juxtaposed texts to seek wisdom from stories, and entertainment in philosophy. Kierkegaard paired with Tolkien, Aristotle with Kafka, Ayn Rand with Virginia Woolf, The Book of Job with The Tropic of Cancer, to name a few. As I read, exploring the many voices in the texts as well as their clashing themes, I found non-linear, non-axial, non-spheres rising from the cognitive abyss wherein my creativity dwells, a place I enter by sight depth only, like one looks into a cave from a safe distance. From that experience I made oblong balls, out-of-round globes. This had been my first step into abstract sculpture, and there's no wonder why I jumped back to figurative art, however vague the outcome so far. They are failures, the globes, failures of the sort that reveal the artist must change or quit. Me. Now I'm here.

I begin work by not working. The paper stack must go because I need my stool. The scratch paper has bothered me for a week. Binny handed them out so she could feel good about recycling, but I use paper tablets, not loose sheets. With no use for them, and having wasted time thinking how I could use scratch paper (Holy Lord!), I can no longer imagine finding another place to move them.

My hands wad sheets one by one, forming paper balls. CruunchCRUUNCHcrrk crunk crk-krrk. Spherical wads. The sound is stereolab static and popcorn chewing. CRUUNCH CRNK crrrrk, krk k-k-k-k-k. There's a big, mesh wastebasket shoved into the far corner, its empty mouth mocking me. I toss paper balls one at a time, taking my time between throws, listening to the dis-symphony my hands generate when I crinkle cheap bond into globes. Its shape and texture begins as a geometric plane, with sharp, dangerous edges for which I pity secretaries, editors, and Girl Scouts working on their origami merit badges. Its shape and texture ends in a lightweight, razor-toothed ball, good enough for shooting trash can baskets. Is this what the ancients discovered, too? Impossible, I imagine, because paper wasn't invented until... I don't remember which year. The Chinese first, I recall, but they don't count because their history is far too long, and I'm fundamentally ignorant of its arc, and constantly mix up their dynasties, and refuse to follow their art movements (too much landscape draftsmanship), and I think K'ung Fu-tzu's analects are lousy with clichéd moralities. After five minutes, the basket — its metal mesh suitable for years of schoolroom abuse — has a full stomach of paper pills. With the last few tosses, it begins to regurgitate its brunch, the little piggy.

Back to the plywood squares. I find quarter-inch dowels for what I have in mind. Each is nine inches long, and I turn these into the corresponding center hole in the plywood. Against one dowel I place a wooden figurine, about the size of a child's action figure, the kind artists use for sketches when a live human can't be found to model. I stand it upright and bend the arms and head down, away from the torso, which I finally kink to the left to help it lean against the dowel. My intention is to let the head, arms, and legs fall linearly, like a hanged man, or a victim of a firing squad. I anchor the body at the waist using thin brown twine.

For the second dowel I use a pair of tin snips from the tool tray to cut a fourteen-inch circle out of the chicken wire. Wearing leather gloves, I bend the four compass points toward a south polar axis, keeping a rounded shape, and thread these eyelets through the dowel, ending with its top two inches sticking through the North hole. As a last wrinkle, I pinch the wire at the center until its shape resembles an hourglass, or a tailor's dummy.

The other dowels get the same treatment, of a sort. More playtime. As I work and shape, materials come to mind that I could throw: cereal might work after all, I tease myself — let it harden around a frame, cover the shape with blown latex, and paint it with acrylics. A marrying of figurative art with pop-culture identification. Alternatively, I could make a sand mold for a metal cast using aluminum, bronze, tin, or lead. Lead would be fun, to get that oxymoron-ish piece like –... of course, this has been done. Everything has been done, hasn't it? No, you bonehead, that's not the way –.... Move on!

I can work in cold casting, too. FMG, concrete, Betty Crocker cake mix, maybe Jell-O.

For two minutes I upbraid myself over pessimistic leanings, and all the synonyms I can think of for vapid and lazy. Building wire shapes to affix to the dowels makes me conscious of my hands at work. Their handy-work helps me focus, become resolute, to scheme the easiest material, and progress from there. Clay is the obvious product for a first test. When I finish the last skeleton, I pull out two plastic tubs from an air-tight rubberized drum in the corner. One tub holds natural claystone, the other a polymer. Yes, playtime.

The five forms stand with blind obedience to my experimentation. I quickly give them names, a seal to their imagery for the next phase. FallenMan, ShadowTree, HourGlassWoman, GumbyDude, and OrchidBloom. Five skeletons on which muscle and fat and skin can hold a tight bond, or else bulge and sag, to employ some gesture or body language, possibly suggest eroticism, but ultimately define humanness.

Shadows have subdued the room's ambient light I've been working in. Looking up, I see dark clouds beyond the skylights. The gray tint that's settled in the hive makes me feel old. I turn on my own photoflood setup (a lá Peter N's canopy), a four-corner fixture that uses 200-watt Philips "frosted white" light bulbs, mounted behind white umbrellas bought at a Chinese wholesale store on 27th and Broadway. Once I flip the switch, the new light perks me up under its glow, under its growing heat. Age must wait ahead for me. My eyes find new perspective, a way to continue. "Not randomly," I pronounce. My voice resounds against the cloth walls. Outside the walls, the voices I've been hearing — whispers, a laugh and counter laugh — go silent. A hoot suddenly klaxons, and behind that, more whispers follow.

For the next phase, the throwing, I place the top half of a cardboard refrigerator box on the table. One side has been cut out to make a hood, something I've used for spray painting. I pick up GumbyDude and center him in the hood. The skeleton has four wire rods that form its arms and legs. The torso is bent, woven with many rods; the head is a simple zigzag jumble slid onto more upright rods, crimped to hold it in place.

I begin to pace again, arms folded. What do you see, Minus? I walk from one corner to the next, make a circuit and double back. GumbyDude waits patiently. He doesn't move; no breeze rattles his wire limbs (handless and footless) to send out false signals. When my pacing becomes volatile and I bang my hip against the table edge, the rods vibrate. I watch the wire until it stops. The sound my feet make, sliding on the dusty floor, takes my eyes off GumbyDude. In the white light's shadow, I notice a book spine. Van Gogh, the dust jacket announces. My hand finds its edge, pulls it out. With a whoosh, I blow dust off its cover. The Dutch Master's work is reprinted by permission of dozens of people, so says the index, public and private holders noted in small print. On page 485, I come across Self-Portrait as an Artist. The original hangs in The Art Institute of Chicago. I've seen this masterwork a hundred times. Guards have reprimanded me for bringing my face too close to the painting ("I'm only studying his brush strokes." "I asked you to step back, please, sir."). Over the years, I've sketched dozens of the painting's details – his tired, blue eyes; the woolen jacket collar; that frighteningly-angular ear; the thin, copper-red mustache – which lie in some portfolio I left in Dad's attic, its zipper rusted so badly, opening it sounds like tearing leather. Had Van Gogh used only a mirror to see himself? Was it polished, or wiped with a rinsed paint rag? How old was the master when he painted this portrait? I've known this answer at some point, but cannot remember now. I remember that he died in his thirty-sixth year. Rembrandt lived to be sixty-three. An old man, for the era, and the transposed age of his impressionist countryman. His own early self-portraits, Rembrandt's, highlighted his community standing: the dandy, a man-about-town, fond of fashion, prone to excess, possibly a youthful rake. What if Vincent had let himself grow old, and not shot himself in that field behind the Ravoux Inn? Grown to be old man, too, I imagine. Still with the same curious stare, if that is curiosity in the self-portrait of 1888. Fattened cheeks perhaps, if he had gotten on, because old men retain calories. Maybe a smile, finally, for all the work he'd done after deciding death was more pointless than life. I close the book and feel its heft.

"Knock-knock." Belinda pokes her head around the canvas drape. "Hi there. I've come to interrupt you." Her arm comes into view, dangling a picnic basket. "Is this a good time?"

"None better," I say, wanting to be annoyed but actually I'm relieved. This annoys me. Oh Lord! She pops in and walks around the table, stops, turns, and walks back all the way around, retracing my steps in the dusty floor, her eyes fixed on the skeletons. I put the Van Gough book on a shelf. The picnic basket has released scents of meat and bread and fruit as she's carried it with her.

Belinda ends her second go-round at my stool and plops the basket into my lap. "Let's eat, boyfriend. We're about to see much less of each other, and a picnic lunch to send me into the storm of industry can only make us want each other more at night." She extends her hand, which I hold, turn it over, and kiss the soft ridges across the palm. She uses her other to scratch the side of my ear, as if I'm a pet bunny.

We eat while standing, hips wedged against one corner of the table, the basket open between us, lids off salads, ham & cheese sandwiches unwrapped, one banana peeled and broken into sections, like a fallen Greek column. A few times during this mostly silent lunch, Belinda looks back at my skeletons. When she finally looks my way, her eyebrow arches, but that's all and it's good enough; good enough to let me know I've made good enough first steps. We close the basket, kiss like we're in public (a chaste, postage-stamp peck), and she waves to me at the door. As much as I love her, I hope this hasn't been the best part of my day.

To prepare the claystone I fill a small, galvanized bucket with water and wet five heavy, square cloths. They'll keep the clay moist and malleable for hours. Likewise, wetted claystone sticks easily to its separate pieces when pressed together, forming a simple bond, somewhat like sand drippings kids make at the beach. When dry, however, the bond will be as strong as the handle on a ceramic coffee cup. I'm hoping for this effect when I throw it at the wire skeletons.

Next: my Walkman; songs to calm me. Steely Dan. Boz Scaggs. Zeppelin III. Mellow is the goal. Con-TEM-plative is where I need to be, not Jazz-busy or Techno-irritated. I hook the earpieces over my lobes and click "play."

The clay bits that I'll throw need shape. Uniform shape. I can't tear off chunks and start hurling them willy-nilly at the wire skeletons. That would be as effective as a monkey throwing its shit at a window, the astonished faces of zoo patrons his target. As I listen to guitar rhythms, a jazzy-blues voice, my hand finds the clay and tears a dollop from the mass. I look at the globes across the room and let my hands fondle the clay. My nails begin to separate it into nuggets. (da-da da da dadada da-da-da da da da daaaaaa) The thumb and forefinger press against a dime-size bit. The shape reminds me of... okay... cereal again. Quisp. A small disc — not a Frisbee — more a flying saucer or... dare I say, a prophylactic in silhouette (minus the reservoir tip). This shape is good: lots of surface; an edge to impress; curvaceous. My fingers make saucer discs in time to three songs. I wet a cloth to cover these. It settles over them like creamed porridge.

Using both hands, I roll clay into six large balls, and the balls into long, thin snakes. I cut the snakes into triangle shapes. Cutting these takes less time than the discs, and by the middle of the third song I cover this batch with another wet cloth, one that's red like caked blood on a mortal wound. The clay has dried out the skin on the backs of my hands. The tape ends, I flip it, and move on to the next shape.

Later, while using a canvas spatula to clean beneath my fingernails, I notice the pieces that drop off look like worms. On second thought, larvae, or maggots. I thought I had finished, but these pieces, their shape and size, show possibility. I open a bucket of older clay, scratch my hands across its surf, and use the spatula to scrape out more maggot shapes. For an hour I must repeat this work to fill another wet cloth. Boz sings Lido Shuffle, and plays the riff on Loan Me a Dime (I prefer Duane Allman's rip'n'er version). How I get to Lynyrd Skynyrd on this tape, I don't remember, but Tuesday's Gone gets short-noted by at least twenty seconds. I have five buckets filled with clay pieces when I pull off the headphones. Outside the honeycomb, the drones and queen and dickhead are quiet. In quiet's background, like a memory, a fast laugh peels. Vendulka is still in front of the television, I hope practicing her English.

Time to throw.

It's long past the dinner hour when I finish. I know this by the change in light and color through the windows, from the gray cumulous which forced my refuge under artificial lamplight, to this dull brown that swallows the highwayman's cupped match. The Beehive rests in a morgue's silence. This reality has come of a suddenness I was not prepared to find. One's lost sense of time, of sight and sound, the notes of spatial existence felt in a room, become an ecstatic flush of blood and water and sweat when found again. I wonder if this is what coming out of a coma is like, or what the amnesiac feels upon his rediscovered history.

I'm not sure of all that sits before me, the effect these sculptures make. Three of the five skeletons are covered in clay, their simple forms now dimensionally complex. Some have got the full treatment, others I lost interest in early, try as I could to let the sculpture find its way as the clay pieces built up — snow crystals on a tree limb (I wanted to believe), or barnacles attached to a ship's hull — until I recognized body and life within the hardened shapes. I beat back all urges to mix clay shapes on any skeleton. My goal was to see how a uniform shape stuck together in a thousand different angles. The result is something beautiful, I think, lowly intense, or otherwise ugly, and my wrists ache from so steady an exertion. I had begun throwing pieces with one hand only, taking my time, but always and with ease got caught up in the mechanics of throwing, until I found both my hands feeding on pieces from the bucket, firing them at pinwheel speed against their target.

The textures are radical to the eye's normal demand for familiar contour and definition. The figures have crevices, spikes & spines, pimples and pits. They're something between cave paintings chipped from the wall (taking the one-dimensional to three-dimensional in a single bound), and the religious talismans gypsies carried up from the Levant. One likeness makes me chortle: a camper sits on a tree stump, petrified by a million generations of desert winds.

Buzzing rises from somewhere in the hive: a file rubs across wood. I listen to its rhythm, and then it stops, the sound settling into the white noise that my ears pick out while I continue to listen, too hard. I scratch an itch on the side of my face and feel clay scabs drop away. When I leave my tent to clean up, I notice a light shining between the cracks of Zeppo's tent. The rising idea to call on him, to ask if he wants a drink, gets pushed down. If he's here so late, he's busy. Zeppo said to me once, "When I was young, art moved me. It was physical. Not as much anymore. Still less so later? I fear the graying years." This statement from a man whom the other day I saw weeping as he washed his brushes after finishing a canvas six months in the making.

I wash my hands in the cold water, leaving no patience for the hot's slow flow. I strip down to my skivvies and give myself a sponge bath. After toweling off in my tent, I step into the jeans and socks and shirt I put on this morning at the loft, and stuff my work clothes into a gym bag. On the way past Zeppo's lair, I resist sneaking a look, or even listening for more signs of human stir.

At home, Belinda has kept a light on in the bedroom. She likes to sleep in low lamplight when I'm not around. I tiptoe through the kitchen and peek through the open door. A book lies open across her lap. Her head has rolled forward in sleep, and her reading glasses hang from the end of her nose. I take my clothes off and put on pajamas, go to her bedside and slide the book from her hands, and the glasses off her face. These ministrations wake her briefly, through which she pouts and then proffers her puckered lips for a kiss she won't remember getting. I plant one with a watery smack and ease her body back onto the mattress. Climbing into bed, I roll her onto her side and kiss her temple, where the soft hairs should tickle her face, fanned out, but they merely move minutely in some air current only a hair can detect. In the darkness, I lie in wonder. Not about my sculptures, but what happened to the crash meeting Binny called, and Vendy had warned me about. Had I been left out? Allowed to work? Fat chance, is my estimate.

The following day, Vendulka sits on the couch again, knees tucked under her chin. Two fingers rest their nails on her front teeth. She's changed from morning game shows to daytime drama. I hear the click of her teeth snipping off the ends of her nails. I'm just back from taking the small dogs for their walk.

"How's your art coming along?" I ask, ducking beneath the glowing screen to open the refrigerator door. Disordered smells ooze out on chilled air.

"I can say this, dat it's good," she says. She's eating a lemon. The peel sits in torn bits on the sofa arm. Such a perfect still life, the yellow peels atop each other, like flower petals or fallen leaves, on the black leather, grainy and used. Vendy puts a thin lemon wedge between her front teeth and bites down. My mouth puckers in Pavlovian response, and I feel the saliva flow so heavily that I must swallow. She, on the other hand, has the kid's happy look, the girl on the verge of penetrating the core of an all-day lollipop. She says, "Your T-Vee gives me ideas."

"It's not my television."

"The American mind comes out of truth here."

Oh, God. I don't know how to respond. Did she mean to say "comes out through here" as in, coming from the television? Or is it that she thinks the mind of Americans is "true" by showing its philosophy (or whatever!) in the programs she watches? Worse, I'm not sure these two aren't the same thing! I decide not to respond and instead work on cleaning out the fridge. When I came in, I found a note pinned to my tent from Binny, asking in a precise hand and polite register that I find time for this month's chore.

"Vendy," I say, "whatever happened to that crash powwow?"

"Fuck that I know," she says, "maybe the Fate has her." Her tone overflows with annoyance, but at whom (Binny? Me?) I can't tell. Vendulka often surprises me, because when I expect to get an earful, or an argument, she suddenly gives a perfect manufactured response.

I squint at the fridge's contents. The hive is not going to get a "Last Call" on what's in here; the smell has only become stronger in the warm room. The bottles of staples — ketchup & mustard, one jelly jar with blue goop and one with yellow-orange goop, sauces of soy, Worcestershire, hoisin, and duck, a plastic lemon and lime about equally half full, and Liquid Smoke — I place on the table next to the fridge. Containers with yellow lids belong to Binny, blue to Alfred; Bert likes red. (Do these correspond to mood, or personality? My sense tells me the latter.) Color coordination notwithstanding, everything is labeled with either its owner's initials or name. A half dozen of these survive my wrath. The rest of the stuff I pitch into the trash. In the small freezer compartment, I find two ice cream bars. Binny and Alfred are printed neatly in black ink across the length of the plastic wrapper. I turn them over to discover they've added their last names. Good grief.

"Powwow! Powwow!! Powwww... woooooooow."

"What da hell," Vendulka says. "These two are about to screw."

My eyes lift and spot Vendy round-eye at the screen, where a white teenage girl is about to go down on a middle-aged black man, his shirt buttons undone and pulled wide, exposing his molded black chest. His blue and white power tie hangs from his neck, pointing south. There is more than the typical cut-away clues of sex. The girl's head has slid down his chest, her nude back facing the camera, while her lover sits on the edge of the bed, when — there she goes! The camera pulls back as the focus softens, then blurs as her head covers his groin. Vendulka claps her hands.

So when has daytime drama gone soft-porn, I wonder. In our post-sex-rev generation, there's nothing new about white girls blowing black guys. But at two-thirty in the afternoon? This is what advertising dollars feed Americans? Seems to me, television has changed since Archie Bunker condescended to the country's prodigious but nearly unscreened black audience. Now Mandingo gets to diddle the white neighbor's barely legal daughter.

The camera pans to the left for us to see a mirror, an ottoman, a woman's vanity. Finally, the focus draws in to a ballerina music box, whose ceramic figurine pirouettes to the notes of Tchaikovsky. The shot holds for three seconds, then fades to black, replaced in two heartbeats by a toothpaste commercial. How appropriate.

Vendy is incredulous. "They don't show nothing!"

A screech fills the hall. "Powwow, powwow. Everyone to the community table, please."

"Be right there!" I call over my shoulder, although I see no one at the table or in the alley other than Binny. I ask Vendy, "Did Czech television show porn in the afternoon?"

"Noooo," she says, all hush-hush and startled. She thinks I'm serious. "Communists never give us that. I come to America with expected ideas. How you suppose I learn from you this language? I known I'm not much good on grammar, but TV helps. Those two talked for long time before taking the clothes off."

"Powwow time, Minus. Vendulka Drakulikova! You're not waiting for a special invitation, are you? Come to the table, please." When I look over this time, Alfred and Bert are staring at me from behind her, Bert peaking around the taller Al. Zeppo has come out of his canvas cave, too. He's in coveralls and a Met's cap, everything streaked in black dots and spattered paint lines. Finger smudges of fireplug red mar the cap's bill where he adjusts it on his head.

I tell Vendy, "America's freedom-call doesn't exactly reach as far as giving kids sex-ed on soap operas." I watch the toothpaste ad fade, replaced by a red minivan with laughing kids in the back seat. "Not when I was a teen, anyway."

"But they don't show nothing. Not even nipples."

"I admit nipples would have been good. But you saw the guy's bare chest. And the tie. Suggestive." She merely glares at me. Is this sarcasm, or does she not know the definition of "suggestive"? I try to encourage her. "Wait until the commercial break is over. It's why American TV has commercials every six minutes, to keep you interested. Don't you think they showed enough, though? I mean, kids are getting home from school soon."

"Don't be so conserve, Minus. After our revolution, boys and girls got to be horny on trams and inside metro. I think they was showing off freedoms they not have ever. You saw lots of tits grabbing and cocks rubbing. This is all what I expect in America."

If I focus on imagery that matches her language, I might confuse the sexuality preferences that young Slavs carried themselves into after throwing down the yoke of communism.

"I'm sorry for your disappointment," I say, truthfully, and start loading the fridge again with salvaged jars and containers. "Just finishing up!" I yell at the Queen & Consort, although we're separated by twenty feet of funky fridge odors. "Vendy, we should –"

"Wait!" she hollers. "They's back!"

Indeed, the couple reappear on screen, lying shoulder to shoulder in bed, a sheet pulled to their necks. She's very white and very young, with a nice figure outlined by the silk sheet. He's very black and not so young, but still a fine specimen of manhood. Abruptly, the picture blinks away, leaving a white spot in the center of the tube. Vendulka drops the remote onto the table. She pushes herself upright and gathers her lemon peel for the trash.

"Fuck," she says. "That's bad. I think I need new opera serial."

Alfred passes me the agenda. There's one copy to circulate among the six of us. Scribbled in Al's handwriting are Group Show, Sculpture Sympossium, The Beehive T-shirts, and Aspen Dealers. I feel waves behind my eyeballs lapping at the sides of my head. We're seated against the plank timber community table, its matching benches able to accommodate eight across. Sometimes we feel like we're teenagers at camp. At least, the circumstances often make me feel this way. I pass the agenda to Vendulka, seated at my right. Zeppo sits across the table and down at the end. He looks to be sleeping, although his eyes are open and fixed on the beeswax pillar candle rising from the table's centerpiece of twisted branches and dried leaves.

If we need to write down the agenda topics, Alfred tells us, he can get some scratch paper. Binny emits a confirmation syllable. She's seated in the CEO position at table-head. "Does anyone need a pen?" asks Al. Binny takes her pen from the breast pocket of her smock, and holds it out to each of us, one by one. No takers, but Bert picks up a pencil he'd placed on the table next to a notebook, to show her he's come prepared.

Bert sits on Binny's left, directly across from me. Vendulka is deftly positioned at an angle to Bert's hunting eyes, allowing him only infrequent glances at her. Bert thinks he's in love, and thinks no one knows this, not even Vendulka, who in fact knew this five minutes after meeting him. Three minutes after that, the rest of us knew.

Vendulka basks in Bert's foolish attentions, and plays off his sophomoric shyness. Her role as the coquettish, dark-haired, high-tits foreigner-slut beats Sophia Loren's in her day, and Penelope Cruz's today. Vendulka's favorite ploy is to lick her lips, using the tip of her tongue, as she stares at Bert in a way that makes him follow her every move. (I'm reminded of offering my dogs liver snaps.) She slides her tongue from corner to corner, wetting the top lip to show the underside of her tongue, which has a fat blue vein bisecting the glistening muscle. She also likes to stretch her back, exposing her navel and the pudgy flesh around that sensual cavity. She pouts at him a lot, too, something I notice her doing now. The table hears Bert take in breath like he's been stabbed. No one will pull out that knife. We're always far too interested in what could happen next.

Al and Bin are no less a pair. Given their names, you'd think Alfred was the older man, gone west to pluck Binny, a child bride, from a California beach community, or a post-FlowerPower commune gone to seed. Binny is eleven years older than Al, and the authentic hippy girl of her drug-deluded generation. She has pictures of herself from the Sixties: long blond hair, frizzed by sea and sun, dangling over the shoulders of a tie-die shirt emblazoned with cat's eyes in rainbow colors; the shirt is two sizes too small and shows her braless breasts like fresh melons, their stems raised and knobby; beads surround her neck, with bangles stacked up her wrists like notches on bedposts; her eyes hold that eternal freaked-out quality that makes you wonder how fast her heart was beating with all the party juice racing through her veins.

When I compare Binny-of-today to her Kodachrome mementos, I see the mother of that pot-enthused teen. While her hair is the same length, and nearly as frizzy, its sandy tinge of youth has gone to zebra streaks. Sadly, her skin matches the hair. Too much sunbathing using PABA during that product's heyday of the Seventies, is my guess, before warnings against its use had flummoxed her and other California-Sunshine women. Nevertheless, Binny looks happier now than she does in most of those old photos, which seem to mark for her days of regret rather than remembrance. "I've had enough of that shit," is a line I hear her repeat when the past comes up — any past, any history. All these contradictions appear, in some form, every day.

Counterpoint: Alfred is a former stockbroker turned onto an arts sensibility (an urge he had as a child, but was beat out of him by Pentecostal parents whose work-work-work for the idolatrous dollar won him over at fourteen). By the middle eighties, Alfred had forged a mini-fortune buying short every time Ronald Reagan opened his mouth with optimism. "I got out too early for a Fortune 250 listing," Al once confided. He left Wall Street after meeting Binny at a Santa Fe corporate retreat, where she had been working her third season as the on-staff art teacher. "It was love at third sight," Alfred likes to joke to party guests. "I looked at her, then she looked at her boyfriend, and then back at me." You can imagine the laughs this gets.

Al puts serious effort into his art, but that doesn't mean the work achieves purpose, or even his goal; his money allows him to experiment without finding a vision from an inner eye, something to reflect on to himself, and, therefore, the subjective object, etcetera, etcetera. He has talent but no heart, and zero discipline. His beard makes him look harassed.

Binny is the true artist of the duo. She has a dynamic vision for her "cadaver prints" — staged photos using dead bodies posed as living beings in at-home portraiture, dressed in period costumes (frock coats; pinafores; buckle shoes) with Alfred always the only "live human" standing somewhere at frame's edge. When I walk away from seeing a Binny piece, I wonder if Al is representative of The Last Man on Earth. I've wanted to suggest to her this title, but I don't think she'd see my angle —... let me put it this way: I believe she would find the suggestion an insult.

Zeppo lifts the agenda close to his face. He's tucked two of his Canadian cigarettes behind his ears, and they stick out like the tusks of some prehistoric animal. "May I borrow your pen, Binny?" he says in his soft tenor, almost a murmur. Binny seems triumphant and celebrates "the note taker." Zeppo licks the ballpoint tip and circles something on the page, draws out a line to the margin that ends in an upside-down e. "You misspelled 'symposium'," he says, before sliding the pen back to Binny, and the agenda on to Alfred. He says, "Thanks for the pen. I think I'll remember the list without prompt." His scratched-vinyl voice is an unusual timbre for him.

Suddenly, from beyond the table, a moan escapes one of the honeycombs. A womanly moan. Sexual release drifts into the air and over the tent canvas walls, only to descend on us all. Zeppo knits his right eyebrow. The voice, the moan, the orgasmus, has come from his honeycomb.

Binny tilts her head toward the sound. Her lips compress, until she realizes what she's just heard. "By the way," she says. "Thanks for coming in today, everyone. Minus has cleaned out the refrigerator, I believe. The smoke has cleared –" (She stops to laugh at her own falsely placed wordplay; Zeppo stares more fiercely at the candle.) "– after Bert's little mistake yesterday, but we're sure nothing has been damaged."

"Such as my health," I want to say. I let my eyes say it — to her, to Alfred, and especially to Bert, who sits with hands folded in front of him, playing the schoolboy.

Alfred clears his throat. "Bert has an announcement for us."

Bert says quickly, "I can't attend the sculpture symposium in July," having decided, apparently, there is no point to preamble. He keeps his eyes on the table. "Sorry, Minus."

I stare at him, and continue to stare until he lifts his head. I say, "All I asked for was a simple hour of your time to get my equipment into the park and set up. What's happened?"

"Sorry," he says. "I just can't do it." He turns to Alfred. "Is that really your ice cream bar in the freezer?"

Alfred smiles. "My name is on it, Bert. That's why you're asking, but.... The answer to your question is Y-E-S. Leave it alone, please."

Vendulka pinches my thigh beneath the table. She rolls her eyes and pinches me again. She mouths what I take as, "I'll go with you." I lower my head in an Elizabethan thank you, but I know she'll forget unless I remind her. I may forget to remind her.

"Moving on," says Binny. "I know you're all busy."

Zeppo sighs. Bert pouts at Alfred. Vendy clicks her teeth, a call to Bert, which works. She makes a slow, long lick across her upper lip. Bert shifts in his seat. His hands unfold themselves, and one disappears from the top of the table, diving beneath, while its mate digs a nail into the wood.

"Excuse me," I say. "What do you mean, 'Moving on'? The symposium gives this co-op a chance — maybe THE chance — to get a little recognition. But to you it's a simple moving on. I had planned on going there to represent the co-op, even though I'm the chiseler working all twenty-four hours of glory. And now none of you is going to be there?"

"I'm going," says Vendy. She sneers at Bert.

"Ah, there you go!" says Binny. "See? Problem solved. Besides, Minus, we have The Beehive T-shirt for you to wear. And now, well... everything seems to be copacetic. You're not going to pout, are you?"

"That's a poor attitude to take, Binny," I say. "It's also not the promotion you need. I'm not the billboard your shirt's to be pasted on. Yeah, no thanks. Jesus, are you people members of a co-op, or –"

"Art is individualistic work," Binny says.

"Why the T-shirts, then, Bin?" My voice no longer hides its anger in sarcasm. What I really want is to punch her instead of educating her.

Silence covers the table. Zeppo might have said something, once upon a time, but he's removed himself from hive politics. I bare him no grudge. The man comes here to make art. Alfred and Binny exchange a look that I catch. I won't let this pass, either, and clear my throat. "By the by. Next month I'm going to be on the panel at the 95th Street Y. If I recall, the topic is City Art and its Reflection of the Art Community. Something like that. Perhaps I'll have something to say about community spirit."

Bert chuckles. "We're all going, Minus."

"Wearing the team colors, I imagine?"

Alfred says, "The shirts are black and white. Devoid of color. Or containing all colors. Whichever you choose. We're trying to reflect the Yin-Yang principles." He smiles to himself, and to us, like a middle school art teacher.

"Maybe some of us will wear one," Bert says.

"I'll be on the panel, Bert. You're welcome to come with questions about what artists do for each other. I'll gladly have a story or two for the crowd."

Zeppo laughs. He holds his hands high over the table: thumbs up.

"You're on the panel?" Alfred asks. "You're on the panel? How did you get chosen?" He looks at Binny for a sign he's heard wrong. She tries to shush him. "We've been talking with the _ARTFORUM_ people for six months. They haven't got back to us yet."

"Actually, Al," I say, digging my hands in my pockets, "they simply DID NOT respond. Notice the tense I've used. There's nothing coming from them to you, not to Binny, not to Bert, or this co-op. Tell me why, Al." My callowness comes through as sour as the refrigerator odors, but I'm pissed and there's no way I'm letting this asshole make the symposium or the roundtable a topic for group-speak. I say, "This co-op is laughed at by the New York arts community, that's why you didn't get a response to your plea, just as you didn't get a response to last year's New York Parks council call for –"

"We put together a good plan for that! Their competition was fierce!"

Bert says, "The parks council fixed the voting against non-minority members."

Everyone looks at Bert, who blanches. Does he know, finally, that that is why Binny and Alfred brought him on, to be eligible for minority-sponsored projects? That had been my guess, when he showed up in the elevator one day, without a vote being cast by Vendy or Zeppo, or me.

Accusations fly up and down the table. Name-calling comes with biting spite. Binny stands. Alfred follows. The bench is too close to the table, however, which throws him off balance and his arm whacks Binny across the shoulder, sending her back into the chair. Purely accidental, but Binny didn't see him lose his balance and thinks he's cuffed her. Binny rockets up from her seat to counter attack.

I laugh, because this is John Cleese farce, escaped from the telly. Binny, looking at me and looking for a scapegoat, winds up and throws a left hook. It's a good one. I'm expecting to see stars because my hands are still deep into my pockets, with no way to block her fist meeting the side of my head. Bert saves me by his own aggression when he leans across the table to stick his swamp rat sneer in my face, and Binny's haymaker labels him, dead center, in the temple.

It's now that I remember why such a punch is called a haymaker. Bert's out cold before his knees have the chance to buckle. And then they buckle. He drops face first across the powwow table. Too bad there isn't hay laid down. His head bounces on the blanks.

Binny cries out, "Jesus Lord On High Mountain! My hand my hand my hand!"

Alfred is yelling, "Don't cry Bin — Bin don't cry!"

She screams at him, "I'm not crying, shit-face, I'm in pain!"

With Vendulka's help, I drag Bert to the couch and lay him out on his back, arms folded across his chest. Bert has a smile on his face like the baby Jesus in all those Christian paintings. An Asian baby Jesus.

"Let him see me when he opens the eyes," Vendy commands. She undoes the top two buttons on her blouse. "He might tink he's in heaven."

"In that case," I suggest, "we should tie his hands to the couch legs, unless you want your breasts groped."

Bert was always little match for her. Vendy has that strength of womanhood meshed tightly with her communist upbringing. She would rout him, in fact, in such a way that he would go home and weep at this failure, and at himself. Not at himself as a man, but at himself as a human. I stand back to give her room for Bert's pearly-gate welcome, that view of her fleshy Slavic cleavage jiggling in its D-cups.

"Go to Binny," Vendulka says. "She's into psycho." She thrusts her hand into her blouse, pulling at her breasts to show more cleavage than I thought possible without the wink of a nipple.

Back at the powwow table, Binny holds her hand against her chest while Alfred stands behind her. His palms cup her shoulders. Tears streak her face. Her hand is no longer the threatening fist speeding at my head, but a crumpled lump of gimpy flesh. I wonder how I can capture this tender moment in a future piece: Al standing over his mate, she in nude repose, acne marking his concern, and triumphant pain in the wrinkles flowing down the sides of her mouth; the nudity would give an Adam & Eve complex escrivein "the apple is eaten and God has sent a telegram." Guggenheim worthy, I ponder, tongue pressed firmly against my cheek. But I don't do oils well, anymore, and the guy who does lies knocked out on a sofa, with a harlot bent over him to administer a sexual coup de grâce when he wakes up with a clanger of a headache and a black eye.

Binny looks up and finds her voice. "Minus, you're out! Leave the hive. I want you gone by sundown." Surprisingly, she has whimpered through this threat.

"Calm yourself, Binny," I say, "we're not in a Western."

"Binny, calm down," says Alfred. Surprise surprise, I think, just as Binny whirls on him. "Don't traitor me, Al! He needs to –"

"I need to do nothing, Binny," I say. "But I hope you can understand one thing. What's happened is a mess, but it's nobody's fault." My voice is calm, leaving no wake of nervousness. I glance at Zeppo. He hasn't moved, and seems bored. I say, to Binny and Al, "Let's paint this over and then, later, we can talk. When we're all able to talk." I nod toward the couch. "We can paint a whole new picture. Together, eh?"

Binny looks hurt, but more from the pain in her hand, now. Nevertheless, she can't retract her words (I imagine she'd rather not) but doesn't have the votes to win (which must hurt). I harbor no guilt for either of these problems, of course. Zeppo looks up from the candle, fixing his eyes on something beyond all our sight. Alfred's hands are massaging Binny's shoulders, working the tension out. He doesn't second my suggestion, not verbally, but his body language and soft, ready attention to his mate show acquiescence to a bury-the-hatchet pact.

Binny has visibly mellowed, from my words or Al's hands I can't be sure, but her neck muscles are no longer a bundle of twigs wrapped in wet tissue. Her smock has slipped down in the tussle and (with Alfred's massaging hands) has exposed the tops of her freckled breasts, two quivering fillets of meat. Not quite up to the ranks of Vendulka, I must admit. Alfred starts really giving her the works, his fingers all over her shoulders and neck and nape and clavicle and upper chest and behind her ears. And she is into this, a sleepy hound at the hearth that offers herself, belly up, for a pet and a pat and scratch and tickle. She rotates her shoulders and her hips follow, making the bench squeak and groan. Zeppo smiles. Alfred hitches his legs, which catch my eye. I look down and... Holy of Holies!... he's tenting right here at the powwow table. Zeppo winks at me. I stay stone-faced, but feel my bowels churn as I hold hilarity from spewing across the table.

"Yeah, okay, Minus," Binny says through a sigh, very throaty and sensual. "You don't have to –" Her hips roll again, Al's hands are at her sides, fingers poking from between her arms. I'm waiting for his hands to slide around, like a fog, and envelop her quaking breasts. But Al shakes his head at me; he helps up our Queen Bee and they disappear into their honeycomb. The flap closes. Rustling behind the canvas turns to moans.

Zeppo stands and lifts a cigarette from behind his ear to put between his lips, then steps his legs carefully over the bench and leaves.

CHAPTER 8

It's a fact that sounds drift unevenly on hot, dense air currents than the cool atmosphere of winter.

Astride my honeycomb's threshold, I hear tantric sighs folded between human giggles. Behind this, like a rock bassist holding the beat, are the flagellating strokes upon which Bert punishes his cock while listening to Binny getting fucked, or eaten, or whatever Al is doing to her behind the tied tent canvas. Zeppo hasn't shown himself since the powwow debacle. Vendulka has also gone into hiding after "reviving" Bert. And if I know her, she's in her honeycomb (adjacent to Bert's) making low moans and uttering whispers to jack him up, so to speak. It's well known (perhaps only by me and Zeppo?) that she has made a peephole in the canvas wall so she can spy on Bert, and to let Bert spy on her.

How would I, a sculptor, immortalize these people and their habits? Modernity gives me full license. Art's narrative serves humanity's basic need to describe the flow of life. In puritanical times, the basest of human desires (needs were confined to house, food, clothing, God) had to be made metaphorical. Along came Michelangelo's colossus, David, whose cock became the equivalent of anatomical revolt against correctness. Of course, the true halcyon days — ancient Greece — chronicled (and celebrated!) every libidinous act, followed by its natural excess. Later, Ovid pulled back the drapes to let us peek through the windows on ancient love and... congresses. Binny and Alfred are easy targets to sculpt in love's grapple: add a thorn and a crease to the yin-yang swirl. Indeed, I could carve bees from frozen honey, but the correlation of what I see and hear at the hive won't come through. Perhaps I could place a bird hovering in the atmosphere, representing Eros, or Cupid? No, that would be kitsch, the amateur's theft of the Baroque's yearning to paint his way to a comparison with the ancients and their own crass, brutal leaders. Scratch all that.

I have to get away from the hive.

There are these two little mutts I know, Babe and King, who are always up for a tandem walk. They're West Side dogs, teacup Chihuahuas. They know each other from the neighborhood, and have tracked the other's scent on solo walks (and left their own as a calling card). I can easily fit them both in my Puppy Papoose, which elevates them to human eye contact, where they can bark at the world and traffic and people as I porter them quickly through these crowded streets to the park. With a few phone calls, I set up a doggy play date.

I have time to kill, and before leaving my honeycomb I sidle my stool up to the table, eyes level with the previous day's work. In a few minutes, I feel neither satisfaction nor despair. Last week, when Belinda woke me in the middle of the night with her big plan, our talk had dispersed so many doubts about my direction, a new vision, the throwing technique; I was ready to work, hands flexing and eyes shortening to microscopic magnification of what there was way down close, and yesterday I let myself loose. Here's what I see from all that: FallenMan looks promising in his death-weight pose, the maggot-size clay shards cover him in a flesh whose texture is grated cheese. HourGlassWoman's bar-bell shape defies my empathy; her body has, by simple imagination, been pulled inside out; it's an offense to the human physique. ShadowTree retains a negative symbiosis with the lighting, an effect I could use by polishing the undersides of a metal cast (limbs, nose, ears) while leaving surfaces naturally pitted (to what purpose is yet my fantasy). GumbyDude has sagged from his stick — sunk to the ground, on hands and knees — he looks old, decrepit, a dying vagrant or, to take a judicious twist from the norm, an old man positioned in mock prayer. But... Why 'mock'? I rotate the base to see the sculpture from all angles. GumbyDude clutches a grin close to his left cheek, an asymmetrical feature that strikes me as one of a thousand human mannerisms almost impossible to capture in art because it is artificial, a truly animal deception without duplication; nevertheless, the clay pieces have achieved an uncanny effect made by the impact, where three saucers have folded onto themselves. And I think: this is why I make art. The prayer posture is a plea for forgiveness, for all our character flaws; or else it's an end-of-life pose the aged man assumes for spite against fallacious promises. I'm not naturally provoked to sacrilege, but from what old people have told me, I've reckoned this: the more years you live, the easier it is to relax for death's approach. The very thought makes me want to say, "Huh." To mock death and life in a single gesture is the essence of art.

Or maybe what I see is Narcissus himself, aged to adulthood, and with adulthood's reasoned thoughts (one hopes), he has turned his back on his pool of water. No more does his vanity reflect in its glossed surface. I hold this image for a moment, and then... no. Who of us can afford to lose the closest friend we have — ourself? It's a fair question that leaves all liars mute.

Finally, then, there is OrchidBloom, which gives me nothing aesthetic to grasp. No feeling. Ambivalence. But then, that's a feeling. Stop, I tell myself. Back up. This was a first try. Now it's over.

King and Babe lick the crumbs off my fingers. I've made them share a peanut butter cookie. It's a dog biscuit, not an over-sugared human snack that'll cause Adult Onset Diabetes all the medical journals warn about these days. Women on the street stop to stare at the doggies. (Had I known dogs collect women like women collect shoes, I'd have scored more girls in high school and college than those I can only tally using three fingers). They turn around and gawk on the street, their powdered cheeks and reddened lips pouting at the dogs.

"Lick, don't bite!"

The pups drop their ears in cowed submission. Almost as quickly, though, they recover their instincts and go on licking my fingers, their feathery pink tongues lapping furiously. The afternoon has become warm, and I feel the wall behind me hot against my back. Spring has only been a word this year.

Across from us is the 10th Street Art Gallery. What this gallery lacks in imaginative identity (outdoor latex splattered in a graffito text above the storefront windows), the owners make up for in demanding artwork — if perhaps, outré. It's why I think my guerrilla marketing can work here. I hatched the plan three minutes ago, after a pair of schoolgirls asked to pet the pooches and I had to shoo them away. Little dogs like to bite little hands. Children howl when bitten by dogs. I looked over the girls' heads as they walked away disappointed, and saw Earl Hap parking his Dodge outside the gallery.

I've met Earl a few times at NYC openings. He's big on being closed mouthed about what he sees on his competitors' walls. Secrecy of thought goes a long way in the gallery community. I have a spiel in mind for Earl, and now that Earl has gone inside, my hands find the ass of my jeans to wipe away dog saliva. "Watch the street for me, mutts," I say. They lick my face. Traffic on 10th Ave is light, moving one-way going south. I make a dash for the opposite curb. We get a double honk from a slowpoke taxi whose fare sits with a newspaper held high. I wave, and the cabbie hangs us the finger. He wears a turban.

I grab the gallery door as a guy & guy couple leaves, each with a handhold on a newly wrapped frame. They make bird chirps at the dogs, who sniff heavily at their boy scent, musky and sweaty and a bit ripe. Then we're inside. The dogs sniff at this new, stale air. The room is cool, humidity controlled. I hear conversation somewhere in the back, through a centered, arched entranceway leading to a second room, where I can see sculptures on square, white pedestals. A lot of ironwork sculptures married to wind imagery. Further on is another room. Other than the voices, we see no one. Babe growls. I tap his head and he holds the next growl in his throat.

Here in the window-front gallery hang large, rectangular metal sheets with a one-inch lip on three sides. They're tin trays, or perhaps steel, and have an authenticity to their proportion and weight. I haven't a clue as to what they were once used for. In colorful Seventies' Pop-Art shades, the artist has painted a cadaver on each tray, head down, feet up. The bodies' attitudes are further disconcerted by the colors: purples and hot pinks and lime greens and chocolate browns — and orange, lots of orange tints. The bodies lie dissected, their organs arranged in the exposed cavities, skin sliced from throat to pelvis and pulled aside like a vest on a hot day. The paintings aren't photo realistic, but impressionistic and real enough.

I discover a wall plaque along the second wall that gives the legend behind the motif. Each tray is part of an authentic nineteenth century morgue table, reclaimed from British storehouses that Thatcher had decommissioned from public funding. The artist, William Flurry, bought the trays at auction. I like Flurry's technique, and fear his subject's creepiness. The top of each tray has no lip for a specific reason, states the legend; this is the run-off ledge, which carried the body fluids by gravity into a rubber hose (the table was tilted for this purpose), whose end fed a disposal barrel that was shifted from one table to the next during the day's autopsies. I feel my stomach turn (the fidgety dogs against my belly don't help) and must walk away.

Through the far doorway I see a desk with a computer whose screen blinks with green characters. It's either Earl Hap's office or an installation piece. I place a hand on each of the dogs' heads and stroke them lightly behind the ears, and walk through to the final room. Earl Hap is in close conversation with his partner, Gaiyl Patel.

"Hi, Earl. Hello, Gaiyl." She doesn't recognize me. "We met at 'Art New York' last November."

Gaiyl Patel narrows a pair of thin, dark eyebrows our way and replies. "Please take those pets outside," she says.

By contrast, Earl is controlled, and puts a hand on Gaiyl's sleeve because she's begun to advance, eyebrows leading green eyes that have the menace of a gender-bending Shiva. Earl whispers something to her. She stops, and they confer like pirates, ignoring me. I don't wait for their verdict.

"Animal lovers, right?" I start to walk slowly toward them. Gaiyl folds her arms across her chest, but Earl smiles at me like I'm a happy devil. "Your name is Ort," he says, "Is that correct?" He holds out his hand. I take it for a swift shake. The dogs begin to bark, shrill snaps that ricochet off the walls and threaten to split our eardrums. Earl and Gaiyl wince, and look wildly at their consignments as if the paintings and sculptures will crack under the high-pitched yaps. I cover King and Babe's little snouts into my cupped hands.

"The name is Minus Orth," I say. "I'm a sculptor."

"Of dogs?" says Gaiyl.

"You saw my globes, Earl. Oblong spheres cast in bronze." They nod, but their eyes settle on the dogs' heads. I grimace as they keep their distance from the dogs, or me, or both. My annoyance at their wooden behavior pokes through.

"They won't hurt you," I say in snappy assurance. "Park Avenue mavens come to openings cradling their own mutts. I think dogs can be inspiring. What other breeds are popular these days? Those little Westies, and Italian greyhounds. I welcome pets into my studio because the silvertops warm to my art when they have their own warm'n'fuzzy friends cuddled between their arms."

"Silvertops?" asks Earl.

"Yeah. You know, Gray Mares." He's not getting me. "Customers, Earl. The Silver Foxes with treasure in their purses to spend on beautiful home decorations." I wink. This gets Earl Hap to gesture humorously, but his Pashton partner (Brahman stock, I've read in Sculpture News) seems put off. I need to address her directly. "Sorry, Gaiyl. I'm speaking indecorously, but my East Siders all claim they invented the term. Alicia Greene, in fact, told me something like that right in this gallery. She recalled how 'we silvertops are all aglitter tonight.' I think you were showing the Argentine, Paola Escobar. Her Patagonian landscapes. I heard they sold well. Odd, for landscapes these days, but classic painting always wins over the gaudy deconstructionist pap, right?"

"We don't allow dogs in the gallery," Gaiyl says.

"Yes, you've already said that." I try to hold their attention with business-savvy eyes, an expression I've seen posed by captains of Industry on the covers of Time and Newsweek. The dogs start squirming in the papoose. I almost want to incite them to bark again. "Okay, a moment of your time, please. I'm not here to browse –"

"Mr Ort, we have no wall space for new artists," Gaiyl puts in quickly, "if that's why you're here not to browse."

"That's Orth. Thanks. And I'm not a new artist. I've had shows in Chicago and New York. I'm working on fresh pieces that'll be ready in a few months."

They take a beat to look at each other. I've met with enough gallery owners to know when there's direct interest and where there's a brush-off coming. This is something in between, like when an artist painting outdoors is fighting with the light and can't decide if the color inside a tree's shadow is crimson or maroon. This problem didn't plague Monet in London, genius being what it is, because he simultaneously painted eight or ten canvases in his Parliament cycle, changing canvases as the day's light changed. If that's not genius, it's at least practical — and thrifty. I make one last maneuver that is not so genius as practical. "May I leave my card? You're invited to visit my loft, where I have a viewing gallery and –"

"You're welcome to submit slides, Mr Ort," Ms Patel says.

"Orth. There's a th sound. Minus Orth."

"We prefer slides," Earl says. "You have to understand, going around to artist's lofts is time consuming and –"

"Inconvenient," Gaiyl finishes.

Now I can't help myself. "You know, I recall reading a piece on Pollock where, after one of the Guggenheim daughters wanted to buy a painting, or help him out – can't remember which – she walked up five flights to his dump of an apartment. I mean we're talking Pollock here. Years before he became THE guy."

I have with me in my backpack a handful of color prints, five-by-sevens, that Peter helped me take for my files and insurance cataloguing. There's no way I'm pulling them out, though, not now and not with their attitudes inflamed. It's principle, at this point.

"House calls aren't exactly part of the trade, these days, Minus."

"Did I mention Peggy Guggenheim? Warhol gave Basquiat space at the Factory."

"Are you Basquiat?" Gaiyl asks. "Or Warhol?"

I sigh. "Oof, that's harsh. Would if I could, and then I wouldn't even be standing here, now would I."

I am under no illusion that art snobbery has not held me in any less mortgage than collectors & dealers themselves. It's only a shame our personalities stand on opposite sides of a thick door. Nonetheless, how we approach the market holds equal importance, and potentially perilous consequences. But you see, I have nothing to lose, and my value can only rise, if I make the bold move.

"Minus, we're busy planning a show," Earl says. "Besides, we're booked through 1995."

"At least," says Gaiyl.

"So — perhaps in the event of the artist's death?" I must live up to my smart-ass self.

Gaiyl-of-every-answer answers. "In that case, an immediate retrospective would be engaged."

"With a forty-percent rise in prices, I imagine," I say as an aside. I see through their droll expressions, the baggie cheeks, the Mona Lisa crimped-lips: my presence has worn a hole in their enthusiasm. I leave my card and walk out.

Dad always told me, "If at first you don't succeed, try again." He also added this Chicago signature, "The next joker might just be hard up."

King and Babe deserve some sprint time while I scheme, so I take them to a dog run in Dewitt Clinton Park. They tear around and bark, nipping at the big dogs' tails, and otherwise do what dogs do, while I roll through my mind a list of nearby galleries.

Drop-in marketing never hurts, despite what just happened with Earl, and Belinda's game plan to the contrary. I've got it. Deitricht Arts. It's somewhere between 10th and 11th Avenues, but further south, down on 33rd Street, where the rail yards send a mist of burning oil into the air year round. Deitricht's shows appear occasionally in the Sunday New York Times arts page. They're new, about a year since opening, which means they should be looking for talent. I call the pups over, helped by fresh biscuits, and scoop them up to head to the A-Train subway in a skip-walk of happy energy.

Under the soggy fluorescent glow of the subway platform, surrounded by sausage halitosis and sour body heat, I favor a quartet of thoughts. 1) GumbyDude teases my emotions more than my intellect (I note this under the Good column). 2) Karen Kosek's homeless getup is an escape, but does she want to be invisible? (Bad column) My guess is yes, but only for a while, her way to pull society inside out. I don't know why she might want to do this, but my time is worth the answer I could get. I might ask. 3) Belinda's marriage proposal-cum-ultimatum has consequences I'm not yet aware of, or don't want to face. 4) There's no other way I can live my life.

I walk up from the subway, subdued.

"Sculpture is difficult to show in any space. Too small, and the people crowd out any effect the pieces can make. Too large, and the sculptures fade into the carpeting. Then there are things like lighting, staging, and of course security. Oh my god, the security risks!"

This is Terry Doon speaking, forty-ish, black hair with wisp-o-gray temples. We've known each other since I came to NYC; he was yet cutting his teeth with an auctioneer. Look at him now. A bodybuilder's trunk, but swan necked, and fingers as long as a spider's legs; his eyes are brightly virescent with money. To sculpt Terry would be Agony of Dimension. I'd be accused of carnival mirror gimmickry.

We used to meet at gallery shows, opening nights mostly, for the drinks and cheese and crackers and network schmoozing. I told Terry one night how I was reading this book by another Sixtie's radical cultural critic, this one going by a single letter for a last name. This was months before I ran across Karen lugging overstuffed plastic bags in the park. "I heard she turned vampire against friends at a party," Terry told me. "Insults, champagne tossed into faces, spitting bloody vitriol, and all of that. She became a pariah." I told him that I hardly believed that; on the page, she comes off smooth and level, and always in control. "Careful of your hero's, pal," he quipped, but he saw my doubt. "So don't believe me. Look it up on the Times microfilm. "Talk of the Town" would have written something up, too. She was a devil. But she did like artists."

"Sculpture sells big, Terry," I now tell him. "It sells big for two reasons. There are those who've run out of wall space for paintings, but still love the buzz of that new purchase. So they look for alternative forms, something they haven't thought much about, or have even seen because they're always looking at walls. They need a different fucking medium. Three-dimensional objects that fit great on tables, desks, sideboards, or a corner pedestal. And of course you can't forget about people who like the world cast in bronze, brass, or pewter."

"But the space!" Terry reaches up and tugs at his collar with a long spider leg. He's wearing a white button down shirt with red tie, no jacket, and dark blue pants; the daytime uniform of the gallery manager. I'm getting nowhere with this guy.

"Terry, if you invest in two dozen pedestals and store them in the basement, you're always ready. There's no fright element here." I feel as if I'm selling aluminum siding to an Appalachian inbred. "The gallery can still have paintings on its walls, while the sculptures act like pin-ball bumpers to the crowd. That's a joke, but listen: sculpture takes their minds off the pretty pictures and helps them refocus, adjust to the three-dimensional world again." I let the image and story sink in. Terry has mellowed. I spread my hands. "How can you lose?"

He hooks his thumbs into his waistband. His eyes switch to the floor at random intervals, but I can see he's begun to visualize twenty-four pedestals standing in his gallery like load-bearing posts. He inhales and suddenly blows his cheeks out in a Sachmoesque furry, or a used car salesman.

"Tell you what, here, Minus," he says, touching the tips of his fingers to hold the pose. So it's to be the car salesman, then. He says, "Can you bring over some slides? If you can drop off slides, we'll get back to you in eight weeks or so. And, if you don't mind, I prefer black and white to color."

I can't believe this guy. "What if my sculptures are colorful?"

When I get home, a note from Belinda sits on the table, propped against a bud vase with a fresh rose standing up. Her words sling arrows at my twice-wounded pride:

Dear Minus,

I'm out with gallery owners and dealers. They liked your slides! They like your AGENT, too! Isn't this exciting?!!!

x x x – Belinda

My first thought is that the three Xs are kisses. Except, Belinda's carnal appetite might be playing on Triple-X, as in... you know. I wonder if she's promising some action when she gets home, a treat for finding easy success after taking the management helm. Maybe "promise" is too hopeful a word. How about suggestive? Sounds good to me.

The second thought is really a voice in my head, calling for coffee. I make preparations: a Sumatran dark roast, no. 5 strength on the Wake-the-Fuck-Up scale, boiled properly in our little two-cup Italian stovetop espresso jobbie, which I get to unscrew along its narrow waist to load its belly. The surge will help me hammer chisels through rock, because that's what the day has made me want to do.

As I fiddle with the primitive coffee maker, my memory mocks me. Years ago, I made a chance meeting with a private collector hunting through the Miami Art Fair. I was twenty-four, or a bit older. Harvey Dorward was an established Texas collector who used the services of a run-about agent, a guy that was younger than myself. I was there crashing the VIP lounge, a room where no art can be found in the otherwise overstocked expo center in downtown Miami, miles from the beaches and the heat & surf and sweat-drenched, tawny bodies.

Miami is no summertime arts & crafts show that every city center hosts — white tents erected side-by-side, selling water colors or home-made jewelry to the Bermuda-shorted crowd, people barely willing to part with ten dollars, much less tens-of-thousands that fine artwork fetches. Miami is an extension of Art Basel, the annual Swiss fair where influential gallerists, brokers, and collectors meet to glean, kibitz, lament, and deal. Six-figure sales are the norm. I've lately read in _ARTFORUM_ and _ARTnews_ that moneyed Reaganists — American new money — are battling European old money. The art pool has been shrinking while market prices have risen. Friends have heard me on this subject already. Of course, you'd think this automatically opens the market for artists, but the opposite is true. The market tightens because galleries are hanging on to "sure bet" artists, a formula that milks collectors for as much as possible. Is this bad for artists? Certainly for some, although making art (not creating art) merely for market demands is sure to make just three people happy: the artist (whose vision and talents will diminish), the collector (who doesn't know great art from a mediocre New York strip steak), and the galleries (whose pitch seems always to be the smarmy phrase, "I'm just trying to find good homes for my artist's work.") Surely, then, the love of money is the root of evil.

I found myself talking with Harvey, whose hometown was Dallas. Harvey talked about what populated his collection — how he had found each piece, the emotion in the work — but never mentioning its value. This was a good sign; a signal that he was knowledgeable, savvy, and held a love for art more than its investment "flip" value. He'd made his fortune in commercial real estate, "and I've got enough lubricant," he reported. "Art is a splurge that comes from the heart. Hell, I want paintings in the office, not pictures of high-rise birdcages!"

Harvey wore a gray three-piece suit with a gold watch chain strung across a bulging belly built on Texas BBQ and long days in an office chair. His dark brown hair, just speckled with salt, belied his seventy-plus years. He'd been going to Basel since its inception in 1970. Back then Basel was a backwater show where dealers were seen carrying in rolled up paintings under their arms. A bijou show in a backwater town, but within a few years Harvey was meeting with world-class dealers and gallery owners, auction houses and fellow collectors.

All this was fine, except that Harvey admitted to being too "set in" with what he had, and so could not intelligently see what was leading or ahead of the market. This is where his art consultant earned his money. I asked about him. Harvey said he'd make introductions. Later, the young man walked into the hall and joined us. Alex was a sandy-haired twenty-five-year-old, and looked like an art student, not a jet-setting consultant to a handful of private Dallas collectors.

"There are two kinds of collectors," Alex explained over his gin and tonic. "New and Old. Dealers call them something else, and auction houses have picked up on those, but they're too formal. Any-hoo, the names don't refer to money or collectors' ages. New collectors go for new art, fresh from the studio. God only knows why. Name recognition helps, but galleries are also bringing along their artists. A territorial lot, gallery owners are. Any-hoo, old includes collectors buying masterworks from the major artists. I mean like, from the moderns — let's say Seventies and no later — back to, like, whenever."

Alex liked to talk and, I soon learned, pontificate. He wore a striped button-down shirt, cuffs rolled to the elbow with the tails hanging loose over a pair of stylish jeans and brown loafers. I still haven't decided if he was acting a part, or was arrogant by nature, or had the gift for seeing what art, whose art, would take hold where and when. Of course, Harvey watched Alex and really listened to his line, even though this kid hardly had the experience (it seemed to me) to be given proxy to veritable blank-check orders for new works at auction, or hanging on gallery walls from Pittsburgh to Tokyo. On the other side, I soon realized from their back and forth, more collectors were looking for investment pieces they could flip in five year's time, passing up on substantial masterworks that were "blue-chip stock" (in Alex's parlance), which was Harvey's sole interest.

Throughout our conversation, I didn't pass myself off as anything other than what they took me for: an unknown artist who'd crashed the VIP lounge. The fact that I didn't sell myself like a Southside whore went a long way, in Harvey's mind. He ordered champagne and we three talked about art and what it meant to create it and what the feeling of buying a great piece made to one's life. Then the inevitable came. Harvey asked the bold question, but when I answered, Alex took the reigns of a diatribe I haven't forgotten.

"At your age?" he said. His hand erased the air, and with it everything I'd said; my entire reason for living. "You've either made it by now or you're not worth looking at."

I sipped champagne. "What about Grandma Moses? The austere style. American icon imagery. Or a dozen other artists going back as far as, say, last fucking year."

Alex smirked. "All fucking fairy tales; lightning strikes. So what?" He glowered with self-assurance; I saw it as self-importance. "The one-hit-wonders of art. Trees falling in the wilderness. No one cares! Look, if you want to keep at your art, Mr Minus, then I suggest you get some backing. Patronage. Or open your own gallery." He couldn't help but look at my clothes, a cool glare from shoes to haircut. "If you have that, I've got people who might think about showing you. It would have to take place in one of the outer boroughs. I'm talking New York, of course, not... uh, Milwaukee, that's where you're from, right?" He sighed, a sort of horse whinny. "Otherwise," he began to break toward a big finish, but....

The completed sentence I didn't wait to hear. Harvey hadn't spoken a word since the kid began to trash me. I put my champagne on the table and left. While Alex hasn't been right, in the years since, he hasn't been exactly wrong, either. My uncle Frank used to say, "You eat shit, you talk shit."

Coffee in hand, I wander over to the block of marble under the wooden arch. This block isn't a work in progress. I carve petroglyphs into the five sides, "studies" of dimension and objects. Playtime, for when my mind needs to wander but the hands want activity. Out of one corner peers a three sided face, blighted Asian features, one eye and the nose pecked out, while its cheek and chin are roughly abraded; a gargoyle with carrot-stub nose and exaggerated, fat-lipped mouth. Above this is a human ear, its dimension four times larger than what we stick our fingers in on the sides of heads to clean or forage, or where little kids store their dinner peas. Into a second corner I've chiseled a lion's head wearing Hitler's toothbrush mustache. Across the stone's table are further abrasions that expose the casing, face and mechanics of an old-fashioned alarm clock. One of its clacker bells cracked on me when I blinked and hammered at the same time. The clock was my original purpose for this marble; the crack changed its raisson d'etre into my practice stone. Had I tried to salvage the sculpture as Echeandia did to his coal roses, I'd have felt like a plagiarist.

I stand over the block to examine it while pulling on thin leather gloves and safety glasses. A portion of the smooth table catches my eye, left of center and up near an untouched corner. The table shows its various layers of dark sedimentary veins curving to a high arc along the edge, before dropping precipitately to form a sort of camel's hump design between thicker marbling. I pick up a cape chisel and hammer, set the bit against the rock, and strike the end four or five times. Each strike rings sharp, like an anxious lover tapping at his sleeping paramour's window in the middle of the night. Bits of stone spit from the chisel's nose, a fine three-sixteenth's bit. I follow the line between sediments, and steadily hammer the nose into the rock at a thirty-degree angle. Progress is slow, steady, taxing. After five minutes, I blow out the dust in the newly chiseled runnels and slide my fingernail along their arc. The sediment lines, when raised by this chiseling, will be as dramatic against the white rock as a woman's eyebrows, plucked and lined for a night on the town.

Quite suddenly, though, I don't want to hear hammer strikes in my ear anymore, or sneeze marble dust the rest of the night. I need to get out of the loft, take a walk — give myself a walk. I gulp breath and barely feel my feet scamper across the floor.

I show up at the Beehive after seven. I expect a dark room and the moist air of an empty cave, but the elevator door lifts onto full light and happy-talk chatter. A small party sits around the powwow table. Heads turn. The five Bees are there. They have female guests, two models, their robes draped around shoulders, hanging loosely down their chests. Beer is the drink of choice, bottles in hand, elbows pinioned on the table. A case of empties litter the center like sacrificed chess pieces, a battle between pawns. From this distance I can see eyeballs glassy with inebriated logic, set into rueful, penitent faces. They call my name; beers are raised high. It's a peace gesture, offerings of no hard feelings. The stench of doubt lingers in the air for me, and I tread lightly to gage this neutrally festive atmosphere. If everyone has done work today he can be proud of — or perhaps have at least found satisfaction with — I'll feel the vibes once I sit with them. Anyway, my mother raised me to be forgiving, and she would roll in her grave if I should be so rude as to ignore them.

The head bench has an open seat next to one of the models. She scooches over near the edge when I sit, as though I might have cooties, but her slurred grin shows friendly appeal. Bert hands me a beer; Al pours a few drams of Jameson into a square shot glass and slides it in front of me. He passes the bottle around the table. I hold up my beer and toast to healthy imaginations. We all take a swallow, and I follow mine with the shot of whiskey. The liquor flows hot and sandy down my throat and a moment later spreads summer sunset across my stomach.

"Remember Dalí's warning," I say to them, " 'Have no fear of perfection – you'll never reach it.' " They look at me with sozzled comprehension, and also a little fear. I was making a joke; but it is no joke. Everyone goes back to what they were doing when I came in, which is to drink and talk shit for a few steady hours.

The woman next to me introduces herself as Tina, and immediately tells me she's not so beautiful, body-wise, but her face is asymmetrical. Painters like asymmetry, she says. Out of politeness, I agree with her. Otherwise, I sense no mastodon proportions beneath her peach cotton robe, open in front and showing, from my angle, a moon-glow crescent of firm breast. While she talks, my eyes casually jump back and forth between her and the drones. A black crescent shines around Bert's left eye, the center of which puffs out like a muffin top, but, oddly enough, he's using it just fine. The trace of a bloody stain, kite-shaped and with a long tale, streams across the sclera. Al and Binny sit shoulder-to-shoulder, arms linked and hands clasped in love. Zeppo talks a blue streak across the table with Vendulka, though his voice doesn't carry this far. Her lips move in lagging translation.

The second model frowns over a plastic fast-food tray on which sit two pyramids of marijuana. One is built with small buds, the other of seeded weed, crushed fine and ready for rolling. Her fingers are sticky with green flecks as she picks up rolling paper and makes a fold along the third of the skin, drizzles enough pot into the fold to roll a pinner. Between her elbows lie five other thin joints. She's the most concentrated among the group.

Bert is explaining how he came looking for me after waking to Vendy's care and holding a bag of frozen peas over his eye. He asks me what the clay figures in my honeycomb are all about. I tell him I don't know what they're all about; practice, maybe something more. From his wandering eye (the good one) I see he doesn't believe me. But I haven't anything more to tell him. The joint-rolling model flares one of her creations. Everyone takes a hit, and the stick is dwindled to a brown hyphen by the time it clocks around to her again. She lights another. Vendy is finding it harder to keep up with Zeppo, whose mercurial mouth sends sputum onto the table between them.

Maybe it's the effect of the pot, but it occurs to me that everyone has begun to shout. I'm shouting, too; I want to be heard. We're not saying much, nothing worth taking notes on, but we are nonetheless competing. Only fear makes you shout, say the psychologists. What did we fear? The future and the present, that's all. No wonder. I try to take refuge in hearing Aurelius's advice: don't let the future disturb you; you'll meet it with the same reason you use against the present.

After a while, the leaky estuary of our ambitious voices slowly calms us. This isn't art, the image I've imposed on my fellow drones, merely human emotions unbottled by liquor and drugs. It's only that we always expect to step onto pavement, terra firma, but too often find mud climbing over our ankles. Other days, it's the opposite. I look past Bert and this other woman — I remember: Tina — to lengthen my focus.

The model at the far end is older than Tina. My guess is middle fifties. But this isn't a criticism. The waxed fruit shine on her wavy black hair makes it appear fuller than it is, yet the length reaches away from her head instead of falling naturally, as though an updraft has control of its gravity. I'm reminded of the witchingly odd Medusa, a ravishing beauty in Ovid's story. I don't know whose model she is (probably Zeppo's, although I've caught her winking at Vendy twice. Lesbian come-on? It's possible.), and her drop-in quality of an outsider-looking-in doesn't exactly hold with how she's comfortable in her seat, one knee balanced over the other, lots of thigh showing from a hip-length robe, her posture is spine straight, and her green eyes move around the table like an inquisitor whose success is had by listening to the wails of her prisoners. Her hands and arms are veiny, the musculature of a light eater and exercise addict. A face with lines but whose attractiveness holds together with attitude and verve. I don't want to meet this woman, because my illusion of her beauty would fade quickly when I've listened to her life story, one which I don't try to gather from imagery that's already coming, but I fight this away successfully by seeing her as art object, to copy as stone oval, wooden rod, dental floss knots, crystal shards, or leaves painted chartreuse and oxblood. Caravaggio painted Medusa in open-mouthed agony (having your head severed by a sword will do this to you, I imagine, as Caravaggio had shown us). A ghost's chilling touch compels me to look away.

She could be Karen K, I surmise, slipped out of her bag lady costume after the day's performance, freshly bathed and pampered in a silk robe, possibly a kimono. If I were to sculpt Karen K, as I saw her on first sight, she would be cast in plastic, an injection mold, a version of her plastic bags but crimped like those bags she keeps in a drawer. But this is only the false representation of a person who is making a representation of someone not herself. How do I get through that façade? Karen K is an artist herself, that type that is a seer, a writer, one who looks at the world to find meaning in what others want to see but can't quite get there, by choice or inability. She gets to see the simplest objects subjectively: language, photographs, the park, all the tourists changing colors and shapes daily; the subway and bus riders belonging to that distinctive home-city caste; and authentic bag ladies who know (they know) that she isn't one of them. She, Karen, sees them while they see through her.

The party floats on when I leave the Beehive at eleven. Near midnight, Belinda corners me in our bedroom while I'm undressing. One sock hangs from my hand.

"Dogs in a gallery? Silver mavens? What's up with that?"

"How did...?" I drop the question. I drop the sock. I pick out a Midwestern country-twang voice to make my ploy look acceptable. "I's just being folksy, in a city-ish way." The beer and whiskey still have their grip on me, and "city-ish" comes out "shitty-ish." Belinda folders her arms and taps her nails on one elbow. She's not angry, and even seems mildly amused. I tell her, "Don't blame me if those Ivy League assholes can't take a joke. Isn't art itself one big –" Her hand shoots skyward, its pink palm stopping me.

"Okay, Minus Mouse, I get that. But honey...." She shakes her head and sighs as deeply as I've ever witnessed a human pull off one of these yearnings. She takes another breath. "I've started something. Its design is meant to generate an image of you. For you." She stops and straightens herself. So I'm to be read the riot act after all. I pull up my legs on the bed and sit Indian style. She says, "Let me give you an image, as Artist Dude: we want collectors to visit your studio. This loft, the co-op, wherever. It's time to cut out the galleries if they don't want to play, or until they see that the people who normally buy art from them have already gone to the source of the art. You know what I mean about this. Your card players fit into the idea.

"Now, getting your sculptures into the right homes is essential. And quickly. Any paintings you have in the vault, like those mobiles you did a couple years ago — take all of it out. One hand washes the other. Right? Okay, so we can't just sell to the maven dangling the largest diamond earrings from her stretched lobes. When other collectors and auction houses hear of who owns your art, then those gallery parasites will call us to see your work. Don't worry, I've seen this stunt work a dozen times."

Something inside me wants to ask who she thinks I am. I also want to know how the art-into-the-right-home concept works. She reads this, and tells me who I am, adding unsolicited examples. What surprises me is that I agree with her. Down to the blue socks I wore with brown shoes today.

"Who have you seen?" I ask, my voice filled with proprietorial angst.

"Anyone who's let me in the door. I have to break some eggs here."

"But I did that."

"You tried that. They missed the bowl. Galleries don't want to see artists. Not until they've been given a nod. They think it's too hard on the artists to reject them in person. Where have we heard this before, right? Anyway, they think the rejection hurts them – the gallery squids – worse than it hurts the artists. Isn't that the cat's meow? What gall. Do you want to know what I think? I think these people — smart, sincere, knowledgeable, some are real art lovers — are projecting."

"O balls!" I say.

"No. Really. They want to find good art. Imagine how crushing it must feel to see crap all day long. There's far more shit out there than shinola."

"You're kidding. This is not a joke? Okay, well... did they tell you this?"

"A few were extremely confessional. After a while, it's like they're reading from a playbook. That's when I switched over to the dealers."

"You mentioned success –"

"What success? Did I say that? Honey, I've been rejected fifty-seven times, got ten 'maybes' and three — count 'em, three — said yes to a meeting. Three. Not a good average, but Babe Ruth struck out over three thousand times to get just seven-hundred-plus homers. Practice makes perfect, so goes the moral."

"Funny, I read the opposite recently," I say. "Someone on good authority."

She waits for me to tell her the punchline, but when I hesitate she shrugs and sits down on the edge of the bed. "Whatever. Okay. So I've got time. It's a place from which to build. Next step –"

"When have you done all this? The time, the – where have you found the time? I thought you'd been driving the hansom cab."

"All day? Minus, I leave the house before you get up in the morning."

"I thought you were brushing down Gretchen. Or something."

She shakes her head. "I'm paying a kid at the stables who loves horses to take care of Gretch mornings, and have her ready for me after lunch. Smart girl, eh?"

"Wow," I say, like an imbecile. "But, how did you learn all of this? The information, and getting inside so, so quickly."

"Not inside, but – that's the easier part, boyfriend." She's up from the bed and starts taking off her clothes as she talks; folding, stripping, hanging, tossing. "Most of these gallery owners and dealers, collectors and artists, too, they just love to gab, no matter what game-play look they give you and the proletarian public. All without trying to say anything. It's like attending an actual, honest-to-the-Christian-Christ, pissing contest. What they don't realize is that someone who's really listening has just got access to the same chow line. Or slop house. Take your pick, because in my experience we're dealing with pigs at the trough."

I don't think there's a lot of room for cynicism in the art world. Not for artists. But even as I think this, I become aware that, except for the artist (mostly), Art is either used for idle entertainment or exactly as how Belinda wants to use it.

CHAPTER 9

If my treatment of NY has sounded contradictory at times, therein one finds its definition; and so to paint its many sides is to reveal city life in its flush or pale. Not every city proves loving and loveable, or harsh and hate-able, coalesced as the experience of one day or the syntax of a single sentence. NYC holds both these cats in one bag. The closest comparison I can find is the human itself, and by inference human emotions. Humans build cities, humans live in them, humans destroy them — and for these reasons, a city, like a human, has flaws. In love, and in passionate desire, we tend to overlook flaws and hope for equal compensation. Or, if not overlooked, they are kept veiled by opaque focus, to be revealed only when, for example, a sidewalk vent sends a powerful updraft to lift hems and — shock! — show the cracks, discolorations, age & abuse they have suffered and accepted. We only glimpse these because we are certain to quickly look away (as good manners demand). A question is left in memory's wake: Is to reveal also to revile? The ebb and flow of these winds can come upon you from behind, as well. They run off with your smoothed solitude like a Dickensian pickpocket.

One morning a few weeks after arriving in the great City, I walked up a sun-soaked stairwell from the subterranean shadows of the A Line, beyond which a train's rumbling out of the station gathered round my feet. At the top of the stairs a man stood with his back against the green railing. He was looking across the small, nearly empty square on this Sunday morning. I saw a flash, sunlight against steel. His laugh slashed into this concentrated moment, and in the next I saw the knife held in his right hand, twin to the cruel smile cut across his red, wet lips. His eyes were not on me. I don't think he ever noticed me. The knife held all the fascination he needed on the Christian Sabbath. It was a switchblade, the in-out kind, and for each ejaculation and tuck of its polished blade, caused by the pressure of his thumb extended on a grimy hand wrapped around the shaft, the man laughed a tinny voice of triumph. I thought to take his picture, but feared what he might take in return.

I begin to stake out The Parkview. Karen K will show herself.

I use my little dogs for cover to walk CPW from the north past her building. I stay on the opposite sidewalk. I won't draw Henry's attention (or the Dick's) with this floppy straw hat and sunglasses to disguise me, a common enough sight this time of early summer. It's just past lunchtime, and people crowd the sidewalks. Mrs Cowper, Napoleon, and Rasputin are easily managed. Likewise, they make it easy for me to stop here and there. Henry has not seen me with dogs.

Two women leave The Parkview as we dawdle near a tree up the street, but neither is my prey. At least, I don't think so. In all truth, I'm not sure I could recognize Karen Kosek dressed in normal clothing. On our way back twenty-minutes later, we veer inside the park where, occasionally and on pretense of following the dogs' lead, I walk through the small-leafed brush and over broken twigs along the curtain wall. I poke my head over to further reconnoiter The Parkview's entrance. A man stands beside Henry, smoking a cigar and talking with one hand, to suggest there's a lot of back and forth to life, weighing arguments or making decisions. Henry executes a snake charmer's nod at appropriate pauses of the hand, although I imagine he's wondering how much of his own life has been wasted listening to all the tenants' nonsense.

Just once in three days do I spot Karen K. I notice her only by her filthy straw hat perched on her head. I spot it bobbing through the angled trunks of border trees. I pick up her trail east of the Wolman Ice Rink, shuttered for the season, and am so elated that I nearly break into a run, a mistake almost certainly to blow my cover. I reign myself in and follow at a safe distance. It's time I learn Karen's habits. Here and there she stops: she looks around randomly; rests on a bench; watches children at play; dips her hand into a trash barrel (a discarded apple with two bites taken along its equator; a newspaper folded into thirds; soda bottles she can return for deposit); and she kicks a stray soccer ball back to a group of kids down from the Barrio. On her way home, she crosses at the 77th Street light, not quite making it this time before cars jump and buckle when they get the green, and curse her with the sour blasts of their horns. Karen K doesn't jump, doesn't rush to the curb — she wears three coats pulled over her body on a seventy-degree day, the longest so oversized its tail drags on the ground behind her like a wedding train — she answers the car horns with an upturned middle finger, the stout defiance of the marginalized. She shuffles down the sidewalk unhurried, head down, making room for no one, and turns onto The Parkview's carpet runner where, with Henry's meager help and raw-meat smile, she disappears through the open door. I note the time in a small student's diary.

Days Four and Five permit sightings of Karen K like those of a rare animal in the wild. She proves to be habitual, however, and by the afternoon of Day Nine I follow her for two hours, always from a safe distance behind or across the street. Twice I lose her, but by guessing her routes I pick up her trail later. From Day 15 I can assemble her schedule: she's out at nine or ten, back by three or four; she walks the streets of Midtown, the Upper West Side, and Central Park; she loiters on city benches, hunched over like an air-sick passenger; she eats from garbage cans or buys hot pretzels to douse with yellow mustard; she rarely stops longer than a traffic light's interruption.

My dog-walking duties bring me across her path through simple street maneuvers. Her passes through the park are marked by empty hands or bulging shopping bags, whose contents are still only my guess. Her clothes change, but rarely the shoes — Days 8 & 9: one turtleneck and two cardigans of different colors and sizes; Day 13: what looks like a blue knit skirt but turns out to be a dyed burlap sack. Her disguises are nondescript to what's found in New York; people remotely looking bum-like are eliminated as solid material. I vary my disguise, too, a fact whose connection to Karen K's outfit and meanderings is not lost on me.

Following her gives me time to play out questions and a few hypotheses. Anyone who wears a homeless getup in broad daylight can't be a simple fetishist. It's far too dangerous, especially for a woman. Nevertheless, I have no idea how long this charade has been going on. That first day I recognized her could have been the first day of her bag lady routine, or the hundred-and-first. On her off days, I imagine, she is simply Karen K the writer and Citizen of New York, living the life of any woman her age and profession. For starters, who otherwise does her shopping? Henry? Doubtful. Therefore, her actions have to be the object of a game! She's bored; there's no one in her life; upper middle age pulls at her molars; she has lost life's vitality — the wrong word, but somehow I find it fits in the crooked space she's elbowed out for herself.

My intention is not to stalk Karen K. I only want to meet her, as I told Henry and The Dick. How I'll make that into a chance event is something I'll work out as this malarkey plays out. If she wants to be alone, she'll tell me when we finally meet. I have respect for people's privacy, but I feel like I'm stuck in a Stoppard play — wait, no: Mamet. He's a head taller when it comes to crazy.

On Day 11 I sketched my idea of what Karen K looks like, twenty-five years older than the book jacket photograph. The result showed little likeness to the woman I see under three coats, matted hair, and skin smeared with theater grease to look like street grime. What I first recognized — polished nails, the educated chin — still screams out to me, "You know this woman!" No one resembling that other Karen K has entered or left The Parkview, at least not when I've been watching. Whatever she's doing, she's very good at doing it.

One day, after I'd given up my bag lady to The Parkview, I watch the front door from my position behind the wall to see if she will go upstairs for a quick change and return to the world as Karen K, culture critic at large. Henry is street-side, looking for me on orders from his mistress (a premonition that won't leave my head). He stands at the curb, shining his oversized buttons with his sleeves, down one row and up the other. His head turns with the jittery motion of a suburban lawn sprinkler. I know his routine as well as the dogs' bladders: whistling to cabs in the morning, lunch break at noon sharp, picking up cigarette butts with a whisk broom and dustpan, and signing for packages brought by car, bicycle, or commercial truck. This is the job Henry holds out for bonuses at Christmas? I think I'm losing the respect I felt for his gab with the widow Robertson, but especially losing the fear I felt when he breathed that toreador's breath across my brow to scare me off. Of The Dick, I've seen only his shadow; he keeps himself behind the doors, standing tall and unmoving like a hallway clock. He must leave for home through a separate entrance.

This stakeout has given me shin splints from stilting on my tiptoes for long periods; I've threaded through the park a hundred miles; both groups of dogs are exhausted, and pull me away from their favorite spots, necks arching behind them to stare at me with pleading eyes, Just take us home already! One day Chief started to bark and refused to walk further, taking a stand, to which Boilermaker and Pan joined in. But Marshall, such a big loveable dope, whined like a baby and dropped down to lick himself in front of an audience of Italian tourists. When the others saw the attention Marshall was getting, their mutiny ended. Likewise, Napoleon and Ms Cowper have nipped at my toes and ankles when they've become bored with my fast walks, sudden stops to duck behind trees & bushes, and then long, motionless standing, only to bolt when I spot the author-cum-derelict.

After thirty minutes I give up on Karen's return and ease back from the wall, where I hear the soles of my high tops scruff along the dust and twigs. On my way home I force myself to stop at Metropolitan Museum of Art because it's not too late and I'm tired and bitchy and annoyed that I can't seem to catch a bag lady today when I need one, and if I don't relax with some art, I'll surely take out my frustration on Belinda. After being scolded for that, Belinda would want to know why, and then I'd have to explain what I've been doing for two weeks. Better to unwind.

The Met is closing when I walk up the steps. People file out through the massive iron doors alongside the escorting smile of three blue-uniformed guards, walkie-talkies holstered to their hips and earpiece wires clipped to lapels. From this extrusion Peter N strolls past me.

"Pete. Pete!"

I catch up with him halfway down the stairs. He tells me he needed a break, which gives me a natural excuse for my own presence. We both think the other's lying, so it's a fair match, with no need to press. But the museum is closing, Pete assures me. I only want ten minutes, and my watch says I have five, I say. Pete's pleased to follow me to a guard for a laugh, but that's all. I turn and march up the stairs. The patron exodus is like wasps whose nest is under attack.

I confront an older guard, a porky Chicano whose breathing is asthmatic and makes his face appear suspiciously blue-red, like he's being strangled. I show him my watch. He shows me his. We make the simultaneous conclusion that no matter how righteous I feel, his watch wins. Only the gift shop is open, I'm told. I huff, look at Peter, he blinks, but there's at least something for me. He says he'll tag along.

The gift shop exudes smells of coffee table tomes and tourist perfume. A line of shoppers at the checkout counter leaves hope that I have fifteen minutes to wander. While most people find taking a nap rejuvenating, I feel the same after looking through art books. But now the background noise of foreign voices, Russian and French and a Greekish confabulation, drown my peace. I dart down an aisle that takes me to heaven; a long table has been stacked with exhibition catalogs, from Kandinsky and Calder and Hopper to Delft and the Italian Renaissance.

"I'm going to the paints," Pete tells me, and wanders off.

"Yeah, yeah. Good hunting," I say. "See you when they drag me out of here. Kicking and screaming, I hope. I'll go proselytize the virtues of art at the city jail nut cage until Belinda bails me out."

Peter flips me the bird. No sense of humor.

The catalogs are beautiful, oversize volumes, hardcovers shiny in their cloth wraps, four-color jackets and glossed pages. I don't touch anything, but let my eyes kiss the cover art. Deep breaths take me near a yogic state, and with every exhale the tension flows out of my muscles and joints, draining into the white linoleum under my feet. After this renewal I open books at random. The headache I felt coming on recedes. After five minutes I go in search of the postcard racks.

A pre-teen girl in jeans shorts and a Statue of Liberty T-shirt browses through the first rack, slowly rotating it while her head, not her eyes, moves up and down. I scan the cards from over her shoulder, letting her schoolgirl attention span set the rotation pace. There's no order to the cards' placement; Greek busts have been set beside Baroque landscapes, Hopper above Gauguin, a Thalia bust amongst Egyptian cats and Giambologna's Medici Horse, surrounded by twentieth-century black-line sketches and sepia cityscapes. At first I'm put off, but then I begin to like this disorder. Its unplanned blend of browns and reds and creams and blues coaxes a collage of dreams come through the eras and movements.

I step sideways, over to an unattended turnstile I can control. Its theme is self-portraits. Bruegel's includes, beside his ruffian appearance with wild hair poking out like straw from a tightly fitted pudding-cup hat, a bespectacled woman in a baggy shirt, who looks birdlike; both figures seem brightly caricatured, their eyes full of self-mocking. Warhol's red and fuchsia silkscreen lets him be mysterious by blotting out half his face, its blackened twin staring into the void of the viewer's eyes. He's in the blue flame of his popularity, enjoying the joke he's played on the art world for at least a decade. Da Vinci has scratched out an old man, his sober mouth corresponding to the fleshy, hooded eyes of resignation.

Norman Rockwell has his own playful qualities sparkling; he looks in a mirror while drawing himself (his back is to the viewer, which presumably he can see through a second mirror, placed just about where we see his face). His ubiquitous pipe-in-mouth expression resembles a Main Street, U.S.A. grandfather hanging about outside the general store. A study of five heads (his own) is pinned to the canvas, upper left, and four other Masters' self-portraits hang upper right. How original, I think; how American, for its un-self-conscious egotism. I pick one out of the rack, and also a Rembrandt that catches my eye (he's drawn himself in half-balding, pudgy-faced middle life). I pass up Gustave Corbet's Desperate Man because he's imagined a fiercely deranged self (though perhaps true enough for Corbet).

I fan my choices out like a card player. Each is beautifully printed on good card stock. I have the idea to use them as bookmarks. But I find this card collection lacking. It has no women on offer, even though Judith Leyster has a fine painting in the Met's Dutch collection, and she was a member of the Haarlem painters' guild in 1633. Hers, in fact, is about the happiest self-portrait I've ever seen — full of life and smartly colored. Her image silently speaks to the audience with an open-mouthed smile (maybe for her growing reputation?) or perhaps she's laughing at those contemporaries who see women as models, not artists. A little of both, I can imagine.

A voice through a speaker squawks overhead, informing customers it's time to bring their souvenirs to the sales counter. I give the turnstile a final spin, and that's when she catches my eye. My free hand stops the motion, turns it back. I pull out Dod Procter's Self Portrait, done when she must have been in her thirties. She's looking to her left, into some middle distance; a neutral expression leaves no lines on her face, although her visible eye has resolution of some sort, while her brown hair is bobbed, flapper style. She wears a modest woolen sweater with a Spanish scarf knotted at her throat.

I get into line behind a middle-aged couple whose mumbled complaints ride on some Southwest ranch twang. A hand pinches my ass (I think it's a hand) and I jump. Attached to the hand is Pete's arm, and the arm to the shoulder, and the shoulder to all the rest of him, including a whacky grin.

"Look what I've found," he says, and waves a tube of oil paint in front of my face. I catch a bluish brown color and my guess is a phthalo blend. "I've been looking for this tint all over town. The supply houses keep telling my supply guys that it's on back order. No one knows why. 'Could have something to do with the Chinese buying up so much raw material' for some shit or another. Do I believe that? They wouldn't lie, or at least I hope not. But now where do I find it? And tell me why tourists would want to buy paint here, and this particular color."

"So they can take a bit of history home with them?"

"I s'pose a cheap-o gift set with plastic bristle brushes isn't good enough for them. They need a forty-dollar tube of paint the size of their toenail fungus salve."

"For that price they'll expect to paint like Titian," I say. "Maybe they should. Did you check if it comes with an instruction booklet?" This gets a laugh, but there's a cloudy frown hanging over it.

"Yeah. No." Pete is unfazed. "Unless they have a good paint-by-numbers kit burning a hole in the rec room cupboard."

"Does that paint really cost so much?" I ask.

"No, but this tube does. And I need it. So it goes on the 'travel' expense sheet for my accountant to sort out."

"I wish I had an accountant."

"No, you don't want that wish to come true. When you see all the taxes you have to pay and the FICA you can't get out of paying, your past life as a teenage burger flipper doesn't seem all that bad."

The couple in front of us get louder. He's hungry and she's tired of hearing about it. Pete and I elbow each other, like kids on a field trip. The couple wear too-tight trousers, from which their hips bulge like they've been collecting rocks on their journey from ranchlands. As the line shuffles forward, I wonder how these two would draw their self-portraits. What would they reflect of themselves to the world? A Warholian gaze of comfort-of-place, or Corbet's angst, or Renoir's confident stare, the pious Botticelli, maybe Durer as unequaled genius? And would they be true to their age and count the lines on their faces (a la da Vinci, Rembrandt, Proctor and Leyster)? My bet is they take Rockwell's path, whose endless spirit captures American values that say art exists to make us happy, not sad or anxious. Something up-beat and prime time, a gloss on the truth. I pay for my postcards and get a weary but cheerful smile from the blond teenager behind the cash register. Photographs are easy self-portraits today. You only have to learn how to load the camera with film, focus the lens, and don't forget to pick up the prints at Duane Reade.

Outside once again, we breathe fresh NYC air to flush the canned odors of the Met's circulated A/C. Pete looks in his bag and rustles the tube, as if he's bought a live mouse and he wants to transfer it to his breast pocket. I see he's itching to get home, now that he's come up sevens. We part on the sidewalk, without me having to lie again about being so far from home without one of the dog teams. I toss Pete a wave and walk off, peeking inside my bag of goodies.

Day Nineteen: I get my third chance to get close enough to Karen K that I might speak to her if I have the courage. I don't even have to follow her to make this happen; she walks right past me. I'm sitting on a bench in Strawberry Fields, nursing my aching legs, without any of the mutts along, writing in a journal and sketching parts of the world in blue ink. One of Karen's plastic bags brushes my shins, which pulls me from my gaze over the heads of an Asian family performing dreamy Tai-Chi poses while ringed around the John Lennon memorial. Karen stops at the cheesy tribute, elbows her way through the Asians, and kneels on the pavement. Out of one plastic bag she takes a potted plant. The plant's deep green leaves wiggle when she positions the pot in the center of all the other flowers left as signs of love and lasting sorrow. Most are plastic-wrapped roses with the price tags showing. I lean closer and look for signs of the plant's purpose or significance, because what she's laid down is an herb plant, basil I think. She's wearing a blue jumpsuit, the kind issued to New York sanitation workers, filthy and thread-worn at the knees and elbows like she's come off an obstacle course, or been dragged behind the garbage truck.

I don't understand the herb connection, nor her presence. She has caught me unawares because of the time (5:10) and place (touristy & mawkish). When she quickly rises from the half-pious genuflection, I'm still unprepared to follow or interrupt her. Why I want to do the latter is because it's time I made some move; I can't follow her forever.

While I'm thinking, making this no-plan, she beats a path through the crowd. I react in the quickness of hurried flight and shove my notebook into one pocket, the fountain pen in another, keeping one eye on Karen parting the crowd with elbows akimbo. But I shove too hard in my haste, and feel the acute pain of pierced flesh as the pen's needle-sharp nib rips through the pocket and sinks into my inner thigh. I scream.

"Ouch!" The pain rushes across my groin. I shriek. "Fuck!" A dark circle of blood soaks up through my jeans. "Fuck, fuck, fuuuck me!"

People turn and gawk. They've discovered a genuine NY-moment: street theater; a kidnapping; mayhem is afoot. My reaction effectuates the perfect plan. A baker's dozen watch me grope my groin. A billion-plus nerve endings turn my lap into a barbeque. And at the back edge of the crowd, Karen K looks at me from behind the bobble-head tourists. For a long moment she stares; I think she recognizes something in the shape of my face. Her eyes are painted in a smear of blue sparkle eyeshadow, treasure stolen from the purse of a teenager. Then she turns and dips behind the colorful dots of baseball caps and summer hats.

When I lurch from my seat I feel blood flow from my wound, so I drop back onto the slats. Post shock, I wonder if my health plan covers blood poisoning. Post post-shock, I recall the expression on Karen K's face, the movement of her nose before she fled: she knows that I know who she is.

As I limp home with one hand pressed medically to my wound, I spot a horse carriage entering the park along 59th Street. Its chestnut mare pulls with a steady gait, head held high and straight, no blinders destroying her eyes. Her tail has been braided into thick pleats, and her mane is a pile of narrow cornrows that move like confetti with each step. She's almost prancing. The carriage is modeled after a nineteenth-century design, with open sides, step-up rails, and a bench seat facing forward. At the reigns sits an equally upright driver in red livery with gold buttons, skin-tight white pants tucked into black leather boots hugging her calves up to the knee. Her boot heels lie solidly on a footboard overhanging the back of the cab. Atop her head is a stovepipe hat. Her hair is braided, too, into pigtails that hang from beneath the hat. The cab is empty of passengers. I hatch another plan, my third (fourth?) in a month.

Gretchen the chestnut mare can easily outpace me if I stay behind her, so I choose an intercepting path across the Heckscher ball fields. I'll catch her at the feeder lane to Central Park South. I begin to run, but immediately falter into a gangling limp so I don't bleed to death (overplayed, because the blood stopped almost as soon as it began, but the pain lingers and I'm sure I should get a tetanus shot, and probably won't because it was just a prick from my Mont Blanc fountain pen, not some cheap Bic with its adulterated inks, which I think makes the real difference between life or death and simple lockjaw, and pages that bleed when they get wet). Nonetheless, I'm certain the limp makes me look like Ratso Rizzo from Midnight Cowboy (a movie millions of tourists claim to have watched before visiting the City, thus insuring NY retains its rough edges). At least I have the right city to pull off this look, should a cab stop short from running me over.

The four ball fields are crowded with spectators and ballplayers. Teams playing 14-inch softball stand on the scrubby outfield grass or pebble-strewn infields. Some players crouch zealously whenever a new pitch arcs toward home plate. Cheers from different fields erupt after batters hit balls. Hits sound like the echoes of wooden mallets driving stakes into the hearts of vampires. Umpires yell OUT! and SAFE! with equal intensity. Teams wear makeshift pants and cleat shoes, but their shirts are uniformly colored: cadmium orange; cerulean blue; brown ochre; cinnabar green; English red. I dodge through spectators wolfing hot dogs dressed in mustard and pickle relish, who hardly stop to chew before yelling something unintelligible through the chain link fences. It could be encouragement or criticism, and doesn't seem to make a difference either way. Chunks of sticky white bread and green offal hang on the metal wire.

At the bend along West Drive, I come around broadleaf bushes just as Belinda and Gretchen clip-clop along. My thumb shoots out and both horse and coach-woman angle their heads toward a chest-heaving lump of manhood, hunched at the waist like he's nursing a hernia. Belinda slows Gretchen with a practiced tug on the reigns, and the carriage comes to a stop at the curb.

"Can I ride up front?" I ask, and in a child's voice, "Please, lady, pleeeeezzzz!"

"Will you shut up?" murmurs Belinda. "We're in public."

I give Gretchen's shoulder a rub while I walk to the cab to hoist myself up. Belinda is watching me and I'm trying not to wince, but this fails. When I sit, she sees me adjusting.

"Have you peed in your pants?"

"I stabbed myself," I tell her, and in a huff explain what happened. Fast admission is the best tack here. "I saw someone in the park. When I made a bit of a scramble to catch up and say hello, I injected the nib into my crotch. I guess I didn't have it capped."

Belinda frowns. "I don't like fountain pens. I'm surprised airlines allow passengers on board with such weaponry. You know you're going to have to buy new jeans."

"I can sew up the hole, or iron a patch. I'm sure the blood will wash out."

"And the ink from your blood? We need to get you to your doctor –"

"Dog walkers don't have health plans. I don't have a doctor. I know a few vets, though. Perhaps –"

"Then the free clinic will take you. Get a tetanus shot, at the least. Have you ever heard of lock jaw?"

"I'm a sculptor, not an actor. Muteness can only help my career."

"Minus!"

"Hey, I'm liable to come out of a clinic with something that's more deadly than tetanus. Like a methadone addiction."

"Don't be an ass, honey."

"It's not a worry, B. I bled out the ink."

"In the park? Did you take down your pants with a crowd watching? Pay a five-dollar hooker to suck out all that nasty poison?"

"You're worse than I am," I say. Her crudeness is no blandishment, but I can play the game. "But that's not a half-bad ide-er there, cuz-in Mary-Jo."

"Jesus, boyfriend, if I didn't love you, I'd use this whip across your back."

"I think that kind of love is called S&M — in'it?"

"Only if I hog-tie you before administering the punishment." Belinda shakes her head, but through her new, friendly frown, she smiles and I see the light of love in her eyes. For some measure, good or bad, she whacks me across the shins with the crop. Then she picks up the reigns and snickers at Gretchen, who chivvies the cab into motion. The mare's hoof clops are immediately soporific to me.

"It's nearly six," says Belinda. "I thought you'd be at the co-op."

"Change of plans," I tell her. "Research. Colors and forms. People watching. The young and old and the middle-aged found in New York, wherever they've come from across the globe." I'm rambling through a half-truth. "It's quite the mix, unlike flipping through mug shots at the post office."

New York's pot doesn't so much melt as it stews: groups walk in their unified races: white with white; black with black; Asian with Asian (a whole subculture with its many strata); Puerto Ricans hand in hand; Mexicans finding their niche; and God forbid, don't forget the Hassidic Jews dressed like Wild West undertakers. Cross-pollination for the purpose of business is everywhere, naturally (NY is the cosmopolitan city), but that's the exception regarding friendship, not the norm. Following Karen K wasn't all that I had my eyes peeled for, otherwise how could I call myself an artist. I pull out the museum postcards to show Belinda. The names, their masterworks, imply the ultimate achievement of artisans through history. We have a laugh at their vanity, a justified and honored tradition among painters.

"I think I'm ready to make maquettes," I say. "Something's coming, sweetheart. I need to play in the studio some more and... noodle."

"Okay," says Belinda in a concerned-mother tone. I know what she's thinking: it's been weeks since the throwing experiment, all through which I've said little about work, while she has filled our dinner conversation with descriptions of collectors and dealers, meetings and negotiations. I'm finding it harder to get food down for all the guilt, rising like bile, at producing ideas whose butterfly flutters get caught in a storm. Belinda, though, is my rock of encouragement. "That's good, honey. See, not so bad. Two or three weeks. A month. I believe you when you say you need to let ideas percolate. By the way, I'm glad you didn't say 'fiddle.' Too much like Nero and the destruction of Rome and a black day for civilization."

"Yeah. That's me: helping out eternity." I ponder regretfully my nineteen-day stakeout, and Karen K's blue-corona stare. "Time to work now."

Belinda becomes animated. "Me, too, Minus Mouse. I've got news about you."

I wait for this news, good or bad. Her tone makes it sound good.

"So?"

"No, not now. Too much to tell, and I have two reserved rides. I see my first fare waiting for me up ahead."

Under the street lamps of 59th Street, where other horse carriages stand idle, and some coachmen bird-dog tourists on their way to an early dinner, I spot two couples dressed to the nines standing beside Belinda's sandwich board advert.

"Okay, then I'll jump off," I say.

"Fine, ArtGuy. But you know...." She looks at me like I'm the man of her dreams.

"Yes?"

"I'm sure I'll be famished when I get home."

I do love a woman who can eat, and for a second I look at her riding crop. Her hand gets there before mine. We laugh. I rub her knee and make a promise. She kisses me on the cheek and I vanish from the driver's perch. The drop to the ground makes me grit my teeth. The things we do for love.

Belinda gets home at nine-forty to find me behind the kitchen island. Three silver serving trays gleam atop the white tile & black grout countertop. Their dome covers promise caloric-rich temptations inside. She lets out a sharp O! and points. "Numbers one, two, and three." She has changed out of her driver's costume, her legs sheathed in faded denim. A red sweatshirt holds snugly above her belt loops. "Shall I let out my belt a notch right now?" she teases.

I come around the island and lift the lids one at a time. "A Caesar's salad to start. Then we have... curried meatballs with grilled eggplant and carrot stalks. And finally, to make your stomach gurgle later on..." my hand pulls the lid off the final tray "... chocolate tartlets."

Belinda drops her bag, which hits the floor with a salty spank, and runs toward me, arms out. I put the lid down and step up to catch her. She floats right on by, hikes her knees onto the barstool and hovers above the food, smelling the aromas with her eyes closed. Her nose works the air in a rodent's precocious curiosity at the whiff of food.

"You're a madman, Minus. A diabolical culinary wizard. An artist with a palate."

"Careful," I say, dispensing with modesty. "Words like that will ruin a man."

"Food like this will ruin my figure," she says. "So we'll be even."

Belinda's roots in Nebraska have a few Midwest clichés attached: two sisters (one prissy and one rebel) and one brother (BOMC jock); a doting father who gushed over 'daddy's girl'; a mother who seasoned each dinner with sacrilegious gossip from the corner church, and intrusive questions about personal diaries, male dominance in business, and what the neighborhood kids did on dates. The stereotypes ended on the road separating city and farm. Belinda grew up in the suburbs, just like me (on finding out we both knew the movie No Down Payment from late-night reruns, our friendship was sealed — who could forget Tony Randall as the drunken neighbor looking for extra-marital action on the dance carpet, while all the husbands and wives looked on?). Belinda's idea of farm life comes from watching those schlock Seventies' sitcoms Green Acres and Petticoat Junction. The nearest she got to farm work was dating a dairy mogul's near-do-well son, who tried to talk her into hooking her tits up to the industrial milking machine. When her father died in a head-on collision (a hit-and-run by a local cop, off duty and a known boozer; found three days later in a Colorado jail for, you guessed it, hit and run), Alice was left with four kids yet in the nest. They sold the six-bedroom home, moved to the seedier side of town into a middle-scale housing complex (just like Tony!), and Mom got a job at a doctor's office in a nearby, tawnier suburb. Alice began to sleep with heart surgeons — "auditioning them" was Belinda's description (Or they her? Belinda was unclear on this). Meanwhile, fifteen-year-old Belinda hung out at the town pool that first full summer of her depressing life change, to escape the heat (of Nebraska's summer sun and mom's mid-life lust), sunning herself in a bikini that — oops! — Alice seemed to have forgotten on her own way to hell was two years too small for a developing teen. "The white polka dots looked nice," Belinda remembered. "It took me three minutes to figure out why I was so popular." One day while waiting in line at the poolside concession stand to buy a Dreamcicle, avoiding stares from middle-aged men whose pot-bellies protruded like pregnancies over their Speedos, Belinda dreamed up a real life for herself, a vision to trade in the amber waves of heat rising off suburban asphalt for a real city. First stage: don't lose your virginity to a tuxedoed stable hand, no matter how deep his daddy's pockets were. Next: get a college degree, something useful, which meant stay away from the Humanities Department. Finally: New York, here I come! She bought her Dreamcicle and ate it in the shade of an elm tree overhanging the pool's perimeter fence, where she decided that anything — anything-anything-anything — was better than middle-America mediocrity. Business would take her somewhere. Management. Of what? Well, what did she like to do? The answers tumbled out as fast as the Dreamcicle melted Orange Dye No. 3 down her hand: I like to listen to records; I like to ride horses; I like to ditch math class; and organize meetings of French Club; and lie to mom; and haggle prices at the Saturday Bazaar flea market; read books by Henry Kissinger and other Watergate conspirators; write letters to the editor of the local paper in the persona of an eighty-year-old Russian émigré (and ex-POW); go to the art gallery and choose what she would buy based on which room of her imaginary house the painting would look best in (e.g., Edvard Munch's "The Scream" in the nursery; Modigliani's "Nude in a Cushion" above the guest room bed; Bruegel's (the Elder) "The Slaughter of the Innocents" in the dining room). She also liked to ice skate on a frozen pond, not at an indoor rink.

Belinda's hand dives knuckles deep into the curry sauce. She pulls it out and two meatballs drip from her fingers. And my dear-heart woman offers me one. I take it between my lips, hold it there, and suck it in with a plop. "Plump Belinda or not," she says, "I don't mean you should stop cooking."

"There are two stomachs in this house," I tell her. "You won't see mine ever shrink."

We munch the meatballs loudly and lick our fingers like cave people at the hunt feast. Then I offer her a plate, and we start with the salad. Later, over coffee and a tartlet, Belinda spills the beans about her news, earlier dished out as a headline on the carriage seat.

"I have two collectors coming in from the Hamptons to see your sculptures, here at the loft, and then listen to you on the arts panel. They might want to see sketches of what's in store for the future. Just sketches, mind you, but something you can tease them with. You can refuse, which might work to our advantage."

It doesn't matter that there are no sketches, I tell her, but she explains that I can simply describe something to them. Meanwhile, whatever it is I'll create in the next year will "be like found money to these guys." Belinda smacks her lips on a bite of the tartlet. She says, "The best play, Minus Mouse, is not a Hail Mary pass or a bunt to the third base side. You want to let these people use you, in a good way. No-no, don't worry; never worry. Later, we'll turn the tables. It's possible." It's possible I blink in response.

Her phrase makes me shudder, although "use" is a fact of business. Anyone who tells you that art dealers are there to always help you – no, I can't think this way, not yet; these are the thoughts of disgruntlement. To step into that bath shall be to drown.

"By the way." Belinda has stopped her fork from entering her mouth, holding the last bite of chocolate. "How's your self-inflicted wound?"

"Fine," I say. "Just before you got home, I had another expert blood-sucker come in for the five-dollar routine." I wink. Belinda arches an eyebrow, but eats the chocolate and lets me get away with nothing because she doesn't bother to respond to my frat-house humor this time.

"I thought you were giving galleries the cold shoulder," I say, somewhat dumbfounded by all this new information. The pressure on me to make art feels like a hair shirt. "That other kind of 'turn the tables' thing."

"Eh-heh!" she says, like a belch. "They come with the price of admission, sometimes. If I'm introduced, I shan't be intentionally rude. That's not worth the sentimentality it would bring us thirty years from now, but anyway, there's more where these people come from. Do you know they like to call themselves 'gallerists'?"

I did know.

"Well I never heard such a word when I was modeling. Sounds made up, if you ask me. So much pretension in this business. Worse than artists themselves. I don't mean you, sweetie." She winks, in case I hadn't heard the playful irony. "You're one of the few lucky ones. On the other hand, I suppose ego and pushiness and – what's the word I'm looking for?"

"Confidence?" I say, confidently. There's no sarcasm or irony laced between the syllables.

"Come on, Mighty Minus, give me some credit. You tell me all the time how full of shit so many artists are. My god, the only person you hang out with who's 'one of them' is Peter. Even he's a bit of a stretch, for my money, but hey, no one can bat a thousand, right?"

CHAPTER 10

I have patrons. We meet for poker once a month, on Thursdays. I'm the resident alien, with no money but what jingles in my pockets; no family pedigree; no position in society; no funny accent from across an ocean (unless you compare NY with Chicago, between which lies an ocean of grain and lumber and hillbilly mountains and highway). Yet, like every card game worth playing, there is a trump suit: I bend creative, and the FaceCards don't.

My relationship with the FaceCards wasn't something that Alex-the-art-weasel or Harvey-the-collector understood. They came from different eras, different societies. They didn't know their history. What Alex and Harvey didn't hear in their own words was that they, too, were arts patrons. Our definitions differed by terms such as "business" substituted for "nurture." Let me describe my experience this way.

NYC is famous for its hoi polloi spotting celebrities among the masses. They marvel at how celebrities lead ordinary lives on the same ordinary streets where ordinary people stumble, trip, and grind out cigarettes under a shoe. Celebrity sighting is not my hobby, and I've only seen the one, Karen K, whom to most people wouldn't count as a celebrity, for a whole list of reasons. But I know such a species exists — celebrities — and plenty of "hospital born" NYers join in the hunt.

A neighbor once spotted Keith Richards buying a hotdog on Fifth Avenue, in the Flatiron district. For weeks afterward, he told everyone he knew about his "Stones" sighting. Not to be outdone, the friend would immediately jones on his own recent sighting. At this point, the one-upmanship got heated. "Did you say anything?" "To HIM? You don't talk to Keith!" "Why not? That's bullshit. They're just like you and me. I said 'Hey' to Lauren Bacall last summer... maybe it was winter... she was in Zabar's, standing in line like the rest of us. I think she bought the Scottish lox." "Which archeology project did you say you dug her up from?" "Fuck you! Bacall was a real beauty in her day!" Society begins to break down once the ad hominem attacks roll out.

What I lack in sightings, I make up by actually knowing people. Viscount Bruce, Freifrau Joyous Frisse, the Maharani Smrtee, and Baron Raspe are "otherly famous" celebrities who are not now, nor ever shall be, household names, topics of dinner conversation, or sought in the crowd strolling across Bryant Park's green lawn. You shan't see paparazzi chase them into limousines. They will not pass around husbands and wives like a lot of heirloom milk glass.

Viscount Bruce is my inside man in the group. He came to my Wicker Park studio (near Chicago's Six Corners) in the 1980s, where he bought one of my "red" paintings and two steel sculptures. On a series of visits, the viscount found me likeable, and we became friendly. "The man out front of the canvas and rock," the viscount called me. For a month or so he brought by a different "very good friend" every other week from the Continent. They, too, bought some of my art, and, like the viscount, slipped an extra sum into the patronage envelope ("Cash IS king," said one Duke of something-something-Dalmatia).

The viscount is a native of Sussex, and spent the best part of his life in Bombay, "frittering in the family business" (of which details I haven't required nor asked after). Though vaguely royal (his family is pre-Windsor), the viscount displays the tribulations & tics of the ordinary man: fleshy lower lip that droops (a genetic trait, something you can detect in old black-and-white photos mounted on his study wall), a bit of a lazy eye ("It helps me unnerve Whist rivals — the buggers think I'm cheating, what?"), and a frivolous, almost coquettish, laugh.

When we parted in Chicago after his third purchase, he offered me an open invitation to visit him at his NY apartment if I ever came to the "World's Capitol," as he called his soon-to-be adopted home. Then he handed me an envelope with several thousand dollars in it, of which he said was the sum of a collection he took up between his friends as a farewell gesture. "To keep you from having to live as a jobber, some bloody roofer or something equally dangerous to those exquisite hands, dear boy." Yes, I have patrons. So Viscount Bruce was not surprised when I sent a note upstairs at his Park Ave & 83rd St address, to which he immediately invited me in for a re-acquaintanceship sherry. Chicago had been a few years past, and the viscount — invitation notwithstanding — wasn't sure what to make of me. I took him to the Beehive to dispel any doubts, showed him my honeycomb, and impressed on him some early, raw sketches of the city in charcoal and pencil: landscapes, people, city streets, coffee houses, hole-in-the-wall bars. "Splendid," he asserted, and straightaway bought two pieces, which he had me sign before he sealed them in frames. When I told him I was moving onto sculpture exclusively, he responded "Splendid, indeed. You'll do fine, lad. Remember the words of Epicurus: 'The greater the difficulty the more glory in surmounting it.' Bloody invigorating spirit, don't you think?"

A few weeks later (only a couple days after my first date with Belinda) Viscount Bruce introduced me to three new exiled courtiers, three "very good friends." We first met at a private auction; they were buying and had asked for advice, and my eyes bugged out of my head at the bids called out through the night. Somehow I mentioned poker that evening, a comment that garnered appreciation and much talk. And the rest, as the bard said, awaits the reaper.

"Peers of their realm, on the run," was the viscount's description of the baron, maharani, and freifrau, punctuated with a weary grimace I don't think he understood was something I could easily detect as regret. I was led to understand that, like himself, the others had fled from home and country; reasons unknown, murky, or plainly fabricated. But what did I care? These were nice people, funny people — their ages ranged from forties through seventies, older men and younger women, the perfect set for casual poker — oddlings, with capital charms and dockside flaws. They also happened to be cultured and loaded. A double-bonus for me.

Now we gather every third Thursday at one of the exiles' uptown suites to play five-player stud or draw. Nothing is wild and no stupid kid games are allowed. We pit strategy with good-fellowship, topped off with icy gin-tonics (spring and summer) served in nine-inch pillar tumblers, or brandy served neat (fall and winter) in bulbous snifters. I feel gauche if there's cause to cancel a night, and have worked around interruptions with a simple, "Sorry, poker tonight."

Tonight at eight o'clock on the nose, jewels jangling, spectacles fitted onto the ends of noses, tumblers topped up, our five-some sit around a square-legged table with guilt fluting. Its thick green felt is tight to the pinch, and shows only a few blemishes. A sestet of matching chairs doesn't fit our modern sense of comfort, but Maharani Smrtee won't bow to breaking up the set. The table terrifies me. The style is Louis XVI, and comes from the beheaded king's Orleans chateau. The maharani, a Himachal Pradesh daughter in love with Paris, snatched the set at auction. What frightens me are the five tumblers filled brim-high with gin & fizz; should I knock mine over by accident or dumb luck, I think the maharani could wheel out one of Robespierre's guillotines from a back room. She's quite the avid collector.

While Viscount Bruce unwraps a fresh deck of cards, Baron Raspe counts colored chips to make stacks for everyone. Freifrau Frisse passes newly minted stacks to each player while trying on different poker faces: false tells, steely eyes, a smart winner's grin.

"It's our converzzzation, you understand, Meester Minus," Maharani Smrtee is telling me. From the minute I walked in the door tonight, she's been determined to teach me the historical verification and justification for Rule by Bloodline. "A small nod to Neapolitan air-IS-ta-crassy — this being already the late middle eighteenth century, before your Master Jefferson wrote his ideas for some new democratic expression that had already expired with the Greeks after Darius and Xerxes conquered that little empire on the peninsula. Nothing but an olive grove today, so no harm, true-true. Darling Joyous, your pearls are lovely. Of course, Mr Minus, I flirt just a leetle. My English is much better after a tall drink."

"You know, the Neapolitans were highly sexed," says Freifrau Frisse, fitting a cigarette into a jade quellazaire. Her comment makes Baron Raspe lift his furry eyebrows, the color of silver tarnish, and threatening to leap from his forehead. He proffers a lighter's yellow flame to her fresh cigarette. "And their bromide was cards," continues the freifrau, who puffs light smoke rings into the air. "Of which they played nightly in each others' homes. Salons, they claimed. Ja, freulein! Little enough conversation took place. No pole games – that's a wink, my young cavalier — at least not the variety of talk that was found in Parisian salons."

"Nor in the Shimla variety," Baron Raspe says. He pushes one cheek out with his tongue, and the group laughs. I have no idea what they're talking about.

"We should emulate one or the other tonight," says Viscount Bruce. He, like the baron, is dressed in black tie. Not too fancy a cut, but undoubtedly Saville Row. They have yet to warm to American tailors. I feel shabby wearing a regular tie (and colored! blue!), but at least I slipped myself into a black suit and white shirt. The viscount says, "My vote is for Naples cards. Minus, would you like to shuffle? I'll call the game. Joyous, you may deal."

Freifrau Frisse raises her head. She's piled her black hair high tonight, gathered with a thin string of pearls wound twice around, like a holiday garland. She has squeezed herself into a simple, white Chanel blouse, which helps her shoulders square up to the round table (something to see, I assure you). The open collar presents her pillowy cleavage as perfect female ornaments, powdered to exude a flowery bouquet that rises above the liquor and tobacco odors. On the table her hands clasp furtively, fingers interlocked, displaying only two rings as accessories, a diamond and a ruby, each set in platinum; her eyes move this way and that, taking in the competition. Baron Raspe folds his big belly over the table's edge, and coughs twice into a sausage-finger hand. Maharani Smrtee shakes her bracelet-festooned wrist, gold and silver hoops adorned by a rainbow of gemstones. The jewels highlight her skin tone, like toasted walnuts, and when she mixes the cards in her hand, the bracelets rattle like cobras threatening to strike. Viscount Bruce unwraps a cheroot and places it firmly in the corner of his liver-lipped mouth, to remain unlit through the evening (but growing progressively darker from its absorption of saliva).

Before the cards are dealt, tattle bounces around like a game of hot potato. Gestures of preparedness set eyes to spy. Age-spotted hands silently tap the chips. Painted nails scratch the green felt beside the cool drinks. Our bottoms wriggle to set us upright in these awful chairs. And the subtle sounds of throat-loosening distraction-cum-intimidation. This is how the night begins.

Our opening hands play out in silence, but for Hoyle's customary bets, raises, folds, and mumbled gratuities over chips gathered and stacked in a micro-demonstration of redistributed wealth. I count $11.40 in total pots through four hands. Viscount Bruce wins twice, while the baron and maharani each pull one pot to the good. The freifrau seethes; her diamond rings glitter beneath the chandelier when she twitters her fingers after each loss. My mind is hardly in the game, and yet I can't grab any outside thought long enough to see it clearly. Between hands, I feel rude by looking around the room and not chatting with my card mates. Only because its opulence ceases to surprise me.

The room is modeled in French Empire to match the card table and chairs. It lacks only a mirrored ceiling to be the copy of a Versailles apartment — but a card room with mirrors? A naughty thought, and unthinkable. The maharani's Claude Gillot is framed in gilt wormwood above the black fire grate, taking up space like a Murphy bed. Twin settees angle toward the grate. On the opposite wall hang a quartet of impressionists — two of Renoir's dancing couples' portraits, a Matisse, and one of Modigliani's "man with a hat" series — set between gold sconces whose white-wick candles flicker in a draft from the window side of the apartment. Outdoor sounds jump through the glass like a cat burglar (a scuffed sole across the carpet can be a car driving on rain-wet pavement), so soft as to wake you only when he's closing the door behind him. Above us hangs a three-tier chandelier. Its bright candle bulbs illuminate the room without throwing annoying prisms, the benefits of cut crystal medallions. Nothing in this room is common. The parquet floor is finished cherry, with just the one Berber rug lying beneath our feet, scarlet as a new poppy.

"Minus, you're distracted," Maharani Smrtee says. She smiles with her kind, gentle manner. I think princesses must be taught how to do this from an early age. While princes may scowl (usually at the father, where green-eyed usurpation is cast upon the throne), the princess is always the light of any kingdom. "Oh, Brucey," says the maharani, "let's hear Minus tell us about his idea while we play another hand, shall we? There's no reason to keep him sweating until the gaming is shot. By then we'll be tired and lunging at the biscuit tray."

"Or falling onto it," Viscount Bruce says, which gets them all to laugh.

"I don't want to hurry us," I say, and for an unknown reason show my teeth like a performing dog.

"I agree with the viscount, Minus," Freifrau Frisse says. "We don't have to be so snooty and formal. Let's leave protocol to the kings and queens we left behind, ja?"

The table rumbles on its legs with more laughter.

"I guess it's settled," says Viscount Bruce. "Or...?" He checks a look to his left, at Baron Raspe, who clicks the heavy mouthpiece of his pipe across his front teeth before muttering solemn agreement. Only the baron smokes profusely on poker night. He keeps his pipe on a pedestal table by his side during the game, sitting in an ebony dish. The pipe bowl is as big as an ice cream scooper. "Go to, Minus," Raspe tells me. "We're all eyes."

Do I correct him? No. Happiness is a satisfied patron.

"It's simple, really," I begin. "My proposal is to offer a subscription deal, with matching discounted prices." I hear the calm in my voice; inside, my organs dance a Cha-Cha. "As subscribers, you'll agree to make a monthly purchase of a single piece from my reserve works. New pieces will come later. Soon. I deliver on beauty, quality, value, and –"

The baron clicks his pipe stem across his teeth. "How do you see its value to rise, young man?"

"See here, Baron." The viscount sits up and calls order with a fist clenched into a gavel. His combed hair shines chromium silver under the lights, commanding attention and respect. But I need to control this pitch, so I bring them all around with a word. They humble themselves and pay attention.

"You all own pieces of my work already," I explain. "My art is known, but not so much my name... not as much as I would like it to be. This will change when two things happen." Now I have their "eyes." Freifrau Frisse claws at the felt as Viscount Bruce sets down the deck of cards. "I'm working on new sculpture ideas. In six months I'll have pieces for a show. Eight months, tops. As you purchase my archived work, word of mouth will spread. It's how the game is played, right? Okay. So, before the show opens, you'll have reserved about a quarter of what I plan to open with. Meanwhile, I'll continue to work in my studio." My mouth has dried out. I pick up the tumbler of liquor and tonic, only to notice my hand vibrating. The gin tastes funny. Another mouthful pulls me back to the pitch. "I'm onto something that is new for me, and new for modern art – I think." The hesitation is from my editing out the word "unique." Not yet, I tell myself. Not before this comes together. This?

"Well." Viscount Bruce picks up the cards and begins to shuffle. His eyes rise in thought. Baron Raspe is more demonstrative: "More, young man, more." His moist yellow teeth glitter in the chandelier's glow. Those hoary eyebrows ride high, like caterpillars sailing to Earth from a tree branch. "I want details. What have you got in your heart's locker? We should want to know. Tease us, at least!" He looks at his blue-blooded companions. The ladies have their heads together. The viscount serenades us with successive bridge shuffles. I'm thoughtful, but silent, brooding on the baron's encouragement, or demand. Perhaps this is the reason I've hesitated. A siren sound comes through the open window, then bends as it grows distant.

"The locker is full," I tell them. The bridge shuffle stops; the maharani and freifrau lean forward; the baron sucks on the end of his pipe, holding a lighter up and ready, thumb on the trigger. I place trust in their education: "When I tap my heart and head with my hammer, these days, the sound does not echo. I've been cutting keys this past spring." A game of "WhoDunnit?" passes for looks on my FaceCards. The baron strikes the flint wheel, making the women jump; the viscount fans the cards in a smooth arc.

My FaceCards remind me of characters in an Agatha Christie story: Baron Raspe has the look of a Hercule Peroit, though far from Ustinov's portrayal, and the ladies can easily be dowagers on some junket cruise, looking for adventure, intrigue, and a bit of twilight romance; for the sinister role, Viscount Bruce owns the silver hair, the military mustache, and the stone-cold midnight eyes for the assassin's disregard (and whose guess is it that he wasn't his King's hired man before needing to flee? Or was he only pensioned away, sent for an exile's existence because of his age, or old-fashioned opinions, neither wanted at court any longer?). He catches me in a jester's smile, does a double take from his resumed shuffling. But my eyes have jumped to the ante pile. And what about me? What role am I to play? The butler, or even the victim.

Baron Raspe sucks hard on his pipe. Through a blue cloud he calls a tune. "Cards, anyone?" The subject of subscriptions is abandoned. Their trust is extravagant, but I know it isn't simple, and has been hard won. I expect to be handed an envelope tonight that contains a thousand dollars, my patronage for the month, which makes me want to lose hands with chivalric right. Poker continues. I get dealt two aces, a pair of threes, and a king. I check, see to the freifrau, see a raise by Viscount Bruce, and make my own raise of fifty cents. Everyone folds. My take is a laughable six dollars.

For a while I'm left alone with my thoughts. They're thinking of my proposal and my enthusiasm, masked in its cryptic remark. But there are two things I know about the FaceCards: they like intrigue (it reminds them of their courtier days), and they have enough money to invest in artwork. For them, I'm a safe bet. Actually, one safe bet; I don't flatter myself enough to think that these exiled aristocrats aren't also investing in other, younger, newer but otherwise gifted artists with the promise of career longevity.

"How are your lovely doggies?" asks Maharani Smrtee. "I want a puppy just like Chief."

"Your co-op board would throw a fit, your Highness," says Viscount Bruce.

"You would take him for me," says the maharani, with a girlish pout. "I'll pay your dear Mrs Emily to feed him, and Minus can walk him. All I have to do is play, play, play!" She practically screeches. I wonder if this is how the phrase "She's a real princess!" was coined. She makes smoky eyes at me. "Though you must watch him closely in the park. I just read the other day that people are stealing dogs off their leashes. To sell them. They put adverts in the paper. Wonky bastards!"

Her use of profanity spouts laughter. Foreigners love to use English profanity. It's never so harsh to their ears as the bad words from their native tongue. Just as well, they think Americans like to hear profanity because of its liberal use in Hollywood films. I'm sure this is true.

"It's the homeless," Baron Raspe says flatly as he picks up newly dealt cards and tornado shuffles them in his hand. "They've got nothing else to do but watch people, and then boom! They strike, quick as vermin."

The freifrau frowns. "How is some homeless gesindel able to put dogs for sale in a newspaper? They don't have credit cards or addresses."

"They don't need anything from our world. They put a bundle of stolen puppies in a basket and head up to Harlem. It's easy money for the bag ladies. Blacks love the dogs."

"Those people don't like German Shepherds, Bertie," says the viscount. "Makes them think the police are chasing them. Ha-ha!" Ha-ha's rise through their ranks, while I'm left mute. "They want pit bulls that'll fight in the ghetto streets and abandoned parks."

My chair feels as though tacks have sprung up from the plush cushion. I pull my ears in; this is the class and cultural differences that are impossible to explain to them, or explain away. A rap on the door quiets the group, and, as if on cue, the maharani's butler, Harold, enters behind a cart on which he's arranged three trays piled with sandwiches, cheese and fruit, and little cakes. Harold wears white gloves and white tie. His shoes tap on the floor as he walks, heel to toe. His hair is frostily white like the frozen leaves of a hedge, while his skin is black as the night is long.

"Just in time, Harold." Maharani Smrtee mimes a swoon, regally elegant, of course. "I'm so hungry I could drop from this chair."

Harold nods his reply, or perhaps that he's been acknowledged at all. The gesture might also hold a secret smile that hides the spit he's spread on all the sandwiches. I'm not certain which of these can be true, although I'm the only one who notices a brief grimace before he leaves. His casual gaze across the heads of the aristocrats as he closes the door becomes the authenticity of honor for all that they can only imagine.

We break for snacks, and I excuse myself. In the hallway outside the parlor, all is quiet, although I hear through a far door leading to the kitchen the wrinkle of radio voices. The hallway is lit, as are the maharani's paintings. She hangs her moderns here, eight of them flanking a woolen runner. None is the best of his movement. An art encyclopedia would call them representational: "Mid-level painters of the abstract expressionist, surrealist, and pop art movements." Much like the FaceCards themselves, to their regents, I suppose.

On the walls, among a Gorky, Donati, and Goode, I find my "August Storm" — nearest to the toilet door. It's a violent landscape with equally discordant colors. A movement-bending representation, I think (if my opinion counts). I no longer admire this picture because this conflict with color signaled the first steps to my abandonment of painting, although I still like its expression of emotional calm. This very strength is what I notice most, tonight. Five years on from its completion, I would not have guessed such spirit was in ascendance. Too late for me. Yet here they hang, in a private collection. This ought to be solace of some kind; I'm part of the movement, a member of a small society (getting smaller every year). Whether admired on a hook in a museum, or coveted by a collector, posterity is a word attached to your legacy. Would Karen K recognize all these works? I turn away and grip the bathroom door handle, and don't look back.

When I return to the parlor I grab a cucumber sandwich on a dish and wander over to the coffee table between the sofas, where the fireplace whispers cool air from its mouth. Four thick museum catalogs lie stacked on the table. I slide out the bottom volume from the pile and thumb through it from back to front. A handbill used as a bookmark is wedged between pages whose facing photographs show Rauschenberg's "Monogram" sculpture from two views. I notice how the taxidermied goat, girdled by a rubber tire, carries a human quality on its mouth. Ironic mirth comes to mind. The handbill that marks the page advertises a skin cream to sooth the effects of eczema. Faces of sufferers appear down the left side in five square snapshots. The patients look forward into the camera, a mix of young and old, male and female, Mexican-American, Caucasian, Black, their expressions blank or neutrally resigned to being medical subjects. In the next to last photo, an elderly woman holds her hands up beside her face, displaying red scabs across her knuckles as well as her lips. She has youthful eyes and healthy skin tone, but for the blotchy redness. Yet here's her true claim to beauty: her mouth has been caught by the camera in some movement, the corners just in blurred freeze, perhaps having been told not to smile, not to appear happy, This is a serious medical condition that demands sober intelligence. But she's fooled them, in her way; she's made herself look better than the condition might otherwise reveal, all from a trip-wire smile.

I hear my name called and slide the handbill back into place.

Over a second snack of salmon and cream cheese on trimmed white bread, I start to tell the FaceCards a story. "Do any of you remember Karen Kosek?"

"The critic from the sixties?"

"A simple gadfly, some said."

"You only say that because she's female, and you're a chauvinist."

"Gadfly! Who uses such terms anymore?"

"I am not chauvinistic." The viscount brushes lint from his sleeve. "I'm a continental."

"You're a gadfly, too, whether you'll admit it tonight or not. And what's more, you like it."

"I'm a respected member of an aristocratic society — a very small, exclusive club, I might add — one who resides outside its borders on political grounds. Therefore I cannot, by definition, be a chauvinistic. My exile-asylum status won't allow such unseemliness."

"Are we to have a speech now?" Baron Raspe vibrates with mirth.

"Oh, dear, I should have Harold bring in a soap box that you can stand on."

"You're all a pack of meanies. I've a mind to collect my loose change and leave right now." Viscount Bruce takes another sandwich from the pyramid. "There. I must gather energy for the long walk."

They laugh because it's all been a joke. Everyone has played his and her parts, like a playhouse skit. They carouse like children, wonderfully free of care. I think I must carry the look of a psychotic who's suddenly glimpsed reality through the light outside the nut-house window. And then I'm pulled back inside.

"Has she died, Minus? The writer woman? Poor soul." Baron Raspe picks up the story for the others. "She disappeared years ago, after so much fame and notoriety. I remember her because it was just after my own departure from court and state — God knows I was young once — and I met her at a party here in the city. I think it was in the Frick. Or does one say 'at' the Frick?"

Grammar becomes the topic while I munch on a pretzel. When they weary themselves of English, German is tossed back and forth, with a handful of French used for classical trim, and finally the maharani teaches us a sentence of Hindi: "The air is filled with the aroma of war." She smiles at her pupils' pronunciation after the fifth chorus.

"I saw Karen K last week in Central Park," I say. "She was dressed in rags."

"How interesting. And scary." Freifrau Frisse is shocked. "Something like a medieval witch. I can see it now." She puts on her glasses and checks her watch; for what reason, I haven't a clue. "I know you Americans say 'easy come, easy go' but that is a bit much."

"The mighty fall hard," Baron Raspe says.

"I'm not so sure," I say, and tell them about my chance discovery in the park, her clothing, the Duane Reade bags, the matted gray hair and the polished nails, her shoes, and Henry opening The Parkview's regal doors to what appeared to be a fetid bum.

Baron Raspe will not be dissuaded. "Kept the family silver and the home, but going Scotch on the clothes. Bloody dreadful."

"It all sounds theatrical." Freifrau Frisse is certain of this. "Perhaps she's playing a part for real, or for send up. Or she's just lost her marbles."

"Both are my guess as well," I admit.

"Are you sure it was her, Minus?" the viscount asks. "You said you saw her for only a moment. A glimpse only, and years after seeing a book jacket photo? Sorry to press you, lad, but the likelihood sounds too good — or awful — to make it suss out."

I begin to speak, but stop. Telling the FaceCards about Karen K in the park has been a benign leak of a secret thus far held close to my chest — my way of flirting with these exiles and their constant tittle-tattle. It's shameful, but I can't help it. Nevertheless, other than our poker games, we don't move in the same circles, so I hope the secret will be safe. Which comes to why I've stopped myself from telling the FaceCards how I know my park bag lady is Karen. I cannot tell them about my attempted bribery of Henry, and staking out The Parkview is pure stalker talk. The mind of a weirdo, not an artist. All the same, I have my reasons to keep quiet, and these are my secrets.

"It's her," I say, using the same objective case determination that the FaceCards seem to live by.

"Okay, okay," says Maharani Smrtee. "So what does it mean?"

They're all looking at me, sandwiches growing stale on their plates. I'm not sure what they want. The freifrau helps me out. "Why do you care?"

"Good point," I say, from which my fallen face reveals a "tell" like no card player should ever expose. With a simple gesture, I find myself unable to lie. "I want to meet her."

"So tap the bloody woman on the shoulder," says Baron Raspe.

"She's liable to attack him," shouts Freifrau Frisse. "I mean, if she's become some crazy lunatic who lives in luxury but walks around as a bag lady. They carry hypodermic needles to spread AIDS on the population. I read it in the Post. The thought is shaking."

I imagine that the freifrau is wondering how each of them could become what she thinks Karen K has become. Oddly, I have that very question in mind. I've tried to answer it twice, but neither has stuck with me for long.

"Well, I'll make a few calls, is all," Maharani Smrtee says. I flinch. She's turned my white thoughts into a thunderstorm.

"Your Highness, please don't do that," I say, over-excited by the calamity this could cause. "I-I'm honored that you should take such interest in my whim, but a move like that is exactly what I cannot do. It's a great imposition on her privacy. That'll surely scare her off. She's... not what she seems in her writing."

Once again the FaceCards glance at each other. The club the viscount has spoken of comes with its own language — subtle changes in eye movements, the corner of a mouth lifted or compressed, a whorl crease in the chin, an eyebrow flutter, the twitching nose — and I realize that courtiers do indeed have a sixth sense for intrigue.

On my way back to the loft, I stand on a green-line train, near a redheaded woman in a center seat, her long legs crossed at the knees. As she fixes her hair, she sets a bundle of strands, pinched between three fingers, firmly behind her left ear. Her face opens in such a way that reminds me of a half-moon subtlety peaking from behind a cloud. I want to squint for its loveliness. The subway car rocks its passengers with gentle, baby-carriage ease. It's ten forty-five and I hear tourists reminisce over the day's events. A space by the door becomes free at 56th Street, and I sidle over. She's chosen to wear summer linen – beige, sheer – a thong tucked between cheeks, I'm thinking. Her breasts ride high and tight to her chest, helped with that delectable invention, the demitasse bra, whose lace has embossed the taupe blouse she wears, opened to the third button for fashion, allure, and ventilation. She makes eye contact. Our smiles exchange through the rumble of metal wheels. I lean near her, but not too close. "You're pretty," I say across the tunnel noise. "Do you sit for artists?" Now she ignores me. A simple "No" would have sufficed. I lean in again. "I've seen prettier." She disregards this by using the language of the confidently beautiful: "No you haven't."

At home, Belinda asks about the card game. I'm slurping on a grape-flavored Sugar Pop sucker, the round kind that you spin in your mouth with a twist on the stick until it becomes enticingly robotic.

I tell her, "They made racist jabs in front of the butler."

"Poor Harold." Belinda peels herself from jeans, T-shirt, and bra, and changes into sleek black pajamas. Her back is to me so that only her bare bottom smiles its firm happiness. "They're so alien. How can you be their friend?" she asks.

"I'm not their friend. We're friendly. And they like my art. Remember, too, what else they do for me. Us." I nod at the envelope Viscount Bruce pressed into my hand at the end of the evening, now sitting on the side table. "I'm also entertainment for them."

"I think you've just insulted yourself."

"Hardly." I slap the pillow to make a pouch for my head. "For the same reason a PR hack or corner office attorney shills the virtues of corporate America, I play cards with a few of the world's discarded aristocracy. They know who they are. They know what I am." The sugary lollipop is making my mouth water, and a thick syrup puddles around my gums until I swallow. "The subscription deal is on. No one refused."

Belinda steps up on the bed and walks to her pillow. She stands over me, a lot of bare leg asking for a caress. I think she's trying to seduce me, but this could be my male mind, or the Sugar Pop. She plops down to her knees and sinks her butt onto her heels.

"I'm glad I won't need to do any of that as your manager."

I pull the sucker out with a slurp around the bulb. "Won't you?"

CHAPTER 11

Kids stand near me, close enough for a few to reach out and touch the clay, if they want to. For protection, they hold their mothers' skirts. I look up from my work. Men have stopped, office workers, some dressed as accountants, others as lawyers, the distinguishing mark between the two professions is the style of suit. The group carries discriminate faces of the old and young. They've formed a semi-circle in front of the park bench where I've sat since early morning, modeling clay figures. I'm near the 77th Street entrance at Central Park West. On a small table under which my knees fit well enough but my feet stick out the other side into the path, a life size clay hand and two feet face my audience. The terra cotta-colored clay is a manufactured substance, malleable for hours, that hardens into sandstone density with a change in color like Chicago brick.

I hadn't expected an audience; at best, a few people might glance at me, or stop for a moment on their way through the park. The dog walkers don't stop; pets don't know art means anything.

New York's street performers usually collect the crowds, the jugglers and magicians, guys on stilts dressed like Uncle Sam or in happy clown-face, occasionally a woman in statue-of-liberty costume (patina green, with matching face paint) standing motionless for hours on end. Street performers take spots on the other side of the park, near the zoo, where tourists swarm like migrating birds. But here I am at a lazy curve in the path, a through-point for the energetic, and I've got myself a crowd. This group is really into it, too, especially the kids, who pull at a parent's grip to get closer. Others crane their necks, jockey for position. A few take my photograph. I want them to go away, all of them.

A young boy of six or eight implores his child's reasoning on his mother. "Mommy, it's a toy, can I touch it?" A gray Bugs Bunny sweatshirt hugs his chubby body, an orange carrot cutout sewn onto the chest that bursts off the fabric. "Ask the nice man, first," the boy's mother says, as if that will make all the difference, to the boy and for me. She's short, with lingering pregnancy fat hugging her hips like shivering animals, a shape made worse for her having stuffed this human gelatin into skin-tight red stretch pants. Her hair is tied back, fly-aways catching in the subtle morning breeze. Gnats buzz the very ends. "Hey, mister," the kid says, and advances on me. I'll give him points for assertiveness. "Can I touch these?" He points at the sculptures, his hand inching closer in anticipation of my reply, the brat's answer to everything. His hand is open and ready to grab... grab and run.

"Not now," I say firmly. His hand draws back as if he's touched fire, and his fingers grasp the carrot stalk. My warning is hypocritical, because I want to add, "Shoo!" to send him and mommy away for good. Take the rest with you! Instead, I find myself explaining to the boy what it's all about, before he has a chance to cry, which seems likely by the look of his quivering bottom lip. "They need to dry, sonny. That's why they sit on cardboard."

If I wanted to drive people away, this was as good a method as the next. The boy's mother gathers him in her arms and shoots me a look that screams, "If I could only charge you with child molestation!"

"Let's go, Timothy," she says, tartness in her tone. Timothy, I think, not Timmy or Tim. I blow out my lips and they flutter flatulently. Good riddance, Madam! The bitch's stare turns glacial. To think that if I'd given him what he wanted, she wouldn't have thought twice about letting sweet Timothy sit on my lap and get dirty fingers in my clay.

They barge through the audience, offering no excuse for colliding against people like a pair of drunks. The crowd grudgingly parts, not without their own comments. Just when I think their departure might encourage others to follow, three people fill the empty space. The semi-circle closes in. The faces are now two- and three-deep. If this is what I had intended, for show, I'm sure I could have paid people to stand here.

I stop making cuts along a finger pattern I've fashioned out of a thick slab of clay. When I pan the crowd, people smile at me. I smile back, a forced, disingenuous response. What I really want is to look through them to keep an eye peeled for Karen K. This is her homebound route, and my small chance to spot her is thwarted because this crowd has formed a phalanx. If this keeps up, she'll easily pass by and not notice me at all. "She can't recognize me if she can't see me," I scream noiselessly at the people. This mental protest echoes inside my head. My smile says, Get lost! Off to one side, a sanitation worker leans on his broom and sweep bucket. A man with a greyhound passes at a jog, the dog leaping along in its natural stride.

My idea is sound; my positioning ideal. When Karen passes, sooner or later, I'm going to say something to draw her attention. Maybe I'll use her name. It's the natural thing to do when someone recognizes a friend. It doesn't matter that we're not friends. She's my celebrity sighting, the real thing, and I can't help thinking that she's not past, not part of the back then, not just a memory. Last week I saw her name in The Little Review, its summer edition. Her essay, "Panning for Electoral Gold" asked why political ads have been elevated "to an art form by a culture that has decided the only way to save education is to stop educating its children: one of the few 'success' stories to come out of America since Neil Armstrong walked on the moon." Bravo, Karen.

Not a single bag lady, however, has come along since I sat down hours ago. My watch reads a midday hour. An hour from now I need to leave for a walking date with the little mutts. Yet the crowd waits for me to sculpt.

I stare at the remaining half-dozen people, their faces waxen with wonder: why isn't he working, why is he staring at us like some... some performance artist gauging our readiness before he bursts into activity? The business suits give each other the nod — time is money — and then split. I rest my hands on the table and look sideways. Far into the center of the park, the noon sun drenches the open fields and lake, washing out the greens and blues in a hazy tint.

The forest along this path extends to the edge of West Drive, the park's inner road that winds circuitously as far north as Lower Harlem. From my seat I can see clear to the Ramble, the park's vast hillock of narrow trails covered in scrub and trees (infamous for being the place where gay men can "lock ass" with a knowing glance, and, hand in hand, disappear behind a bush for ten minutes of sexual glory). The separation between trees and lawn, blue lake and rising hill, is a black outline drawn in hard pencil, tree trunks and bushes, benches and people, rowboats, the bow bridge, each silhouetted. A shape comes through the haze, swaying like a mirage. It gets caught among other murky blotches, blends with the lines, and is lost. Then it reappears, a plump body, a human, walking fast along the path's edge. A lone man is left to my audience of kids and moms, and he whistles to catch my attention. I give him a sallow stare, and look back at the lumpy silhouette. It's my bag lady. The guy mumbles "Whatever" and hustles down the path. He sees the bag lady and moves over, makes a big bend in his route to avoid breathing the same air.

Karen K has come. Now I'm agitated. Go away, people, go away! Her silver hair is kinked with the curls I learned to recognize in a crowd of heads. Today it's tangled and bunched against her temples as if they're glued in place. My feet and legs tangle beneath the table. She's not going to see me; Karen is going to miss this! My hands act without my eyes helping to guide them, and take hold of the clay mitten. Can't you people go away!

With my thumb, I indent a spot where the palm's cup should be. I watch Karen walk with that same unfailing purpose. Her brown shoes shine with fresh polish in the soft light. She is here and I'm ready for her, but now I can't do what I've intended. Leave me alone! Go! I need to get up. No!! She's nearly past... she has passed.

"Karen," I blurt out, my voice crazy with emotion, strangled and weak, desperate. Her head turns, away from me. The four moms who remain, pram pushers, look around and at each other, confused or curious. Who is he speaking to? They have no idea what is happening to me. She is shying away, Karen K is, because they're here, blocking me from her. If they weren't here, she would recognize me from the Lennon memorial. But she's not even looking!

"Karen Kosek! Can you stop for a moment, please — Karen? I'm a great admirer of your work." She picks up speed. My audience sees who I've called to. They scatter, horrified. Too late, you fools!

I yell, "Karen K, I see you inside that costume. What's the game? Can I play, too?" This is bad. She won't like this. I'm hooked, though; I've got the barb lodged in my throat like a big fish. But Karen doesn't lose her stride to a hiccup.

Finally, desperate for time to reel back thirty seconds, I call to her receding back, as if I'm in a storm. "I like your shoes!"

Then she's gone, she's disappeared behind overgrown bushes at the sharp bend in the path. I bellow out a long breath. Shit. Shit. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

That's not what I had planned. All she needed to do was notice me today. Tomorrow she'd do the same. Then on the third day — when the plan was to take hold — she would have stopped and looked. To see what I was doing, who I was. That's when I was supposed to talk to her. What the hell has just happened?

"So now you've spoken," I say aloud. "Well played, Minus. Now you can go home."

The people; it was their fault. They didn't give me the space I needed to work the plan. I wanted to be alone. Karen needed to see me alone. Alone, like her.

I look left and right. At the bend where Karen vanished, a pair of teens come along, ambling hand in hand. Their hips knock together while they walk, playing young-love games. The clay mitten still sits in my palm, a little crushed by my enthusiasm at bird-dogging the bag lady. And just what did you expect? A picnic lunch? But here I am, with another hour to kill, and waste not, want not. I fold the uncut half of the hand over, into a loop, leaving the third and forth fingers standing up. If I separate them, and fold the thumb into the palm, I'll have a peace sign. Perfect art-in-the-park kitsch, and I'm embarrassed to hear a Brooklynese accent pander, "How you do'in?" that cuts through my palsied concentration.

After a moment, I look up. "Okay," I say. The boy teen of the couple stares. Having come close enough to see what I'm doing, the pair have stopped to watch. Their arms are linked behind their backs now, the free hands worked into each other's back pocket. The new emblem of love, or possession.

These kids are about the same height, same age, both thin and wiry like undernourished pets. Their jeans are wrinkled, faded, and hang down from their hips. Concert T-shirts advertise Def Leopard (him) and Nirvana (her) printed off-center and slightly askew on cheap black fabric. The kids look clean, anyway, not like scamps or runaways sometimes found begging or stealing in the park. Just teens out for a walk between classes, or harmlessly ditching school for the rest of the afternoon.

"You an artist?" the girl asks. Her boyfriend laughs. She elbows him in the ribs; it's more play than irritation, but she won't be patronized. "He could be anything, Chris. Shut up." Good girl, I think. Chris takes it like a young man should, and shrugs. She nods at me, throws a second nod at the model hand I've continued to work between my fingers through their little sideshow. Blond fringe falls over her eyes. "So?" she says, and sprays the fringe off her lashes with an upward blow through her lips. She wants an answer, but doesn't know how to ask politely a second time. I wonder what schools teach kids these days, if not at least manners after the formal history, math, and English has failed to stick. Maybe Karen K is more correct than I ever imagined; I was a kid in school once, and had thought I got a decent education, although now I think I might have been just like these two, and maybe these two represent the uber-teenagers of both recorded and pre-history.

The girl's bangs have, predictably, fallen to obscure her eyes again, and just as fast she flips her head sharply to the right to make the hair jump diagonally before settling above her eyebrows. I wonder how many times she does this every day; I wonder if she, too, wonders. Chris shifts from his right leg to the left. He's got thin eyebrows, thin lips, narrow eyes and a beaky nose — the gawkiness of youth, not yet grown into his body. She's willowy, but shows hips and something womanly up top, though still a girl's figure. When I sculpt them, she shall be resplendent as an Iroquois huntress, and he (in dull pewter) a Pilgrim farmer.

"Yeah," I say. "I'm a sculptor." Why not talk if the day is busted. "Just hanging out and, you can see, doing a little work in the park. Art in the park."

I look past them — a pretense to keep my mind from splitting; something nags me that I should make meeting Karen K a priority however I can. What's just happened doesn't matter. Now she knows someone is out here, in this big fucking city, this lovely cesspool, who acknowledges her, accepts her for who she is, remembers who she was. And I don't know why this is so important, or needed at all, but I want to get some response, anything from inside that world where she appears real only because her name and words materialize in print every so often.

"Umm," I say to Chris and his unnamed girlfriend, "What do you guys do?"

"Shit, dude, we go to, like, high school," says Chris, mild sarcasm spread over this sentence. His girlfriend nods, or sort of nods. It becomes a toggle, the way Indians move their heads to signal affirmation. She says, "Sucks" in such a way that I take her to mean school.

This can become an excruciating conversation. I look up the path and — I see Karen sitting on a bench, forty feet away. She watches me with flaming white eyes; they glow brighter, become round with intense anger from beneath her hat and hair. My mouth opens and closes. I want to pick up the table and toss it aside, but I know that's the wrong way to act. And there are these teens, too.

I ask the kids, "Do they teach art at your school?" and steal a glimpse of Karen K down on the bench. She's leaned her bags against her legs, and sits at three-quarter profile, one elbow propped on the bench, a hand holding up her head beneath the chin.

"Art?" says Chris. "Angie, you hear that? Art. Dude, they took art out of school back when Reagan ran the country. Don't you remember how he tried to get ketchup listed as a vegetable for school lunches? He didn't even want to feed kids! Money for art classes. Ha!"

"Sorry," I say, and admit that I don't remember. "A bit after my school days. But that's a shame. Seems to me there'd be fewer dropouts with more art and music, instead of only sports. A waste for all the non-jocks, right? But you know, don't like give up on the 'ole USA just yet. It has a few years left, anyway. Maybe a new president will help you out. Pump some money into the system."

"Maybe," Angie repeats, but she's shaking her head. "Sort'a over for us, though... dude." She frowns, a sign that she's not sure that she likes parroting her boyfriend, or me. "We'll graduate before that happens. I guess they tried to teach us a lot of math. We learned some English, too, if you liked to read, but, you know... so what's your name?"

She catches me in a fuddle because I've been trying to keep up with her see-saw intonation and speed talking while watching Karen, ready to spring out of this fucking seat if she makes another move to leave.

I say, with a lump in my throat, "Minus." The name coughs out at them, which they take in stride.

"Way cool," Angie says. She labels Chris with a shin kick. A love stain prints itself in brown mud on his jeans. "Did you, like, change your name so people could remember it? Like you know, like Madonna... or –" She frowns again, deep lines above her bushy, lightly browned eyebrows. She asks Chris, "What's another artist who uses just one name?" He shrugs. Kids do a lot of shrugging, I've found.

"Prince?" Chris suggests. He shrugs again.

"Prince is sort of an artist," says Angie. "Not like a painter. You known Prince, right, Minus?"

I nod, and hope they don't mean that I'm an acquaintance of Prince.

"I dunno artists' names," Chris says, a mock complaint. "Didn't have art class, remember?"

Angie looks hard at him again. "We read the daily paper together. All the sections. It beats reading textbooks. But, you know, no art anyway."

My sigh brings them around, before she can kick him again, this time without love. "Yeah, that... sucks," I say. "But there's always hope. You have to have hope. Believe in yourself. You know? College has art classes. Of course, you don't need any classes if you want to make art. Study it by going to museums. This is New York, after all. There're lots of things to see."

Chris doesn't seem interested in me or the conversation anymore. I can't blame him. His feet scuff the asphalt, and he says, "Oh, yeah, I know... Minus. Hey, now I get it... like the math problem, right? You know, plus, divide, square root? Your name."

I nod. I know my own name, kid. "Well," I say, "it's not a problem so much as a way to come to a conclusion." My bright smile is something that's a bit of an amusement so he doesn't cop an attitude. His feeling the name out gets me to chuckle, too. Square root? I've never heard that one. Kids are smarter these days, I think, but wonder how they can be so slow at getting the drift sometimes. When I sculpt them, he can be the chrome guitarist and she the Grunge sycophant in bronze, chewing her nails in the front row, center stage. It could go the other way around, too.

"Your P's must have had some sense of humor," says Chris.

"Yeah," I say, and figure out in a couple second that P's are parents. "Real sweet."

Chris nods. "Yeah, yeah. That is sweet!" His low-charged delivery means, I think, that he really believes having Minus for a name (or Squareroot) would be just that very thing.

"Art's not something you just pick up," Angie says, a sentence she's put some serious thought into. "You sort of know, right? You have to know. Like if you're going to be an artist, I mean, you think the way artists think. Always, like, seeing what you can do with people. Am I right? And you do arty things when you're a kid, like make clay models."

My hands are holding a clay model (calling it a sculpture makes it no more or less artistic in value); I have work gathering dust at the Beehive. Karen K shifts on the bench and leans into a new look she gives me, as though she knows me and only awaits her turn. I scratch my head, because what I want to say to Angie and Chris might be insulting, though I don't want them to take it wrong.

"Do you know about Picasso? The weird faces, all the shapes? Right. So he didn't start painting until he was thirteen. He saw his father painting one day. His dad took him to his studio, down among the trees near the family home. One day his dad had to leave the studio for a while, and left his son behind. Picasso looked at his dad's painting, picked up the brushes, and just started painting. He finished what his dad had started, and when his dad returned, he was blown over by his son's talent. He couldn't believe how beautiful this painting had become. He'd never known this about Pablo! As the story goes, his dad never painted anything again, but devoted his life to helping his son become a painter."

Chris and Angie unlink their arms. They're all elbows and knees, pointy shoulders and narrow hips and twig ankles. When I sculpt them, they'll be eaglets standing on the rim of their nest, with human faces that peer, horrified, at the long drop to the ground.

"Wow," Angie says. "That's like, way cool, Minus. My dad's like, a stockbroker? And he says I should study law stuff. But I don't know. Art isn't my thing. I don't know."

"No," I say. "Not for most of us. But a lot."

Chris rolls his shoulders. I look sideways; Karen is on her feet, she's moved closer. The teens are fidgety. "It was just a suggestion," I tell Angie. I hold up the clay hand for their inspection, this unfinished wreck of a sculpture, rough and ugly but cool in its ugly and rough gesture of peace. I give it to Angie, and she holds the cardboard plug level so the hand doesn't fall off. I don't doubt that she'll get it home somehow. I tell them, "I like to get people interested anyway possible. You know, the MET's just across the park. You have Museum Mile, too. Viewing is as good as doing, I suppose, for most people. It's all about appreciating the beauty. Borges once said that he was prouder of all the books he read than those he wrote."

Angie smiles and raises her hand as her instrument of communication.

"That's cool," Chris says. "Yeah, whatever, like, you know?" He pats Angie's ass, or hip, close enough to be both. "Say, we gotta, like, get going, Minus. Take it easy, dude."

"Yeah," I say, and try to think of something in their age group's nomenclature. "Keep it light, you two." They nod and walk away, headed into the park. I hear a bit of complimentary tones but no words hang in the air because they're whispering. A laugh skyrockets, and another. I suppose I was much the same at their age, I think for a second time (or third). I turn my head. Karen is standing close enough to get at –

"If you come near me again," she says, "I'll fucking stab you." Her voice is a vicious growl, a stone-scraping tangle of syllables. She pats her coat pocket. "I have a knife here that'll slice through your neck like it's a stewed chicken." I look at the pocket for a bulge the size and shape of a knife, and notice the filth on her hand as it inches up to hook a thumb into the seam, and the white lines where the dirt hasn't penetrated.

I bark my defense: "But I haven't come near –" She cuts off my words with one swipe of her hand, close to my face because she has advanced on my position. It's the chicken knife I fear, and rear back with the involuntary move of a breath because I'm stuck behind this bench, my legs exposed to any sharp object. I see the rest of my life in that swipe of her hand: wheelchair bound, knees a mass of scar tissue, a shredded groin and my wrists connected to a pair of prosthetic rubber hands — the real ones taken as wall trophies. All the NY newspapers will brand her the "Lend Me a Hand Slasher."

Her movement is enough to intimidate me; my reaction has proved I'm no courageous knight or heroic victim. I stay still, and silent, while she hovers. I think I could act if she makes another aggressive move. If she were to really pull out that knife she says she has. I wonder how hard it would be to lift the table and use it as a shield, or a battering ram.

Suddenly she laughs. It's a crazy, deranged sound, un-human. I can't tell if this is for real or fraudulent. She stops and peers at my face, everywhere but my eyes. She doesn't want to recognize me. I'm frightened to be mocked like this. Threatened and terrorized. Her laugh turns on again, only she drops its volume to an abrasive rattle. Then she steps back, turns, takes a few steps, and turns again.

"Maybe," she says, and here she stands straight to make herself tall, nearly nine feet tall. "Maybe I'll send Henry the Black over here to ass rape you. After that he can fold out your elbows and knees for good measure. You see, for the bother you've caused. To make a point." She glares at me with beady, animal eyes. "Do you follow my logic, pal?"

"Ms Kosek. I- I... I only wanted to say hello to you. And... to tell you that I admire your writing. Maybe talk with you. I have nothing to offer you. You don't need my help; you're not a bag lady. My intention isn't humanitarian. I'm an artist. It's all self-interest. I've admired your writing. What it's all about. I get it. The world and art, art as a piece of the world. Rotten and sour, ugly and dark. What beauty! All beautiful."

Karen stands ever taller, twelve feet now, her head at the highest branch, as though a knotted rope connected to the top of her head has been pulled taut by an invisible hand. In this posture her yellow pants ride high on her ankles, while her hands and wrists shoot from the cuffs of another alley-rag jacket. What comes to mind is that she's getting ready to talk to me. I've cracked her façade after all. She takes a step forward, another, over to the adjacent bench, where she slowly sits next to me, only two metal armrests between us, their curved aluminum design painted in black gloss, ugly and crude and beautiful now, but once frilly and smooth and beautiful. My neck aches in its twist to see her, as my body has not allowed itself to follow. She inhales deeply, freely, eyes closed, and when she exhales I smell mint, chewing gum or mouthwash — I don't know which — and this is a fresh mouth.

Karen leans in, looks steadily at me, and says, "Get lost, asshole."

Where does such a phrase come from? To ass rape you. The words give a battering visual. Husky. Raw. Her stone-ground voice plays in my ears for hours afterward. Both the threat and her tone carry menace, quite possibly there's a promise built into the threat. That it has spewed from the mouth of a woman like Karen K, whose book I have on my shelf, the pages filled with beautiful imagery and thoughtful understanding of literature and art and culture, this is disturbing. If it were Mailer or Kerouac, or Roth, I could see the connection, but Karen's jacket photo doesn't give any idea of the potential to invent that profane sentence. I don't think I'm being naïve: we all know the words, but who says them so easily, and with such vehemence, and threat?

This incident is so bizarre that I want to tell someone. I look around the southbound bus I'm riding. I'm on my way home from walking the little dogs. The sun shines through the windows. We're rolling down Broadway. Shoppers flood the sidewalks. Across the bus's narrow aisle, two women hold Fairway Foods bags. An old man in thick, black-framed glasses works his way to the bottom of a peanut butter jar using a teaspoon. After each bite, he turns the spoon over in his mouth to lick off all the sticky food. Over his shoulder, a small girl of seven or eight, sporting a red jumper and pigtails tied at the ends with matching ribbon, begins to pick her nose with a narrow pinky finger. Her mother sits next to her leafing through a fashion magazine. My foldout table is folded and leans against my leg; the bag of art supplies lies between my feet. Three teenagers near the door talk with loud, barking teenage voices. These people aren't my audience, although I like the old timer eating the peanut butter. He looks newly retired: he's active, antsy, and checks each passing street corner with his nose pressed against the window. I can tell he's no tourist; he has the moves of someone who wants to go to work, but has been led aside, away from the action, out one gate and in through another, where pasture grass grows sparse, clumpy, yellowish without nourishment or interest; he's been led there to die.

His lined face is the color and texture of an eroded creek bed, bearing deep runnels from the silver hairline to a stubble-field chin. This was once a handsome face, but a lifetime of use has reshaped it into an oil rag. I want to sculpt him. His eyes have a life that I can make look at you from the three dimensions of marble. Caesar had this; Caligula did not. My camera is inside the zipper of my backpack, but the bus slows and my old man looks around wildly, like his hair has caught fire, and when the doors open he dashes from his seat and onto the sidewalk.

If a Keith Richards sighting at an ATM can get people worked up, what about the threat of sodomy by proxy? I can't tell anyone what has happened. Not Peter N, who wouldn't get the nuance or double meaning. He'd more likely ask (and rightly so) why I wasn't working at my studio. Belinda would ask the same question, and have a follow-up. She'd be just as right as Peter, only more lethal in her delivery because, of course, I don't sleep with Peter, and I'm in love with Belinda.

"What do you care if she dresses like a bag lady or Martha Washington, or even in Mother Theresa's linen habit? Besides which, I'd carry a knife, too, with the sort of men a woman can meet in Central Park."

Of that sort, Belinda means to include me. She isn't happy. I had to tell her the story after all, because she's my confidant and best friend, and because the feeling the incident had left in me had settled in my stomach like a gas bubble, and begun to hurt. Naturally, I've left out details, and focused on this afternoon's "chance meeting" in the park. Everything after that — Karen K's reaction, how she double-backed to watch me talk with the teenagers, and her sudden confrontation (the anus-expanding threat) — was in my story. This time, however, I expected a different reaction. Only now, suddenly, after I've heard my own version, it doesn't surprise me that she has come up with the essential question: Who cares? Intriguing as Karen's story is (if you're me), I see that it matters nothing to others.

"You're amazing, honey," Belinda says. "Some people see celebrities once a week or once a year, but you see the same celebrity, and all by chance. So why were you in the park making clay models, anyway? Models of hands, or, what the fuh- Don't you have anything better –?" She stops because she knows living with an artist comes with the odd events, admissions, and stories of the ex-ordinary and a mis-orthodox life (style). She sighs before saying, "Sometimes it's best not to know everything." She has told me this before. I see this phrase work its way through her mind, in reflection. She shakes her head, but gives me the benefit of the doubt, something I'm not sure I've earned.

"Are you hungry?" I ask. She clasps her hands together and pounds the air with her imaginary mallet. It's a sign of relief that this business is over. Where's the concern? she thinks. I think she thinks this. Lovely, stable Belinda. Truth to the wall (not that I've been asked), I couldn't claim such savoir-faire if events had been reversed.

I pull out all my best paring and carving knives. An idea has been brewing inside me for days, one that combines carrots, avocado, horseradish, and a roasted eggplant. Does Karen cook? Does she have her own chef come in each night? There can be a culinary boyfriend, too.

The next morning I get to the same bench at the same time. I set up my table in the cold-front air through which my vaporized breath expands in the sun's buttery light. Next to me, in a paper bag, I have two coffees and two bagels with cream cheese. She'll be hungry was the thought that struck me on the way to the bus stop.

Riding to the park on the northbound bus, I saw the same old guy as yesterday, without his jar of peanut butter. Maybe he was on his way to get the day's supply. He got on at 42nd Street and sat across the aisle from me. His features were as chiseled as I remembered, and in the early June gloaming, the fissures pulled deep shadows into his face. The effect was magnificent portraiture, and maybe stone wasn't the right medium, I thought; oil on panel could best get his expressive age, that and a subtle sense of beguilement: a Sargent or von Aachen portrait, a Victorian or Rhinelander face. He noticed me staring, so I said something to make conversation — usually a mistake on city buses, places of sorrowful contemplation or the hassle of movement, impending destination. Listening to me, he pushed his glasses up on his sharply angled nose with one finger. He told me the weather was going to change today, get cloudy in the afternoon, that's why he was up earlier than usual. He was on his way out of the apartment, for his walk. "Four hours, minimum," he said. I expressed my envy of his free time, and he confessed he wished he didn't have so much of that. "Sitting for hours at home reading or, worse, watching television, is sapping my brain. I feel stupid, and a bit useless," he said, his lips a mess of doubt. "The walking helps," he claimed. He told me he likes to smell the flowering trees at this time of year, and to feed squirrels with the seeds he gathers, and to talk to some of the ladies who watch their grandchildren go round and round on the carousel, or else he calls balls and strikes under his breath behind the chain-link backstop at the ball fields, and then, perhaps, he rents a toy boat to sail on the Conservatory pond, hoping a kid will come by and ask him a question. "The day goes by quickly enough," he mumbled in a passion, "if I'm not careful." And here he winked, his way to tell me it was all okay, he was alive; there are worse things that could have befallen him. He nodded at my bag and fold-up bench. I told him about doing Art in the Park, for the kids and moms. He liked the idea a lot more than I do, even if my enthusiasm was a lie to begin with. He introduced himself. "Alvin." We shook hands. His voice was low; he spoke his words smoothly, with no hesitations or squeaks. He didn't believe me when I told him, again, that he had an interesting face, but he thanked me. And, no, he didn't want to model for me. "That'd make me uncomfortable," he said, but I saw in his eyes that he liked the idea anyway, and was flattered. I thought if I could have ten more minutes with Alvin, talk about sculpture and the subject's essence, over a beer, that I would be able to turn his decision around. Before I got off the bus at 70th Street (he was going on, up to 110th from where he'd loop back through the park on foot), he allowed me to take a few pictures of him, portraits and profiles. He looked into the camera as casually as I expected he thought he could give me; his expression of "normal" — on a bus, in the morning rush, people staring, annoyed and spiteful. His face was never expressionless, and each snap was exactly what I wanted. As I looked through the viewfinder, I saw looking back at me a simple, magnificent gentleman who could have once been a powerful or important person. No one is ever always powerful, not at the very end.

It's eight-eighteen when I check the path for signs of her. She might take another route today, tomorrow, for a week, to get me off her trail. My feet stick out from the table, but I'm upright this morning, concentrated on two sculptures, and a lump of fresh clay wrapped in wet cloth, just so people walking past don't think I'm sitting here collecting for some bullshit organization (illegal in the park), or giving away free palm readings (frowned upon by park police, I'm sure) or panhandling. People file past at speed walker, sleepwalker or zombie paces. Everyone is on his way to work this early, each an unknown name to the others; their hard-soled shoes go click-clop or tap-tap or crunch-scuff. The men wear muddy colors toward the indigo side of the spectrum, somber colors for such a sunny, cloudless morning. The women show their engaged sense of color, held fast to this season's fashionable reds, bright yellows, and African and animal prints. Hair bounces with each step; bracelets jingle. Ties dangle and jump; red is their predominant color and base. The occasional hat I see worn, all by women, is cocked. The people walk both ways, some using long strides while others stroll through their pace, not in such a hurry to sit behind hermetically sealed windows, wondering how to live a different life (I can't be the only person to imagine office workers think this way). Amidst this parade that's terribly easy to caricature, a half hour into my show, Karen K shows up in her Skid Row outfit. She stops on the opposite side of the path, two overstuffed plastic bags hanging on fingers gone white and blue from the strain. People have to detour; she gets brushed across the shoulders. A few look at her, that same drift of disgust pulling their faces one way or another.

Her gray curls shine today. My guess is she hasn't had the time to add hair gel & sand & park dirt & fireplace ash. A green goo (strange in its brightness, the color of plastic soda bottles) is smeared across the front and arms of a filthy white lab jacket pulled over a sweater. The coat is open and she's pushed her arms through the sleeves like mop handles stuck on a scarecrow. The Duane Reade bags are filled to near splitting. Through the passing crowd she stares around me and at my hands laid flat on the table, at the axis of my limbs, my lazy feet and legs stretched out into the path. She maintains this random scrutiny until only my face is framed in her stare. I don't think she believes I'm here, another day. I'm somehow familiar to her in the supernova of yesterday's encounter. We stare across the path, our gazes deflected only by passers-by. I count to sixty, then to one hundred, and on to one-eighty. Finally I look away, down at my sculpture, and lift my hands to continue working the clay. I feel her stare, it gnaws, I wonder if she is crazy.

Within half an hour, when the work-bound walkers have thinned, and now changed over to old timers and teenagers off to school, some moms with prams, I finish a sculpture and set it on a plywood plug to dry. This is another hand (they're easy, therapeutic, meditative projects), its index finger pointing up, though crookedly, while its fellow digits and thumb form a loose fist, perhaps cradling something in the palm, a note or morsel of food, or air that has been breathed on by imagination, a lover's recent kiss. The creases and whorls, lines and cuticles, those subtleties that make a piece of clay seem lifelike, are yet to come (will never come, because this is practice, and, now that she's here, something better can happen). Karen stands unmoving, I haven't seen her blink. I sit back and look at her. My turn to stare.

The space of fifteen feet separates us from a lunge with her chicken-cutting knife. I pick the table up, move it forward, and stand with my hands held open: no weapons, no threat. She's so still she might be a tree (or a statue).

"I'm ready to meet your knife," I say.

"I'd rather have Henry ass rape you." She speaks in that same graveled voice that has replayed in my mind over night. "Perhaps you'd like that," she says, flashing a pimp's smile of scorn and offer. Her words are no less disgusting today, but we humans get used to almost anything.

I shake my head, aghast at her crassitude. "How can such a compassionate woman –"

"You don't know me!" she yells. Two women leading children grab their wee ones and make an about-face ("Mommy, I thought we were getting muffins?" "Mommy knows a better place; come quick now.") Karen moves her jaw in jagged motion before speech comes forth. "You aren't qualified to give an opinion on my personality." This time her voice, a new sound, touches my chest as the words of a saint dying in martyrdom. This is the voice of normalcy. She says, "The mildly literate make this mistake."

Quick to take advantage of any dialogue, I reply, "Yes, I've read your book. I learned your words and how you organized her thoughts. I think I can identify you behind them, up to a point. So I do know you, and I am qualified to say something about your personality."

She snorts. "Up to a point."

"You are a compassionate woman, with the voice of reason." Silence. "Unless of course you really are crazy." Silence. "No? Okay then, so how can this compassionate human be so violent?"

"I haven't hit you, you big dummy." She's used the gravel-grinding voice.

"Okay, right," I say. "Then it's... intellectual violence. Why?"

She doesn't answer. Then she snorts again. "Intellectual violence."

My experiment — having the dauntless courage I lack — is to be completely other. I nod to her across the path, and she sets her mouth in a line. Three people pass between us, one after the other, and in the time they pass, Karen turns and drops her bags on the bench across the path from me. Now we stand facing each other, two gunslingers, hands close to hips, prepared for the next play, any move. But gunslinger Karen defuses this tension to set alight another: she walks across the space to stand in front of my fold-out workbench. She keeps it between us, nods at the sculptures and points at the hand I've just completed, nestled in a wet cloth wrapped around the plywood square. I step aside to give her more room, for her to bend down and look, or pick them up, without me hovering. This is progress. I don't say a word.

People continue to pass to our left and right, their eyes on us because now we are these two New York characters — caricatures they see in magazine illustrations and laugh at, but can't do so when they appear in the real world. We're the skell and the weird guy, whose inherent kinetic energy crackles between us, across the table. They want to see what happens next, but we're too slow for them. This is not an action movie. They give us the fast pan, otherwise reserved for museum paintings and women's asses who aren't their wife or girlfriend, and then they change direction to make space that we'll need in case something does happen.

Karen squats to look closely at the hand. In her position, my nostrils get the full assault of her stench. I don't ask her about her clothes, their origin, real or farce, but the questions are on my mind: Did you get the clothes at a mission? Did you find them in a dumpster or pick them off the pavement in an alley? Are they acquired from other homeless in trade? Can they be your own clothing from the back of the closet, "treated" in your Parkview condo's bathtub with cat urine, vomit, months-old sweat, dirt, fetid sewer water, rotten food? And where does one purchase such alteration supplies?

I want to ask about her hair and her skin. Does the grime and soot come in bottles, labeled "hobo dirt" and "railroad oil" and "campfire ash" — all stocked in a cardboard carton picked up at the Five & Dime? Maybe she'll tell me, I imagine now, that there's a whole line of perfume called Homeless. (Who's their spokes-model this month? Streetwise and Spare Change News carry its ads. There's a scratch-and-sniff bar to entice budding bums.) Does she already have a branded collection up in her penthouse atop The Parkview? Names like "Au de Alley Trash" or "Crotch Sweat." I can find a bottle of "Milk Vomit" next to "Used Diapers" beside a big-ball diffuser filled with "Feces Stew." I want to tell her how bad these products are for her skin. They'll age you beyond your years! Of course she knows all of this already; her manicured nails rest against the table (without a tinted polish, although holding to matte lacquer).

Her hands turn the plywood plug clockwise to expose each of the sculpture's angles, and these hands are the contrasting evidence that she lives clean, knows what a bar of soap is used for, comes from money; she has a vital mind, in proof from the four essays I dug up at the library, all published over the last six months in Allure and The New York Review of Books, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Artisan. I want to ask her what she hates about America that she's chosen to reject its motto. Something momentous, if rejection is the answer; certainly not the Democratic or Republican parties, or economic and social decline, or fast food. Because, Karen, whatever you're doing cannot be construed as happiness. And Karen – Karen! – how did all this that stands in front of me — foul smelling, foul-mouthed, foul to the eyes, a stench to all senses and to basic humanness (cave people had more self respect!) — how did this person get here? I don't know if I'll ever learn why; I don't know if I'll get the chance, or if I should take a chance, to ask. I shouldn't want to try so hard.

I open my mouth to ask. She shakes her head. I flinch because she has reacted in time to make me think she has known all along what's been going through my mind. So my thought makes no sound. She folds her arms hard across her chest. She lifts her hand to hold her chin, a gesture of the intellectual brimming with thought. Her eyes peer into me, the eyes of a Columbia don, albeit dressed for a prank. I don't know what to say, so I make a half turn while keeping an eye on her hands, and motion toward the bag.

"I brought coffee and bagels." I shrug. "Are you hungry?"

"Later," she replies, using the rocks-in-blender voice.

At least, there's to be a later.

Her eyes move along my body, from the loose-laced high tops to my spiky, unwashed hair. I feel vulnerable under her inspection, and though I'm unwashed and soiled from sculpting these few hours in the moist park air, I feel positively baptized compared to her. Karen's eyes don't stop moving for a long minute. When she stops, once more settled on my face, I know I've been unbraided. She puts her hands on her knees and stands with easy grace. She's done with me; I merit no time. She raises her hand in a sign of farewell. I utter a syllable of grief because this is it, this has been my chance, and I've promised myself (and her) that if she doesn't want me around, then I'll leave her alone. My voice is a child's plea for attention, and I've been caught in a lie. Karen raises her hand higher, which I follow with my eyes, and then she whips her hand down hard on my sculpture. The sound is a drumbeat, a single tone that disperses through the trees as quickly as the violence it wrought. Death. I look at my work. The little hand is smashed beneath her palm, the extended fingers poking out in distress from the mashed clay, the kiss folded in, for memory and eternity.

I take a deep breath and blow it slowly into the air to let my seethe float off through the June daylight. Karen peels her hand away, and looks at the henna stain left on her palm.

"What's your name?" she says. Her voice is soft, almost too soft for me to hear, and I almost say What? in that moment before speaking, but do hear the words through memory's hollow tunnel; this is a third voice of hers, different from the chipped gravel bum and the martyred saint. This sound is the salon voice I've imagined Karen owning in those Sixties and Seventies photos, standing with one shoulder lightly pressing against a wall, her black hair grown past her shoulders, parted on the side with a curl at the bottom. In them, she tells the photographer to be truthful, but be kind: "I'm a woman," I hear her say, "We are standard-bearers for this new generation." Her voice is that of the radio-modulated raconteur. The look on her face is always that of one who knows how to listen, while in the foreground a man (always she's with a man in photos from that era) is caught from behind, in quarter profile, sometimes with a beard and sometimes with horn-rimmed glasses; smoke hazes the air in these b&w pictures, martini glasses held delicately by their stems.

I tell her my name.

"Sounds like a girl's name," she replies almost immediately, as if she'd been waiting for any reply, any name. Moreover, I get the tone of the principal acknowledging the talented student's rebellious prank with a verbal challenge aimed to jab his chin, make him take notice of himself: You're a lot less than you think you are.

"It's not," I say. We move our feet the way people do in cold weather, which squares us up across the table. I say, "My name is unique. It's a name of someone who's important, someone you'll want to meet. Minus is the sculptor whose chisels transform a block of stone into anything that's in his mind, my mind. He peels away truth to reveal truth's essence, which is how the sun peels off your eyelids if you stare at it too long." I'm feeling my schoolyard muscles and sass from fifteen years back. This isn't quite High Noon menace, but she's affronted me and I want her to know that she won't get away with it, bag lady or famed writer or Humpty Dumpty. I don't care anymore. Karen is nearly a foot shorter than me, I have bulk against her thin frame; if she has a knife and can take it out quickly, from some hidden pocket inside all those clothes wrapped and pulled and shoved into, even then I can take her.

Was this the lamest way to get a person's notice? A woman's? My intentions are entirely honorable, as a feeling at least, even if I don't yet know what those intentions are. I can want Karen to be my mentor, but in what incarnation? She has only written on the visual arts, and has never, to my knowledge, molded a head from plaster, or hammered the ass end of a steel chisel until her hands can't grip a cup of coffee the next morning. I can't want her as a lover — a notion that is as laughable (by description) as the image is infelicitous. I see her in this moment as inspiration, the inspiring figure of art's values — the muse I've only recently renounced and disavowed — a cutout for Belinda. Floating up through the bubbles of these liquid thoughts comes my mantra: life & art as experiment. Nothing is asinine, I think, and have always believed, if you can get work from its natural force of character. And there is self-discovery to consider, too, a process that cannot be forsaken.

She lifts her chin so I'm able to notice her visage, her expression — passivity; amusement — through which she nods at the ruined clay hand. "Make another," she commands. Before I can refuse, or reply at all, she turns and walks back to her discarded bags on the opposite bench. A shit-stain the size and length of a banana greases the ass crack of her pants. One bag has drooped and fallen on its side, producing an orange that lies tangled in the loops of the white plastic handles. The effect is a dynamic partnership in color — green, blue, orange, white — that is a still life worthy of any canvas. Fuck the camera and silver gelatin solvents. Light resolution and focus is not my medium. Anyway, I've brought only clay and honing spatulas with me.

I talk to her back as I sit down. "Nice shoes, by the way."

She stoops to gather the still life into the bag, and she says into the air, "Shut the fuck up and get to work." Her gravel voice.

There's mustard-colored gunk on the back of her lab coat, pressed, drawn and smeared into the shape of Illinois. I pull my bench against my waist. The sculpture she has smashed is embossed with her palm print, the lines and gullies flow with mapped precision. I wonder, suddenly, if I can emboss my fingerprints onto the clay fingers of this sculpture. They could be ever so shallow, slight, as the veins of autumn leaves found on dew grass.

Karen plops down next to her bags. She reaches into the nearest and pulls out an orange and a bottle of mineral water. The orange fascinates her; she feels its weight with an up-and-down motion, turns it in her hand — I can see the dimples absorb the light into shallow pools that fire like diamonds when the sun catches the fruit through the foliage whispering on a breeze. She drops it into her lap, where it hits silently, and works at opening the bottle. It comes open with a hiss, and she upends its mouth against hers. Her throat ripples with action. She guzzles a third of the water, and smacks her lips with a small "Ahhh..." while twisting the cap back in place. She looks at me without the need to turn her head, a practiced move I've seen the homeless use to spy on the world they've left, without wanting to notice it all, or claim ownership to life. Suddenly she attacks the orange, rips open the dimpled flesh, peels the rind back from the navel. She drops each piece in her lap.

She's hungry and so am I, but I don't get offered a wedge. While the dog walking retirees look fatigued and ready for a nap, the pram-pushing mothers have now joined the late-waking joggers, and map-toting tourists dressed in bright, mismatched reds, ochers, lavenders, and browns, spring colors of the holiday-making shiftless, they look around as though they've just gone blind. My bench and clay sculptures get casual glances; idlers stop for ten or fifteen seconds, and before they move on they pay me with a smile or a flash of eyebrow. Karen K gets the rare glance of pity or menace. She doesn't notice them, they're fast to ignore her, but I've seen Karen look at me twice. I have yet to move.

From an inside pocket of one of her shirt layers, she pulls out a sheaf of notebook paper, folded into small squares. I see blue lines and black letters. She gets a pencil from another pocket and, setting the sheaf on her knee, thumbs through it and starts writing. I'd never seen her do this before, write in the open like this. Her hand moves slowly across the page, making painstaking jerks of the pencil. I realize she's printing each word. In my mind I see small letters, finely shaped blocks running unevenly across the page. "Get busy!" she yells. Her sub-society persona is so trod — hopeless — that I think she's called this out to the world at large. Heads turn but quickly right themselves, and she is once more ignored. The non-person has made a noise. She looks up and speaks to me in her raconteur's voice: "I haven't got all day."

If I don't do something while she's here, watching me or not, Karen will finish her orange, pick up her bags, and leave. And when she leaves I won't get more from her. She'll blend into the New York world of normal and abnormal, become again the non-person into which she's dressed the part. My chance to speak with her — to get her to speak to me — lies in this challenge, issued for God-only-knows why.

The world detours between the two of us.

I dig a ball of clay from the bucket, scrape the sides to get a good mix of gritty clay with the center's dense, wet stuff, and get down to work.

The first clay hand had only taken me forty minutes. I don't know if I should be faster here, or just be good. I've seldom thought about speed. The brain is focused on the integrity of the shape that each sculpture must radiate. Form is the goal, beauty its release. Now is when I feel a lazy smile settle on my lips. My hands become nimble and dexterous. Pat, dap, dent; fold, smudge, pull; cut and scrape. The fingers splay in the act of a wave, a wave pulled back, stopped at the beginning of a hand's most congenial gesture. The wrist is narrow, that of a child or small woman, and extends upward in tree-trunk grace from the plywood plate. I turn in the middle, ring and baby fingers, a fraction further from the center of its outer range of movement, a nearly unnatural angle; the hand has finished its wave, but holds itself on the air of delay, awaiting some reply — but this wait, this hope, is in vain; none shall answer her — only the hand won't let go so easily as the object of its gesture had (turned away, ignored), as the thought of abandonment crushes its jubilance.

Done. Twenty-four minutes. "Okay," I tell Karen, and put some force into my command: "Come and get it!" A group of Italian tourists wrench their necks in worry, and chatter as they walk on.

She stands, shuffles over to a trashcan to dump her orange peels, and takes out a sandwich bag from the lab coat pocket. From its open mouth she pulls a wet washcloth to wipe her hands clean of sticky orange juice and pulp, working the edges up under her nails like dental floss between teeth, and ends with a red stain from clay taken off her palm. Finished, she puts the soiled cloth back into the bag and folds the top of the bag closed and puts it into a different pocket. I've never before seen a bag lady do this.

Now she notices me and stands tall; she's the famous writer, dressed for Carnival. She walks over, eyes on me all the while, and, in a winding motion like a big, slow animal, lifts her leg high, her foot rising to a balletic height, up above the table, high, higher, until at its peak, when I think she'll wrap the foot around the back of her neck, she drops her heel onto the sculpture. Stomp goes the foot, riggle goes the table, wuffle replies the echo. Karen looks at me as she scrapes her foot against the table's edge and the stuck figurine, smashed cow-pie flat, slides off the edge and drops onto the ground. Her foot is encased in the leather shoe, its shine fresh and gleaming. The clay is a pile of shit, with pebbles and paper bits stuck to it like sugar sprinkles on a doughnut.

"Do another," Karen says, quietly. "Make yourself full of care this time." I look at her, crazily, but she shields my anger with the white glimmer of her eyes. She says, "A third of your life is over, which doesn't matter to you because time stands still. This won't matter either, because time cannot trip forward until you know what you're doing." She looks up at the sky, through the treetops. I follow her gaze and see the blue of a lighted heaven behind the black, veiny tree branches and less dark teardrop leaves, their edges trimmed in mantis. Before I know it, she's back across the path, sitting on her bench.

What a witch! I think, but suddenly wonder at how I've had to force the words, and anyway my reaction is fleeting. Her antics are more scabrous than violent. They even amuse me. Why not see what she'll do next? This shall cost me another ball of clay. Evidently, she thinks I've got the time. Can she crush each new sculpture I make, all day long? She probably has more time than me. There she sits, pencil stub in hand, writing on the slats of wrinkled notebook paper, wrinkled and stained like herself.

Two police officers walk along the path from the center of the park, as lazily as if they were out killing time at a supermarket, smelling fruit, reading labels. Their black clubs swing against their hips, the sides of their mouths are in motion. Then they see me, and, across the path, her. "A crazy lady," I hear one say. Their pace slows so they can take in the table, the finished sculptures and the flattened lumps, and the bag lady on the opposite bench who's hunched over a pencil stub that scratches like a chicken in a coop. Their expressions are benign. These people are no problem, they decide, and regain their pace, fall back into the conversation they interrupted, resume their Sunday shopping.

This next hand needs to be different. Rodin chose hands as objects of sculpture for expressive abilities, and the kinetic energy inherent in each of the fifteen joints. Nimbleness engages form even as it creates the form; it mocks convention, where there is play as much as industry, and where dialogue-by-movement tells a story through dancing digits that reach out from a cupped palm. This sculpture I do right, better than the others; exact — instead of quick. I have nothing to prove to this woman, but maybe something to gain by pleasing her (although I've never quite been the student to the master, I've read about its effect on a number of artists: most resented the relationship, in time). It matters a great deal, to me, nevertheless, to know that my life has been consumed, up to this point, by looking for, and at, beauty, in whatever métier I find it and from each angle she appears....

"Bagels!"

The voice jars my concentration. Karen sits forward, elbows on knees. I point a thumb at the bag but don't say a word. I won't serve her two ways. She uses a stiff finger to scratch her temple; her hat moves, her hair shimmies. I proceed with my hand, but soon I sense her cross the path and hear her open the bag. She looks inside and stares, as if what she finds is the answer to all sublime questions. She leaves my sight and I hear only birds up in the trees, twitting and singing, wings flapping to launch from branch to limb to trunk to ground, before retracing their paths; a few squirrels scuffle behind me as they forage under the bushes, and far off come the sounds of teenagers tossing a Frisbee across the open field. "Run, run!" "More wrist!" "Good catch!" Across the path, deli paper crinkles, and coffee is sipped with a satisfying "Ahhh..."

Fifty minutes pass, between which neither of us speaks, although I hear her belch after she finishes the bagel. I feel my stomach gurgle, but this is no time to break off from the work. My fingers mold clay, and I find the process captivating. As much as large projects can mesmerize and challenge, this simple hand takes powers of concentration I haven't used in years (a feeling that amuses, deflates, and revives my art senses because of what I have and have not achieved — or tried to create — for a couple years now). There's a certain movement that the sculptor's hand makes when it has clay between its fingers, or when it rolls a piece against a palm, makes a column that becomes a leg, a branch, an arm, flower stem, torso, a vein or penis or lock of hair, the lips of a maiden or the lips of a lamb. I'd learned that when I join my thumb, index and middle fingers together at the tips, they pinch the clay just so, and make a universal shape, a crease, versatile for many parts of the body; pinch it in two successive places along a cylinder, and I've formed the knuckles of a finger. The pinch is perfect in scale for miniature figurines. A four-fingered pinch scales the knuckles to a life-size hand. I've found this skill important, as important as the accountant's need for double ledger notation, a journalist her shorthand, the cook his flavor palette.

This sculpture is somehow taller than the others. The fingers extend proudly, Homer's rose-tipped metaphor. They define their expressive essence (more even than the human eye) while they resemble the ribs of an abstract fan: the hand has answered a question with a gesture, its meaning left to the imagination. I think I've finished. Time: two hours, fourteen minutes. Karen K is gone when I look over at her bench. Her bulky bags lie propped against the backrest, and inside them could be two sleeping infants, or their corpses. The sun is overhead, with the day's heat all at once apparent around me, as I'm yet dressed in a sweatshirt against the long-gone morning chill.

A crackling sound strikes behind me, too large to be a squirrel but it could be a bear. Knowing that no bears live in Central Park, I turn around to confront what beast there is and see Karen stepping through the break between a trio of dense bushes, behind which there must be some space, hidden from the path's view. She's back from leaving a pee puddle, I guess. She stops, looks at me, and pulls nuts from a pocket to scatter on the black dirt beneath the bushes. Squirrels appear quickly from different directions, three grays and a red tail. They compete tamely for Karen's tossed morsels. Mouths stuffed, they race off, one chasing the other who's chasing the third, up a tree trunk to wind around and around, their bodies nearly touching nose to tail as they run furiously, claws chattering against the thick bark like sewing machine needles.

Karen doesn't toss the nuts in her hand glibly when I stand up, but returns the bunch to her pocket. She looks both ways down the path. We're alone. She puts her hands on the back of the bench and leaps over with a track star's agility. The sculpture is at her striking distance, and I wait to be reprimanded, somehow, resigned to watch helplessly while she releases her easy anger as retribution for my having followed or recognized her; or maybe because she doesn't like my style of clay sculpture. Anything is possible.

She squats low, appraising the sculpture at eye level. Her hand comes above the table's edge and I take a fast breath. Her fingers touch the edge of the plywood base and turn it a few degrees. She does this three more times, examining the hand with each quarter rotation. Her eyes melt into the figure and blink only when necessary. They follow the lines of the fingers across the joints, from nail tips to third knuckle, one by one. Her nose twitches as she draws her face closer still, to see how I've made veins beneath attenuated skin, and tendons stretch from knuckle to wrist down the back of the hand.

Karen says, "I want this one." She picks up the plywood base. I detect a smile on her mouth, or maybe it's the squint in her eyes that has pulled at her cheeks. She turns heel and walks six paces, stops, and makes a turn in the soot of sunshine. "You're not going to hound me into submission," she says, her salon voice cracking from so long a remission. "I want to be left alone. Not because I'm full of my own shit-eating ego. I have no explanation for you." She walks away again but again stops and turns. "Thanks for the hand." Then she does something unexpected. In a look pressed through the daylight, her expression softens, and she becomes a conciliatory auntie. This is a look she's made for, even in the clothing of a bum. She lifts the sculpture and nods at me. "Take what you learned today and do something with your life, Minus the artist."

At the loft I hunt through the shelves in the living room. Karen K's book is somewhere among all these titles. I remember sliding it between two smaller books a few months back, maybe as long ago as the New Year. As I scan and dig, pulling out volumes whose titles are darkened by the shadows of use, I think, I heard your voice. That bag lady act won't intimidate me. In my gut, beneath these same shadows, Karen K the intellectual has harried me. I don't like to feel harried. Half of me wants to shout "You bully!" the next time we meet, only she'll tell me I'm a whiner, and to grow up. My manhood-half doesn't let this go far, and takes over. No one can imagine how this little admission works on me. I don't carry intellectual superiorities (or artistic ones, for that matter), but standards, yes, these I cop to.

I suppose if I were a real New Yorker, I'd call my shrink. A Californian might bicycle off to a yoga class. In the Rockies they go shoot a moose for solace, I suppose. In Chicago, on the other hand, we punch people in the nose when we've been wronged (my pony-league football coach taught us: "If you're losing, you might as well get in a fight!") Call this the Blue-Collar Syndrome: knuckles first, friends later. This bluster is apropos to feeling picked on.

Then, while adult emotions settle in, I take Karen's tactics as part of her philosophy. Which is what? How about, Once more into the breach, lads.

My hands change pigment in the work to shove big books aside, from their stained peach flesh to a dusty gray, to get at the short and thin volumes crimped between the fatties, like younger siblings placed on a sofa for a family portrait. I'd lost count of how many art books I have, so to keep my mind at rest while searching, I begin a mental list of the unusual and special. The exhibition catalogue to Warhol's final show (it might have been a gift). The Uffizi's book of Michelangelo's sculptures is, at three-inches thick, the centerpiece of my collection. A more recent sculptor graces the cover of _Modern Queens and Captives_ , an encyclopedic volume of the Ideal-Sculpture movement of the 19th century American experience. Just what did teetotalers and the mystically chained masses think when they saw nude women in chains, or a mother and child shipwrecked? Their sentimental (and hypocritical?) notions of womanhood came later, which, from all likelihood, grew out of popular literature's depiction of women (not a picture modern women enjoy dwelling on, I trust from experience — prairie husbandry while eight-months pregnant, four children trailing along like sickly ducklings; or as city-factory slaves, corseted and locked in sunless, airless chambers six days a week; or daughters of industry married off to competitors' sons, as if these men were European kings tying fiefdoms into knots of solidarity — although I cannot help thinking that few enough understand what their forebears had sacrificed; after all, I'm no better).

In a fit of pique I yell out to the room, "Why don't I have these books on the coffee table?" My Midwest nasal bounces against the bare corners and beamed ceiling, striking me with a flat bell-tone response. Sound dampening has been left to inhabitants to cure, or suffer. The room demands tapestries, but who wants to live like a medieval duke? My answer tornadoes through my mind: I do, sometimes.

I find the book stuffed in the center of the lowest shelf. She was hiding her chocolate-colored spine between a dog-eared copy of the KJV Bible and _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_. How it got shoved down here I don't know, but if New Year's was nearest to its last reading, my clue could be wine, Belinda, and song. We'd stayed in that holiday to avoid conflagrations of humanity and witching-hour taxi droughts. And morning hangovers. I open Karen's book as the winter memory fades, stand up from my painful crouch, and turn my shoulders so the window's light brightens the pages.

Karen Kristine Kosek, an ingénue writer born on the west coast, published _What Beauty?_ in 1969. Its table of contents lists twenty-seven essays. They're grouped into six categories, arranged thematically, themes generated by their titles: "Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder" and "When Worlds Collide" and "Equatorial Winter Solstice" seek, respectively, the explanation for bad acting in major films, gross values of art lost during World War Two, and color variations in Gauguin (marking the contrasts between hue, value, and chroma). This skinny book, with its broad ideas, was cobbled together from essays published in the newly flourished "little magazine" market sprouting like meadow wildflowers in America's Northeast, Midwest, and South. Her introduction explains how the magazines New Yorker and New York Review had only just got a taste for her grade of essay when the book hit the shops and libraries. (Ten years on, she would work as contributing editor for both magazines, while no longer courted by the NYC literati whom she'd given up as "incestuous" and "larcenous.")

The sun breaks through clouds outside and, in the new indoor brightness, my shadow strikes the title pages like a faded tattoo. I remember something. On my first reading all those years ago — maybe I was seventeen, still pimply and struggling with my identity — everything about her subjects was unusual to me. Re-read through this past winter's darkness, however, I absorbed why the essays were peculiar choices. In the parlance of the day, she chose "offbeat" subjects to create irony with the times: Goethe's _Faust_ and Neil Simon comedies, but not Beckett or Albee or even Stoppard, the three introspective dramaturges who ruled the 1960s; Picasso's sculptures but not his paintings, and no other influential sculptor of the twentieth century; Preminger's film noir and John Ford westerns, but not David Lean's bio-pics or Sergio Leone's popular spaghetti westerns, nor the recently hot Stanley Kubrick; in architecture, van de Velde and the Bahaus movement but not FL Wright or Minoru Yamasaki; Graves but not Wordsworth or Auden.

Her dissociation was purposeful and, I realized, poignant. What was popular twenty years before her book appeared was no more artistically valid, she argued, than the recently new or fashionable art. Naturally then, _What Beauty?_ made its noise in the ArtCrit world for topics it didn't cover (fashion counted for Karen, but for its intrinsic value, not sales figures or schmaltz; or its profundity).

My copy is the twentieth-anniversary hardcover reissue of 1989. Its jacket is a stylized collage of the iconic images she's written about between the covers. An afterward by Karen explains some of the negative criticism her book got. My fingertips find these paragraphs. Her detachment was not neglectful, she writes in response to critics' claims that she hadn't anything new to contribute to the 'masterwork dialogue'; such was the vogue nomenclature for cultural ontology discussed on campuses, and likewise published in university journals. To this, her response is an italicized "Please! Art is what it is just as God says 'I am who I am' with little value placed on particulars." Even this isn't snarky, she claims. She had never planned to isolate herself as some paragon of critical temperament. In fact, the opposite had been her goal.

The irony of those essays was to reach behind the scenery that our 1960's "of-the-moment culture" had put up on four sides, like bad wallpaper or theatrical backdrops leant against their corners to satirize the house of cards they were propping up. I wasn't making aware to people how good or bad Kubrick or Graves were, only that they had overridden Preminger and Wordsworth because mainstream critics wrote exclusively about "new" art, and left "old" art to the academics and their pupils. And of course they didn't, but who was to notice? However you see this argument, by ignoring the depth of their artistic forebears those 'icons' lost their position once held by the masses. And such problems had always been thus. This only mirrored modern culture's landscape, but I was not ready to let go of the importance our past was to our present, and middlebrow art forms stood up to the canon, filled with heavyweights few read anymore.

Nevertheless, the loudest roar was heard from critics and academics whose stature was threatened by Karen Kosek's central argument, upon whose eponymous title showed the real problem, as she saw it: "art is in fact the purview of everyman" — viewers and artists and "housewives" alike — "not the critics, academics, students, architects, dealers, collectors, or moneyed insiders, whose tenured influence has sought to define and redefine art and art-value according to whimsy or 'visions of the year' — akin to fashion seasons straight from chic Milan, Paris, and London runways."

The first time I read her prose I felt enlivened. She armored her ideas with evidence, citing the critics' (et al.) "interpretive nomenclature so laden (leaden!) with jargon and crypto-shibboleths that your average art lover is made to feel uneducated and inferior, or worse, plainly stupid for not 'seeing' the same things the steadfast 'experts' can see (i.e., value, taste, good art vs. bad art)."

Her main thrusts and parries struck at the natural meeting (and connection) between high art and popular art: there's nothing wrong with enjoying both, so get over your pretensions — "this means you in your Ivory Tower and you on your gum-littered sidewalk: whether you prefer cave drawings, glossy magazine advertisements, and televised theater productions, or Botticelli's Venus, the London Symphony, and Shakespeare, art is wondrous, accessible, and needn't be cluttered with interpretation or high-mindedness." It seems to me her book loosened many keystones holding up the passageways to the canonical gold mines: critics who talk amongst themselves, publish unreadable texts, and accrue high salaries for teaching university students to be self-appointed critics themselves (always a disaster, in my experience).

The public accepted Karen's ideas, and loved her outspokenness for them. The media lauded her; and why not, because weren't they slinging the same hash? Academia barely tolerated her. (She writes, "What could they do? I didn't teach, I didn't need their tenure committees, and my essays and books stood side by side with their own boring theses, each available for their students to choose. To use the cliché: I was having my cake and eating it, too.") Meanwhile, arts critics and insiders hated her, and let their venom drip publicly. New is threatening, unless "NEW" is what the powerful, the elite insiders, have put up for consumption. A pity, really. Anyway, Karen accepted every ounce of their attention as if she were eating a triple-dip ice cream cone on a summer day. (As a sculptor on the fringes of my own success in this world, I understand why the powers retaliated.)

Three months later, with her book riding the number four spot on the best-seller list, Karen Kosek changed her by-line to Karen K. Abused critics disguising themselves as academics labeled her change pretentious, and one critic re-named her "KKK" for her "dislike of any subject she isn't writing about at the moment." Having myself helped Peter N deal with the same bullshit, I can empathize with Karen. Nevertheless, she let the loudmouths steam in their own hot air, and her reasonable contemporaries excoriate the loudmouths (right or wrong).

I flip through the book, watching the vanilla pages fan in a slow arc, until I come to one of my favorite essays. In "Hollywood Back Lot" Karen takes the New Critics to task for setting up "avant-garde" realities to the simplest and most basic points of a literary education: reading books for story, entertainment, and what the author has to say about a life.

Linguistic systems are beside the point for ninety-nine percent of readers who want a good story told well. In the words of Joseph Conrad, "My job is to make you see." Okay, and what there is of the story that needs to be understood is the job of each reader, sitting alone, with a cup of coffee close at hand, or standing in a subway car jostled between other straphangers, or under the covers at night with a flashlight to read so that mom and dad can't bark, "Lights out and get to sleep!" This is our world, the readers (Readers of the World, UNITE!), and gummy words pressed on us by over-educated "thinkers" needn't knock, nudge, or publish texts inviting circular logic that few care to read outside humanities classes.

Please, please, please, authors: tell us your stories without the encumbrances of signposts or morality. We want to have fun, we want to cry, and we want what Kafka sought: "The books we need are of the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation—a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us." Thanks for your nightmares, Franz. We wouldn't know what to do without you. The critic knows this, and for that, I'm sorry.

If she hadn't intended to alienate critics, as she claimed, I have a hard time believing her. Her words read to me as calling on battle flags to fly! I close the book on my finger. My knees hurt and I'm thirsty. I want more of this book, however contradictory her late ideas struggle against the recent explanations... even as her present street life has filled my own ass with birdshot. My mind dandles with all sorts of retorts for the next time we meet. I need a drink and a comfortable sofa.

In the kitchen, I lay the book down open-faced at the edge of the sink. Two beers sit in the fridge on the bottom shelf. I find a can of Spanish peanuts in the cupboard, and shake the can to listen for its maraca voice that makes my stomach smile. Back on the sofa, my feet wedged in the center of a pillow on the coffee table, with one hand in the peanut can and the beer crotched, I flip through Karen's book, back to front and front to back.

If the TOC was risky, the index runs rich, deep, and polymathic. Let your fingers walk from Aristotle to Zeno. In the alternating streets, cafés, and alleyways, you meet Ruskin and Lippard and Bukowski, Fragonard and Baudelaire, Roger Fry and Leo Stein and Karen Wilkin. At best, I know by sight only a third of the names she lists like a personal address book, used by Karen as associations and examples, some to quote and others to meditate upon. I haven't heard of half of them, and back at Christmastime, if I remember right, I visited the library to learn whom I had missed in my education. Karen referred to them with the approach of casual respect, mixed with chords strummed like a folk singer instead of the historic method of plucking individual strings.

In her essay cornucopia, two oaks rise and spread their capacious limbs. In the first, Karen K lifts Faust from the humanities department grave, from which the play had sat for at least a century, into a how-to on designer selves amid America's social upheaval while the summer of love saw flower children and freaks descend on "suburban sensibility" — Kosek: "A misnomer by definition."

I haven't read much Goethe, and never his Faust. Too old-fashioned for me — I mean the language, of course, not the story. Give me Woody Allen riffing on Faust instead of wading into some nineteenth century German sentimentalist. Please! I remember reading parts of _The Sorrows of Young Werther_ in a Lit Survey course in senior high school. Fucking boring. The voice didn't translate to my Me Generation attitude, walking America's second city streets. I got a C- in the class because of a sub-par term paper in which I'd compared _Moby Dick_ to that vapid sci-fi adventure _Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan_. I'm sure the essay sucked — I'd spent my afternoons painting old panels (before I could afford canvas) or using my dad's wood chisels to carve gargoyle faces in the tree trunks across the street from our house that bordered a pair of baseball diamonds.

Karen's essay "Faust Finds Feral Friends for Feisty Forum" almost made me go buy Goethe's damned play (I opted for a well-worn library copy). Her argument came through more clearly on rereading this essay from the power of adulthood. Its premise makes more sense to me now than it had at age seventeen, when motivation for me was the kind that moved on curvy pegs sticking beneath a short skirt. Karen opens the essay with the line "Beware poodles following you home" and quotes some repartee between Mephistopheles and Faust, in which the striving scholar is asked to mimic the devilish scarlet cape and trousers worn by Hell's favorite prince.

Faust complains (as if he ever stops), "In every dress I well may feel the sore / Of this low earth-life's melancholy. / I am too old to live for folly, / Too young, to wish for nothing more. / Am I content with all creation? / Renounce! Renounce!"

I think this is a good bit of romantic self-pity, but there's something here that illustrates the feelings coming from the complaint. I've felt them before. Karen, too, (I think) because she wanted her readers to see life through Faust's eyes (for a moment of recognition), and take at least two things away:

The essence of free will, as seen through the prism of free will itself, represents the confluence of desire and labor. Mephistopheles says to Faust, "Trust me... take a shot... What do you have to lose?" Faust's answer is "Denial is all that can be lost! Must be lost!" [How long will you stay content?] Surely the end of Sturm und Drang ("Storm and Stress") had not come twenty years earlier, but has lived on in the belly of Faust.

Kosek is relentless:

Never satisfied with his own life, Goethe asks rhetorically as a self-guiding challenge to Faust, "Am I content with all creation?" To this the answer must be "no" — is "NO!" because, as the polymathic Goethe does, Faust has aims, too. Ah, but then the libido gets in the way, as it always does, and a woman is his design — Faust and Goethe's (like any master artist, Goethe didn't waste a good story, and used his life as a sometime map for his major work). Like all good pacts with the Devil, there are winners and losers. The Romantic appeal of Herr Faust gives us a winner.

I wonder at Karen's subject and intent. Is she mocking people's lust for recognition in 1960s America? Vietnam; the Sexual Revolution; Beats and Hippies, Freaks and Dropouts; campus protests and youth riots. Nothing could be less profound, nowadays, even while the media-born "Us Generation" turned into the news-saturated "Me Generation" (recall, if you will, the wave of college journalism students following Watergate). Therefore, social criticism found in the verse-play of an eighteenth-century German cannot be overlooked, I somehow think.

This moment, my discovery, calls for another beer because my thirst for German art and culture requires a brew from the fatherland. When I open the bottle at the kitchen counter and watch its foam rise from its brown throat, my idea of Karen levels into the typical artist-subject relationship. If I were to sculpt Karen K (I mean a bust, not a bag lady), I have a feeling she would give me complete license of shape.

I open her book to the pages I'd kept a sweaty thumb between and find its oily print in the margin where I'd left off.

The Goethean ideal is work, experimentation, striving, and the desire to use all things and everyone for personal enrichment. He felt used by others, so he used friends and women for his own enrichment: intellectual, spiritual, physical, psychological, scientific, and ultimately artistic. Goethe had precursors (Epicurus, to name one), but afterwards we can look back to the German from Frankfurt (even his contemporary, Shelley, sparks a mental flint) for our pre-modern sense of egoism.

Making Mephistopheles your intimate takes the reigns of a many-headed beast. KK lives up to Goethe's dramatics by moving on to a grand finish. _What Beauty?_ ends with a booklet-length essay on the strange concept of ugly-as-beautiful. Its title, "The Grotesque as Beauty" fits wildly within the book's dramatis personae. She wants us to reflect on how we find those compelling images most ugly in the world. This is not only a visual prompt:

We're compelled by the images themselves to think of... the society we have always lived in. Nothing has changed since the cave drawings of hunters poking at a raging saber-toothed tiger, Christ on the Cross, Moslem war atrocities, Crusaders' revenge atrocities, Elizabethan history plays, Japan's samurai culture... right up to, and including, modern music, literature, and photography.

Karen continues:

Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, we are taught. Beauty is that much at least, and is not that at all. Society has perennially minted standards of beauty like a lot of drachmas, centimes, francs, and pennies. Their edges steadily wear: so too beauty, our notion of its existence, its scale, its composition, and value — of copper, tin, nickel, silver, or gold. In the end, there is another beginning. Always, another re-genesis. This is not sophistry. The practical application of our senses describes beauty as flawed, and ugly as meritorious.

I find her demonstrations a prize, like a child plucking the sealed decoder ring from the bottom of the cereal box. She has scaled the ancients in a paragraph, and then settles on Matthew Brady's American Civil War photography, Frank Zappa's early recorded albums "Freak Out!" and "Lumpy Gravy," and Gerhard Richter's photo-realistic "death" paintings.

Zappa is her headline. He's equally "of the moment" and "progressive" — making music that is ugly to the established canon of Rock 'n Roll (itself having taken years to get mainstream approval, though by 1969 you even heard outrage over The Rolling Stones' "cheeky" marketing slogan, "Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone?").

Kids love Zappa, Karen K informs us, "and that's all it takes to make a nobody into a household name." She dislikes Zappa's music, is passionately dismissive toward its discomfiting rhythms and electronic sounds. Nevertheless, he's a brilliant musician by her own standards of musical taste, which has nothing to do with album sales. I have a hard time believing in the intellectual exercise of extolling the virtues of something you hate. It's wishy-washy, playing in gray areas when a simple black-or-white position sets you apart, gives you legs. Karen hasn't won me over — even as I stand with book in hand, her threatening expletives fresh in my mind, and my more-than-ever desire to learn what she's about — but I see her point of ugly as beautiful because, in his notes, the melodies, and the disharmony that branded Zappa's sound, the music makes sense of a country that was splitting at the seams from an un-winnable Southeast Asian occupation, the home front Culture War, the Generation Gap battle, and Dirty Politics, all made into dinner conversation.

Kosek writes, "Zappa and his Mothers of Invention trade the Sixties' 2/4 beat, blah, blah, blah [...] for imaginative lyrics linked to chord structures and dissonant syncopation we aren't used to hearing. Good for us, I say, because soon we will hear this kind of music everywhere, in every genre. The mainstream cannot make sense of him without comparisons to the mainstream bands, themselves outsiders at one time."

She keeps the pressure on the reader because she wants — at least I think she wants — to make connections while we think she's breaking connections. Gerhard Richter's death paintings, she argues, are a cross between Zappa's innovative songwriting and media imagery — advertising & marketing that Zappa and his Mothers targeted for its "pornographizing food, teenage girls, race riots, and astronauts." In Richter, Karen finds a friend:

Following the vivacious "everyday life" photo paintings that brought suburban jocularity into frame, the German artist gave us "death" — his now trademarked, innovative photo-inspired oils based on newspaper clippings.

And why not death? It's part of everyday life. I can only imagine he thought this, too (I don't interview artists, only their art), perhaps in a melancholic mood after learning of a friend's death. Better yet (for one's melancholy, that is), a lover's death. However, a lover lying in a casket, with stricken-faced family members walking past, is not what Richter painted. Instead, we got the portraits of the eight student nurses murdered by Richard Speck in Chicago in 1963. The paintings have nothing to do with the murder scene, but are oil renditions of the eight portrait photos used by news agencies to publicly identify Speck's victims. What we feel as viewers is left behind the scenes, given to our own imaginations if that's how far we would take a "fantasy" such as Speck lived out in his night of rape and murder. What is beautiful in this grotesque display are the women themselves, smiling into the camera, giving their gleeful expressions for family and friends who, it seems likely, still keep these very photos framed on the living room mantel, or tucked inside their wallets.

I can't help thinking, Now why didn't I think of that? The ugliness of life, given pictorial essence, is ancient. But in this guise we're asked to be an intellectual participant. Richter's oeuvre through the Sixties is given two coats of Karen's prose. She appears smote by the German's vision, though a thorough critique of the man's critics shows her sense of fair play; she agrees more than disagrees with the criticism (painting from photographs "is a paint-by-numbers exercise; why bother?") but she never strays from the elegance of Richter's theme — "Terribly appropriate for our times."

Then she shifts gears, of a sort, through a portal that leads back more than a hundred years because, she says, there's precedence for the ground Richter treads. "Can you guess?" she asks. The question titillates her readers, given all that the twentieth century has catalogued of death: the St. Valentine's Day Massacre; the Baton Death March; the Rape of Nanking; Nazism's Final Solution; Pol Pot's killing fields; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; Saddam Hussein's gassing a town of Kurds. No, no, KK teases — reach back to that unexpected pleasure: the American Civil War!

For Karen, Matthew Brady did more for photographic art in his documentation of soldiering and its furies than all the cheap pornography coming out of Parisian studios at the time.

Is the ugly-rendered-beautiful a matter of form, capture, or/and visual extrusion of point of view? I don't think so. The question, though, is neither limiting nor unfair. There's simply more to beauty than opinion – more to beauty than meets the eye. Take for example the shadows and shading of Brady's Gettysburg Battle photography. These are violent images — the results of war and vengeance. Grotesque faces of death peer at us through silent eyes and waxen complexions. Desolation and abandonment gather the dead like a bouquet. There is no mistaking their unmoving eyes with the unmoving eyes found in a family portrait print: lifelessness is intrinsic no matter what medium is used. The visual oddities that we find unfamiliar in daily circumstance become representative of what is missed. Art, real or imagined, strikes our aesthetic bell in the tower of reason and emotions.

All grotesques do not project beauty any more than traditional art taste defines beautiful as arresting. Beauty comes from a connection between our sense of the natural world and our sense of self. In that, there shall always be a nexus of high, low, and middle art. It is the dying tree amid the vibrant autumnal arboretum. It is the fly on the cherry-topped ice cream dessert. It is the nudist family that relaxes in the beach's falling light. It is each of us who look in the Monday-morning mirror.

My beer is long gone, and sits, strained and filtered, in my bulging bladder. My knees feel hyper-extended, and I hear them crack when I pull them into my chest, then roll forward and make a tentative rise from the sofa. The slow move gives my head a rush, and a dizzy spell comes over me, only to leave like clouds dissolve shadows.

In its place is left a question tapping at the inside of my skull: Is Karen's book a lot of popular criticism given at a time when pop-psychology and pop-art and pop-this-and-that was, well, the popular rage? If so, perhaps her time has long since died.

I don't have the experience of growing up wise through the late Sixties to successfully answer this question. Her critics tried to answer her, and fell flat against the wall of sales figures Karen K put up for nearly a year. She became the flavor of the month, then the seasonal flair, and that year's itch. She rode her success by writing more essays, giving university lectures, appearing at NYC culture-type parties on into the following decade (on another burgeoning industry, the television talk show), in fact doing all the same things her detractors had done, and continued to do. This went on until, that is, she left the scene she had criticized and had enjoyed. What does it all matter, now? This is the question I really want to have answered (for me alone), and the only person who can give me satisfaction is, pardon the expression, the horse's mouth. Perhaps Karen Kristine Kosek was more Goethean than even her critics could fathom, considering their anger. She used them all, and for good measure. As a teenager, I didn't know what Karen's book could do for me. Now, though, I think I have the answer.

The book on ugly isn't complete.
CHAPTER 12

Belinda bites into my newest food creation with the gusto of a carnival fat man. Her "Mmm... mmmm!!" tells me I've done well, found the right curry-to-chicken ratio. She holds the top half of a round French roll and inquisits, "What do you call this?"

I've scraped out the roll's inner white bits — the soft stuff — and replaced it with curried-chicken, topped with sliced pickle, brie, and tomato. Where she's bitten a crescent from the end, steam rises off the meat in its bread boat. Belinda swallows and smacks her lips for another attack.

"This is 'toast,' " I say. "You must describe it as an idiolect. 'I toasted the toast in the oven.' Its success lurks in the preparation. The bread must be crunchy when it's served."

Belinda opens wide for another bite. The bread crunches delightfully between her teeth. I've eaten two toasts before she came home. It's past ten o'clock. I lean back on the barstool to enjoy the sight as Belinda savors her food. A gleeful chuckle escapes me when I catch her eyes wiggling in gustare orgasmus. While she chews, I notice the ox-blood briefcase she laid on the counter beside the day's discarded newspaper.

This is new. A self-gift for a milestone accomplishment?

Its stitching runs tight, uniform, each rib visible in serpentine rows, an upright model with a gape-mouth, and a brass buckle attached to a strap thick enough to repel scissors, or anything less than a Bowie knife.

She claimed starvation at her entrance to the loft, didn't bother to take her shoes off because I stood at the island holding the baking tray with two toasts fresh from the oven. The room's air danced with stomach-bubbling aromas. After another bite and sip from a glass of red, she rests her arms on the island and belches lightly. "Sorry!" She covers her mouth before another belch catches her. "Oi!" she exclaims. "I haven't eaten in three days. My stomach has shrunk to the size of a dried raisin."

The work of an agent has given her something to look forward to, she tells me, besides harnessing Gertrude in the afternoons and brushing her down near midnight. Her descriptions of hours and work have the sound of the taskmaster's whip: phone calls in the morning from our desk; appointments set that she's learned will get pushed around or cancelled; the meetings with gallery owners, dealers, and collectors take no more than ten minutes (when they do happen); then she dashes across town.

I don't say a word, other than encouraging utterances. But her day sounds like a doctor's routine, where the price of a prescription can be the cost of your soul (or mine). How she's found so many people to speak with in three weeks is a mystery I ask her to solve.

"That's just it," she says, "the finding is easy — recommendations and name dropping — but getting them to look at slides or samples –" she points at her new briefcase "– is like striking out Lou Gehrig with bases loaded. I mean, I can understand running around, but not getting the run-around. You'd think they were fronting for the Mafia, the way they avoid a genuine business discussion." When I open my eyes at her casual assumption, she lifts her hands and says, "It's not like I'm the artist, Minus. I've got station. Half these people know me already."

Now I'm confused. I say, "You told me you'd modeled. Was there something more?" The light in her eyes changes to dusk, and it's not Belinda who is looking at me, but that second being.

"Oh, Minus Mouse," says NotBelinda. "We need to have a heart-to-heart."

Belinda came to New York as a sophisticated Middle American. She had double-majored in Finance and Psychology, and was Wall Street bound, with two summer internships at Omaha insurance companies on her resumé and a handful of crisp recommendation letters, printed on the highest quality rag bond. Without solid experience, though, she was just another come-to-town-er wearing green-tinted sunglasses. New Yorkers treated her like a wide-eyed farm girl with Okie dust under her nails and who walked barefoot (few NYers make the distinction between Nebraska and Oklahoma; or, for that matter, Ohio and Idaho, Chicago and Memphis, The Blue Ridge Mountains and Okefenokee Swamp).

Newspaper ads selling stardust dreams, targeting young women who could afford money for head shot photographs, had suckered two of her three roommates. There was a third, Andi, who made $10.50 an hour sitting for figure drawing classes at NYU's Tisch and Brooklyn's Pratt academies. The difference, Andi had told her, was that Belinda had to be naked.

"Really naked. Bottoms, too," Andi told her. "But don't worry. They don't expect to see pink." Her smile was supposed to be Belinda's shot of encouragement.

Belinda blushed at her roomie's city sophistication (a different rung on the ladder than her Cornhusker polish), but she wasn't worried. She didn't expect art students to be anything more than mere boys. Neither school's department disappointed her. What she was after, unlike what the boys might have thought, were the teachers. And not their cocks, but their contacts. The pseudo-suave student painters wore grunge and listened to Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Sonic Youth, while their teachers played Todd Rundgren albums in class and put their hands on her ass after the school hour had moved to happy hour in a university tavern. This little ass play got her free drinks and a priceless management education: who was "agenting" artists A through Z; how to get on a gallery's Gala Opening invitation list; and which artists paid the best wages for models while not expecting sex for the privilege.

She learned to play all their games while keeping her "honor" intact. They relished her "Lordy, ahm just all flushed with excitement" naivety she threw back to keep their interest. For a twenty-two-year-old woman who'd already had her share of sex, drugs & Rock'n'Roll, the art world soon turned her off: gallery freeloaders made plays on any woman (or gay man) that moved; gallery owners practiced intellectual snobbery on the freeloaders; the dealers played opportunistic games with the galleries; the collectors fingered their money like Jerusalem-temple usurers (anxious to add paintings to their private museums, while gambling on an artist's rising fame in the art world's new cache as investment tool.)

"Business is business," quipped one dealer, offering my Cornhusker a fluted champagne glass whose sparkling liquid showed like spun gold for a reason.

Belinda saved her evaluation of artists for last: most were genuinely gifted, sensitive souls, but highly vain and, thusly, vulnerable. "Of course, then I met you, Minus," was her excuse for me. Us.

After four years sitting for students, journeymen artists, and a few of New York's nouveau masters, while never having become an artist's mistress or girlfriend, she decided it was time to leave, before "the surface tension of a pond" became her only way to negotiate life. By then, she had saved enough money to buy her chestnut mare and a rehabbed hansom cab, and said "toodles" to the SOHO crowd, the Upper East Side hoarders, and all those hands on her ass.

Nursing a third toast, cold now on a plate, I realize I'm up-to-date, but no less confused. She tells me I should take my time, soak it all in, but she has nothing else to say about that life. Deal, Minus, she says, cuz I have. Remember, I'm the one who was naked in cold rooms under a spotlight.

What about the new life?

"The new briefcase makes a statement," I say, cleaning up the dishes from her second toast. "You're part of the game now. An 'operative,' in the parlance of the art bizz."

She points at me. Her finger wags, and she places it perpendicular to her lips: children's international code for "silence forever." So there's to be no new history. Fine.

I see how Belinda wants to protect me (she thinks) from the Big Bad Art-Wolf. She's probably wise for this essay. Apart from the FaceCards deal, I try not to think much about business. This has always been my own, very foolish, attitude. But at least I'm aware of it.

I have only enough room in my mind for art creation and all those things that get me to its threshold which — subtly, lightly — push me through the looking glass. That space-time thingy called business is a deep-shaft sieve, built to drain every creative impulse from my natural sensibilities. There are also the stories I hear of artists who pour a week's time into the business end of art and are no better off than if they had taken a desk job in some nameless office behind mirrored windows in yet another forgettable skyscraper.

I turn on the water and pour sudsy liquid on a sponge.

"What did you do today?" Belinda asks.

I think of Chief and Marshall, Pan and Boilermaker, tethered to their leads. I think of the black-and-white art postcards at the museum. I think of my honeycomb at the Beehive, subdued and shadowed and quiet as a monastic cell. I think of clay hands smashed on a folding table. I think of the dust collector gang: GumbyDude and HourGlassWoman and FallenMan. I think of Karen K scratching her head, the hat and hair moving side to side. I think of Henry and a good ass raping if I don't watch my step. I think of Peter N holding his purple-headed paintbrush. I think of my practice stone, and its chipped Where is it all leading me?... When will everything collide? motif. These questions deserve some sort of answer.

"Living on the edge," I say, "I am, therefore I art."

Belinda rolls her eyes, one of the intangibles that keeps us together. By this I mean the details not needed to be told day by day, because they stick in you like bits of food between your teeth, which require daily flossing. I now see perfectly her reasoning to squelch shoptalk.

At the bottom of the sink, the bubbles take a ride around the top of the drain before dropping through. I surprise myself by not being surprised by Belinda's art world experience. I had my share of mattress muses, a thought I've no wish to pull her into (nor fantasize that she was one herself, once upon a time — denials to the contrary). Likewise, there's little in me that says Care, because you know it matters. No, that's wrong: for some women, their guys would quickly become self-righteous over a single nude sunbathing episode. I can't see the fuss over that or this history. The reason is simple and obvious: hers is not my history, and therefore none of my business.

Deal, Minus, she said. Sure, and then there is the "my end" of that life — our handshake deal. It means something only if I know what's happening. She describes the meetings she's had: corner offices; warehouse galleries; a 5th Avenue hotdog stand; the backseat of an uptown-bound taxi. Brief, productive, promising; but nothing is on paper. "Not yet. But there's potential." A word that describes my life, any life. She reminds me of the meeting we have with gallery owner and two dealers after the 95th Street Y roundtable event. I balk, but only a little.

"This is important for you, Minus Mouse. I'm getting... what the hell is that buzzword?... traction — whatever — but I'm getting it. More people than you'd ever guess have heard of you. That includes your sculptures and paintings, Art Man. You'll see how this works out for you. Us. Listen, there'll be people at the Y I need you to meet in the days and weeks after. Some of them are to the art world what Triple-A scouts are to the Majors. Are you getting the picture?"

Her speech is so filled with encouragement, I must say something. "I'm excited." My voice lacks the punch I'd planned.

She folds her hands beneath her chin. "You're going to cause a ruckus tomorrow, is what you're going to do." I'm silent. And she growls, "Aren't you?!"

"The very essence of art," I say. My eyes fold to sinister slits. "Wit is its own greatest value."

In the dead of night, I'm awakened by my steam-engine breathing. Deal, Minus.... (Okay, I get it!) I have. (Only....)

My fingers find the lamp's switch in the dark. Its sound is a howitzer in a dead wood; the hundred-watt bulb augers into my eyes. Belinda stirs, groans, and grabs my pillow to cover her head. Through the down I hear, "What the hell, honey. Go make yourself a toddy."

I have a question, and when I ask it, she pulls the pillow off her head. Tomorrow. She promises. Yes. I turn off the light, satisfied, but not (not ever) content. Belinda slides my pillow under my head.

In the morning, over breakfast, she listens again and, only slightly annoyed, takes my face in her hands. "Out with the old, in with the new," she says, and lets go of my face to return to her grapefruit, which she attacks like a starving fruit bat.

"You're twenty-nine! A spring chicken. Once a model, always a model, is what I say. I have ways to use your beauty that'll peel your stockings off."

"That's exactly what I'm afraid of." She makes a fart noise with her lips. "Artists want nubile nineteen-ees, not plumpy twenty-niners. Rubinesque is out, and high tits, a firm ass, and belly buttons with just the hint of shadow (not a cave) are every middle-aged collector's dream of a water nymph able to rock his world. Or his filthy imagination. Me, I can't compete these days. I could barely do that six years ago. My tits already show signs of sagging."

"Your tits are great," I implore. Actually, my voice is into the exaltation octave. To complete the effect, I look at her breasts. High, tight, round. Very nice. I thrust my chin at her chest. Belinda lifts her shoulders up and back.

"Minus, I'm wearing a push-up bra and a light sweater. A goat would find my tits attractive."

"Lucky goat," I mumble. My best wolfish glare (to stay with the animal metaphor) isn't going to implore Belinda to show me some flesh, though. I switch subjects, sort of: "Artists don't always paint what they see, and they can –"

"Please stop," she says, "because we're way off the subject. The point is that I made enough contacts four years ago, which I'm using today for just a small price." She winks like a gangster's moll.

I must be blushing, because she takes my hand and puts it over her heart. A plaintive warmth rises along my spine, and it takes me a moment to realize she's staring at me like I'm a stranger.

"I'm giving you a chance to cop a feel," she whispers.

"Oh!" My hand pulls away, but then I recover. The palm finds the spot beneath which her nipple lies in hibernation, only needing a gentle nudge to awaken it. Her cheeks pull in; she'll only let me get worked up (to use for later), but I can be persistent, so I say, "I thought we were having a lovers' moment."

"God, you men. Sentimentalists to the last, yet five minutes too early or else asleep before we get back from the bathroom."

My pride doesn't wound so easily. "Shall I extol the virtues (games) of that creature doth God named woman?" This only makes her take my hand from her breast. My hand stays molded to her cup-size. It's a laugh, so we sit back and become silly with mirth.

After breakfast, still lingering over coffee, her refusal echos in my mind. I quote her something I read recently. "D.H. Lawrence wrote, 'The new thing is the death of the old.' He was writing about countries casting off their colonial minders. Europe versus America. But I think it's true also of art. Museums hold old things and new things, and without museums, any of the modern societies would, mostly, have only the new. The trade magazines focus on the new, the latest, and the famous — just long enough for them to be taken by what's the next 'new.' Some artists are jeered for what they'd done. Then they are ignored. A bit like old people are treated, these days."

Alvin, from the Broadway bus, comes to mind. He sounded lost, confined to a world that had passed him by. Millions stand shrouded behind him.

I say, "Yet the museum gift shop sells dozens of postcards every day. For fifty cents you can have Van Gogh as a young man (vibrancy of mind and color) and in middle age (disillusionment painted in a muddy patina), or Rembrandt's self-portrait series (a bookmark of four faces from his life cycle). Both men are the historical and elite masters of their age, now stepped over by artist's whose sense of color splashes across canvases in primary smudge marks, streaky brush strokes, and the disproportion of the human figure."

More examples might be overkill, and this stops me from saying more. Nevertheless, I'm close to being overcome by my own automatic calculation of any artist's time limitations (of life itself, but also legacy). If I were to continue speaking, the easy path would be to bring up Karen K, who's hiding herself in a bag lady's outfit, aging, forgotten, a stepped-on image; underneath she's older than her book jacket photo, but I'm sure (want to be sure) she retains beauty, that special middle-aged female winsomeness, the type that has learned to take care of herself. _What Beauty?_ is right. Her argument is really for dis-interpretation of the value judgments leveled by critics at artists, or the public.

Belinda waits for me to say more. I'm finished though, and a shrug makes this clear.

"Make great art, Minus. Beauty has always been your guide. Believe in that, at least. I haven't known you to say or do anything to make me think you stray from that perception. Yours is the only vision you have to uphold."

Right, I think. Mine, against the art world of... whatever it becomes next week.

CHAPTER 13

A sandwich board announces the night's program: "City Art: a conversation palette." The room at the 95th Street Y has seats for more than a hundred. Steel folding chairs have been set up wall to wall, with three narrow aisles (left, right, center) that bottle-neck the crowd weighing in to grab seats up front. The walls are cinderblock, painted a banana yellow, and give me the idea that this room is used as a kids' after-school romper room when not the arena of verbal gladiators. A platform the size of a boxing ring sits at the far end. We panelists get to sit on padded chairs, arranged in an arc so that, obligingly, we'll be able to see each other and address the audience.

Lively conversation makes the room bulge with sound, meshed like spider's silk. "I hope we can learn something." "Jesus, all of humanity has shown up today." "I have business cards. Spot the gallery owners so we can corner them later at the coffee bar." "Can someone open a fucking window?" People dress casually. I don't see a tie in the house, and I'm in a linen blazer over a black T-shirt because the night air was cool when I stopped back home for a shower after working at the Beehive all afternoon.

Someone touches my elbow and I spin around. Belinda winks. She's flanked by two men in their forties, one smoothly shaved, with a touch of gray at the temples, the other sporting a trimmed black goatee. It looks like pussy fringe on a skin-magazine model. She introduces them as Michael and Thomas (not Mike and Tom). One is tanned, but pussy fringe is pale, which shows off his red lips like something I don't want to think about. We shake hands and they wish me luck, as does Belinda, sans kiss to keep up decorum.

"I might suggest you're brave to participate at one of these things," says Michael, "but the fact that you haven't skipped town for the weekend proves it." He grins with half his face, a cowboy's disarming corral gander that stops horses in their tracks, and cowgirls, too.

I tell him, "That's the contradiction, right? Makes the trip worth my while." I supply no grin because I'm nervous and don't want it to show in a facial tick that might be hard to stop once I get on stage.

But Thomas won't let it go. "How do you mean?" His left eye holds me in an inquisitive focus while his right roams the room.

"I get to say whatever I want today," I reply. Belinda slips me a bemused smile. "Especially the truth of my daily bouts with self-doubt, if I'm asked to fess up. That's what people think enhances art, all that personal torture we artists are supposed to endure: anger for artists who stole your success; destructive behavior; public humiliation; black days and looming suicide. Starvation works, too. And all of which can be true, but it hardly ever is, at least not on the scale they imagine it should be."

"Chained to the easel?" Michael ventures. "A noose swinging in the breeze over the center beam?"

"Something of the sort," I say, alarmed by his needless repetition. I try out a smile, and feel my lips crack from dryness.

"Can't that all be a cliché?" asks Thomas.

I lick my lower lip and feel the sting in the split. I tell them, "Isn't that the only way to answer a cliché question? I'm hoping for more, of course."

I walk away, and make it through the standing crowd to the stage, where to one side the other panelists have grouped in a circle, arms folded, heads nodding, bobbing, serious art faces over folded lips and eyelids, as if they are strategizing.

"Minus Orth," says a woman in a crimson blouse. "How nice to meet you. I'm Valerie Brown, the program's moderator." Her hair is blond-streaked brown, shaped like a fashion wig, bangs curled in at her thin eyebrows plucked into the shape of new moons. An emerald brooch the shape of a salamander is attached to her blouse.

She introduces me around to the circle of faces. I don't know them, but know who they are: Anna, Billy, Archie, and Jane. Two have popped up recently in magazine interviews. A round of handshakes reveal marks of the artist: stained fingers, skin the rough side of irregular, strong grips without visual girth. One hand is as smooth as a baby's ass. Valerie explains that she was just covering the ground rules for the talk. I'm reminded of a daydream I once had, in which I saw myself as the editor of a top-subscription glossy called "Affected" in which bios of the nearly famous compete with advertising for art supplies and offers for workshop retreats in Michigan forests, Vermont mountains, and on Georgia's coastal islands.

"Valerie means to say that there aren't any rules," says a fat-as-fat-can-be man, wider than he is tall. He wipes his forehead with a blue handkerchief and says, "It's hot in here." He tries a sly smile, but it comes off as belligerent and facetious. This is Jimmy Bells, the art critic writing under the pseudonym Billy James. Valerie has swallowed a reply to his blithe comment.

"Some of us are artists, Jimmy," retorts Jane Rohan, the left-wing visual artist (film, collages, and painted large-format negatives from the 1920s) from Queen's, New York. She's on the short side, round, with black-framed glasses and curly red hair. "There's an appreciation that has to trump celebrity. In other words, we practice humility."

"Well," Jimmy says, his voice straining to be overwrought, "practice makes perfect, or so my mother tried to teach. Please, if you will, call me Billy while we're on stage." It was his hand that was so soft to the touch.

Another artist pipes in, "It's not a stage, Jimmy." This guy is big and linebacker wide, with a last name, Tower, to fit his size.

Valerie Brown succeeds in finally relaying the rules, to which we all agree with short nods. I don't see anyone's hands, so I fear we've all crossed fingers behind our backs. I step out of the circle and tell the group, "I'm going to use the bathroom, then find a bottle of water." Before anymore can be said, my back is turned and I'm away from the group in three long strides.

I return five minutes later, water in hand, half empty and feeling the urge to urinate, which I tell myself to forget, it's only nerves. Valerie is taking the boxing ring stairs. The panel stands single file, according to seating arrangements, which I've missed because of the poisonous moment I had escaped. A tall woman dressed in jeans and a green sweater, introduced as Anna Stappel, hair like chocolate mousse, twirls her hand at me and points to the open space between her and Billy James. So I am to sit next to the critic. "You're late, so you got the short straw," chocolate mousse whispers to the back of my head. I turn around to say, "I thought this was going to be a nice talk about art?" She blinks at me. "It is," she says, in a tone suggesting I'm being defensive, but also that she's not so sure herself what might happen. She adds, "I hope it is." My breath spills out my nose. "That's the spirit," I tell her. "We're waiting for one more," she says. "One more what?" I ask. "Artist," she says softly, as Valerie has begun to call us on stage. People clap after each name is announced, and our line moves forward. I'm third onto the stage, and find water jugs and glasses on tables set between each pair of seats.

Valerie waits for the clapping to stop once we're seated. I feel the audience's bug eyes on me, but not just me so this is okay. I spot Belinda, seated on the left, toward the back, among white, brown, yellow, and black faces. She's talking with her guests, red mouth moving, hands gesticulating. Suddenly the gym doors open with a metallic clatter. People in the back rows twist their heads around. Through the narrow opening slips Peter N, who gives a sheepish look toward the stage, to those who've arrived on time. I beam him a half 'n half "how gauche" / "how sneaky of you" expression, and make a monkey's face. To his honor, Pete slips through the SRO crowd and up the side aisle, then quietly takes the stairs and slides his ass onto the end chair.

"Peter N, everyone," announces Valerie Brown. A new crescendo of clapping rises, but there's a note of reprimand in its tone and sarcasm to its tempo. "Your fellow panelists were worried about you," Valerie says, which is news to me and, by the glances passed across the stage, the other panelists, too. Peter meets my glare; he flares his nostrils like his porn-star namesake made famous on the brink of every money-shot.

The set program lasts twenty minutes. We're asked to say something about our discipline, the life experience that "finds" us here today, and why art is important to city life. Valerie calls on us B-I-N-G-O style, either to keep the audience, or us, on our toes. Anna Stappel tells an animated story of small-town life: she drew faces in the dust as a child; sudden family deaths catapulted her to Wichita in the summer of her junior year in high school, where an art teacher befriends her as autumn's tri-color leaves drop from the maples and sycamores in the college quadrangle (Stappel gushes over this, then reddens, which makes me wonder if she had not been more than a "befriended" student). Out of these admissions, Anna comes off as less than enigmatic (an artist's badge of honor in a "Baa!" society) with such sincerity, but "mysterious" could be applied.

Jane Rohan speaks in a nasal monotone for more than five minutes, within which the highlight is her statement that art is the conversation between the creative and non-creative world. "Like a medium?" Valerie asks. "Sure," is Stappel's curt answer, and, "Yeah," the follow up.

Billy James gets a laugh or three when he relates his one year at art school, where he discovered his artistic vision did not coordinate with his technical abilities. "The subjects, themes, and colors all went to shit in my hands; to sum up, I had not talent." Billy's honesty freshens me the more he speaks; his brash confidence a style, belying the balding pate, stubby limbs, dwarfish stature... to which I wonder if this is not the cause of his wit. The audience shows eagerness as we try not to posture — no hand sitting, this bunch — and they clap politely after each panelist flies his flag.

I speak about figure sculpture as a live form, in which movement comes through the pose, facial expression, or perceptible muscle tension. All are basic techniques, I say, although to an untrained eye each becomes the artist's genius stroke. Then Peter speaks fluently but quickly, like he's arrived from a coffee house's "Buy2Get3" promotion. Colors are the material of modern life, he says, a distinction from the everyday person's world of past centuries, which is why art was so proudly appreciated in every square, on the walls of common merchant's homes as much as those of the aristocracy ("Art literacy was not only common among children, but expected...."). Archie Tower rounds out the biographical talk with an illustrious memory of meeting Funk artist William T. Wiley in a San Francisco tavern, in which toothpicks, olives, cocktail onions, and a corkscrew became characters in a stage production directed across the bottle-strewn bar.

Having visited more than a few of these art talks (as audience member), I'm impressed today by everyone's candor.

We're sitting back in our padded chairs after this first round, feeling euphoric, proud, and insecure (me). I hope we've not been a soporific to the crowd. Then Valerie opens questions from the audience. A man in red Bermuda shorts asks about the brand of oils we use. The most recognized artist on the panel, Archie Tower, answers loudly, "Whatever is on sale." A child in a wheelchair talks for a minute about his photography, but doesn't ask a question; eerily, no photographer sits among us to offer encouragement or a tip. A fashion design student from F.I.T. wonders why artists don't use more mixed media, in which fabric and other organic products make the piece "more three-D" (Anna Stappel reminds him that she's a collagist, and that stones, textiles, even bits of trash, find their way into her work). I stifle a yawn, which pops my ears, then plugs them again. The audience has become the attraction, thanks to Valerie's style. She's seen too many televised talk shows, but none of Phil Donohue or Tom Snyder's insightful foraging into background, method, or predictions. I don't think it's what the audience has paid for. They appear happy, though.

A face in the crowd moves behind another, reappears, oscillates, then hides itself. My sleepy mind wakes. Those eyes, the round chin, a hand fixing a length of hair. I sit up abruptly, as if I've fallen out of a nightmare. Billy flinches; he must think I'm about to throw up because I lean forward, chest over my knees, shoulders back, nose pointed like a hound sniffing for scent. I've just seen Karen K!

My eyes comb the patchwork of multicolored ovals around the spot where I saw the telltale features, and that chicken-knife gesture of feminine obliquity. This can be her, but now I don't know that it is, or must be, her. There's is nothing like this I need right now. Had I drifted into a half dream? Imagined it all? Surely she does things outside her home when not wearing fetid remnants... THERE — partially eclipsed by a white summer hat... aisle seat... the hand again (my eyes water from the strain to see clearly what is a puzzle, the tears blur this small triumph)... she's uncomfortable in her seat, moving about, her legs reaching into the aisle... the shoes, now they will tell... — but I can't see them... has she followed me because, because I...

"The question stands," I hear Valerie say. "Minus Orth, what is your opinion?"

Valerie walks from the back, past the row in which the woman who is or might be Karen... I'm unsure; the person with the hat has leaned to her left, and the face of the woman who I thought... and in fact... no, something is wrong. This is all wrong.

"Minus?" calls Valerie.

People turn their heads this way and that, looking for some sign. But I've missed the question. Something about art, I trust. Stage eyes have focused on me along with audience perplexity. Have I become a piece of stone? They begin to murmur concern. I smell the anxiety in the room's heat, and a rising spice of body odor. I've smelled this on myself for the last ten minutes.

"Art is a language," I say, a verbal burst that shields me for a moment from rising titters and whispers. I make a gesture that is supposed to urge speech. Thankfully, it follows. "This is visual first off, a representation of life, or, some might say, the world. Secondly — if the artist is lucky — the language becomes that of words. People talk about what they've seen. Talk encourages conversation: 'I like it' or 'I don't like it.' I think both are good starts. What is there to like, or dislike, to ignore, or celebrate? Some might say, 'I like the reclining nude.' You see where I'm going; these are statements of preference, perhaps seeking the ideal, the ideal that comes out of oneself or society's norms, or variations on the exotic, or the tension between acceptance and disapproval. I could have just moved art through four years of a movement, or forty years of a cycle, from its birth to its death."

"Value!"

Billy James has blurted the word like a belch or a fart. I ignore him, but some in the audience nod along (perhaps unsure what Billy means by this loaded word, I can only hope).

"The visual is what artists give their audience," I say. "That comes before anything. The public wants to see their work, not so much as talk price or –"

"Buy it so artists can feed their families?" Billy says, louder this time. "Let's speak of reality instead of palate size, shall we?" More laughter; the audience has found the jester by looking for, and misidentifying, wit. "The reality is, art has become a commodity," he says, this time in a chiding tone, "whatever else it does for the soul." He uses his fingers to mark quotations around that charged word.

Valerie toggles her head. She has agreed, too, but she's said it under her breath – "Oh, yes, yes." – a sign that she's not sure if she should shut Billy up with some kind reminder that this is a discussion and not a political rally. Nevertheless, Billy's trap is easily avoided: I ignore him.

"The public absorbs art," I say, "without needing to buy it. That's why we have museums. In fact there's never enough art to go around, regardless of its cost, artistic taste, etcetera." I focus on the audience and use my hands to guide them away from the mocking critic. "The public can read art's language when it sees what the artist has put up. If they, the audience, are careful enough, they'll see themselves in the painting, or as part of the sculpture, photo, film, or dance. You've asked questions tonight about all of these. So then the public absorbs more by talking with friends about art's effect on themselves. To compare or contrast art into 'I love it, I hate it' epitaphs — okay, that's fine. We don't have to agree which is good because, mostly, we don't. I don't like everything done by the people we call masters or the stuff done by yesterday's artists. Pick your era, this matters little. Anyhow, the public of an era gives reasons for its opinions. This is the verbal language after the visual that I've been speaking about."

Billy yawns openly, like he's in a play and I've given him his cue. He slaps his knees and sits forward. "Meanwhile," he says, "the price is listed on a sheet of paper inside the gallery door, right next to the guest booklet asking for mailing addresses and — what's the new thing called? — E-lek-tronic mail. I admit, it's all catchy marketing."

"Prices have risen," Valerie says. "Does this affect art sales to a mass audience?" She looks around the audience, like Oprah Winfrey waiting for signs of fealty. A part of the audience shows its agreement like house pets waiting for a treat; in another faction, a rumble spreads through the ranks. Now I know why the words rabble and hoi polloi became popular. Valerie walks forward, trying to pose like a barrister in concentration and probity. I stare at her and think, You knuckled-headed philistine. Serious conversation? She's moved this event into her own milquetoast, pie-in-the-face carnival sideshow.

A voice comes from the opposite side of the stage. "Collectors' wallets have fattened, so why not the artists'?" This is Peter N. "It's not as if artists use supermarket stamp pricers, stacking cottage cheese tubs in the dairy aisle." The audience laughs with his use of the logic of economics to sell his point.

"I wish art was the price of cottage cheese," yells a voice in the audience. Some of the crowd laughs, others hush-hush this rudeness, and some hiss.

"Ask yourselves if you'll accept a raise from your boss on Monday morning," Peter says over the laughter. "Anyone who claims he won't is a liar. Why, then, should artists not take the money, any big money on offer? Artistic integrity? That's bullshit. Collectors and galleries make a profit without embarrassment. It's time for the artists to cash in, too. If you don't like that, Billy, and anyone else, then you can kiss my black ass."

The audience rears back. A hush dampens their zeal because this is what they've wanted all along.

"That's all I've been saying," Billy yells.

"No it hasn't," Archie Tower fires back. "You've used the words in such a way as to make artists out to be thieves, sell-outs, or mere merchants dealing wares at some filthy bazaar stall."

Whistles erupt; catcalls. I look at Peter, who waves the audience down, and I can almost guess what he's thinking: "Not in my market range." I raise my hand, but don't wait for Valerie's recognition; Robert's Rules is not part of her world.

"I never mentioned price," I say above the noise. "But I agree with Peter and Archie. Nevertheless, art's value reaches far beyond money. Dollar signs can fly around the room like mosquitoes, and you'll let them sting us all, Valerie, if you prefer Billy's cheap jabs to the artists up here. Society listens to art and is the real critic: of its beauty and social value and of course its price tag."

"How comfortably naïve you are," Billy says, his patented byline photo a sneer marring an already pruned face. "If I'd had to guess, you're one of the outsiders looking in, eager to be listed as a hanger-on at a Schnabel show. Good God, what kind of passive fool have you given this audience today, Valerie?"

Valerie ducks her chin, but I see her smirk openly. She's been told to let us rumble. Who's behind the curtain here?

Joan Rhoan stands from her chair. "Why must America be so mercantile minded? Has art really become only a commodity? Billy has implied this without any evidence. Of course art is bought and sold, but before either happens, an artist dreams. She thinks how to make that into a visual representation, and then physically labors at the task. Do you shop for art like you choose mustard? No way! Values and tastes aside, what is considered beautiful should not be the most expensive works, the pieces that sell to the highest bidder, or the cheap watercolors you find for ten dollars at a summer art fair. We've already been witness to this abomination in literature."

I say, "I'd like to know where the representational art has gone to. Replaced by –"

"Minus, there's plenty of representational art around," Joan says.

" 'Around' yes, but hardly given attention. Crowded out by splattered primary colors, and the shards of broken coffee cups hot-glued onto a canvas for texture. What Beauty!"

"Sour grapes," Billy sneers.

"No — a vision of art and mind and humanity that's been soured."

Billy delivers a loud strawberry.

Antics, I think, will lose to substance. I try again to address the audience as my ally. "The events on the canvas and the features of the sculpture are what people pay for. There are many other factors, but those are the basis; what viewers see, and how that makes them feel. Hey, if you don't want to be a critic, be a viewer and appreciate the art. Think about why Manet chose to place a naked woman in a park having lunch with two clothed men. Or why Giambologna chose to sculpt a rape scene."

The audience gives collective approval by sitting forward or whispering; some clap. Valerie stands wooden. Someone shouts "Yeah!" from the back of the room.

"I'd rather be a critic," says Billy. "It pays better, or at least I get a steady paycheck. Besides, we know all that stuff you're saying. Already, enough! Professional interpretation is the key element, after price. What are you buying this piece for? Value! What's it going to be worth next year, in five years? Investment!"

"Of course you want to criticize," says Anna Stappel. "It leaves you free to observe only, and not participate." Stappel hasn't said much, but her voice is a welcome shot across Billy's bow. It's fully now the artists against the critic. Hip-hip, hurray.

Across the stage I spot Peter, arms folded. He'll sit out the rest of this melee. The most animated parts of him are his lips, puckered for a whistle that just doesn't come. I flash my eyebrows at him. He looks away, or more precisely, into the crowd. Now that he's given them a bone to chew on, he's content to lean back and watch the dogfight. We've had this conversation before, over sandwiches and beer.

"Critical review is participation, madam," Billy says. "If we critics don't interpret for the masses, they don't have a clue what they're looking at." The audience rustles at this. "No, no, don't complain with your whistles and chirps," he chides. Then he challenges the artists on stage: "Artists don't often talk about their work. You don't want to look like it's all a contrivance — which it is. You want to claim the muse had come to you and the art is its spawn. You can't explain your work. Let the audience figure it out! Fine. Now who is afraid to participate?"

Joan Rhoan bites her nails. Anna Stappel and Archie Tower exchange a look of support, maybe a plan to make a rush at the breach, or the execution of the traitor. Suddenly, Anna and Archie raise a defense for form and function, art for art's sake. Words fly like flint sparks, back and forth between the two artists and Billy.

The audience is on the edge of their warmed steel seats. Peter is amused. For a moment I wonder if, had there been a second critic on the panel, a woman, would she have neutralized Billy with something in the form of a natural reaction to art. I quickly push this somersaulting fantasy aside. Critics stick together, is what experience has told me, at least in public. In private or print, critics will act like vipers against each other, spitting poison. Artists, on the other side, like their sorority-girl huffiness displayed in public. Stuff for the tabloids, if America could unglue itself from the television screen. Abruptly, the argument heats up, and I see Valerie has lost control. My elbows flare from the chair and I want to make myself heard through the crowd, but my voice is overpowered.

Anna Stappel shouts, "Billy, your cynicism harms art! To you, art's less than a commodity. It's something to write about, not to admire."

Tower seconds her. "I'm sure your writing is just as shit-filled as what you've said here."

I look out into the audience, because now I can't help giving them something they should have realized at first blush. "Don't you know an insult when you hear one? Come on, people, wake UP. You've just been called stupid by some asshole that flunked out of art school. And to get back at the system that wouldn't have him, he's become a critic. A self-proclaimed inept, he gets paid to tell you what your feelings should be, how you need to like one art piece but not another. How you shouldn't listen to your own inner voice. Art is for everyone to interpret, not some clown who writes for a magazine that's hardly read outside the offices of collectors, auctioneers, or gallery owners."

Archie Tower stands and clears his throat. His goatee begins to move, like a rodent peaking up from the rim of its hole. "Let's get something straight about the artist-critic relationship," Tower bellows across the top of the audience. "The artist doesn't have to listen to or read or even speak to his critics in order to survive. His ability to make money — yes, Joan, it's a mercantile exchange, in the end, and I'm both sad and happy to say that — this market is independent of some criticism. And, my friend Minus, you know well enough that it's the arts community that ultimately decides. Which means critics as well as gallery owners. Collectors are often a sheep-like creature." He looks around for attention, and gets it in the calming crowd. "However! That devil we call 'critic' is chained to the artist, at least invisibly. Which is all the better...."

Laughter erupts. Valerie folds in her shoulders, looks around wildly but is lost in the crowd. Billy sits up, ram-rod straight (perhaps a second pole has been shoved up his ass that none of us has seen). He leans his elbows on the ends of the armrests, turns his head toward Archie Tower and sets a churlish smile.

Tower will not yield this time, and continues in his speech. "These chains come from his own training and needs. He's a tick, a leech, a lamprey, a louse, feeding on the work of others, having learnt how he must see an object of art — old or new hardly matters if his training has been in the subjective application of objective-based analysis." The crowd murmurs. Valerie begins to speak but Tower lifts a hand to keep her down. "Meanwhile," Tower says, "the artist strives always, always, always –" (he pounds on the table: a drumbeat, a war rhythm) "– always to be new, if not unique, an indescribable term forever harder to live up to within the mist of history clinging to each artist like a disease. But even that doesn't matter! Form is endlessly malleable and color equally infinite. We aren't applying lipstick to the bathroom mirror, Billy, even if you like that mélange. We're making something out of nothing. I'm sorry you failed in your attempt to be an artist, only it seems that now you're taking revenge on those who have succeeded."

Billy jump-dives on the gauntlet just slapped across his face. "My twelve-year-old son can do half the stuff I find hanging in SOHO galleries."

"Maybe he can," growls Archie, "but he didn't. And that's the point! Art isn't done with twenty-twenty hindsight. Don't you think the same of your critical reviews? Good Christ, man, have some self respect for your craft."

Valerie's voice squeaks in its appeal for the panelists to go easy on each other. And in her own way, she tries to play the rapt moderator/game show host. "That's profound, Mr Tower."

Archie Tower gives no quarter. "I'm sad to say, Valerie, that it's not profound. It's simply how it is."

Surrender shadows her eyes. She tries to rally, as any good soldier does when all she can do is soldier on. "Is beauty the objective criteria?" she hollers at the stage.

Tower says, "Beauty, taken as a quantifiable principle of art, among many others, requires the singular form, Valerie. Thus 'criterion' is correct." Tower has achieved what Valerie doesn't want to do and Billy can't hope to do: the crowd is hushed, waiting for an answer. Billy takes the bait.

"What is beauty?" he asks. "Whose beauty?" He laughs hard on the heels of these questions, an obvious fake laugh, one made to incite rage in his opponent. Except the audience thinks he's laughing at them. The people he has appealed to rain boos on him. Billy waves them off; this is all theater to him, something he can write about for the next issue. "Beauty is determined by the critic, by the public –" He raises a Caesarean hand to the audience, and tips his head. "– and by the investor. The artist, you ask? Just the ghost in the machine."

Valerie finds an opening to say, "I'm afraid we've run out of time" — as though she's only now remembered that muffins are in the oven and she must run home. In a whisper of fabric, she spins in her dress to turn her back on the dais. "Thank you, audience members, for participating, today. Allow me to speak for the panelists when I say this has been a good window into the lives of city artists and their... work. Please give New York's city artists a warm round of applause."

So this is it, I think: the rambunctious kids get their room back.

The crowd claps, and heartily. They've gotten their kibble. People stand quickly and shuffle toward the exit doors, rather than linger with the applause they now think is hardly deserved of the time, or the insults they've incurred. What they miss, then, is Billy reaching over to shake hands with Anna Stappel, who beams. When he holds his hand out to me, I stare. Are you kidding? He stands and walks around me to chinwag with Archie Tower, whose own sudden good fellowship appears authentic. So were his anger and his comments staged? Perhaps rehearsed? I feel like a secondary character without script, plot, or direction. The talk-circuit sham, now that I've drunk from its fount, is not for me. I wonder how Karen K was able to muster control at these shindigs. Perhaps she hadn't, ultimately. My gaze follows the moving audience. I've forgotten to look for her, and now the woman is gone, the crowd having consumed her.

"Hey, Orth!"

Across the dais Peter waves at me. He jerks his head toward the door. We follow the crowd like two stragglers behind an exodus. In the hall, Pete pulls me aside and takes a silver whiskey flask from his pocket. We each take a pull.

"What the hell was that?" I ask. "I need to change my shirt."

Peter shakes his head. "You were good, Minus. So you lost a few water pounds. Big deal."

"Billy Boy is a real pit bull."

"Fucking critics," he says. "Billy James is a hack. Aren't they all? You walked right into that one, buddy. Archie knows how to bury the hatchet. Why do you think I kept my trap shut? Okay, not quite, but you need to take it light and look at the silver lining. You're in tomorrow's newspapers, and that dickhead will have to write something about you. People should be coming around to you soon."

"Then why'd you come?"

"Marketing. To show my face." Peter blinks and rainbows his eyes. "People will notice that I'm still out there, and writers will print my name. Just like I said. I'll let my art speak for me. They'll remember. I shall remind them." What he says strikes as a direct contradiction to my own position out there.

"You sound like a politician," I say.

"All politics is personal."

In the rush of people still pin-balling to leave, colors and faces and smells blow past us. I look quickly for that familiar face. Nowhere.

"Say, Pete. Do you remember Karen K?"

He thinks. "No. Can't say that I do. What's her game?"

I tell him.

"Can I meet her?" he asks.

"No! At least, I don't think so."

He looks at me, his eyes dark with wonder. "Then what do I care?"

Belinda appears behind Peter, flanked by different men than she introduced earlier. She uses a voice I've never heard come from such a beautiful, sexy mouth. "Gentleman, may I introduce Minus Orth. And you know Peter N. I think we can agree Minus distinguished himself up there as an artist who cares about all art, not just his own."

They are art dealers and brothers. Wilhelm and Deiter Hoss shake my hand and compliment me on "fighting the good fight." Neither man wears a suit. It's jeans and T-shirt day, with a casual jacket for sporting looks, and soft-soled shoes that don't shine like Karen's shoes. They suggest we go to my gallery to see what I'm working on. Peter gives his regrets, says his good-byes, and leaves us.

Belinda works the conga line we form to get out of the Y and stand in line for a taxi. To the side, I say to Belinda, "I was a buffoon in there, right?" She smirks, "No. You were sincere."

Which means the same thing.

At our loft, The Brothers Hoss say nice things about my older sculptures. Their accents are happily foreign. When they wax philosophic over three of the globes, I feel heat running up from my neck. Such words are not terribly natural for me to hear (at least, not since Chicago). "This is good work." "Your voice is ahead of us — your older pieces are right for today." "I like its chances where my clients come from, artistically speaking, of course." I stand in the center of the room, so its acoustic effect is at its best echo. Of course, the commodity is on the block.

"When we saw your transparencies we decided to stay an extra day," Deiter says. "To see a real piece outside its graven image is the fulfillment of a week for us. I want to say that your globes are ideal for someone we know. The other work, while of high quality, is not suitable for the movement in our personal collection, but we'll carry our suggestion to others. Wilhelm?"

Wilhelm has been alternately watching his brother with a half frown, and me with a conservative smile. "Minus, please tell us something. What is this that Miss Belinda keeps telling to us about your new work? Give us an idea to take back on the flight tomorrow morning. We so want to talk about something other than the poor food Lufthansa serves these days."

I hadn't expected all of this. The praise was enough of a surprise, but asking for a speech on work I've only begun makes me stare wildly between my two inquisitors. "People," I blurt, like a moron. "Everyday people in classic roles... or, well, not... you see, they are aged. I think. All by degrees. These are my studies. I might sculpt in plaster. Or I might not." If only this were made up, I wouldn't feel so mentally crippled (it's far easier to riff on stuff that you prestidigitate, like a rabbit taken from a hat, because you know you never, never can do it for real). Belinda seems to think I should want this. The Hoss brothers smile, accept my befuddled utterances as the released spirits of inspiration (or something like it, which is fine by me).

"Is there a theme or motif that you have worked out?" asks Wilhelm, who won't let it go.

"Ages," I blurt again. "Humans — and... figurative people in motion. I think; I'm thinking about these... possibilities. Or, not in motion — seeing, thinking, playing."

Deiter can detect a kook when he sees one. He carries himself diplomatically, self-assured in his judgment of what the art tells him, not the artist. In other words, it's no matter to him that I can barely compose a sentence from my mind.

Wilhelm touches his brother on the elbow and remarks to him in German, of which no doubt he thinks neither Belinda nor I can translate beyond "guten Morgen." Their tones sound the seriousness of war, death, or surgery (as even "I love you" does in Deutsch), but they chuckle through the moment. When their English returns, they say good-bye and thank you, and other polite comments transferable between American and European culture. Tonight, later, I'll forget all that they've said, and then I'll start to think.

Belinda leads the Germans toward the door. "I'll be back in a moment," she tells me.

When I'm alone in the loft, I hear the soft beats of their steps in the stairwell like ghost images. It's not my fault, I tell myself. I'm glad Belinda is here to help me. Five minutes later, Belinda returns. "Nice job," she says. I give her a kiss. "What now?" I take off my jacket and pick up a hammer and chisel. How about a wine buzz?

"Maybe I was wrong on how to sell you," she says over her glass. I throw up my shoulders. I know the answer, but want to feel its impact when I hear her criticism. "The shy genius," she says. When she sees I've expected a whipping, she obliges, but in that inimitable tone reserved for privacy. "Okay, the babbling artist who's let out of his studio to be shown as an oddity, like the freak who hammers nails into his skull."

"No comment," I say.

Belinda isn't finished. "This sort of thing worked for Dalí. He shaved his armpits once, before a party, and painted them purple, and wore his bathing suit inside out to show the skid marks. When he saw his future wife out the window, he cleaned himself up as best Dalí could, and came out to greet her, just as weird but without the purple armpits."

"I hope you didn't want me to go that far," I venture.

"I offer it as a demonstration, not example."

"I don't think Dalí needed to try much to be nutty."

"On the other hand, his eccentricities helped sell his art before everyone saw them as normal — for him, that is."

"I didn't expect tonight to be a PR event," I say, in defense of my performance. "Hadn't I done enough already at the Y?"

"It's all PR, honey. Don't start acting like you've never done this before."

"No, no. Just not on the level of... whatever you're cooking up."

"It's a stew, Minus. All honest ingredients. Look, just as soon as you turn those sketches into sculptures, you're the new commodity. I've promised myself that much. So don't stare at me like I'm a pygmy headhunter. If I have to lock you in a room like Jagger and Richards were to discover their righteous truth as original songwriters, not just a Blues cover band, then I shall."

"You've got a deal." I don't admit that her suggestion is a good idea. A great plan. "By the way," I say, because now I want to be done. "You didn't see a bag lady in the crowd, did you? Out of costume, of course."

"Of course," she says. Her lined mouth tells me all that she wants to say, but doesn't out of friendship and whatever else she doesn't see up my sleeve. "Of course I don't know what you're talking about."

"I guess I was taking an imaginative leap. It doesn't matter."

CHAPTER 14

On a cold December night, with stars winking their ancient brilliance through Manhattan's orangey froth, I first met Belinda. I'd lived in New York for three weeks. We had gone to an art thing, separately, held at a gallery crowded with partygoers, politicians, musicians, literati, and lots of your sundry artists-on-the-make. Fairytale moments come lots of times in life, but seldom do we recognize them. At one subtle moment amid this hoopla, we both turned and saw each other standing in the proverbial spotlight.

The spots (for they are true to the story) were this room's only source of light, a side chamber more in the line of a closet than a proper gallery room. Outside their superb, white beams we hovered in the crepuscular shadows surrounding two paintings hung low in the corner, so close together that their frames made overlapping shadows on the wall. Little did we know that we were both overenthusiastic in our art gazing this night, and when we simultaneously bent our heads for a closer look at the paintings, we bumped butts, turned, and saw a nimbus. Hers was yellow and blue, mine white and red.

This is the official version, the story we've sewn together from patched and competing memories. I use sewn because we were both, admittedly, a bit drunk by the time we made "the turn," having already twice winnowed separate paths through the heavy, happy, intoxicated crowd that overflowed the gallery onto Park Avenue. My poison was champagne; Belinda's, red wine. Her glass listed a provocative thirty degrees to my corrupted forty-five.

Peter North (before he dropped the o-r-t-h) had only lately returned to NYC from an eight-month tour, having taken paintings, serigraphs, and prints around the country much like a rock band promotes its albums through live shows. On this night he was hosting the finale at his agent's Gramercy gallery. Belinda wore a livery outfit (black tie and tails, buff riding breeches, knee-length boots, black stovepipe hat) and carried a long whip. I questioned her with what I hoped was not a too-sly grin. Does someone wear this costume for pleasure, for presentation, provocation, or sport? "Work," she said, her voice an oblique aria beside the costume. She used the woven leather whip handle, thick as a horse cock, to push the brim of her hat up, making a conversational gap through which she looked me up and down. I was the casual Bohemian, new to New York City: suede jacket, navy jeans, western boots, and a loosened red tie over a white shirt. I could have been the Marlboro Man come in from the range, sans cigarette and chiseled chin. Or I could have been Oscar Wilde in America, sampling west Texas barbeque.

Belinda told me she rarely met interesting people at galleries, and had only come tonight to see a friend. Meanwhile, she had turned to see whose small nose and wild hair was casting an inky silhouette across Peter North's Prussian blue canvas (after our bottoms had touched). My hair was a sort of frappe punk-wave that year; this was before Cobain's stringy, banana-yellow hangdog fashion became all the rage, calling society's youth to finally break from the '80's asymmetrical styles (thank the good Christ). I tickled her funny bone by pouring the half glass of champagne onto my hands and using it as a style mousse, ruffling the sugary bubbles into my hair and pulling out the hardened mop to end with, I hoped, a spiky hedgehog look that had lately made it into men's magazines. She reacted by brandishing her whip, raised it near the white lights, and mildly lashed my haunches, once on each side.

If I were ever able to recognize a sign of good luck, this was my time to act. And so I did, offering her my arm for an escorted walk through the gallery. We wandered the rooms we'd already seen, trading consequential barbs at the reigning fashion in dress, style, and art. I asked the whereabouts of her friend. "She hasn't showed," Belinda replied, and made the point (I think) to look at me so I wouldn't miss how she flashed her eyebrows.

She didn't reveal that she'd been an artists' model for her first years in the City, and I didn't ask further than the carriage-rider's outfit. She didn't say anything after my answer of "sculpture" to her "What's your story?" Since I'd never made a habit of philosophical rhetoric about art or, worse, my art, we both accepted that we'd found a friendly face, figure, and ear. Later, after a second circuit through the crowd (which seemed to have disappeared, though this has no literal sense because elbows and chatter struck us like autumn weather), I offered to walk her home. She accepted.

On the sidewalk outside her apartment building, beneath a black-limbed tree weaving in Polynesian dance on a midnight breeze, I played a most dangerous gambit: "I won't kiss you tonight. I'm afraid of –" [here she cocked her head, a subtle sign of cautionary interest] "... I'm afraid you might invite me upstairs, and that would be just one happy night. I'll be pleased to shake your hand instead, and make a promise to call you. Is tomorrow too soon?"

This, Belinda told me a week later (on date #3), had made all the difference.

Courtship is a funny thing. For us, it was literal comedy. We walked New York's streets throughout that first winter, laughed at the other's pie-balled cracks about the frivolity of the life-lived-so-seriously by too many people (this included ourselves, as such understanding makes itself known, eventually, although we later insisted our versions approached life from unique angles). We frequented oven-warm bistros whose bread and olive oil and wine were all we ordered; we shared a hash pipe in Central Park under a gathering snowstorm; we crab walked past "fresh art" in SOHO galleries; we kissed at stoplights in the driver's seat of her hackney cab; and we made a pact outside Madison Square Garden, on the night of the The Who concert, that we'd hold off sex until the time — that moment — when our heads felt right. Very Middle-America Wholesome, was how we described ourselves (not the Urbane Sophisticates we saw in certain friends, who exploited their carefree and care-less attitudes). A pair of couples, also friends, mercilessly teased us one night ("Masturbation lingers in the air!" "You two remind me of a Boy Scout rubbing two wet sticks together to make fire." "Just do each other, already — make us happy, anyway!") in the middle of an early February thaw, as we walked along the empty bridal path within sight of Larissa Ames's high-rise apartment.

Jokes like these we easily brushed aside. Ours was a relationship formed on the ruins of the past (where no plaques exist to reconvene memories), those nightmarish blowouts with "fuck-friends" (the agreed-upon term reserved for the exes) on whom we pressed our notions of love. Contrary to the NYC lifestyle and its smorgasbord opportunity, we wanted feelings before action, emotions attached to energy. Love (and sex) could arrive later, on a Valentine carpet, or in a Bunny-delivered Easter egg, even under a Memorial Day stars & stripes hat. Or it could wait till the calendar wound back toward crisp sounds of Jingle Bells while riding in a one-horse open sleigh. Details, details.... Love (and beauty) only blooms by close attention. Likewise, that which surrounds our senses for those who are full of care: I once had a friend whose mother constantly mistook the blue jays & juniper wallpaper (dining room) with that of the pink roses & Spanish ivy (her bedroom).

Back then I walked a dozen different dogs during the day (my best-paying gigs were months away) and sculpted at night in the basement of my Lower East Side apartment building. Belinda worked on marketing her horse carriage business from early daylight to noon, building a corporate client list and word-of-mouth tourist recommendations, before she clip-clopped through the park from one to nine, seldom returning to her Hell's Kitchen apartment before midnight because she tended to Gretchen at the stables. We did this for seventeen months while dating. We still do it, in a fashion, but now we're together.

Strivers. Yes, we had to laugh at the rat-racing world, scurrying past our stentorian idealism. Ours was an "other" life; eclectic dress & personality had colored me (NY-influenced); Belinda has colored me (beknownst to her); and in the short time we've been together I've shed that other self, the one cloying for recognition, and now I'm learning (a lot) from Belinda. Unbeknownst to her.

I love you, Belinda. I want to marry you. Children? Sure-but-can-we-waitawhile? Our careers must be given the time, work, and.... I love you because I want to do more for you than I feel you want from me. Does that make sense?

It does to me. Belinda gets it; she's told me so. It's why she winked at my feeble answer to her proposal-cum-ultimatum. That's why I get to sit in this park and make clay figures, and wonder what GumbyDude and ShadowTree do for my imagination instead of putting ass to chair at my honeycomb to work through the problem. Peter N's ghost voice gooses me so regularly — for spite and for the laughs — that I sometimes wonder if this feeling doesn't strike from hemorrhoids. (You don't have a problem, Minus; you're thinking. I sing this to myself on the melody to a long-forgotten one-hit wonder. Okay, that's nice; use art-student excuses to....)

I think of myself as somewhat refined; Belinda says she's "as refined as milled Kansas wheat." I've not asked for details. Compared to our contemporaries, we've been bred on books rather than television, art-on-walls more than flickering images on the silver-screen. Do these make a difference each day? To a lifetime? We think so. We hope they shall.

In another thought, these are platitudes, Besides, New Yorkers think we're hayseeds from the heartland. "N–Y–C is the sophisticated town." I've said this with a straight face, but the sentiment should be rethought. See here: every third word from the mouths of your average NYer is "fugett'it" "whatev'a" "gimme'a break" "wahhhchit" or "fuck that." I give multiple choices here because who's counting, right? Effectively — and effectionately — we Americans are all alike, although hubristically we're ethno-regional-centric (skin pigmentation not being an issue).

Behind my mental gymnastics, I spot Karen K stop herself flush against the morning crowd. She gets a few lowered shoulders across her arms from passing office workers, because she's now an interruption instead of just the smelly ghost in soiled pink stretch pants and blue runner's jacket zipped to the throat, so tightly that neck skin extrudes around the collar. She's carrying that particular stink eye that was noticeable the last time we squared off.

I didn't see Karen yesterday, but she might have seen me, as I was focused on sculpting a horse's head. This morning I'm onto my second head. Equine imagery fired up the other night as a new way to see the human physiognomy. This came following the 95th Street Y episode, of which I've since labeled The Debacle. Hide doesn't cover our skin to warm us in the winter air, but the other features are an identical list. It's the tomato sauce added to pasta after a year of using only olive oil and fresh basil.

"You're pissing me off, Minus the artist."

People veer left and right. It's an automatic reaction to danger in a city lousy with idiosyncratic defense mechanisms. Karen's voice is no more or less caustic than what I recognize among her repertoire. She reminds me of a cartoon character, or all cartoon characters in a chorus line. Nevertheless, I'm tired of this game.

"Come sit down!" My voice surprises me, a coronet sound of alarm. Belinda preaches that I should be subjective in my view of our "fucking fucked-over fucked-up fucky world"; but I'm often not sure her own objective-subjective quotient isn't a bit short of half-baked. I wave for Karen to come near. She doesn't move. I say, "Okay. Just do whatever you want. Come eat my bagel. Or smash my horsy head. Did you bring oranges with you today? Do you have your chicken-skinning knife in a hidden pocket?" She is multilayered again; God knows what lies within.

At the mention of the knife, some pedestrians pick up their pace, and a second pair turn heel to double-time it back to Central Park West. Karen screws up her face. "You fuck-nut. They're going for the cops."

"Shouldn't they? I'm being threatened by an authentic New York bag lady, a skell. Of course, if you don't have a knife, the cops will melt into the background. On the other hand, it's hard to tell with city cops. One look at you might incite them to drag you off behind the bushes and beat you half to death. Shouldn't you know this already? Naturally, it depends on what they've eaten for breakfast, whatever gets them in a jack-booted, stomp-your-face mood." I look overhead. "Today's supposed to be a great day. It hasn't rained in a week. I'm in the park until two if you want to stop back. Art in the Park, I'm calling it. Mostly it's mothers tethered to their high-strung kids that stop by. But hey, the best time to get them arting is when they're young, right? Hell, Jesuits hammer their Christian nails into kids' heads before they're old enough to reason –"

"Can you shut up?" Karen barks. Her voice has swung back to the normal sound of human irritation. Gone is the water-filled kazoo that bums acquire from a whiskey-and-dumpster-diving diet.

I stop my patter, look away, and put my fingers on the horse. Its neck has dried. I feel the grit in the clay, risen up like five o'clock shadow, a texture that is neither.... She's curious, and she wants this (not as much as me, but then... who does?). She's going to come sit after all; her arms have begun to twitch (no bags today; easy to get at her "knife"), knees hitching like a dance novice practicing in place before the music starts.

Then she passes through the crowd and sits on the adjoining bench. She uses the double armrest as sole barrier between us. A casual attitude settles. If she speaks, I'll hear her. Time begins its measure, in wind currents, animal sounds, the traffic far off to the right, racing and stopping along CPW (horns and tires in desperate battle); jet engines strain as they climb through the atmosphere. There's no need for transition.

"Say something," she says.

Okay. Here we go. I tell her, "I didn't see a profound difference between the third and fourth hand."

"Naturally you didn't. You're the artist. It takes a trained mind to push aside school education to really see quality. Stupid fuck."

I look askance. "I'm not a stupid fuck. That's rude. I have talent."

She lifts an eyebrow.

"Have you kept the hand?" I ask.

The eyebrow drops. Acknowledgment? Not unless it's short of agreement.

"You're a rube," she says, accusingly.

Before I know it, I've agreed with her. "We can't help but live our lives in cycles," I say. "And do you know, a few modern philosophers would argue (I mean the smart ones) that every life is doomed to rotate on its own particular axis. They must be thinking of the ancients, although I fear the right-true answer. Not sure why. Maybe to support my own theories."

She uses manicured fingertips to wipe her face. When she takes her fingers away, she checks them, like a monkey checks itself for lice. "Which cycle are you in now?" she asks.

I think easier this time. "The middle one," I say.

She reaches out and slaps the clay horse from its pedestal.

"Heyheyhey! Hey, now." I throw up my hands. The fall has flattened one side of the horse's face. Stones are embedded in the clay. I look closely at the damage. It's either ruined or it parades its battle scars. I could make a set of chess pieces with similar damage. I almost want to thank Karen for the idea.

"I can make another. I can make ten, but what does –"

"You think so linearly," she says. "Reach left when you find yourself in this way. See what happens."

Belinda kissed me first. We took a ride in her hackney cab on New Year's Day. A fierce wind caused her to hold her hat in place with one hand and the reins in the other. I held her whip. We stopped at the Columbus Circle traffic light on our way back across 59th Street to parade in front of the tourists passing through Grand Army Plaza. She leaned over and kissed me. She took my lips into hers because I hadn't puckered and her lips were ready and open, the tip of her tongue peeking out. Everybody remembers the first kiss with that one person you want to make your lover and, if luck is to play a part, your mate. Belinda's warm mouth moistened my lips, bringing a shudder from my core that overrode the cold-weather shivers along my ribs.

We had kissed the night before, at a New Year's party given by friends in Alphabet City, where in a small apartment with lots of bodies gliding about in slow dance as Dick Clark counted down the hour to midnight, a peck of good tidings let us know what we both were thinking. That was not the moment for passion, when noisemakers screamed their tortured-bird squawks. Our Hackney-Cab Kiss had meaning stamped on it, transferred to me through her heated mouth, and which I sent back with a gift attached: my wonder. She kissed me with her clear eyes open, and they coveted what my face gave up. When she pulled away, I was in love. When you know, you know.

The next week I began my Globes cycle. Work took me away from Belinda for days at a time. Reels of hours were lost to, or for, the sake of art and commerce. I made up those hours by appearing on some street corner, where I would hail her atop the hackney cab. Or she would turn up suddenly, as suddenly as I had, on a Beehive couch, talking in whispers with Vendulka. When I finally came out from behind the tent folds, Belinda would answer the question turning over in my mouth with a throaty, "I've been waiting for you."

There were no arguments between us; we happily agreed on the many compromises new couples make, in our case made silently because we got each other's drift with only a look, a smile, a nod, a wink, a kiss blown from one hand across a room or between buses across a busy street. The alternative to compromise was unthinkable, and anyway our differences were negligible. We aren't perfect, only because we don't try so hard, and we appreciate each other's flaws and hang-ups.

Where was drama when you needed some? I had the co-op; Belinda had her customers.

Then an old girlfriend from Chicago began sending me letters later that spring, or sometimes a postcard with a Chicago landscape. I think she must have thought this would make me homesick, and to want... exactly what, I left to her imagination. I told Belinda about her, and she wondered how the Chicago Ex knew my New York address. A friend back in Chi-town must have given it to her, was the only explanation I could fathom. What will you do? she asked. Tell her to stop, I said, and that there's a woman in my life, and that I wasn't coming back, and it had been over between us before I'd left, and, well, I would be honest and say that she was a disaster. Belinda concentrated on my answer. She suggested I leave out the last part: Why destroy a good memory for the Ex? It would show her, finally — maybe — that whatever she thought you two had, is now and truly over. Be magnanimous, Belinda said, men have that ability when it comes to relationships.

Karen's breathing works itself roughly, a riffler against kiln-cured poplar. I look to see if she's asleep, but her eyes flash right and left like the flickers of a candle flame, toward people and nature's sounds, my hands and a white jet vapor up through the trees, her nails and feet and something that itches her near the crotch. Then she stares at my hands with a special intensity.

"Do you have any education," she asks, "or does your gumption come from streetwise observation and a precocious sense of beauty?"

"I don't know how to answer that with you. Are you being sincere or ironic, or only sarcastic? I suppose I could lie, only both lies that come to mind are likely to piss you off."

"Try the truth then, da Vinci."

She has a point.

I say, "My life wasn't so difficult for me to figure out, even as a kid. I'm your typical suburban-raised American. Chicago's west suburbs — not the Gold Coast or far west corn-crib mansions. There was a post-JKF school I went to, where the teachers pushed math and I guess basic science because I think they wanted to make little astronauts out of us all. I feared worse though: engineers or business managers. Not the girls, of course, who even then were expected to start looking for a husband or secretarial work. Obviously, music and art were side dishes to the scholastic equivalent of meat'n'potatoes stew. I remember my junior high art teacher got fired for sleeping with a student. Fucking, I mean; I'm sure no ZZZZs got spent."

"Trim the biblical genealogy, will you?" She smiles a mirthless, unwelcoming smile. "Jump forward. College. The art degree."

"Ah, yes. Always the question: 'Who did you study under?' As if the teacher begets the artist through some vocational equivalent of alchemy. Or as the sculptor reveals the horse's head lurking inside the block of marble he has stared at for a month, or a minute. Question: is the artist the product of his teacher, or is he a true original in need of but the thinnest planing by the teacher's stormy tutelage? So. And so. I decided, 'What for?' That kind of school isn't for me. Instead I bought a yearly pass to the Art Institute. It proved the better investment. That, and a thousand bucks for paint and brushes, canvas and panels. Clay, plaster, a few knives, spoons, and a set of chisels. Two hammers. Not your typical laundry list of the do-it-yourselfer."

Karen chews on the inside of her cheek. I want to ask if she was at the panel discussion, if in fact she was the woman in the crowd I'd seen, and then didn't see. The question would be ridiculous without my ability to prove it. She's a wily person, I realize, something I hope isn't too late for her to use as she once had. But I choose to keep my supposition to myself, and only to play along, for now. Maybe I'm... maybe this is... maybe, maybe, maybe....

"I know how to read," I say. "And I can sign checks and balance the books. Some art teacher's insolent demonstrations at contrarian views never appealed to me."

"You make a living?"

"At sculpting? Now you're trying to be funny." I say ha-ha and slap my knee. Silence. She expects an answer. This really is a day to shrug. "Sort of. Almost."

"So let me clarify by way of counterpoint," she says, having listened to enough of my spiel. "Typical suburban kids attend college. They learn how to smoke cigarettes and finger pussies owned by small-town girls stretching their legs while away from Pentecostal or Catholic parents. Who knows which are worse, prolly the ones who escaped to analysis or its package deal with atheism. You're white; you speak well. Well enough. You wear clothes that don't hang below your ass. I know you're too old for that Vanilla Ice scene, but it fits the nomenclature of our time. Besides all that, I don't read 'cock sucker' written with a lisp."

"Like I said." I let the phrase make its own impression.

"You're holding back," she says. "There's something else. I'm no more the idiot than you, and probably a lot less."

She's gauging how far she'll step from the shadow of her protective sanctuary. It strikes me how much her filth helps this mechanism. The world leaves her alone. To do what, though? It shouldn't matter to me. A line stretches across her forehead, low, just above her eyebrows. Another is built on top of the first. They make me feel like I'm standing on the edge of the abyss.

I begin with ancient history. "I blew a scholarship."

"To?"

"Chicago born, remember? That same School of the Art Institute, where I let the subscription be my master and tutor. Well, I guess it used to mean something to me... or maybe it's just starting to mean something. I've lost perspective on the artist-as-educated-self-critic movement. Believe me, I didn't want training in another's perceptions."

Karen balks. "Nearly every great artist served tutelage. It's called learning from someone who knows better. Not best, mind you, but better than what you had coming in. You were too good for that, is what I'm hearing."

"Have you seen art school shows? Making derivative art was not how I wanted to spend my time. By the way, from what well did you draw water, Karen?"

"Under my belt lie a thousand books read, pulled apart, and recreated as images of possibility in my mind. I also own a degree from Wellesley. But if you're looking to compare CVs, dear, I suggest you drop in at the library. Non-fiction: P-N eighty-five point something-something-something. I'm in the letter 'K' section. So up yours, tint mixer."

"Try 'stone cutter.' I'm a sculptor, remember?"

"And my ass to your mouth."

She gives me another unwelcoming smile.

"What would your mother say to your using such language, Ms Kosek?"

Her hand tosses away my question and all it suggests. "I guess the least that school could have done was buy you the yearly pass as consolation prize. Do they know you even exist? One's alma mater can be a helpful provider, buying works, giving shows, networking."

"I've never complained of its absence," I tell her. The added insult is harder to ignore. "I like to work. Work on my own. I don't argue the price of a ticket. Great art, even good art, deserves conservancy."

We sit motionless through a quiet interlude.

"So? Why me? I'm the bag lady living in a penthouse apartment, losing my marbles." Karen says all this in a single breath.

Her admission is treasure. I say quickly, "Maybe that's enough for me." Then I slow my thoughts, my words, and find a pace worthy of the audience. "Otherwise, I don't know. I don't know yet. Here's where a bit of the weird gets a nod. I think serendipity has played its part. Synchronicity, too." I sigh. "Alas, maybe the Fates have spoken."

"Been shopping around, have you?"

"Maybe I wasn't ready before, one might say."

She points her chin at me. "You gave away a scholarship."

"Someone else got that money. Good for her. Him. Twelve years ago, by-the-by."

"Not like fine wine — a shit storm of arty change wouldn't have fazed the statues pontificating at that college of yours."

"Wasn't my college, remember?"

"You shelled out food money for a year's pass, fuck-nut."

"Jesus!"

"He can't help you, either, dildo face."

"You're a piece of work, lady."

"Not even in moments of hysterical paroxysm. Instead you want an apprenticeship in... I don't know. Enlighten me! Something else."

"Like I said: maybe." I want to ask if she's offering, but a 'fuck-nut' lurks behind that question.

"Very Mark Twain of you, but..."

I wait for her to finish. It never comes in words. She stares a while at my unwavering eyes, and I look at the small wrinkles around hers. They are the same size and texture of the eggshell cracks on a Vermeer — strike that: Vermeer painted pretty young things; so like crazing on Rembrandt's "Self Portrait as Woman of Fallen Virtue." I realize Karen has no design for me. She gets up and walks down the path toward the park's interior, not home.

Something that she wrote has been on my mind for days. I make my second most dangerous gambit. "Are you content with all creation, Karen?"

One of Belinda's ex-boyfriends followed her to the City. He turned up on her doorstep, the same steps on which I had pledged no sex until "we were right." We'd been right for months by then, and at the boyfriend's appearance, were set to move in together. Belinda didn't ask him into her apartment. She did, however, sit with him on the steps and explain that he was welcome to a complimentary carriage ride in her newly restored 18th century wooden-wheeled jobbie. "Some British Tory left it behind when he escaped the colonies," she told her ex. After the carriage ride, he was to leave her alone. She was not right for him, she explained. She would spoil if she ever set foot in Nebraska again. He needed a wholesome woman from Four Corners.

I had to tease her. "So you didn't have a torrid affair before sending him back to Nebraska?"

"I thought about it, but I'd just showered." She's a better tease than I can ever hope to be. "Besides, it turns out he really wanted the carriage ride."

"That was nice of you."

"Hell yes, it was." Then she became reflective. "Back in Nebraska – when we dated – I could be a bitch. This is fact. He called me his Little Lemur. It was meant to be a joke because he raised lemurs as a kid, took them to 4-H shows and everything, and he always talked about how much they fought, had this pecking order, the females slapping down the male so bad he sometimes cowered in the corner, didn't eat, even starved to death because the females denied him food. But they made the male have sex with them."

"Really?"

"Sure. I wouldn't lie."

Karen stops, turns to confront me. Lugubrious lines shadow her face.

"What did you say to me?"

I don't answer. She waits with Job's patience. I fold my arms. She looks like she'll stand there awhile, but suddenly her head jerks, in a gesture for me to follow her. When she quickly walks down the path, leaving me to make haste or lose everything, I gather my canvas bag and leave the table behind.

Out on the open path, under the mustard sun and paper-doll clouds, I catch up with her. We walk together. People stare. I stay quiet, aware that to break her concentration, some unwritten-unspeakable protocol, will break the spell she is under (or that we're both under — or maybe it's just me), thus rendering the moment to more fairytale musings. I concede that I'm right about something, but willing to wait for its own sign to touch me, however the Moira has spun her thread. Karen K takes us out of the park onto 5th Avenue and up to 89th Street. She leads us east for a block. In under two minutes we're there.

"Go in," she tells me.

I look at the building. Its Space Age design is yet another of Frank Lloyd Wright's beat-off sessions, to my mind. The Guggenheim in NYC has only lately become the much-loved pantheon to modern art. No surprise then that it has franchised, and of all places to Bilbao, Spain (!)

"I don't want to go in," I tell her flatly.

She nods. "Good."

We stand here awhile and try not to look at each other. Karen has the presence of waiting on something, a bus or a fly ball. I begin my own reconnoiter, at the people walking past the museum, and those on the curb, always weary of the walk/don't-walk light on busy Madison Avenue. I spy people through the windows of the museum lobby, and college kids shouldering backpacks in the sun along the curved wall. Over at the nearby taxi stand a man sits idle in a wheelchair. He's dressed in a tweed jacket, gold over brown, and matching brown pants. The pants seem baggy on his legs, likely covering atrophied muscles from years of disuse. A soft yellow tie on a white field completes his look of dapper indifference or happy solitude. I figure he's eighty years old, but he could be sixty. Where's his nurse? Or wife? (The wife is dead, so he lives alone; no use for a nurse because he's agile and, nowadays, mini-van taxis have automatic lifts.) He's into a smile now, the whites of his eyes lit saffron by a sun well past it zenith. Off to the opera, I suppose. Maybe he's performing in one, an entire opera staged by a wheelchair troupe. Can you see La Bohéme staged this way, and what's-her-name wheeling herself along Paris's snow-covered streets? Her T.B. would yet kill her, sure, but that dramatic death scene would make a vastly different impact. This dapper gent at the taxi stand, he's got a jocular twinkle set above two dimples in his sun-browned cheeks; his hands tap a tune on the wheelchair's armrests, then move to his knees. His is the nervous gesticulation of a drummer who can't turn off the music in his head once the song has ended on stage. He's spiffed up his silver hair, has it combed back in a sort of wave, a modern pompadour, long hair he's tucked behind the ears, only it unfurls into grassy fringe below his collar. Back in the Forties he'd be described as dashing. While today he's old and crippled, his body and life-soul claim an unwillingness to let those problems spoil whatever lies ahead. By contrast, some kid just now has sat on the bench next to him. This one is definitely waiting on the bus; he has no car, and by scruffy looks, little future; he's twenty-five if he's a day, but he looks older than the dapper gent because his shoulders sag and a two-day beard makes his face a dirty rag rather than simply an unshaven actor "in character." His hair is a mess, zigzag fly-aways and knots the bane of decent care. Lots more guys and dolls pushing seventy show better self-regard, despite class or status. Such as... there, that couple, coming out the doors. My guess is late sixties, both of them, white hair for him, a bit of a frosty mix for her (Vanity whispering at her ear). Their hands clasp as they walk, talking about what they've just seen in the Guggenheim, liking the day, liking the exit and the fresh air and the light, the end of the tour, and now they're off to dinner or to have a drink first (something with a bite to it) and then dinner, maybe even a Broadway show later still, a fine way to fill out the evening. All these possibilities, and they match, too: earthy greens and yellows and browns, buffed leather shoes, hers patent and glowing with a golden edge against the sunlight. I can see them in younger times, still hand-holding (different partners? Okay, but so what, life spreads lots of sorrow along with its sunshine, just to remind you that life someday ends, so enjoy it in every year; the young don't get this — look at the bus stop clown, now he's picking his nose; if he cleaned up, he could look good, there's something to work with in him, the nose and chin are straight and cut well, no jug-ears; and he's slim, with a decent build under his wrinkled shirt) and this couple still hanging onto their museum smiles, all marquee happiness and love, yeah that right kind of love, ready for a night on the town and not even knowing that in forty years they'll be doing the very same thing. This idea struck Rembrandt (this repetition of Van Rijn has hold of me, and I need to know why), so he began his cycle of occasional self-portraits. He must have intended early in his career to capture himself throughout life, taking all the eras into account: pulling goofy faces, wearing the dandy's clothes of a successful painter-about-town; he changes how he wears his beard, and opts for days where a clean-shave means a new me; but he's always true to the nature of his skin, and over the years he adds the wrinkles to the new etching, and then the paunchy cheeks, the shadows cut into the lines across his face's terrain, from that ripe peach of youth to the pocked citrus rind of middle age. Yet, true to his self, the light in his eyes is always there — the mischief, the artist's mystique, always watching, examining, taking notes, measuring himself for the canvas, or otherwise the myth behind all of that. I must remember as a proof, though, that Rembrandt's reputation wasn't based on myth. His work speaks for itself. Myths and heroes in art? Sure. Look at Hemingway's self-defined myth-making as "Papa" and sportsman, the Great White Hunter; all that he couldn't live up to later; Grace Under Pressure, a myth, the myth he created for himself as Machismo This and Nobelist That... and then he snuck into a bedroom and killed himself. You wouldn't find Odysseus committing suicide; he was far too wily a Greek for the fickle gods and goddesses he had to outwit for survival — Poseidon and Zeus — along with their mythical minions, including the Cyclops and Calypso, who did silly bidding that messed with mortal lives. What's become of them? Well, they're dead, of course, yes... although not really dead as we mortals know death, not exactly, but where do –

Karen has waved a hand in front of my face. I realize she's been looking at me for a long time. I start to talk because now I want to hear my thoughts aloud.

"GumbyDude has that frame of the slain one, along the theme of 'The Dying Gaul'. You know that sculpture. The tree, my tree I just threw together, its shape is yogic; who was the first? I dunno — a Vedic deity. Yeah... she looks celestial. Vendy has shown me photos of Prague. Some castle garden sculptures is what I remember. Someone had slain another.... No, no. I won't retrod those visions, youthful gods in battle told as motifs to fan a king's vanity. That can't be where my mind goes!"

I slap my hands in a single clap and walk around in a circle. Karen stays put. I stop and spread my arms. The need to follow these ideas is a palpable feeling of covetousness. I start in again.

"But thematically... the history, our use of deities (no), gods (NO!). No. Wait. Older than that. Or just — old. Wait now......... How about older gods? They get old, they change — their ideas change. But that's not right. It's more Man's idea of how gods have changed: the words, His laws. Hold on, wait-wait. The face of God is unseen, and Jesus just forms to every race that believes... and then there's Mohammed and Abraham. Prophets, not gods. Capital-G God. Fuck, these are religious icons. I can't.... Anyway, that God doesn't have a face. That's anthropomorphizing. The Jews didn't even say his name. The Muslims, they... shit, these days they'll kill you if Allah's image isn't just so. Or is that Mohammed? Whatever. Fuck them. Free publicity is no excuse for bad art."

I wonder where my mind wants to go. It needs to eat from this boiling soup of images. Karen folds her arms. Her face beams thought, aim, resolve. Questions answered, but... Forget Karen K! Or at least use her as your audience, since she's picked a good time to go mute. Good. Fine. Maybe for the better.

"Which gods get old, Karen? Whose gods? Ancient gods or the ancients behind their need and invention — Hold on! Rembrandt painted himself as John the Baptist. He was older when he did that. He had to be. And so was John the Baptist, I presume, the aging John before Salome demanded his head. Perhaps Rembrandt knew the age of the disciple and... no, no, I can't seriously think of these religious ancients as viable work. Art has passed them over for good.

"Rembrandt sketched his life, all the changes he experienced from a simple look in the mirror each morning. A Dutch Master is not an ancient, though, so where does that take me? He's been on my mind for weeks and it can't be because I own one of his prints!"

Karen unfolds her arms. She's listening; wants to listen. I've begun to parade back and forth, not quite pacing, but delivering my rant to an audience of one (because all others on this evening sidewalk have ignored me). Karen is a poster on a wall, a window through which I see someone so plainly they become the white noise of our vision.

I say, "That takes me to the ancients again. I must reach backwards. This is whom I've been talking to all along! Age. Eras. No, epochs! Epics? Both. The ancients. Epic heroes of the epochal ages: ancient heroes. Knights. Wait, they're not ancient enough. Not like Homer-ancient. Well, he wrote about the mythological gods. But were they gods? No. They were fictions: Odysseus, Paris, Agamemnon — and the gods they prayed to, the mythological gods. Only, those gods were as much real to them as ours are to us. The ancient Greeks held belief in their gods as well as their... Poseidon, Zeus, the-the... who were the Titans?... wasn't there just a movie out with fighting Greek gods? — Clash of the Titans or something like that, right? I could be a few years off. I don't go to see movies anymore. Yet, there were those, like Calypso – no, she – she's the Siren that held Odysseus captive so she could fuck his brains out for all eternity, or else until he died, anyway, because his lot was as a mortal. That was on some island; Crete or Naxos, maybe Lesbos? Now that doesn't sound right. Tough luck for Odysseus, though. He only wanted to get home, not sit around some cave waiting to be called down to Calypso's beach hut for torrid sex. Did she have the looks of some hottie goddess? Something to keep Odysseus from wanting to get home? Or had her face crinkled into an old bag by then? I mean, wasn't he captive for seven years? How old was she when she took him captive? There's no saying, that's why it's Myth. Or just a blind man's story. Hmmm, sure, but yet – Odysseus must have been forty, his wife is back at home, their grown son leaves to hunt down the old man lost at sea. That's how the story begins. Yeah, forty-ish if he's got a grown son who's able to scare up a crew to sail off in search of dad. And Calypso – what? – she's gotta be nineteen, the perfect age-lust female in heat for a man like Odysseus. But that's too young, and too green for all that cunning Siren stuff of lore. Athenians didn't go for inexperienced myth figures; not her variety, anyway. They wanted decisive myth makers. The Nymphs would have been different; just the name gives you an image of youth and beauty and distraction — the death of many a young sailor or half-god, right? Calypso: she had to be in her forties, then, too, like Odysseus; and if that age, then, why not into her sixties? Why not two-hundred sixty?

"Odysseus hadn't been her first captive. She lured such men to their fates before. A nymph, not one of the Sirens. So she could be thirty and perpetually beautiful, or a hag of sixty-three trying to restore her youth by bagging sailors who've crashed on her shores when they followed her voice to the reefs, one after the other, bam-bam-bammm. For years, even decades. Perpetual beauty? That's a myth if I ever heard one. But how about perpetual beauty through sex? From the body of a worthy sailor-soldier? It's worth a try.

"If I can't picture her as a nymph of late teenage years, that means her image can change with time, along with the human curse that says time ravages the body, its youthful suppleness slackens, the hair thins, thins and grays, turns brittle; muscles hang from the bone in skin bags slack with disuse and feebleness. Or else the gods could change with their own era — not as age-less time on this mortal Earth. Yeah.

"And... What does a nymph look like when she reaches sixty? Not like she does at sixteen, I bet. That's a mortal's lot, to know age and feel it, at least vicariously, in others. Even in their gods."

I feel my throat, dry and scratchy. I'm dying for a drink, something cold. There's no hotdog cart in sight. A whiskey would be better, anyway. Would Karen have a bottle stashed beneath all those nasty clothes? I'm afraid to ask. I fear the truth, within which yet lies the possibility that she is a stew bum and has been all along, and I've only fed my inflamed imagination by following her, or getting her to follow me, and then to lead me somewhere else. To where, though? No matter; I don't want to be led. My throat is dry. I feel older — but I don't look as old as Karen K looks in that filthy get-up. Regardless, time does it to us all. In the end, it does it to everything.

It occurs to me that my rant is not an epiphany. None of this has charged as an out-of-the-blue idea. I've been musing on this theme for months! But if I don't get them into some word-visual form, a line, a group, a mob, right now, I'll lose them. My urgency is to find what they mean, which can make all the difference. What they mean to me.

"The ages sink us all," I say. I hear in my voice a want of sober logic. Karen waits for more. It's not hard for me to take up that path. I think she wants me to tell her something I haven't told her already, even something she's never heard before. "Even the mythological gods get old, and tire out. Their skin loses its elasticity, bones ache in whatever morning they find themselves that is not our own. We, the mortals. They once played a role in mortals' lives, their everyday doings and the goings on in society. They were often like humans — human Eros and Fury, for sure — meaning they changed over time because their stories showed their lives to those mortals over which they made mischief. The story of life is the story of change, even for the gods: growth from boyhood to manhood's maturity, onward into old age. Theirs are the stories that often don't have a grand finish, only death. Aging, old, and finally so retired and decrepit as to... a retired god?"

I feel the silence of my mind pull these ideas together, into the image of new shadows and lines.

"Why not this? There's no reason why gods don't age; gods retired and sent away to usher in the new. The religion, the... pantheism, that belief system changed. The Jews and their One God were over there, somewhere, waiting. Finally the pagan gods fell out of favor, and only then had they died. Almost died, that is. While the ancient myths, the mytholo-... mythologicals? The Mythos. Is that a word? When the Mythos lost out to the One God idea, they died off. But that's not exactly true. The monotheistic God had only finally supplanted the old gods of Rome, of course, which had themselves supplanted the Greek gods, some by name only.

"All those pagan deities... they didn't die off completely, they didn't disappear; they lived in folklore, the stories, the epic tales, and later, in new paganism and –... they lived on through art. As celebrated figures for all ages, was the idea. Still is. They've held up as the Virtuous and the Just. Metaphors for our own time, and the faults that lie in us all.

"Exalted by kings and queens and their anointed courtiers for the next thousand years, painted on ceilings and sewn into tapestry, carved in stone, cast in bronze, committed to song, then resurged in print, verse and story. That's all true. Or accurate enough, I suppose, because along with the art, people regularly put themselves in place of the ancients and the biblical (Rembrandt again!), as honorary or in self-delusion. Look at the Medicis. Look at Napoleon! The Mythos are still with us because they're remembered through art: idealized, sometimes eulogized if their story ended in death, like Achilles. That means they are older. Older by centuries and by conception of who they were and what creed, what power, they lived by. The new religions took their place, eased them out to pasture to settle outside the city, in the green fields, to be celebrated not in death but in and of life itself by being passed over, pushed aside, sent to The Old Hero's Home. Pushed aside, yes, like old people are today. With each new generation of artists to come along, their images changed, too. And what image do we, the young, have of them?"

Karen nods. There's a half-smile on her mouth. I think she wants to be sardonic, but it doesn't work this time. She has heard something she likes. If I'm wrong on facts, what does it matter? Artists have never been quite right. The beauty is first, then symbolism: these are our ends. Let the historians iron smooth the facts. Karen grunts, but I don't think I'm going to hear "fuck-nuts" now.

"It's there, Karen, I see them. All of them. The Mythos and the gods and goddesses get old, but the old timers have things over the young, like attitude, wiliness, cunning, wisdom, sagacity, savoir faire. You've never seen attitude in someone before you've seen some codger with a bug up his ass."

She blinks. I do want a drink now. A pencil, too. And paper, a pad of it, a big pad, ten-by-twelve and a thick bond that'll take a narrow gold nib and wet black India. Zeppo has some whiskey. Good stuff, too, and he'll share! He knows I'm good for it. I can feel its edge already sluicing down my throat. Eighteen-year-old scotch. Even good whiskey is an aged spirit. Mellowed by time, refined, good, still strong. And it finishes well.

"I'll see you again," I tell Karen, and pick up my bag to dash with down the street, wind-milling my free arm and whistling for a cab.

"I've been looking all over for you."

Silence.

"Minus?"

Belinda.

I look up from the page. Yes. The voice is real, not another imagined body that wants to join the crowd so busily moving across my vision. She stands in the receding glow of candlelight I have had to make. The overhead lights went out on me when I flipped the switches, fizzled by a bad fuse. Her narrow-set eyes stare at me, fearful, disbelieving, furious.

"Hi." I whisper softly enough to see the sound float across the room. The image of Medusa reaches up from my page to catch hold, but the word slips through her fingers. The loft is quiet. I hear the wax burning through the candle wicks. Beside me is the canvas bag, draped halfway off the bench. White pages spread out around me, their corners curled, lying as if dropped from a great height. Penciled figures stare from each sheet. Hands and chins and shoulders and noses push from the static page to confront you. I've sketched dozens of fast-forming images through the last hours. What time is it? Belinda will know.

She holds her arms out, questioning. Her purse dangles from one hand, its weight pulling the arm lower than the other, while her mouth agitates in the ghostly light. She becomes a Gerrit Dou figure, someone from an age before electricity.

"It's nearly midnight," she says. Worry has stretched her voice thin. "I've looked everywhere. Why –"

Her hands cover her face. Her shoulders turn in and hiccup with sobs. She starts to cry. Why? I drop the pencil on the sheet and it settles across Zeus's eyes, how they peer at our modern world with subdued humor held onto calm amusement. I could not find my pink-fish pencil holder, so I picked up whatever I could find. The no. 2's have given up gray, watery lines from their hard lead. I hear Belinda whimper and my legs move so quickly that I fall off the bench trying to get out from beneath the table. The crash to the floor brings me from my state.

"I lost track of time," I say. My voice is a clear sound in this room, a TV voice. I run to her, which takes but four steps. We collide. She grabs at my shirt collar and pulls me, pulls her head into my neck, and then she hammers her fists against my chest. The pounding is furious, a release of frustration. Her fists feel like stone-filled snowballs.

"This is the last place I looked. I thought everything imaginable. You should have called, you should have let me know. I don't see why but I thought the worst had happened. I don't know why! I didn't know where you were."

"I'm sorry," I say. Her tear-dewed eyes berate my soul.

She shakes her head. Either this is good enough, or there is no excuse and I've failed her, or none of that matters now that I've been found alive and not gutted in some alley. I should be very sorry. This does matter. I can do nothing for the moment but hear Ovid's words, "If you would marry suitably, marry your equal." No, my friend. Fuck that. Give me my better, in emotion and virtue.

Belinda catches her breath and takes a tissue from her purse. Blowing her nose, she looks around my shoulder at the candles, and at what's on the table. She says, in an iced voice, "What are you doing?"

I look at the sketchpad and the curled sheets. Smudged prints have dusted their edges. She pulls my head around and holds my face between her tear-moistened hands. I feel her wet tissue pressed against my ear. I hope she sees the power that I've felt all my life, when an idea has taken me away from that part of the world in which people wander with no regard for the beauty within reach, their beauty. Now I can smile.

"Look!" I take her hand and feel the bubbles of mania flow from my heart to my extremities. The underside of my skin tingles. I lead her to the table. "Look at what I've found." I need a gulp of air after I've said so little for these hours. "This is Alvin the bus rider. He slings his lightning bolts at the world because that's all he has left. Here's Zeppo's Medusa-haired model, who stares into a mirror in a vain appeal to kill herself. And this, this one, he's the taxi-stand cripple that holds up the world, his wheelchair bending from the strain. Look at this bag lady singing a sailor's siren." Belinda doesn't know whom I speak of, but the sketches interpret my verbal splurge for her. "They're here, Belinda. All of them, and they've been in me for weeks. They're all here."

Many other Mythos ask more of me as I stand looking over her shoulder. The sketches lie like a half-completed game of solitaire. They speak to me from their wispy gray lines and thick, black shadows and hair and every fold and line in their skin. They ask that my hands sculpt them into the life that is their liberty. I am full of euphoria. The possibilities hang in ripe bud. I feel Belinda beside me, and look to her for the sign that this is alive. She touches my hand; I think she has touched my hand.

CHAPTER 15

A week later, on the night before the sculpture symposium, I get home at seven and nearly trip over two suitcases laid inside the door. A viral fear prickles my short hairs — Belinda has packed her bags for flight! She has tired of NYC life (and me!) but doesn't want to jeopardize my dream! Karen K has left a message (we're listed) on the answering machine! B's transformation from horse & carriage art-girlfriend to manager/agent-cum-unrequited-fiancé has torn her personality into three!

All are possible. I look for evidence to justify my fear. It's silent in the house. A single light shines over the kitchen island. Is that a Dear Minus letter leaning against the stockpot? I squint — No – Yes – Maybe — but can't be sure. My next step sends a toe into the side of a suitcase. This luggage doesn't match. Hers are Macaw blue; mine are Cordovan brown; while these are Hunter green.

Suddenly a voice bolts from the living room's dark end.

"What's two-seventy-five divided by fourteen?"

"God-dammit, Dad! You scared the shit out of me."

Dad walks from the shadows darkening the bookshelves. "You'd better keep it in your pants, son. Belinda just ran out to that garage you two always talk about, for toilet paper and some carrots."

"It's a supermarket, Dad. Gourmet Garage." I nudge the bags further inside and close the door. Dad comes into the light and surrounds me with man hugs. When we come apart, I hold onto his shoulders. The memory strikes me that we haven't seen each other in four months. Not since I flew to Chicago for a Christmas-season basketball game to see Michael Jordan score fifty-three against the Nicks. I wore my old Bulls jersey with "32" on it, bought in MJ's rookie year. I say, "You look good, Dad." Holding onto dad's shoulders, I find that he looks older now, or is this my close-up perception gleaned through memory's brown glass?

"Ahhh!" he says in feigned deprecation. He takes my hands in his long, bony fingers. We stand facing each other, holding hands in a fashion, a sort of double handshake. The gesture is out of custom, but somehow we make it okay because of time and circumstances. Its relevancy has to do with mom's absence: we don't know how to act; she was part of our link, the matchmaker some days and the challenger or referee on others.

All this makes necessary a word here about mom. If I haven't focused on my mom much, it's because she, like all great moms (they resemble one another in care and trust far more than the basic daily hug your run-of-the-mill mom dispenses), my mother wanted recognition for how her children turned out. For mom this meant the essential essence of Mother: "You do your best work by your right-minded children." She'd say this to M-C and me, when we got fussy about something or other on our rapid walks toward adulthood. That's Mom. Or at least, that was Mom.

And for this other reason — mom's death — I can't find a context for her absence. To speak of her is to always use the past tense, but I fear this. Still. She's been gone three years and I'm fearful, and a little guilty. I can't explain these feelings. I wouldn't know how to if I understood them, and I don't. Maybe I shouldn't try.

This moment between Dad and I comes and goes soon enough, so he lets go of me and steps back a pace. "Wait a second, pop," I say, and point at the luggage. "What are you doing here?"

Dad rises up on his toes, and his shoes squeak along the flexing leather. "To tell the truth, I miss you, Minus. You've got this exhibition tomorrow, and I thought if I were to hang out in the audience, it might give you some added energy. You know, a bit of a lift when the pressure tightens around you like that python you used to keep."

I do know. And that python hasn't crossed my mind in years. At any rate, Dad holds his hands together in case I don't know, and a demonstration is needed for which he'll bind his knuckles in a knot, twisting and grinding like he's cracking walnuts. Dad winks, or really it's a double blink because he's gone teary eyed. This is something new. I hope it's just a phase and not dementia — or, worse, forlornness.

"Wow," I tell him, a bit at a loss. Is it his presence, the look of age worn into him, or the misty eyes? None of the above. Me, it's me. "That's great, Dad. This is awesome."

A key slips the lock behind us and Belinda walks through the door with a brown grocery bag cradled in her arm. Carrot greens and the cellophane crease of a potato chip bag peek from the top.

"So I missed the reunion," she says, folding the door closed. "I had my camera ready and everything." She kisses me, kisses Dad again on his proffered cheek (he delivers a mini hug, hands patting her shoulders), and then she scuttles over to the kitchen island to drop her keys and the grocery bag. "I'm not giving away evidence, am I, Mr Orth, if I tell Minus you called from the airport?"

My dad pockets his hands. "Well, I couldn't've called you, Minus. That would have scotched the surprise, right?"

I don't need to know how he got from La Guardia, or how Belinda likely saved the day and my surprise. It's seven-twelve and she's home with me (and Dad), not holding Gretchen's reigns or the ear of some gallery manager. I appreciate the sacrifice she's made to be here. To me she's fantastic for any old reason, but tonight there's no reason I can't cook them a lip-smacking dinner.

"I'm cooking!" Belinda calls out. She points at me from under the kitchen lights. My manner is still quiet with her, it's been sheepish for days now — a straggling penitent expression for last week's disappearance — so I nod without protest. This sets her aback because I usually cajole my way to the stove, and if that doesn't work, impress a little Chicago "muscle" to hip-check her away from the griddle. Trust is not the issue (among pans, garlic infusion, or portion size); I choose to make her life more relaxing than my own when we're at home.

She recognizes the latent shame hooding my eyes, and mouths the word STOP! just to knock some sense into me (she's labeled those missing hours my "art affair" — at which she caught me rosy-palmed).

"There's a six-pack of something in bottles at the bottom of this bag, and I want you two to find a seat on the sofa and do a father-son thing. You need to get sleep tonight, honey. And Mr Orth? Don't worry, the pull-out is comfy, even for your back." She winks at me, a final measure of what I hope is forgiveness. The gesture is so simple that I wonder: This is love? Yes, you dumb-ass, and don't forget what it looks like. Feels good, by the way, doesn't it?

Natural, too, in fact.

I get the beer and grab the bag of chips and a bowl, leaving her to clang pots and pans without me hovering, or even to ask what's on the menu. Over on the sofa, Dad commandeers the chips as I pop the tops off two bottles of some New York State micro-brew. Dad says he's seen the label in Chicago liquor stores, but this'll be his inaugural taste. He upends the bottle against his mouth and I watch his gullet pulse with each swallow. I'm amazed how close we humans are to goats and birds and fish. My dad has cut his hair and blended it forward into what I fear looks more like Moe Howard than that new TV doctor he's patterned it after, whose real-life aunt is a famous opera singer.

Dad's hair shines under the track lighting. This shorter cut gives his head, and his body, a lean, fit shape he's owned since my earliest memory. His hands are hairy across their backs, like silver and black wires teased from electrical sockets, and trail up his arms beneath shirtsleeves rolled back to the elbows. This man's face is my own, minus my flat ears and thin lips inherited from mom's people, the Grass clan. There are folds and lines and brown spots on his hands and on his forehead, none of which I've noticed before. Such is the phenomenon, I think, when you see a person after a long absence (or a serious of absences). I remember like it was last night the day we celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday; I'm four years shy of that age now, and can't somehow put the two of us together in that same age-to-world ratio; his life experience has been so different from mine. How is that? Because you are different, pal! 'Tis a fact no parent can live without. They don't want clones, not after taking all that time, all that work, raising you to be an individual amongst the crowd, with your own goals. That's part of why Dad keeps after me about Mary Catherine; he senses I've given up on something he could never imagine to.

"You never answered me," Dad says. "The math question."

My mind hurdles the memories and settles into our present. I think of the problem. A question. At the door. A two-digit division of a three-digit number: 275 ÷ 14....

"Nineteen..." I say and, in calculation, feel my eyes rotate to the ceiling. "And there's some change, isn't there?"

"There isn't change," says Dad.

"Pftoohy! Yes there is."

His head snaps up, eyes cocked right. A moment passes. Belinda chops a vegetable; something hits hot oil and spits. Dad looks into his beer. The aroma of frying onion drifts over to our end of the room.

"Jeez," he says. "I thought for sure it... but, I thought... a whole number. You're right. Huh."

This is a good time to try out my New Yorker Yiddish accent. "Do you vant I should get out the calcalate'a?"

"Naw," Dad says. "You're just right enough. I guess you wouldn't be pulling my leg with your usual wrong answer that's too close to be wrong. Not on our reunion night." Nevertheless, he thinks over the product a moment longer, then shakes his head. He points at his beer bottle. "This is some brew, huh?"

Over dinner we celebrate Belinda's finding a replacement to guide Gretchen. She's decided to rent the carriage, not sell outright. I don't want to think this is a way of keeping Plan B in her pocket should ArtMan and MuseWoman (her new pet names for us) falter-but-not-crumble; but there it is. I won't hear myself say this, though, not on threat of torture. We toast a few times to Dad's surprise visit, and tomorrow's symposium. Then Mary Catherine's name comes up: she's going on a pilgrimage to Germany, seeking out Luther's birthplace and other martyrdom sites. Reformation and rebirth is a big issue with her church of choice ("To be born again is to have it all," she once told me). Then she'll go on to Rome as a missionary for her sect, with plans to stand in St Peter's Square and pass out pro-schismatic literature to all the papist pilgrims and those merely along for the ride and spectacle. "I think she's got a shot," Dad says. "Or she'll get shot," I counter. Belinda abstains from comment. Away from Dad's line of sight, I toggle my head to catch Belinda's eye, and somehow she divines within my look that she should change the subject.

"Dad, I've always wondered," she says. "How did you give Minus his name when Mary Catherine got hers from the Bible?"

I try to attack her from under the table, but my shin hits the wood cross-beam instead, and I'm left only to grimace. Belinda mugs at me, while Dad looks put-over. Abruptly then he winks (this must be a new phase of the quietly aging: the oldster transmitting affectionate signals to oldster women, and why not include young women, or even dogs). He thinks we're playing a Lovebirds' game, and actually looks embarrassed, though I can hardly see why he should be.

"I lucked out," I say, "Quirky name but not stupid," attempting to deflect the subject, hoping this covers all angles.

But Dad shakes his head and says, "We had a lot of discussion about our daughter's name, his mother and me. Too much, as it turned out. Long story short, in the end we flipped a coin." He drinks from his second beer, enjoying this moment of our perplexity. I'm the most confused, because this is one explanation (of many) I haven't heard. "A simple marital compromise," Dad explains. "She gets to name the girls, I get to name the boys. The coin toss determined veto rights."

"Veto rights?" I ask.

Dad nods, all sage now. He asks me, "What's your middle name?" I glance quickly at Belinda, which Dad catches. "Ah-ha! She doesn't know, does she? Okay, so now, Belinda, you'll know why a veto right was so important. Not that this means you'll have anything on your man for later, but.... Go on, Minus, tell her." He's lauding his parenthood over me, a baron's rights by his vassal. I know he could wait all night, and needle me along the way, so with Belinda's eyes bugging for a big laugh, and laugh she shall, I take the plunge.

"Adlebert."

Belinda laughs. "That is a little dorky." She delivers her own below-the-table poke.

"Ouch!" I jump like a little girl surprised by a spider.

"You see?" Dad says. "I saved you from many a pummeling on the playground, son."

We lie in bed. Dad's snores penetrate the solid-core door to serenade us after we've made quiet, peaceful love. I'm feeling particularly grateful for all things Belinda. She's in my arms, and she's so womanly and soft, warm skinned yet moist with the vestiges of coital triumph. If today were Thanksgiving, I might be able to come up with a prayer. But something else is also on my mind, and I rock Belinda lightly as an attention seeker. She expels a soft grunt.

"Belinda," I ask, in the darkness, "How important is this symposium to your... our... objective?"

"I don't know," she says. "Just have fun, boyfriend." She sighs, all full again with sleep. "Be yourself. Come off as yourself."

For a while I listen to her breathing. It steadies, gets long and deep, and finally slows to five breaths per minute. My mind wanders even as my limbs lie leaden on the mattress. Belinda has tucked her head into the crease of my neck. In the room's silence and the door vibrating with Dad's snores, I try out the answer: Bee, my answer is... Belinda, I have an answer for you now, finally, and... Belinda, my love, I'll be yours if you'll still have me. YES is my answer.

"Okay, Minus." Her fair breath tickles my neck. "No regrets now."

My muscles tighten. I had only whispered, and didn't think I spoke the words aloud. In the silence and our intimacy, my voice must have worked its way through her slumber. Now she's fallen back to sleep, if she was ever conscious. Would she remember this in the morning? Doubtfully. But if so, I'm ready to reveal my true heart.

Novices to live art exhibitions are the equivalent to a kid making a visit to Santa's workshop. Power tools whirl, whine, scream, and chunter. When a chorus of hammers strike chisels, you feel your molars dance in the back of your mouth. Rock dust becomes aerosol, riding the breezes or hanging in the air like gnat clouds. The dust makes you sneeze, so it's best to bring along a pocketful of tissues. A hospital mask wouldn't hurt, but then you'll wonder if you're not bicycling down some hazy Shanghai thoroughfare.

For us sculptors, the fun begins when chunks of marble or granite drop to the ground. People cheer, call out, do The Wave. It's my guess these are the natural responses from a culture dominated by spectator sports. Live sculpture is a spectator sport at its dullest, perhaps, unless you like crashing spelling bees. In the final stages of a symposium, notable for its six- or nine-day format, the soothing sounds of sandpaper on rock can lull many a kid or grandpa to sleep. While the sculptors' muscles ache as they finish with polishing socks swept across brilliant stone, I like to stop for a moment to listen. And I'm reminded of Jackie Gleason doing the old soft shoe.

Art crosses all barriers. It connects humans to their genetic roots: cave-painters from the Upper Paleolithic era demonstrate our instinct for beauty. To you and me, that's around 40,000 years of art. Anyhow, "live art" brings art to the public, under its eye, and leaves art for the public whence it's complete. Not a bad deal for the sculptor, when the sponsor provides the stone, the site, and advertising.

Mid-Town Arts has wanted to bring this exhibition to midtown, where its offices and education center are located near the NY Public Library, at 42nd Street and 5th Avenue. Bryant Park has been the oft-floated suggestion, although the main library branch, whose back windows overlook the green-lawn park on which lunch hour crowds gather, has fought the move. Thus Riverside Park is the event's home.

Our site along the Hudson River has its advantages over the fishbowl of midtown. Space, noise control, and shade. They've run the exhibition for four years straight, and I can liken the competition to what you'd see at a Gold Gloves event between rival cities: rough boys and girls that duke it out with the minimum corner teams, prize money, and fans.

Despite their largess, Mid-Town Arts can give us only two days to work. New York City park permits are at a premium. The eight invited sculptors have agreed to knock off at seven tonight, to help host a BBQ celebration. We've promised the sponsors to be back carving stone by eight sharp Sunday morning. Nevertheless, time is a sculptor's gift or his nemesis. For any hope to complete our sculptures in the eighteen-hour time limit, we're to carve in limestone. It's softer than marble, more stable than alabaster, and has a consistent, grainy texture.

When Belinda and Dad and I get to Riverside Park an hour before chisel time, we find the limestone blocks have been put on their raised wooden platforms. The exhibition area is set up as an elliptical ring. They've roped this area off from public access at a safe distance. Power generators sit outside the ropes, guarded by a rotation of rent-a-cops. The purring machines are wisely hidden behind trees that block this end of the park's Hudson River view.

Stretched across the grass, like sci-fi pythons, are hundreds of yards of black power cords braided through the middle of the oval and under a small dais at which sponsors can sit and shoot video for promo bits and entertain VIPs. From here the cords fan like spider's silk toward each of the rock pedestals and into square blue terminals for our power tools. Belinda carries a white beach bag over her shoulder. Dad has two folding lawn chairs. I carry two bags stuffed with my supplies, and a look in my eye like Dracula getting back late to his coffin.

"Hey, Minus," Belinda says, when we're halfway across the park, "I thought Vendulka was coming to help you with the prep?"

My step stutters at the thought. "Shit. I forgot to call her." We press on. Dad looks sideways at us. "No matter. We're here."

A flock of people mingle outside the ropes, no more than fifty onlookers, yet. They're a mixed bag of morning walkers and old-timers who wake before sunrise. They watch the cubic-yard limestone blocks as though they'll sprout arms and legs and get up to dance any time now.

An opening in the ropes directs us to the sign-in table, over which a nylon banner — "NY Chiseler's Paradise: 5th Annual Sculpture Exhibition" — advertises who we are in black chock-a-block letters with red shadow outlines. Beneath the banner I find four of my fellow sculptors talking with organizers from Mid-Town Arts. Two men in yellow polo shirts hand them laminated ID badges clipped to braided cord. The sculptors hang them around their necks and get a "good luck" handshake.

Angela Whitter, president of Mid-Town Arts, takes my invitation letter and ticks my name on her clipboard sheet. Her long, pale face runs pasty under the diffused light of a flowery, broad-brimmed hat. "Hope you brought your sunscreen, Minus," she says, to which I ask, "Doesn't it ever rain in this city?" My quip is meant to be friendly and not show my nerves. Angela looks frustrated, like I've jinxed today's weather. "Sunscreen," I offer lamely, "lots of it right here." I jiggle my bag and a rattle of metal responds.

Belinda and Dad have gone around the ropes to scope out a spot under a tree near my stone. I wander over and introduce myself to the other sculptors. We're a disparate gang, if much can be seen from gender and size. To read our files (passed between us through the mail months ago) we're no closer in artistic temperament than NYC is to Iowa. There's Tommy the Scot, with granite-textured stubble below a stone-bald head, and big loch-gray eyes that move about like two fish behind glass. Ariel from Copenhagen, her voice laced with a doughy Scandiweegie accent, is a small tow-headed woman whose body lies hidden ever more in a faded red smock draped over baggy jeans. "We're all dressed to work and I don't see any wash facilities," she says. "Do they vaunt us to sponge bathe in the river?" Her round face and apple chin are sallow, but she has soulful eyes that smooth the witchy angles.

Muriel of Wisconsin stands as wide as her state is long, with a cheesy pallor behind apple-red cheeks. She hasn't much to say but watches us all carefully. And I recognize Benjamin Ali from a magazine photo ("the Israeli Arab" – a self-introduction – "but not a Jew"). He's small and jittery, with a head too big for its body (features the photo couldn't project), eyes like coal, a Semitic nose and full beard. Outside all this description he wears Levi's and black Nike's, a brown western-style shirt (yellow filigree stitched across the shoulders) with sleeves cut off unevenly at the upper arms.

"So sure, yeah-okay," Muriel says. "Looks like we're here with bells on our feet and ribbon in our hair."

No one responds.

We're hesitant because we're artists and thus a bit loony, always distrustful of authority and competition, sizing each other up for this exhibition, as if we're TV sports All-Stars getting paid millions, but for today we're to play a friendly pick-up game. Sure, if you believe that, there's this old bridge I have for sale –

"Minus! Where you been, brah?"

The MexiCali accent is one I recognize. I brace myself as I turn. Manuel "Rocky" Trujillo grabs me in a bear hug, lifts me, and squeezes the grin off my mouth, then plants on my cheek a wet, Mexican kiss of peace. "Good to see you, bruvver!" Rocky lets me go and my heels drop into the grass. Rocky shines his teeth at the other artists and gives his name before I can catch my breath from his arresting welcome.

Ariel takes a half step back, making ready to run if Rocky reaches out to give her the same treatment. But Rocky laughs, "I'm ony foolin' wid'yous," and shakes her small, dimpled hand with his big brown paw. "Wow, I betch'ya got lots of muss-kulls under that smock, Ariel, if you pound rock all day long. Hey, Minus, you hear that? Pound rock! Ha!!" I let the big Mexican draw out my own laugh. The others aren't sure what to make of Rocky — or me, anymore — but they lighten up under our cheer and camaraderie.

Tommy makes the point that today's gig is only about shaking the fruit tree, and why not have fun with these two days, whatever happens with the stone. "Eh?"

"Yes, yes," says Benjamin the Israeli Arab. "We'll be friends before the end of tomorrow. No way how the chips fly, it's a peaceful contest." Ben's joke is at least genuine, but flat. I'm not sure it isn't a joke. Tommy the Scot bellows something unintelligible, and with his slant-toothed smile and bald head wagging, we understand its merriment. Muriel and Ariel have already formed a chick alliance, shoulders almost fused, keeping Rocky's friendly touch at a distance. I remember that another woman was supposed to be here, and when I turn around for a peek, I see the last two artists sling badges over their heads at the registration table. Soon we stand in a circle of eight, with French Francis (willow-tall with tapered fingers and a ferret's nose) and Rikky the Korean (Asiatic eyes, fireplug frame, black hair sculpted in bed-of-nails fashion) make their late acquaintance.

I can't hope to define these artists' styles from personality alone, not before I see their stone take shape. Along with that post package with the single-page bios, we had sent photos of recent work. What can be seen from those are no more than what pen pals get at the first letter exchange. I wonder what they thought of my sculptures, as I gauge their faces in different attitudes. No more or less than I had while thumbing through their photos, I imagine.

There is one experiment I have in mind, to see how their constitutions are molded. I ask my compatriots-of-the-chisel what they're working on back in the studio. Xenophobic hackles rise. "Oops," I say. "My bad. Must be true what I read, then, that trust between artists is harder to come by than a first-date kiss." French Francis tucks her chin down, ready for a fight, and says, "Why do you ask?" This reflects our collective sentiment in a nutshell, a violation we've all felt sometimes: the stinging slap of artistic theft. Since I believe swift waters need to be trodden to show the world your balance, I tell her I'm sculpting pieces that will change the public's view of modern humans and their god-imaging predecessors. This is only a typical artist boast; the trouble lies in not pulling off what you've promised. Of course, I've spoken in a vague metaphor that, in the worst light, fits me in with MFA students at a bull session.

Ariel says, "Who cares about the public? Or museums. Only collectors have the money to make us rich." A different voice adds, "And famous." I don't catch who's said it because my neck twists suddenly towards this: "Don't give up on the public just to roll in the mud like a pig." A few snickers rise, and Ariel bridles. "There's not room enough in this town for the both of us," says Ben, using a John Wayne drawl that's all out of proportion to his cowboy clothes. He mimes spitting a gob of tobacco at some distant spittoon. After the panel discussion, I'm glad to hear not all artists agree with Ariel's green-eyed judgment.

"Well," Rocky whistles between us, and looks up into the sky so he doesn't have to see our reaction. "Welcome to paradise." I follow his lazy gaze: a fat cloud rotates on a lofty wind.

Bart Ballard, Mid-Town Arts's major-domo, comes around the registration table to collect us. Angela Whitter follows behind. Bart's tall with a big crown of salted hair, and jerky-textured features mottled by pigment variations from (I'm only guessing) too little sun. Bart gathers our attention with an easy, confident voice. "You can begin work whenever you want, once I send you to your rock." Like pasture sheep, we all nod and look around to make sure we're nodding. Bart promises water and snacks (fruit and energy bars) will be carted around hourly. We're to feel free to talk with the audience, if and when the urge strikes us. "In fact, we encourage your interaction." He smiles and passes this along face to face. He clasps his hands together as though he'll bow like a yogi. "Any questions?"

We artists stand wooden or slack, scratching scabs off our knuckles or blinking in the unfamiliar light called sunshine — artists simply don't get outside much, unless they have to walk dogs for a living. Hurry up, our body language says. With a quiet good luck, we disperse. No bullhorn today, no fanfare, no backslapping, and just a few waves. Our smiles are trenchant now that concentration has taken over.

I make a brisk march with my bag back to my stone. Belinda and Dad lean forward in their lawn chairs. They have spirited faces on, so they must have had a good talk, I think. I unbutton my collared shirt and take off my pants, getting myself down to the gym shorts and T-shirt that'll be comfortable inside my work jumper.

Dad beams fatherly cheer. "Break a leg, son." He throws up a clenched fist. Belinda is suddenly serious. "Are you ready for this?" Now I really wonder what she and Dad were talking about. Marriage? Art-success versus the-life-of-failure compromise? Had she told Dad about my midnight "answer" whispered in the dark? Perhaps the more benign mathematical equations that determine the mass lost from each stone block to leave its equivalent life image? Don't make yourself care, Minus, I tell myself, It's none of your business. "I should be in my honeycomb working on my Mythos," I tell her. She speaks hot concern: "You are, honey." And she taps her head and points at me. "Make me proud-er, Mighty Minus." She springs from her chair and comes to the rope, kisses the end of my nose, and I leave her with my own uncertain smile, and one wink.

At one minute before nine o'clock, a cowbell clatters from under the canopied dais. I come away from a trance in which I saw birds circling above, their wings outstretched and hazily framed by the sun's white-yellow rays. Gratefully, they were not buzzards. Now they are gone.

Around the ring, the sculptors work with purpose: electric saws wind up, hair is tied back or tucked beneath caps, last drinks from water bottles or stiff coffees and then the vessel is tossed aside. All this while they continue to stare at a block of white limestone, willing it to say more as the moment of cutting begins. Perhaps for some of them the stone has answered the question we've all asked: What lives inside you?

My block shows rough blemishes where splits have been made to form the basic cube. Cold-stone-dead, and somehow alive. You can see everything in the gnarled surface — a middle-aged grin, two pixy dimples, the pocked eyes of a judge, an owl with a fish grasped in its beak — or you can see nothing. An artist must ask simple questions. What have you to say? Small cracks across its skin look like clenched teeth. My hand reaches out to let its fingers touch the stone, where they glide and stroke. I want to learn its texture, density, temperature, and to remember its tone when I slap it like a newborn's bottom. This time the slap yields a report of porous density.

My stone is nearly square; of no concern to me, today. I'm going to work her into an oval, leave a broad base for her shoulders and just a hint of a high bosom. I already see her face, and where from the part in her smooth, silken hair, an infant serpent shall peek its dangerous glower. That'll be how people can identify her. A songbird wakens me, and lifts my spirit for my first cut. Her trilling will soon be overrun by quarry work, and she'll leave the treetops and head over to Central Park, or across the Hudson to the high bluffs of New Jersey's Palisades overlooking the river and Manhattan's high-rises. The sun's buttery light slashes through the trees onto the stone. Beyond the rope, Dad has opened a newspaper. Belinda stares at me, which is just as well; she does this all the time.

"Oooo-KAY."

This is me, taking measure of the day ahead.

The zippers on my canvas bags rip through the still air as I work quickly to prepare. My hands pull out chisels – "rifflers" in the sculpture world – one wooden mallet, an ash-wood hammer with a square head, a steel hammer, and finally my pneumatic hammer and electric angle grinder with their dozen chisels, bits, and blades. These get set in their places on a card table beside the cube. Next come the rough-hair brushes, rasps & files, carpenters' pencils, and cloth rags.

A grinder's high-pitched whine shears the sounds of barking dogs and playing children. Shouts erupts from behind me. "Hey! HEY! It's on, man!" and "Someone's doing it!" Already the audience that I'd counted as fifty-strong has grown to twice that. Mid-Town Arts has advertised well. I expect today's gapers to rush and recede like a fickle estuary. A woman holding two bags of groceries walks behind a trio of joggers who run in place. Their sweat stains the fronts of their shirts.

An oversize patio umbrella has been pounded into the hard black soil next to my limestone cube. Helpful when the sun gets to its zenith, although I think the nearby trees will protect me most of the day. I step into my white coveralls and pull the zipper to my neck. I cinch the cuffs tight around the ankles and wrists with Velcro straps. A bandana wraps my hair and forehead, tucked beneath a dust mask with its double filter. I insert wax earplugs specially made by an audiologist, which dull dangerously high sounds to the level of rude walkers on the floor above you. Finally, I pull on a pair of leather gloves, women's size S.

My hands take up and feel the heft of a tooth chisel and steel hammer. I begin to pound a vertical line into the rock, dropping hammer strikes with second-hand steadiness. The limestone parts easily, and soon I'm into a fourth row. I'll switch over to the flat chisels and the angle grinder when I've finished cutting "pin stripes" into this side. The electric grinder is ideal for limestone, and an essential tool for helping me finish the piece before deadline. I'm only doing some hand chiseling now to gauge the stone's properties. What I'm learning will come in handy while doing close-in work as the sun rides somewhere over Pennsylvania's piney reaches.

Lots of hammer shots echo stony reports below the treetops. In the distance, Rocky's voice drifts through the noise, followed by Tommy the Scot's mush-mouth reply. Off to my right, Rikki kneels atop his cube, hammering a flat chisel the length of a baseball bat against its corners. Rectangular chunks splinter away like a calving glacier. That's one strong man, I think. Dad's laugh jumps at me from behind. Glancing back, I find he's adjusted his chair to lean back against the tree, its front legs in the air while his feet rock with a toe-heel bias. The bulk of the newspaper sections have fallen around him like trampled snow.

Last night, as Belinda fixed dinner, Dad asked me if I was happy. "Belinda's a good girl," he said. "Yes, Dad, she is," I answered, and confided my love for her, although that had been obvious to him from the first time he saw us together. There was something more in his look, though, the sound of his voice, maybe, that had changed for me in the months apart. I had to ask, "Dad, you look different. Haircut?" "Sure, I'm done with parting it any which way." The big josher. But not the biggest, this time. Something lurks between the sarcasm. Yes, he'd dodged my comment, but earlier he'd missed that math question. Mom wouldn't have let him off so easily; she might have given me more grief for not saying anything to Dad about his error. My angle grinder spins out a dragon's breath of dust as I hew teeth to chisel out later, like frozen dominoes. I cut deep into the top and bottom, shallow along the middle. Mom's face frowns within the dust cloud. I remember Mom the year before she died. They'd gone water skiing up at Gray's Lake with friends of theirs who owned a weekend cabin and speed boat. I came up for the day, early enough Saturday to scare a deer off the front lawn. Mom was fixing Bloody Marys on the back porch, already in her bathing suit, covered by a sheer yellow and blue sundress. She looked good. Great, even. She had tied back her hair. The satiny ponytail danced while she stirred the pitcher's contents, and her body swayed to something softly piano-like coming through the screen window from an Oldies station. What life, energy, and vigor, I remember thinking. "You're a sculpture in the flesh," I told her. You tell your parents this sort of thing and they wave off the compliment; but what you say is true, the warm glow of health and happiness to be that age — any age past fifty, right? I can only imagine. Later, in the sunshine, glistening with sun oil and smelling of tropical fruits, she dove into the water from the back of the Donaldson's boat and broke the surface like a mermaid — or the mother of a mermaid. No, I'll change that back to my first image. Then Mom got up on those water skis and skimmed the lake's surface twice around. She waved to other skiers, fishermen, people sunning on docks or eating at the patio restaurant near the lakeside clubhouse, before she finally tossed the rope aside and sunk into the gurgling white wake with a Whoop-whoop that worked as exclamation to the fun she'd had. Eight months later she lay in a hospital bed, a withered carrot in place of that muscled and tanned body from the previous summer. This is a story millions of other kids can tell of a parent's final weeks, days, hours. And it had become my memory. And then Mom was dead, with the Donaldson's long-ago invitation for a repeat weekend "next year" glowing like an ocean sunset. We humans may be sculptures in living tissue, but this only means we are not cold stone, and don't wear well through the years.

When I pull myself away to rest, I catch Belinda waving her arms at me. She pantomimes spreading something on bread, stacking meat and cheese, closing it and taking a big, sloppy bite of whatever phantom sandwich she's built. She must be hungry, but I'm not ready for that kind of break. I shake my head and work the grinder's throttle. She retreats with Dad across the grass toward West Side Drive and a big deli sandwich that awaits somewhere, Dad waving from the distance. As soon as they ascend the stairs out of the park, I regret not placing an order. Maybe she'll take pity on me and bring back a morsel. Dad can never finish a NY hero alone.

I notice people have sat in the chairs Dad and Belinda vacated. Elliptical shadows, more waving arms, and some of the red-faced residents residually annoyed by the noise (as if the park's organic noises weren't enough to set them off). Their sweat-shiny faces and primary colored clothing keep them mildly undefined, although blurred they are not. I wave back and feel as if it's repeating in a mirror. Hatted heads, sun-glassed eyes, bodies covered in summer shirts and dresses. Sweat darkens their underarms, like crescent rolls, and tags the odd fatted male's man-tits. A woman with a movie-star hairstyle and designer shades the size of teacup saucers is their fairy godmother; she's a vision more than a living being. Around her neck hangs a thin silver chain with an aquamarine stone lying flat near the depression at the base of her throat. At first, she seems to linger at the rope. Her mousse-colored dress is impeccably worn, and her narrow hips show unlined through the light material. Then she drifts back into the people walking from either direction, and in an eye-blink she's gone, tucked behind all these heads.

On with your work, then, maestro. In the hours since beginning, I've rounded the top half and hewn the bottom to complete the bust's outline. Her ideal that's in my mind is a youthful face to emote the teenager leaving girlhood behind, stripped away because she knows now the strength of her charms. Worse, she has used them — but on the wrong person, and now suffers the wrath of that who was scorned. I've left a knot protruding from the high side of her head, left of center. This foreign visage will take all my skills in the last hours of tomorrow's work session. Yes, she shall be beautiful, in the ripeness of youth, where only the suggestion of the changeling blights her olive-shaped, dangerous eyes, and how the serpent leers its knowing. My finger triggers the angle grinder just as a shout penetrates my earplugs.

Vendulka stands at the rope, waving her hand like it's a flag attached to a stick. Behind her, Peter N leans against the tree. This is a distraction, but I can't nod them off without repercussions. I've invited them. (Vendy invited herself, okay, but she was doing it because Bert had turned traitor). I'm almost afraid to pull out the earplugs and hear the unfettered world release its noise, so different and yet conventional. Before I can take off the mask, Vendy grabs the double filters as I press my stomach against the rope, and she shakes the mask like it's a dog's snout. I'm reminded of people working in theme parks, dressed as fury, larger-than-life animals, and tormented by brats in just the same way. She kisses me on either cheek, Euro fashion. Her Slavic pout puckers her chin. "Can you hear me in there?" Off slides the mask and out come the earplugs. She launches herself into an apology. "I couldn't feel right unless to stop by just this just once today. I forget all about you!" I nod, thank her, and feel the noise of the park surge through my head. She perks up, touches my shoulder, and says, "Okay, bye now!" and trots off down the nearby path, where her ass cheeks jump with each stride. I think, It is the thought that counts.

Pete pushes himself away from the tree. "That woman is straaaa-aaange. But she is a bit of a babe." This is the antidote to all strangeness, we agree. At least, as long as you don't get too close to burn your fingers. For some reason that's unfathomable to me (maybe the sunshine and heat — Pete's no more used to getting tans than other working artists) Pete becomes crude. "That Euro-pussy's gotta be fashionable, no? Does she at least shave her armpits?" He grins and folds his lips down. I tell him to shut the fuck up, and help him to notice all the kids and moms and grandmas walking around. I ask him why he's here, and he says (in his own way) he's scoping out that nexus between form and function, where the confluence of creativity, brute strength, and cleverness begets turbulence. "I've never sculpted before," he admits. He then settles a soothing grin on me and says, "Think mighty rivers, drunken sailors, and dragon sightings." I ask him if he's been painting all morning or drinking all night.

He leaps the question and lands into a critique of the standing sculptures we see from our shady spot. Peter surprises me when he claims to like what he sees: Rikki's sleeping swan ("elegant, like Asia"), the Israeli Arab's fat-stomached woman ("pregnancy is hope"), and the depths of French Francis's inverted cross ("I see the crucifixes of modern Gaullist Catholicism"). He argues that a theme is present, unnoticed by the sculptors but inherent in our core personalities. The theme is optimism against the mounting evidence that serves the childless and homeless and politically aware. I tell him I like his compliments; I absent myself of perturbation for Pete's refusal to levy words for my unfinished bust. He flutters his hands like a dreamland angel to send me a breeze, because now my face has rivulets racing toward my jaw and neck. It's a mirthless attempt to send the psychosomatic sails of my fears against the rocks that are my sculpture. Pete knows I won't accept praise. In this we are fraternal twins. When he leaves, walks off into the crowd like an aphid to a field of wildflowers, I affix the mask over my face and return to my work.

The angle grinder whines in reply to its short rest when I flutter its trigger. Inside my jumper I feel the sweat running from my pits, chest and the inside of my thighs. Shadows lie flat now, sun-pressed inkblots spilled from a fountain pen. I take full breaths, slow and easy to prevent blackout, and focus on the bust. "Time is a nemesis, Minus." This is the mantra I penitently whisper. As I make smaller cuts and shave the outline into more defined features, my mind draws back to Peter. We met just after success had first come to him — recognition but no real money yet (shortly to arrive). Chicago was a stop-off on an early trans-national tour showcasing art pieces he'd amassed and placed in storage over a three-year workaholic period. I'd wondered aloud if three years had been too long, enough to miss the avant-garde appeal Eighties' art had been pulling from canvas-based, abstract ideas. Pete committed me to a secret: he had adjusted his colors according to basic criticisms heard "around and about," and had found himself while he traveled. That's all? That's all. Now, of course, he doesn't make such compromises because he doesn't need to. He also told me, "I can paint using mustard and ketchup and they'll still buy it. Brother, I don't get it myself." Pete and I agree on this: influence, at least for a while, is everything. You ride it until it stops, and the damnedest thing is its rarity to predict your own influence's end. I told Peter I didn't envy him his rising fame or growing fortune. He respected that I stepped back when others were rushing forward to catch the glare from his fame.

My grinder buffets a jaw line with smooth, sideways strokes. I'm close to hand-work here, and damned do I wish for a chisel and mallet.

Sometime later I hear Belinda's voice calling from the chairs. She's one of those unabashed women who can easily hold her hands beside her mouth for a shrill that'll bring taxis from around the corner, screeching to a stop at her side. An acquaintance couple from Iowa's hog wealth likened her decibel power to champion pig callers.

She holds up a sandwich wrapped in white butcher's paper. I've only had water breaks and three bites from an apple till now. My stomach gurgles at the sight, its sound an internal resonance difficult to ignore under the circumstances of work, heat, and fatigue. She unwraps the sandwich halfway so my hands don't soil the food. I nibble like this for five minutes, chewing and swallowing while I gauge the next series of cuts, wetting my dry throat with slugs from a water bottle.

By five o'clock I've cut the block down thirty percent. I walk around what now can be described as a sculpture, noting what's been accomplished, what's to come, where each flaw shows and what's needed to make corrections to bring the image together, and to find the light in her stone eyes. Around me, five other sculptors continue their work, but Ariel from Copenhagen already sits in the shade of her umbrella, angled toward the sun (she has to be in the worst spot of the group, the late-afternoon heat striking her like an anvil). She wipes her forehead with a red towel. She looks whacked. Tommy the Scot also stands beside his sculpture, but in the sunshine, his skin red and glistening. He lifts a beer bottle and drains it to the count of four.

"I'm done," I tell Belinda. "For today." Dad snoozes in his chair, chin to chest, belly slow in its rise & fall that informs on his life signs, one hand folded across his lap while the other hangs down, the knuckles buried in the grass. How can he sleep with this noise? Easily, I suppose, as the simple yet sudden idea of lying down in the grass makes my brain want to spread like water across a thirsty lawn. I pull out my earplugs and slide the dust mask up to a crown, leaving the filters pointing skyward like radio drums. "It's time to party."

After a shower in that promised portable hut (four-stalls; men's & women's on opposite sides, separated by thin plastic that's sure to yield various sighs, grunts, yelps, and dropped soap jokes), I sit in the grass beside my sculpture, drinking in the cooler air, and listen to Dad ask me for crossword clues he hasn't been able to answer throughout the day. Belinda answers him because I'm somewhere else and she wants to leave me there until I'm ready to venture back along a path that leaves no footprints. Across the lawn, beyond the rope, barbecue fires blaze and smoke into the unmoving evening air. Music starts from a portable CD player, hip-hop beats that get Mexican Rocky shaking his big gut, trying to entice Danish Ariel out of a folded posture; she shakes her head, and I can see her grimace from back here. Rocky doesn't let this dissuade him. He turns and there in his sights is a slightly wiggling Wisconsin Muriel, see-sawing her hips that only help to make her breasts jiggle like dice in a cup. Big dice. The two meet halfway and a cheer alights from the crowd as the pair begin to boogie-woogie in the blue fire smoke.

NY faces are faces of the world. History shows that people too often think in colors, but that's only one angle of the canvas. A pointillist's yellow dot placed between two blue dots yields a green image when seen from a short distance, thus altering our perception of light. Yet people are far more shape than color; and faces are people. Have a look in a mirror and what you'll find, when you take the time to notice, is the same face you see on the uncountable masses when you walk through a mall or sit in a park, admire Bernini's "Apollo and Daphne" or wait for a table at a restaurant, watch television or covet your neighbor's wife.

Karen K wrote, "There's enough self-delusion in the world to make the beautiful ghastly, the grotesque bewitching." I agree, and I say more: our obsession with self-beautifying is genetic. People will tell you that beautifying is taught. They're wrong. We lived as animals in every sense of the word before "society" tamed us, and yet genetics have made us primp and dab, comb and wipe. Only, you can never really tame a beast. Adding luxuries — telephones and automobiles, frozen vegetables and CD players, hand cream and picture frames, home computers and no-pain dental surgery — merely brings the beast closer to its origins of Need vs. Desire. The human face is the face of a beast; a beautiful, grotesque, beastly stretch of malleable flesh. NYC is this, and it is its people, too. Malleable from within because the inner workings of the beast ride the rails of emotion, its track the double helix of its DNA. Even in their most static of high-charged three-dimensional animation (see "Apollo and Daphne"), sculptures are indifferent to the human condition. Odd, then, when humans show them equal indifference. Out of fear or ignorance, I don't know, but there is this: humans trump sculpted rock — and all art — when their insolence becomes abject instead of occasional.

Dad holds my beer while I take a leak behind a tree. He shields me from the cops patrolling the picnic grounds where a couple dozen people — friends and family of the sculptors, all given official name tags to affix to their chests — have shown up for the barbeque. With just three Porta-Potty toilets stationed alongside the shower trailer (one filled with flies, standing unused) most of the men gave over the plastic huts to the women and have taken to the trees, a practice which the police have turned a blind eye to for the night. On the other hand, one should never overlook the zealous beat cop.

My urgent urination makes angry cobra hisses in the grass around the tree trunk. Dad tells me to hurry up or else someone might think we're "getting gay" and come "bash us." My next sigh isn't for the relief of my bladder. I zip up and see Dad motioning for quiet, and to head the opposite way we'd come. He keeps close and whispers that he's heard noises back there, people or something, sounds which he doesn't want to disturb. We're shoulder to shoulder, stumbling benignly in the dark.

"I wish you wouldn't have moved away, son." His timbre is hushed, a voice inside a plush-carpeted room. Dad has become melancholic after the last beer. "You could have stayed on after –"

"Come on, Dad. I needed to live my life. Get on with things, you know? You told me you understood."

"Sorry. That was selfish."

"Has something happened? What's changed?"

"Nothing," he says between the dark. "Everything. But that's — it's not okay but it's been tough getting used to. I'm not going to lie to you. Everyone's gone! Your sister. You. My wife."

His admissions wrench my emotions, although there's little I can do. Moving back to Chicago next week wouldn't solve anything for Dad, and my life would be turned inside out. Besides, he'd only think things were okay, until he realized his days were filled with the same work, the same people, and a once-a-week dinner or beer with me (and Belinda; of course she would come with me, as my brief fantasy-horror has played itself out).

"I'm coming back, Pop. Some day. New York has always been a stopover, in my mind, and never the top of the hill. I can't come home yet, though. Not now." I stop him in a clearing, where a semblance of ambient light lets us see each other. "My life has taken its turns, too, you have to have noticed. Things are... happening. And I don't want to interrupt them. The consequences would be terrible. For me and Belinda, and my work."

I tell him about Belinda's marriage proposal, in this half darkness that lets me talk as if he's the ghost of Hamlet's father and I'm not Hamlet and so not much in a hurry. He's happy, pats me on the shoulder, squeezes my upper arm, until I admit that I haven't answered her, not yet (last night's whispered practice notwithstanding), even though I want to marry her. He doesn't understand this, to which I respond "Ditto." I swear him to secrecy. "It'll all come out okay," I promise. "In fact, super great." Then I change the subject, to my Mythos. He likes the idea, and gets the whole motif. Hearing myself tell it like I do, so matter-of-fact, and to my Dad, one of my biggest supporters (always), gives me a charge. Still, Dad wonders about the future instead of accepting that the future is all we have, sometimes.

"Who knows... I might still be around. You know what I mean. Alive." He does like to wax on. He has that right, with his son standing close. "Or maybe I'll move, too. Can't quite see myself in Florida, though."

"What the hell are you talking about? You're like fifty-eight, Dad. Step up on the auction block again. You look good. A Silver-fucking-Fox."

"Hey-hey! The language."

"Get yourself laid already."

"Don't you dare say 'That's what your mother would've wanted.' "

Never in so many words, I won't. We both stop for a breather when a crowd of teenagers troops by, all arm-leg-shoulder movement, and overly boisterous voices cutting across the octaves, nothing in key. Mom told him something I haven't forgotten: don't cry for her too long. She said to him, "There's too much to waste by reliving the past. Mourning a life that had its best times while the times of memory were yet unbroken." She had to gasp these words because her lungs were already cobwebbed with tumors. "You're a good man and lots of women — one more woman — would be lucky to get a-hold of you." That she could joke in her collapse struck me, not as brave, but comforting to herself. At this point Mary Catherine left the room. Dad was shaken. He leaned over her, held her shoulders and placed his cheek against hers. She cupped her hand behind his head and winked at me. The sensation of deep love and abject grief nearly collapsed my legs. "One woman has had you long enough, Carl," mom told him. "Give yourself a break from all of this... and then let another lady learn, as I had, to bask in your best qualities."

Dad choked on his grief. I watched this through some amniotic fluid of unreality turned on a wheel that became my life. Then I swooned and had to lean against the wall. Mom told him, finally, after listening to him cry a while longer, her hand stroking his back, "Have Minus teach you how to cook, Carl. Just in case." Dad balled like a newborn. Mom patted him until the sobs calmed.

I guess, after all, mom did say those things in so many words. Just not the icky, demeaning ones she could have plucked from the language her white-bread students used, the ones she'd taught for twenty-eight years in that north-suburban school. In the dark, I see that scene roll over in my mind one more time. Not for the last time, I'm sure. Dad, meanwhile, hasn't lost contact with his own inner-wisdom.

"Besides," he says beside me, his voice crackly, like we're on the phone together with a bad connection, "where would I go to find a woman? I'm not hanging out at some mall strolling through all those retirees. Have you seen them? It's terrible. Besides, I'd look like a john picking his way down Maxwell Street on a cold Friday night. Or, take that idea of joining a fifty-five-PLUS social group. An or-gan-I-zation. I might as well hire a pimp."

"So stay away from people ten years older than you. Go young! Have fun for a while, and then.... What about the college? You've got at least a dozen profs who are perfectly nice... even a few who are lovely women. Women that have something going for them. Ask a few out on dates. What harm could come?"

"Those women are colleagues. Friends! For Christ's sake, faculty turpitude laws would get me fired for sexual harassment."

"That sounds a bit rough, Dad. Unless you showed up in nothing but a raincoat."

He doesn't even chuckle. There's depression opposite me in the darkness. Then he surprises me. "You really think I should, son? Date? Me on the mare-market."

"It's 'meat market' Dad, but I like your phrase; and, yes, I do think you should. No mincing words here. Life is long, whatever number you're at. We can make it sweet, too. Don't we owe ourselves that much?" I pause. This can be a risk worth the price. "Mom would insist. She did, as you remember."

There, I'd said it. I wonder, though, if he does remember her deathbed plea. Our footsteps crunch over sticks and leaves. He's quiet. He's thinking about it.

"So, you think the 'ole man's got something left, huh?"

"Sure I do. And... you always admired the Founding Fathers, right? Ben Franklin had kids into his eighties."

"Hey. I'm not looking for bambinos."

"I'm just saying that the equipment works until it doesn't work any more. That goes for the heart, too, Pop."

He mumbles words I don't catch, but I think I've got him at least wanting to believe a future lies ahead for him — one that dances, not lurks. "Thanks, Minus," he says. I hear him sniff. Maybe mom's with him now. He's never been one to disappoint.

"So," he says. "You talked with your sister lately?"

This is the wrong subject, and anyway it's our telephone talk signal for the end of the conversation. Hard to hang up, though, when the man you've looked up to all your life is walking you toward a canopy of lights and into a smoky field of barbequed pork. Dad chuckles. I think he must have come to the same conclusion.

When we get back to the party, Belinda is in league with a pair of gallery people (they don't travel alone, apparently; are they afraid a pack of artists will pick off a loner from the herd, a weakling, for revenge?). I nod to each because we've already met. Belinda has given them my business card: stenciled vellum with the look of chiseled marble. Who thinks up this stuff? Dad took a dozen earlier and walked the rope-line, working the audience. I saw two on the ground when I trekked back from my shower. Now he's empty, of beer and BBQ enthusiasm and "Minus Orth" art cards (they remind me of trading cards, and I suddenly imagine a world with artists competing with sports stars wrapped in a package with a free stick of gum. If only McDonald's would think classy, and use its merchandising power to trade in ArtCards, match a masterpiece with its artist to redeem for food, a Big Mac, a Happy Meal; art might just survive. What might a McArt museum look like?).

We need to leave. I motion to Belinda.

While waiting off to the side of the dance-trampled grass, with Dad next to me dancing in place to some swing suddenly caterwauled through the air, I see a cloaked image through the trees behind us. It keeps to the outside of the roped-off sculptures under white flood-lights. A black cape, European in imagery and cheesiness, flaps on each stride, but his gait is familiar to me. I tell Dad that I'll find him with Belinda, that I'll be right back. He chides me for my weak bladder, but stays put.

When I walk into the light, the caped figure brings himself out from the thick night on two sturdy legs, feet hitting the soil like panther paws. I adopt a ghoulish tone and dilute my voice. "Hello, Viscount. You look vaguely Transylvanian tonight. Should I have worn a necklace of garlic?"

He pulls back his shoulders and tries to throw the cape over his left shoulder. The long train catches on the tree trunk, failing to bring about the classic Bella Lugosi move. "That was shite, lad," Viscount Bruce says. "Never could do it right. Got this bloody thing from a Great War vet. Italian. I mean the cape, of course. Has to have come from cold storage, I should think." He lifts the edges to his side, and now he looks like the image of a retired Batman, out for a night of pick-ups and debauchery of the local crime fightrixes. He steps further into the light of the distant lamps and looks closely at the fabric. He holds it out for me to see. "I believe moths have got at the lining. Hell and be damned! These old buildings have just about every pest known to the urban landscape."

Buzzing brings our heads around toward the sculptures. Gnats orbit the sodium lights like electrons. Another tribal beat lashes the air from the BBQ pits. We see dancers in shadow.

"What brings you out here in Dracula's darkness?" I ask. He ignores the question and looks into the space between the ring of sculptures.

"I like your bust," he says. "Can't wait to see what you'll do with that bone sticking out of its head." He wags his nose at the sculptures as a bunny might to its carrots. "I read a book the other day. 'How the Other Half Lives' by Jacob Riis. I thought it would illustrate myself, or my close contemporaries." He smiles, a pitiful irony given the subject, and one that exposes hidden embarrassment. "Turns out the damned book's a depressive example of America's underclass."

"A bit outdated, but apt for the times," I say. "Do you ever see Riis's drama of life from your five-bedroom apartment overlooking Central Park?" I can't pass up this rudeness, and had hardly thought to stop myself. I think I know why. The FaceCards have cold feet about our subscription deal.

"The occasional bum pushes a cart early in the morning, I've noticed," says the viscount. He thinks I was serious; the spoilt among us simply fail to get sarcasm that isn't self-delivered. He goes on, "Do they really exist, or are they the figments of our subconscious fears displayed as holographs? Sometimes it's hard to tell. S'pose Freud had something to say of it. Though perhaps not. 'Warming your own soup' is what the maharani might say. I haven't the first opinion of what that means. No matter."

He finally stops. I don't respond. There is no possible response to what he's said. Nevertheless, the silence is never silent, and we listen to our separate thoughts, eyes tucked in and focused on a pair of hands, or something equally close. My thought is split by a horn blast from a barge on the Hudson. The viscount abruptly shivers, and his teeth chatter in this sultry night.

"I had planned to come around earlier today," he says. "Had my earplugs in my pocket. Then something came up. Tomorrow I'm off to Portugal for a few days, and I wanted to catch you. Let you know what the group has been discussing."

For a moment I had thought I was wrong, hoped, and he was going to tell me something good. Inspiring. His hand grips my arm to turn us away from the lights. He asks me to explicate the level of competence of the sculptors at the symposium, what I see of the unfinished pieces. We're walking now, and it occurs to me that the viscount is going to take a lap around the rope while my critique entertains him. I'll have none of this, and I stop our sauntering pace. A stutter in his step makes him appear old.

"What's the story, Viscount?" When he looks at me, my face is in full lamplight, while his has the grainy texture of an old film. He sees that he's made a mistake. There's no need for rasped nerves here, his look seems to say, so I take a path he'll appreciate. "This is business. Let's take a drink at the bar, like men." His chin rises, showing a waddled neck that stretches as he measures me. Then his eyes soften, and his mouth. His hand leaves my arm and comes up to rest on my shoulder.

"We want to know what you're working on," he tells me. "Specifically. Do you have finished pieces? If so, let's enjoy a mini-show, if you will. You see, Minus, this is a big investment for... for a few of us." He lets a pause make its statement. Then he laughs. "Maquettes will suit the maharani's inquisition."

This is what I hear: pressure. The minimalism that your everyday Joes and Janes bring to work is to be assumed. For me, I can only think of Jackson Pollock's face, brooding at a white canvas, awaiting that vision to touch him before he can begin. Days pass; sometimes weeks. A feeling wholly different from inspiration, I can assure anyone.

"That's fair," I reply. "You might want to take a close look at the bust you praised moments ago. It's a prototype of the cycle in preparation. A long, varied, and robust collection. Naturally, I have sketches, too. The maharani is going to like them." I want him to know it's understood that he's put her "inquisition" forward as proxy for their collective voice. So be it. They need to keep distance, however illusory it is. "And the archived works?" I ask. This addition is my own step into the circle.

He takes his hand off my shoulder. The viscount pans his eyes across the field. "Later," he says. Opposite us, two men walk into the light along the rope. Viscount Bruce steps back with that involuntary motion often observed in the unnaturally cautious. The men are dressed as twins: black tank tops, black shorts, black athletic shoes. Their hair is black, trimmed to the skull. They're holding hands. The viscount sucks his teeth. Of course he and I know "later" means the prices of the older pieces will likely have risen, but no matter. Early pieces paid for by handsome inflation is a status symbol for some collectors.

We part from the shadows and go separately into the darkness, I feeling a bit like Renfield lighting out with a list of Master's wishes folded into his breast pocket, close to the lungs. It's a feeling I know will change. I find Belinda and Dad moving in the light of a portable disco ball, shuffling more than dancing. They give me the look of What the !@&#.... We leave the party.

"That's pretty shitty of them," Belinda says to me the next morning. Her lips perch on the rim of a paper coffee cup, hooded by a plastic cap that makes the cup look like an ice-cream cone. The Red Line subway rumbles and shimmies north on our early return to Riverside Park. Dad holds a newspaper open on his lap, and can't hear a word we're saying. It's seven-twenty and this car is nearly full; it smells of sleep-pressed hair and bad breath and coffee and doughnuts. I take a bite of bagel and chew. I prefer plain bagels. The texture of the dough feels more bagel-ly than the "rosemary olive oil" "chocolate chip" or "everything" varieties. Belinda waits on my answer, and probably for me to agree with her. But I shake my head, and after swallowing I explain the FaceCards' caution in a minimal phrase. "Occupational bailiwick." She attempts to brush this aside, but the phrase is too weighty for that, and she must consider its implications. In bed last night, I debated whether to tell her at all; this morning I decided that, as my agent, she needs all the information when it's available. Now I tell her, "If the FaceCards don't pony up for the subscription, others will. Que sera, sera. My royals will miss out on this lot of seminal work." She's not happy with this answer. She is not satisfied that I'm not as unhappy as she is. Que sera, sera. We look away from each other and into the noise of this morning.

Sunday morning subways are textural. Grandmothers accompany little girls dressed in crinoline costumes to ballet practice (or to church — sometimes it's hard to tell the difference). Men and women who've paired up at a club a couple hours ago stand in isolated worlds of memory, dance sweat dried across their foreheads like tacky paste, and the soiled feeling of liquored intentions draining into second thoughts, or regret. Runners dressed for the track advance themselves in place, jiggle their hips and stretch their Achilles' tendons, anxious to get out, upstairs, into the openness of the park. While the young are still dreaming in their beds, old men whose nightly sleep can be measured in minutes are out like the dawn patrol — unshowered and underfed, but caffeinated — out to lead the march of humanity that will catch up somewhere near noon, stumble outside to get the New York Times, lox and bagels and lattes, at about the same time the old boys are ready for the first nap of a lazy Sunday. There are too many people on Earth to notice all of them between Monday and Friday — the world belches people from its throat so they can earn their daily bread — thus they become impressionistic blurs. Perhaps just as they would like, and how an artist would like them.

Twenty minutes later, Bart Ballard gives a holler and waves across the park's ante meridian silence. Heads turn; irritation grunts from passers-by. I step into fresh coveralls, zip up, and listen to the sound from crotch to throat. Hammers hit chisels. Rasps shave layers off the limestone like an Italian grocer his parmesan wheel. Wood smoke lingers beside the acrid taste of store-bought coffee. Dust drifts along the air, an almost-fog that can't quite compress the mix of smoke and dog shit, or even the car exhaust risen from the West Side Highway.

"I think you're in the lead, Minus," says Dad. He's just returned from a walk around the perimeter. All the artists are in action, he reports. I remind him this is not about speed, just as long as you finish before three-thirty. Two laps around my pedestal gives me the impression that Dad may be right, whatever that means. Six hours (or so) with hammer & chisel, rifflers & rasps, and I'll have my work of art. The largest crust of my time has to be spent chiseling two pairs of eyes, two noses (one serpentine). And lots of hair. The remaining work can be with my various rifflers and flat files.

The sculpture's effect, where it holds its power, shall be found in her eyes, their set and gaze and painful furry. They must be half-and-half: at once yearning for help from the goddess who cut her, while also intense with growing anger, hatred, a crazed ferocity which shall soon turn many a warrior to stone. Her cheeks hold the pudge of youth, although now I think to refine them for a sleeker appearance, one that takes balance on the narrow edge between the two phases that have defined humans in life and myth. Her hair has body, but has yet to morph. Only the one serpent peers from the flowing locks, its size essential to glaze the motif with its foretold horrors.

I pull on my leather gloves once more, and take a chisel in one hand, a wood mallet in the other. Speak to me, girl... How have you become evil? What were you before this? When had that fear, that anticipation of Athena's wrath, first strike you? There, there, lovely Gorgon, show me those tears for the life that awaits you.

At eleven o'clock I pull away the dusk mask. When I spit on the ground, my saliva is a mass of cottony bubbles. Belinda and Dad have disappeared. As to where, this I've missed because of my earplugs and, probably, they hadn't bothered to tell me. Second-days at an exhibition, for family and friends and lovers, are less carnival and more survival. A new crop of spectators have replaced those from the morning, and stare at me in their casual and familiar way.

New York City has awakened. It's the sunshine and the feeling that there's something to be seen, some Sunday action that's not televised, that's palpable and has vibrations and odors that tang the air. I feel like a gladiator, dressed for the ring and holding my weapons. There's no sign from the crowd that I'll be given thumbs up or thumbs down to seal my fate. Therefore my métier beckons me.

Medusa is a beauty, her hair parted left of center. Three ropes drape down and back to hold the tresses in place, to adorn according to the pantheonic station to which she was born. A young snake, of narrow head and rapier tongue, looks tentatively from between the plaits. Its eyes are slow to the vicious turn to which its mistress's have rolled; she straddles lovely and abominable. I sense that her allusion to history, and all she represents, is a metaphor precisely gauged for modernity.

A trio of boys call out to me from the ropes. Mom and dad hover in the background. Feeling a break is what my mind and muscles need, I place the hammer and chisel on the pedestal and walk over to them, sliding my dust mask around my neck so they can see me clearly. The boys all have pinched faces of pre-teens, noses and chins like mom, hair and eyes of dad. Salad-bowl haircuts don't help to distinguish them, but their different heights assess their ages.

"Are you deaf?" asks the tallest boy, who seems all arms and legs, between which sticks out a chicken chest. "All that pounding hurts my ears."

I pull out my earplugs: secret exposed. I let them dangle before the kids, like Svengali his chain and medallion. The smallest reaches out and I snatch them away. People edge in, taking my pause as their opportunity to ask me questions and craft tips: how long does it take to finish a sculpture? Who buys those big sculptures we see in office buildings and parks? How do you keep dimension right on such a big piece? Aren't you afraid of lung disease from all the rock dust? My answers are patient reminders to myself that once upon a morning I had lifted a hammer for the first time. Someone offers me a cold bottle of water. A long-fingered hand slips off its ridges, whose red nails are shiny with sex appeal. I see heads of dull colors tossed among vibrant tints, some shortly bobbed while others lavishly long. We talk about where the art is to go, and if it can be bought by "regular people," and then there's a lull and some say good-bye and drift away like tail feathers lost to the wind. I insert the earplugs and pull down my mask. A last nod to the crowd sends me back to work.

As noon drifts into middle afternoon, the warrior sounds and battle hardware have led to sighs and rasps and coughs. I'm naked above the waist, and have doffed the over-the-head mask for a simple mouth guard and safety glasses. The heat has blazed outside the ring of the umbrella's shadow, causing my eyes to tear whenever I take them from the soft, white-dark of the limestone to see who has finished, who's yet covered in sweat, their muscles flex-pumping with precision. I notice Bart Ballard and Angela Whitter walk to one sculptor's work station after another. When they get round to me they give the "half-hour warning." Their faces glow with clown-like encouragement.

It's time for blending. I use a curved file, its striations narrow and shallow, but sharp. My fingers hold the file along the length of its blade so they can sense the shape of the stone and gauge how much pressure to apply to scrape away the briefest aggregate. Her jaw line is delicate yet defined, the neck willowy with the hint of tension, her high cheekbones almost aquiver under the skin as she tenses with the effort to pull her lips back from the teeth. Then I take a rough, plastic-bristle brush to clean away the dust. There, there, my pretty... Perfection is but the grasp of your mind against the future of its reason, for it awaits you with outstretched arms. A softer brush dusts the crevices around her eyes, her plaited hair, and the serpent's patient grin.

My last task, and it's from passion and honor I do this, is to wash her. The hose attached to the rubber octopus set out for our use is hot to the touch, and the water pours through its nozzle at a near scalding temperature. I wait for the water to cool, my mind on the Mythos cycle, and how this Medusa fits with the characters I have prepared to sculpt (she doesn't fit; she's too young; I'll put her aside) until finally the icy temps of city water numb my hand. I train the spray on the sculpture, and the limestone darkens in its baptism.

"That's nice art, son." Dad's face is a flower in late bloom, his smile that which defines fatherly pride. "So beautiful." I can feel a blush rising from my chest, a good feeling that I wash back through my body when my hand raises high and upends the hose over my head. The cold-water surge ripples in rushes down to my feet, where I stand under its flush until the final call sounds.

Rocky Trujillo stands in our day's falling light, his skin bronzed to its native leatherine tinge. A trucker's hat is pushed to the back of his head, its Union Carbide patch faded and stained. "So why the Medusa head, brah?"

I gasp through the swallow of a cold beer. "Something I've been working on, Rocky. Representational is making a comeback. I give you this: youth in the classics." He knows I'm telling half truths. "Regardless, they want public art, dude. I want my work seen. Did you know that New York City has eighty-nine library branches? Dozens pepper Manhattan alone. Mid-Town is guaranteed to find this girl a home."

Rocky folds his arms and inhales, which pushes out his broad chest. He doesn't like that I haven't explained my Medusa. He says, "Is that, like, selling out?"

"No, Rocky, it's looking ahead. Despite Aristophanes' claim, not all artists live with their heads in the clouds."

The horn shrills twice from the observers' dais. We file over to collect our kudos and the chance for weighty recognition. We're heavy-armed and, some of us, yet crusted from ankles to brow with rock dust dried over sweat. Family and friends, alongside park stragglers sidling up to see what for, stand behind the artists bunched in a grapevine wedge against the dais. In the deep shadows made by the surrounding trees, beyond where Hudson River boats call out a maritime version of evensong, we hear French Francis's name. She jumps with joy, does a fist pump, and takes the dais to collect her prize. I hear through sporadic clapping a murmured, "Must be politics. Playing to Mitterand!" which makes me want to laugh, only I think the voice might be Dad's. A cool sweat breaks across my upper lip, and I keep my eyes forward. Angela reminds the crowd that the sculptures will be displayed in the sculpture garden at City Hall for now, until final placements are determined. Then handshakes are swapped and everyone quickly goes their separate way.

I shuffle back to my table, where I scan the ground for missing tools or the left-behind bag. On my walk the summation of the exhibition comes to me through this question: "What did I get from the Roundtable but the reputation as the guy who talks 'good art' but doesn't deliver?" I run my shoe toe through the grass to feel for the solid object. An answer to my question comes like a phantom mosquito bite: Art spoils wherever more ego than heart gets injected. Get yourself together, man. Thrice around the pedestal yields a small chisel, which I deposit in my pocket. It's a good piece. Don't let fatigue spoil The Loneliest Gorgon its beauty.

I turn to see a hunched apparition. It's a fairytale crone. She's staring at me from the pathway far behind the ropes. It's my bag lady, who comes forward when I give a little wave. She wears her painter's pants held at the waist by a big red belt cinched through a gold buckle. Her hands hold paper and pencil. We meet at the rope, where her voice and words startle me.

"How does it feel? This. Your contentment?"

Life becomes a very large wheel, from which all the little wheels, no matter how fast they turn, make the large wheel move by millimeters. Before I'm able to find my voice, I feel faint (she has said nothing, moved naught), but I don't stagger in this dizziness. Seeing my muted self in the reflection of her moist eyes, all oblong rainbow colors and half-dark lines, I find my voice flat, a burnished sound.

"Why are you here?"

"You told me that you read art journals. A simple exercise," she says, as the preceptor's voice advises the novice. She's done this on purpose. She's working me. "Come to my building next Friday," she commands. "In between your dog walking and –" She tosses the final thought away as a distraction. Her arrogance or my — what? Nothing is clear.

Laughter from the distance — Rikky and Ariel of Copenhagen — takes my answer from the air. She tilts her head. I repeat myself. I think her eyes are not on me, have not been for some time. She has looked behind me at the Gorgon. Then she goes away, and as she recedes so does her stature, which in a few steps has transformed into a hunch-backed bag lady trolling the park garbage cans for her dinner.

"Is that who I think it was?" Belinda asks a moment later. She's come up from behind, brandishing a sweaty bottle of beer that's half gone, the foam hanging to the inside of the bottle. "Or should I say, What was that?"

"An admirer," I say, "I think." Belinda doesn't see it, though. Not really, or at least not for what this meeting represents. And how could she? It's an idea I want to make into a plan. One at a time, I peel back the shoulders of my coveralls, and strip the sweat-rimmed outfit down to my ankles.

The next morning, Dad sits next to me in the back of a livery cab on the way to La Guardia for his flight home to Chicago. He can't stop talking about the comfort of the Lincoln Continental we're riding in. To the driver, this is a sugar cookie dunked in coffee. "And the price!" Dad guffaws. "Holy samoleans!" I explain to him that the flat rate paid for a comfortable ride is equal to the un-comfortable ride of a yellow cab roller-coaster trip. Outside the window, New York is gray and brown bricks, white cross-walk lines, faces like the 31 flavors of ice-cream.

When we see Shea Stadium, Dad breathes a heavy sigh. I know he's getting emotional, even though he's not the guy that easily gets emotional. I recall his few nights with us, the subtle forgetfulness showing through; the playfulness and the memories for me of what my dad has always been for the family. I want to rid myself of thoughts lingering at the shores of dementia, or stuck at the ticket counter of Alzheimer's Airlines. Of course, none of this is the case; only a son's fears, and just as well, for Dad is far too young for complications of the aged, as well as I am grossly imaginative for my own good.

We hug at the security gates. Dad holds back tears. He tells me he's rubbed his eyes and forgot he applied Ben-Gay to his aching knees. There's no conviction in his voice, though. He's taking himself more seriously, these days. This is fine. I promise to call him.

I meet Baron Raspe outside his building. He stares at the black canvas bag I carry, slung over my shoulder. I say, "Home slides and finger-paints collected from under the fridge magnets." He laughs.

We start off, making our way over to Park Avenue and Viscount Bruce's apartment close to The Reservoir. The baron's dark hair has a new cropped look to it, and he sports a three-day beard of silver whiskers; very distinguished — despite his paunch — in buff-colored worsted pants, a toasted salmon button down, and brindle tweed jacket. I wear my black suit and white shirt and blue tie; I've shaved for the evening. These FaceCards never look the same, while I'd be the perfect suspect for a police line-up.

"Your sculptures," the baron says, "and those sketches and paintings I saw in Chicago. What's your theory of art, then?"

"Do you mean this year?"

"It changes so quickly? Heh-heh! Sounds mentally torturous. You must be already climbing walls; in your mind at least."

"British POWs called that 'wire happy' didn't they? Sure, yeah. But I've never had the time to give that any thought. Climbing the walls, I mean. Too busy shifting my position, I suppose, among other things shifted. Artistic relevance is important, I think."

"That's a word – relevance. That's your theory, then?"

"If I must have one today – now – 'relevance' will do well for an argument. Beauty at the core, of course. Relevant to humanity's need for art."

"Need?"

"Instinctual need. Oh, yes. We've always done it, and always will. Some better than others."

"Some more relevant?"

"The evening's buzzword. Yes. Undoubtedly."

"Oh, come now. A very Bosch thought."

"Hieronymus? Or were you implicating Germans in general?"

I'm trying to be amusing in the old sense — showing interest by being interesting.

I tell him, "Relevance to the human spirit is the drive all artists want, I think. Beauty helps to show in some light what other things struggle to hide. It makes relevant all war scenes, or a gnarled bust. And Rembrandt's etchings, in one of which you'll find in the foreground corner a dog dropping a shit in determined squat. But not and never the vapid, arid, color blotches all the rage these days among the bourgeois 'collectors.' Barmie! I think I got the theory into one sentence this time."

"You speak passionately about your subject, Minus. I'll give you that over so many art-school artists. Too many of them for me to bother with, anymore." The baron pulls out a cigar from an inner pocket. He halts me with a touch on the forearm, and, turning away from the wind, lights the stogie. Blue smoke pouring from his mouth, he says, "I've seen plenty of those young artists in New York, Rome, London — God, that city has more desperation in its artists than Paris, which is always trying to remake the nineteen-twenties scene." We resume our walk. "These perpetual students don't have what you say. They don't have much of anything. High prices. So every artist has those."

"Hmm. Thanks for the compliment. I try not to be too hard on the degree-holding artists. Most had only been looking for direction. It takes a few years once out from under the teachers' downy wings to become what you could have without those overseeing critical eyes — and the student mentality to always please Teacher."

"Go to war to become the man?"

"Not so transformational for me, perhaps. But take this for what it's worth: 'Go to war to see the kind of man you are.' "

We cross the street somewhere in the 80's blocks, where cars are light this Thursday evening, away from the commotion and traffic snarls around Park and Grand Central Terminal. I hear the tacky sound of wheels over hot pavement (cooling now, past sundown), and somewhere from above the canned laughter of a television sitcom played too loudly. I walk with my head down to keep note of the sidewalk cracks. The streetlamps make our shined shoes gleam the color of a harvest moon.

The baron says to me, "Money doesn't interest me, Minus. I'd give it all away tomorrow. And again the next day."

"Okay. You can give it to me then," I think. But I'm not going to bite at that one. He's a nice man and my benefactor in spades. Only, sell that can of botulism to the starving runaway huddled in a filthy doorway outside the bus station. Add raindrops. Or tears; not such a cleansing analogy. This isn't Bosch's garden. It might be Rockwell after eating the fruit of knowledge. If he were so lucky, that is.

"So shall your theory change again?" Baron Raspe tokes heavily on his cigar. It smells like the air expelled from a hot bicycle inner tube.

"Shift, not change, is the word I recall using," I correct him. "But let me replace theory with 'vision,' something that needs – hell, demands – refreshment every so often, like a pro golfer who takes a month off after a demanding schedule that has produced a glorious win at the sixteenth hole."

"Sixteenth? There are eighteen holes in golf, sport."

"Why wait till the end? Save some spirit in reserve, if you can. That's my motto. We all need more the next time out. We all need a motto."

"I feel like you're talking in parables."

"Please, no Jesus references. While all publicity is good — even among friends, and even bad publicity — we still remember what happened to The Beatles after Lennon's arrogant comparison."

Upstairs at the classy address, kisses are proffered for the cheeks of the ladies; a smooth, fast handshake to Viscount Bruce, after he gives the baron a clutching double-handed grip and a winning smile. The FaceCards surround my canvas bag and me in the viscount's well-lit foyer. They're like kids. Spoilt kids.

I set up the slide projector on the card table (no less posh than the maharani's, only with less pedigree: twentieth-century czarist), the felt cover protected by a tea towel. Before I show the few slides I have, taken by Belinda at the Beehive, I pass around the sketches I made beginning that night after Karen K led me to the Guggenheim. I'm quick to watch the effect the images make on my patrons. Freifrau Frisse and Maharani Smrtee look at them with businesslike expressions. They hold the edges of the paper. Before long, the pages are passed from one set of hands to the other. Then the sketches make a second trip around the table. The men's faces look to be made of flexible rubber. Their lips part or close, eyes fold when inspecting the hairsbreadth details in a face, and across hands or lips.

I have a feeling they'd like to discuss what they see now by themselves, minus me in attendance. That's fine, but they'll have to wait because we're here to play poker; I had planned to show the sketches and slides at the end of the evening. Not because that would have been after they'd had drinks, but for the time it would give me to escape shortly after I presented them the prototypes to my sculpture cycle.

But now their eyes are on me and they have smiles, genuine signs of pleasure, of appreciation. This goes two levels: I've brought them what they asked for, and I've shown them that my work, good work, is in progress. They congratulate me, one at a time, in turn, from lowest to highest rank among them. I think they had worked this out beforehand. Such protocol escapes me, though I'm learning.

I ask for the lights to be dimmed, and focus the first slide onto a screen that the viscount has prepared before my arrival. The screen stretches up high in front of the fireplace, and covers the viscount's Cy Twombly. So much for cross-cultural protocol.

Belinda's multiple views of three Mythos in different stages of progress pop from the silver screen like they stand alive in the room with us. This is how I see my sculptures, anyhow. In the moon-glow lamplight cast by the reflecting screen, the FaceCards have glad lines wiped into their expressions.

In the dark, Viscount Bruce says something I think the others feel is their birthright. "Isn't it marvelous to appreciate art? The freedom to pursue an aesthetic quality in life is an extra dimension. Like being able to fly where others can only walk. More marvelous to have art for your own enjoyment, every day. Why not create an entire aesthetic ambiente?

"Can't we play poker now?" I think. A while goes by before I get my wish.

If there was one night I should lay down some heavyweight hands, the FaceCards would not begrudge me this night to spill out paper money from their alligator billfolds and gold money clips. But I'm dealt lackluster hands of twos, fives, and nines (not even worthy for sucker bets) to their threes-of-a-kind and straights. Freifrau Frisse drops a king-high club flush.

Gossip keeps the game and the evening light, fun. I knew this game; I am being recruited, and they want to see how much fun they can have with their shoves and prods. I don't mind; we must all suffer through such happy-slappy gauntlets. These social runs far outweigh the significance the official ones can make on us. The level of sweat beaded on one's forehead and chin serves as litmus paper. Tonight, mine feels dry. It's the success of my Mythos sketches. My deal with the FaceCards is a mere formality, where last week it was not, and Belinda was sharp tongued. I'll let them talk together, alone; but now I want to have fun. I can still afford to lose a few dollars to make them feel superior.

I'm usually able to make my turn at gossip eventful. I don't engage in child-play anymore, and suddenly telling tattles about Alfred and Binny would appear to my flush of noble refugees that I were disloyal. It's a special, social error, among the FaceCards, to hear silence at the table after you've begun a story where the others are expected to kick in with ribbing or ribald comments. This is to suffer the taste of salt rime; like swallowing your own silent tears.

I tell them, "I came across Karen Kosek again. We exchanged words." I had their ears now. "When I spoke to her, she threatened to pull a knife on me."

"Did you run?"

"Minus, you're not supposed to talk with those people. They have cast aside society. We should do them the favor of treating them likewise."

"They are their own islands. Fiefdoms of one."

"I don't think she's a bag lady," I say. But I don't dare begin to tell them why I think this, much less that I know otherwise. This is sport; tittle-tattle. It matters little that I'm lying through my eye-teeth. "She's in some sort of self-imposed exile. I've heard from other people that she was a hell-raiser among the literati and socialites after they accepted her into their circles. To her, I imagine, that was always going to be a trial run. Maybe a test that had no right answers."

"She saw too much of the limelight," Baron Raspe says. "And that scorched her personality. My dear maharani, can you top up my glass, please? That's something I read about your bag lady. You know, before. Then she went slum native. She tucked in down at a Bowery flop-house. Went to the mattresses, as the wise-guys used to say. Documented? Not sure. Scuttlebutt. That's New York society, though, right? There's a reason we four hardly find ourselves invited to such events. We're aliens!"

"All you have to do is look at Truman Capote and his legacy. Yikes!"

I'm on and off my turn at the gossip wheel without having to say another word. The FaceCards, on the other hand, cherish tittle-tattle like teenagers watching porn.

"An apocryphal story?" says Viscount Bruce. The maharani has egged him on for a ripper. "Okay. Then you'll have it." He clears his throat, ever the stage-spotlight ham. "My half-cousin comes from the line produced by the Bastard of Burgundy."

"One of his own bastards?"

"Certainly so. The very same. My family wouldn't be party to common bastardy. Nicknames like that need heirs to the throne, as it were."

"Brucy, is that really a story? I mean – sorry – but it has no middle or ending."

"If you insist." The viscount drops his cards face down and tucks one hand into the other on the edge of the table. "The Bastard had himself a country wench while out riding of an evening. When her water broke nine months later, the father of a new bastard line opened his eyes on a mean world. Meaner. Jump now some five hundred years. My half-cousin has only recently returned from a year in Burgundy. He'd become all genealogical, rootsy and nostalgic; don't ask me why."

A flourish of head shakes from these exiled aristocrats admit their incredulity.

"Seems the news was that the brothers and father of some society bitch routed cousin James from town about ten months ago because he had just knocked her up good and plenty. Her own new bastard is named Gillian."

The freifrau chuckles into her diamond bracelet. "I do enjoy irony."

"Well... quite."

We complete the hand; Maharani Smrtee wins seven dollars. She shakes the coins in her cupped hands, like it's a maraca. I deal out only the seventh hand of the night. The mantel clock strikes ten bells.

Yes, they are all so good at this, their life among the clouds: winks and nods; small laughter and bouts of guffaw. I kick in with always less volume than the rest, because they like to hear themselves roar like animals. They revel in teaching me, the neophyte, the flawed pearl amongst the polished jewels, their game. On the other hand, I have the notion of playing the anthropologist, observing bonobos practicing rituals which are oddly familiar, but garbled through translation. Their point is to inspire envy in me.

Only my thoughts betray them on this. With their gestures of normalcy, they only make themselves miss, all the more, their former lives at court.

CHAPTER 16

With a pull of his finger, Henry invites me into The Parkview's lobby, while he glares at my three panting guests. Ms Cowper, Rasputin, and Napoleon snarl diminutively and tug at their leads wrapped in my hands. They look as if they're dancing in places, a cha-cha; or they look like they're running on hot sand.

Sweat runs down from Henry's temples in the tepid morning air. An hour ago, the thermometer read eighty-four degrees. I step into the air-conditioned foyer with Rasputin leading his mutt-mates at my feet, their eyes aglitter with possibilities for adventure, tongues lick-lick-licking their spotted mouths. The pups are well trained, I have no fear they'll be good, and they heel at the slightest tug on the leads. I hold these high to keep their heads up, even if they'd rather graze on the plush green carpet in the foyer like three baby goats. Ms Cowper and Napoleon sneeze; Rasputin lifts his hind leg, but only to scratch his ear.

"This better be for real," says Henry, keeping notice of the dogs' subtle movements. His voice is business casual, even soothing, as though he has reassured himself of something about me that he doesn't like, but will wait to see how an advantage can be found. The house Dick is nowhere in sight. Henry says, "Keep those dogs from barking, if you'd please. I'll call upstairs." The solicitous doorman shall confirm a guest's announced invitation. I sense he wants me to be wrong in the smallest way, so he can hurt me with his size-fourteen hands.

We follow Henry to the front desk, behind which he's retreated to dial his phone. He speaks, listens; twice he looks at me, once with raised eyebrows while the voice from the receiver bids attention. I don't hear anything, not even the tinkle of canned speech. Henry has molded the earpiece against the side of his head, as though that end of phone has swallowed his ear. His final reply is as folded and crisp as a linen napkin.

"The lady asks that you wait on her in the park. She says you'll know where."

"I do, Henry. Thank you."

Two gold teeth shine from between his lips. He's telling me that nothing should go wrong with my liaison with Karen K. "She may be awhile, Mr Orth. You might consider getting your little friends back home. Ms Kosek doesn't much like pets."

"Pets, no — that was my guess, too. But everyone likes dogs," I say, as if to disagree would be an ungodly act.

I've been training Napoleon to balance on his hind legs for treats. He's not doing well. He either doesn't know enough to listen, and thinks the bait treats are his by right, or else he chooses not to hear me. Do animals, like partners in a long marriage, have selective hearing? Pets are smarter than we caregivers will spare to imagine. Napoleon much rather likes to leap for his treats. If I hold a liver chip low, he stretches up and bites my fingers. Too high, and he leaps with a dog's sense of balance that, unlike a cat's, sends him backwards to land all akimbo and with a thud, which startles him into defensive action. He barks at his embarrassment and is itching for a fight. This is only funny the first time. A repeat makes me feel like I'm picking on a little kid.

The worst of it yet is when I use Mrs Cowper to demonstrate for Napoleon what I want him to do. Mrs Cowper dances for her treats like a ballerina; she even does a grand battement à la seconde when I lead her sideways. Napoleon won't have any demonstrations, though, and takes Mrs Cowper's prowess as an insult, for which he attacks her when she's most vulnerable. Of course, the adage "beware a woman scorned" (in this case, tackled) serves doubly powerful in the animal kingdom. The evidence backs up my claim. Mrs Cowper recovers in a flash and, in retaliation, attacks little Napoleon's nut sack. This might just be the funniest moment in dogdom.

While I work with Napoleon I keep an eye on the path. Soon enough, Karen K comes along. I'd hoped for a surprise, perhaps a stylish dress to match the voice she treated me to yesterday. Her want is to appear cloaked in stench, however, disregarding the matching couture of someone who writes so eloquently of beauty. She walks hunched over, with a heavy pretense of listing left. Could this be her newfound sense of beauty? Her gnarled features poke from beneath that silver wig (my early credulity had disallowed the curls being fake, only rearranged for effect), red nose and pebble-dull eyes. Only a crooked cane would polish a witching effigy.

Rembrandt's sketch asserts its power on my memory. When looked at for only a small while, I find it easy to see burgmeister settle into the background, elevating the grotesqueness of the gutter woman who clumsily assumes central imagery. Is it vulgarity in an age of refinement that makes us scrutinize? As in life, so in art, people want beauty to surround them, and only beauty. Rembrandt defied those rules and earned criticism for it. He responded with an etching that showed a dog shitting in the street. What fun!

I wonder if her coarse language will spew like the contents of a sump. So be it. I'll accept these conditions. People are seldom what you make them into — through want or hope, or even the process that transmutes life into art.

Napoleon jumps at a liver chip I hold inches beyond his snapping chops. Only he doesn't reach with his body, but hops on trampoline legs. Three weeks' training, kaput. The fault lies not in the dog, but in myself. Karen stops ten feet from us and digs her hands into her pockets.

The British philologist, R.W. Mantel Pursewarden, writing about the silence that comes when you meet the person you've sought through strenuous journey, asked the question, "Is it the disbelief of the find that spurs this phenomenon?" I'd rather hope it's the end of the hunt that leaves us mute. Glory — large or small, washed in meager mental triumphs — is short-lived, and its appearance is often all we need (and, sometimes, more). It was Freud, the old fraud, who said we remember our failures far longer, and with deeper feeling, than our successes. I disagree and have art living on three continents as proof. Although I've not tallied the two, my charitable feelings on "self" veil quite successfully the rude, misshapen lumps of loss. Likewise, it has been said by someone less known, "Beware of whom you've put on a pedestal, as they usually turn out to be unusual bastards."

"I thought I told you 'between' your doggie dates," says Karen. She has used her own voice.

"I considered that a suggestion, not a rule," I say with bright appeal.

Napoleon fights with my hand. I relent and toss him his treat before tying his lead to the bench leg. Karen edges nearer and Napoleon leans forward to sniff the multi-colored stink bag. I put out a palm to block him and hedge him backwards, beneath the bench, where he breathes hot breath on my hand but settles next to his sleeping companions.

"I would have liked a more urban reality to match your voice," I say. I offer the seat next to me, and as alternative the bench further down. It's the dance of legislation. She looks up the path, then back down from where she'd come. She sits next to me. My surprise at her closeness becomes evident (my chest tightens while my knees come together) because she sits up and studies me. I see the same hat, same painter's pants, a nattered cord jacket with shined buttonholes. What must Henry think? Or her neighbors and, thus, the building association? The puzzle that is Karen K's life is expanding by hundreds of pieces.

"Did you win?" she asks.

I look down at the dogs, at my hands. I realize she's referring to the sculpture symposium. "You know it's not... it's never a true competition."

"Says who?" she snaps. Her mercurial eye traps me in the tangle of indecision. "Minus the Artist, we play games with ourselves all the time. An act betoken of our peril. It's our way of gauging the world. Naturally so, but.... When we do this, we divvy the moments as wins and losses." She picks lint from between the dried paint splashes on her pants, rolls it between her fingers, and drops the ball to the ground. "Well then?"

"I won," I reply. "But they didn't give me my prize." It's not so lazy an answer as I'd thought it could be.

She pulls out her pencil and that bunch of tightly pressed notebook paper, opens to somewhere at the back, where I see pencil marks on the verso page. She quickly writes a few words, or a whole sentence, and then she stuffs the pages into a different pocket. She belches loudly and blows the gaseous effluent through a waving hand in front of her mouth. Part of the act, I think; she won't want the public to see a bum as anything but what they need to see. Is Karen playing with perception? Does she measure her wins and losses at the end of each day? I want to know these answers without having to ask questions. The lint picking has told me something important.

We look at each other from the side, through half-closed eyes that transfer careful interest. The fold of her lids, the unusual sideways squint from which she watches, imparts that she wonders if I want a friend. No! I don't need that. And if she believes I do, she'll bolt. I have to declare myself as out of the ordinary — like herself — because she's seen ordinary, and has stripped every piece within her reach of its veneer, tint, enamel, words, images; what have you. Because our meeting is a man-woman encounter, there is a special consideration: leave no doubt that the mating ritual is not the purpose. On this, I must trust my intuition. 1. No strapping guy at his fittest age (looks & physique) would dare sully his reputation to hit on a bag lady; 2. Our age difference (twenty-six years) must be enough to shy her away from that idea.

The change we seek must be subtle. She wants something, otherwise why is she here? She could have stopped after my Guggenheim rant; and why not (from her perspective); I'd gotten something, while she stood spectator. I see the change like this: art relationships are important, but hardly essential, and how you get to them (and how they fail) tells a lot about yourself. I no longer fall into the trap where you demonize your art lover after the romance has disintegrated. To look within yourself is where real discovery can happen. Karen K's medium, I must remember, has always been words. She makes them dance to a repertoire of ideas linked to images. And this is what we settle on. It comes suddenly, easily.

Her voice flows from beneath the cap and wig and I inhale her words and their essence. The subjects are general, for a time. Who's to know where and when voice establishes a path? Charting a course is like reading star charts without a legend. There is only one constant between people: practice.

Over the yawns of my dogs I say, "Your trepidation leaves me at a loss."

"In jeopardy?"

"Maybe... doubtfully though. Either way — I'm confused."

"I thought the distinction clear enough."

"That's a joke."

She leers. "Truth."

"Opinion."

"Supposition! Based on evidence observed and evaluated. This isn't the first time we've met."

I start. "By whose –" But she holds up a mealy hand that stops me.

I wonder how quickly she gets herself to look so awful. She couldn't have gone to bed in those clothes, not living at such an address. (If she's truly one of those people who collects newspapers until every room is overstuffed and cockroach infested, never taking her garbage out, toilets running over to drain shit-water through the neighbor's ceiling below, Henry would be obliged to frog-march her out of The Parkview. Christmas bonus be damned!) Wearing grime cannot be as easy as its opposite; a woman puts on make-up with purposeful steps to highlight her beauty and to mask the flaws. The ugly I see beside me stuns the senses, of the sort from a crippled genus: traumatic and disgusting, disquieting. Who is this wretch? I may not, after all, use this woman as a model for my Mythos. She fails me, she debases the concept, and collapses as a classical figure because she fails as a human of consequence. She represents the ones of us who've quit, the "given up" of society lore. My Mythos may be old and ugly by comparison to their youthful, celebrated, mythic selves in god-image character and proportion, but they will not have lost themselves. Beside me Karen is their antithesis. And I am sickened. Her kind of ugly tries to adumbrate my newfound language to identify beauty.

But what am I saying? These are contradictions to art's intent, to my edict; to Rembrandt's gutter woman. She has her own beauty; she plays her role. Karen must have, too. I need to control my thoughts. The air is close beneath the trees. People stare at the dogs, but only at us in passing.

"Think of five lives," Karen says. "Supine women. Colors mix. Select cotton is prepared for this canvas — but not another. The moment is alive and the problem elegant in your evaluation. Now solve the riddle."

"Lop off their heads," I suggest, for which she tries a cruel smile. We've spoken in code. I don't have its key, and must grope through the dark while hoping that light comes up before my time is up. "You're flirting," I say.

"I was hoping I wouldn't have to ask at all," she replies.

"Truly. Honest injun... I'm not that kind of boy."

She had not asked what I meant by your trepidation.

Karen K says, "I have no idea what artists' groups talk about these days. I hope they discuss art and not some theoretical hash. Marxist interpretation is possibly the worst, though Deconstructionists haven't done anything for art but confuse the public (particularly the ones who listen fervently) and nearly as often confuse themselves. This must be the case for the artist, too — confusion; maybe simple fear — since their work the last two decades has been the reflection of eviscerated dreams. Certainly they've confounded the masses, who seem already to have had difficulty finding their television remotes and the ability to assuage their hyper-transient boredom, not to mention their sugar-wired children. Enough!

"Do artists even get together anymore? I mean to drink and talk art — the biggies and how they were influenced (or not) by color, technique, form, vision — not that co-op talk of commissions and sales. Café night-owling was its own art form at one time. An era stretching generations! Pushkin met with fellow poets in St Petersburg for spirited recitations and readings. Parisian painters used the Cafés Guerbois and Taranne as watering holes, public places where they could thumb their noses at the arrondissement bureaucrats. Even Greenwich Village had its moment in the moonglow. I think American artistic good-fellowship went as hard as an old man's prostate after so much money flowed into the scene. Jealousy kills the cat, not curiosity. Tell me SOHO is not a cesspool of greed and I'll kick you in the balls, Minus."

I have a response. "Is it really selling out to earn real money for one's work? After toiling in obscurity for years, a morsel or two that fills the bank account, for at least a while, helps. Perhaps it replenishes one's imagery. Something must. That's about all an artist can dream of without getting the cerebral slap. You know that I'm not talking about 'these days' either. Funny, I said the opposite thing at some artists' roundtable. 'Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself.' "

Karen stares; she knows whom I've quoted. I wonder if she has suddenly thought of herself in its context. And then she says, "There hasn't been anything unique since surrealism. Not anything that says something about life. Artists have a fear that rivals will steal their ideas. Which they do." Her hands jump in her lap like frogs as she talks. It's a habit that annoys me. "All the YBA's work is strictly manufactured, no inspiration of artistic form; no beauty there whatsoever. Social realism marketed as art! As if anyone wants that shit in their home. Museums have wasted millions to bring along a movement the critics praise but can't say why they praise it without bringing up psychology. Where the fuck is the beauty in that? Originality is a shallow pond, Minus, not an ocean. A shallow pond during a heat wave. By the way, that still means something. My opinion."

"You didn't like the literati schmooze scene, did you?" I ask. A yawn ripples her lips, but she holds it back. So I prod her. "The hobnobbing, the acolytes dressed in Hollywood or City couture. I mean, you never saw merit in that bit of artist-gathering." The subtlety of her attentiveness-boredom threshold — finger gestures or sighs, tics and chewed yawns — makes my pores gush sweat with the regularity of my pulse beats.

"Failure and success don't apply," she says. "The enigma becomes the art. Question: Is it worth creating? Yes or no! Question: Is it worth looking at? Yes or No. Not making just one piece, but pairs and triplets. Octuplets! Art that you can look at for five seconds or five minutes in complete separation from the world moving at a dead run — and a day later, you look again to find something new in the work or from the metaphor it holds, something that imagines reality and truth for you. No matter its falseness against your experience or brainwashed beliefs. One wins out. You can guess which."

If this is what I've wanted, why I've pursued Karen, then it has come in a gush.

"That's always been my purpose," I say. "The ideas, the art –"

"Then perfect that," she commands. "Your work matters more than you."

"I've got –" I stop myself, take a break for thought, and get myself in line. "I'm looking for an original form. If it isn't original, it has at least got to be new."

"You've already found it. I saw." She sees me hesitate and pounces. "Do you know what that is?"

I continue as though this news hasn't fazed me. We both know it has. "Nothing we can find anywhere today. Or, if we do, it's already in the museums, gathering dust. Maybe from two thousand years ago."

She shakes her head; apparently I'm not getting it. She says, "Primal is good only if you sell it to niggers on hunner-sikky-fid street."

I wonder how Peter N would see Karen K in this... performance. He might disregard her out of self-respect for his race. He might laugh. (I once asked Pete to describe his ideal woman. He said, "I need to learn signing for the relationship to last." That's good, I told him; so much the Bad-Boy-Bastard. He replied, "Thanks for showing up before the laugh track came on." At least you're willing to do some work for the woman, I suggested. "A lot more than many men would," he admitted. "Or could.") Otherwise Peter would (could) trade barbs with Karen until they both fell off their chairs, in love or for respect, then leave with the promise to never see each other again.

"Not that kind of primal," I say. "The myth figures... they're unique because they aren't stylized to be the gods that people take them for."

She chuckles low and lets it build to a laugh. Through the middle rumble of her own humor she prunes the noise. "I heard a sense of purpose in your epiphany that most people cannot grasp as a concept. It's not that they're dumb, don't get me wrong, they simply don't think this way. Never even thought to try. And that's the crime. The few of us who can, and do, through practice or our innate sense of beauty, we understand the near-slave conditions under which artists live to realize a single masterwork. Not all artists. Only the best."

"Have you ever...?"

"Never. My vision has been only, and ever, seeing clearly what the author and artist have attempted. Practically speaking, I failed true-talent searches. That represents my lone link between ninety-nine percent of human beings. As a fre –" she catches her voice and looks far afield, down the path. I don't follow her gaze, and instead look at her face, where, on it, her eyes have sunk into their sockets. In a moment she recovers. "A friend once told me," she says in a shallow tone, "that I could barely find my house keys. We were in college. She was right. That's when I began to take advantage of myself and write.

"The non-possible, that which should never be achieved if you hope to keep desire's flame lit in your imagination, artists must possess this, and so create from what is available. This becomes the non-possible achievement. Past, present, and the look ahead. Picasso's Stare, I once called it. The last time it showed itself was Picasso. At any rate, he had it still at his death, and he outlived a few others who nearly copied it — but no more remain... of course, this is only an aside.

"Once the vision is made art, where all its beauty has been extracted from your mind, the non-possible is achieved. Then you lose it forever. It's necessary for you to lose it. You do not want to try and keep it, or search for that stare again." Her eyes have closed, her hands now folded across her too-small corduroy jacket into which she's stuffed herself, like over-enthusiastic taxidermy. "Otherwise you cannot find another — the next more beautiful non-possible."

She opens her eyes as a sudden burst of noise from bicycle brakes frames her last sentence. The squeal wakens the dogs, who begin to bark. I whirl and kneel on the rough asphalt to corral them in my arms. When they've calmed down, I turn and find Karen gone. A scribbled page of notepaper torn from a diary sits on the bench. Her writing is small, with a curlicue loop on the top of the first letter. Call again.

We meet three times this first week. Four times the next, then twice the following. Description is hardly easy; this is an attempt to replace the paints back into the flattened tubes of a thousand colors slathered on the palette. Our talk is just that — the weather, potholes, flowers, tourists, crime, bathroom gadgets, the history of Egyptian math, paper mills, fast food versus road kill, Harlequin romances, hand lotion, the errata of dreams — all are associative talk to stimulate the next subject or, somehow, one loops onto a previously thought we'd determined was exhausted. Sometimes I doodle in notebooks while we talk; Karen writes with her pencil on the folded paper sheets. She never lets me read her scribbles; I don't show her my doodles. Twice she grabbed the book from my hand for a look. I don't dare return the joke. The trees and grass grow around us; people scurry to work, to market, to dates and trysts, to piss behind bushes; we see them in register, take note for later retrieval; clouds move from west to east; the Earth rotates on its axis; the planet moves a little further along on its orbit toward the next solstice.

Karen is a work facilitator, I realize, demanding "more and better" (I have this feeling it's mostly of herself, but....) — demanding I understand what my work leads to. "Stick to that with no diversion," she said. She presses me to know more about my project at its foundation: the elemental story, the history of each Mythos, and the esoteric details any artist should possess. I tell her how I've found the myth figures in the faces of everyday people.

"Poseidon stared at me from across the room, standing in the balcony doors. Scruffy-haired, wild, with rheumy eyes — but only one is blood-red — it doesn't matter that my Poseidon was a woman. She stood halfway outdoors, holding a cigarette into the breath of the exhaling house. And... these are not always the faces of the old; or under certain conditions and movement, a walk, a stance, the rabid gesticulation of anger. When they frown, cry, argue, sleep, faint, laugh, yawn, fart, cough, and etcetera, each is the exaggeration of his or her own likeness. I notice how people yawn one day and the next, and then I remember last week's yawn. It matches; but no two people are alike. Who are these people? Do they know? Maybe never in their life, but I have to know.

"I asked myself one day, 'Why aren't these people gods? Beneath mortal flesh, at the moment of... what?... at that instant, they reveal their selves.' I had just caught a laugh, a delightfully childish cackle by Thetis on reminding herself of her folly by dipping Achilles into the River Styx while just clasping his heel. It was a rueful sound behind all its strength, laced with the irony to befit a demi-god's death."

Karen scribbles something in her bundle of paper sheets.

Another day.

"What about children?" I ask. Her gesture chides the very thought.

"Forget them," she says. "They have no reasoning worthy of the artist's notice. That the boy pointed out the emperor's nudity does not prove children have some unadulterated perception. They merely state the obvious. If your art is obvious, give that up and go work on Wall Street, or at the fucking fish market. One of those madhouses can make you that pile of American-Dream money. Which is all to say that you'll only always earn cab fare, Minus the Artist, until you make people discover you through how and what your sculptures tell them about themselves. Be thirty years ahead of your time, right now, and people will want to anoint you."

(Cab fare is Karen's phrase for making a comfy living: "Cabs ain't cheap," she tells me another day. "If you don't ride subways and buses to get around, you belong to the robust elite that value time and space over the American Church of the Almighty Dollar.")

Sometimes I think I'm in over my head with her; other times it's me, the jester, caught peering seedily at the court attendees he's supposed to imitate without their knowledge.

Meanwhile, I've been sculpting at the Beehive. Four Mythos carved in plaster stand completed. Another three are in subtle apotheosis to their reanimation from the sketches. The Mythos Project grows steadily, and excites me to the anxiety that what I do each day is knowingly the best I'll ever do. But I stop myself before the image of death casts itself as dream. My Mythos surround me in the honeycomb, their faces slowly multiply, watch me at work, waiting for when I'll admit another member to their ranks, eyes alert even if their faces sometimes hold the forlorn droop of a funereal friend.

Belinda has photographed the sculptures from three angles, and has had slides made, along with twelve-by-eighteen prints mounted on black foam core. Her work is indelible to my second sight of the finished statues. I stare at these prints and, on nights I return late, after showering away the day's plaster stuck in my hair and under my nails, I project the slides onto the living room wall, where I make an image larger or smaller. I have felt for their size and resolved to the best dimensions. Sometimes I walk into the light and set my body in the position of the figure, where the image becomes tattooed on my skin. "Beautiful," Belinda says; her voice is a whisper in my ear. When the projector has cooled and a wine bottle stands empty, the thought occurs to me that weeks have passed where I've not been with Belinda more than a couple hours during any day.

At night, though, yes, always there's Belinda at night, in bed and while we sleep, when the streets gurgle digestively through their subterranean intestines. I won't forsake her, not for anyone, or thing, or prize. Nor shall I stay away long without that tacit approval gathered from a phone call with the promise, "Work is going well, strong — I can't leave it." She must believe I have a lover. A dog's mother? An artist fuck-friend? Vendy — because she knows what Vee is like?

I don't know if she really believes this, but it is a subconscious emotion that teases out the thought. An anti-confession won't placate, only obscure. The payoff on success comes after hard work grabs its due share of your life, Belinda tells me. So there's nothing to confess — neither the sculpting time nor Karen's visits. I think she has convinced herself of this. In a few months, I make a promise to her, we'll be able to shave time from work for ourselves again. "More for Karen K, too," I think, and Belinda is unaware of this thought, and Karen insouciant.

Zeppo is happily envious of my activity and creation. I've invited him to look at some sculptures, ask questions, and most of all have something to say. He shows his gameness by testing me. "The Greek myth figures — your Mythos — they were gods, most of them immortal. They didn't age, Minus. Look at all the art passed down to us."

This isn't an attack on my subject, per se, nor my method; he wants to understand my artistic hallucination that began this cycle. While Peter N is a practical painter of the mind's interior, Zeppo is a theorist who paints. It's this extraordinary perception that I appreciate in him. We're sitting in my honeycomb, he on the stool and me in a club chair I've recently brought in on which I can relax and think. Zeppo has taken off his painter's cap, which has left his hair flattened on the top and sides, and bushy below the ears. His gray stubble is four days old and could sand orphans from a cast.

I answer him using the phrases of a miniature homily. "The gods were torn from the breasts of people, struck from the altars of worship. In worship they don't change, but in history they can become anything we humans devise, for our use or to deceive ourselves into believing. Art history, to name one, is well supplied by these impulses. This passage of time, this one, draws out the metaphor: Mythics in their Twilight. Mythos."

"Apollo carrying a set of golf clubs?"

"A bit like Poseidon's pool floaty — but I might scratch that prop. Too contemporary. I'll find another. Yes, okay, kitschy, some. But, no. I'll leave all that to Taos drop-ins and Sedona lesbians. "

"Minus! Remember what Peter said about wearing the elitism halo? You've just pulled yours down to make a cowl." He scratches the side of his head. "My original question stands: Why return to the classics?"

"The point is to bring their experience, the gods, forward, but along with that comes their knowledge and experience. I won't hold to any conclusion that everything has been done in art that can be done. Art does not need to be strange and weird to continue. If that's the command from galleries and critics, then they have plenty to choose from. If you've been to any mod-art museum, lately, you'll find the least populated galleries are those with monochrome paintings, lighted 'trash-heap' sculptures, and installation pieces. The artists producing these don't know what they are, how it works as art — it refuses narrative, and only yells if there is a voice at all — or what it says about life."

"That's always been the important element," Zeppo says. "I agree with you. It's only the 'how to' that has evolved, not 'what if.' Okay, okay, you'll argue art has devolved into the obscure, the esoteric. I don't get this. Nothing says art has to make sense with our reality, or match that reality. Each of us has a different reality, regardless of our shared experience and the ordinary things we see every day, accepted like the time we read on a watch's face."

I look around at the sixteen maquettes of the Mythos seated across the table like an audience, as if they can help speak for me. Someday they shall, in their way. These are the faces of hope, tinged yellow by 60-watt bulbs into a murky despair. They didn't lack confidence. Their indecision for value truncated the effort. I walk over to three figurines, and uncover them: Narcissus at his pool of water, now at rest, his back against a tree stump, eyes to the sky, a squint so slight that his jaw line is slack, cheeks rigid with the sense of sun-stretched age, like Hellenic ox leather — and the wryest smile of contentment you can find anywhere among the aged class; Aphrodite's breasts are now less full, fallen with time and inertia, a shift covering her quietly gained Mother Earth figure, the sign of sedentary pondering over blissful youth — legs like dinner-table posts, toes knuckled — she eats grapes with the flourish of the happy glutton; and Zeus yet sits on his throne, now a mere pile of sticks, laughing like an idiot, but the knowing idiocy of dreams realized, and spent, upon whose memory he has slumbered restfully for millennia. Beside him, stacked in a basket, lie his thunderbolts, tarnished with age and pitted by acid rain.

"Who says gods must stay young, or youthful, or powerful, or beautiful? That was all for the poets and painters' daydreams and jealousy plots. Art should be unusual, it must take hold of us, tease us to look closer. Scene and color and movement and stillness — no, wait; let me talk — when I say 'unusual' I don't mean to say, or invite, the weird or simply odd."

"For me," Zeppo says, "the 'unusual' in art is a visual exercise. I like to see those images not ordinary to our experience. Is aging unusual? No. Call it a collective experience, for the moment. We're bombarded by ordinary objects every day; it's the collective boredom that makes the experience real. People want what's new. Are aging gods unusual? You think so. I can see how you make that work in your Mythos as the unusual. But are they new?" He lifts his hands, uncertainty in the gesture.

"Listen," I say. "We want to find ourselves in another place and time, and in fields of dreams, whenever possible. Movies are made this way, and books, too. So why not art? To say 'It's been done!' is no answer. Some of us people-watch, some bird-watch, some read books and write in journals. What are all of these? The ways we make the world into a sensory system. That's my feeling of it. If you give me painted squares on a canvas, or a twisted piece of metal welded atop a pedestal, or string hung from a ceiling into the shape of a triangle that you can walk through, it's these ideas and objects that have given us the phenomena of spending a mere three seconds to look at art. That's partly because we're made self-conscious when we don't know what to do with it."

"It's that very un-ordinariness, or not-as-usual, that makes bewitching possible, Minus. If any of us is nevermore bewitched, the essence of being human has become tainted."

"Scratches on the cave wall bewitch us still, Zepp, for the simple reason – among so many others – that we ask 'Why had they bothered?' "

"If you haven't already got it, you'll never get it."

"Seems I've heard those words not long ago," I say. "Give me a minute and I'll recap that. On second thought...." I leave this and move on. "Although, da Vinci finished only a half dozen paintings his whole life. I think I've got time."

"Look at his paintings, stupid. Most sort of suck. He did show others how art could be done. Is that genius?"

"Joyce wrote four books in twenty years."

"Two are nearly unreadable because he was more concerned with wordplay and purple prose than giving the world a story. Dostoyevsky before him, and Woolf after, did the hard work that made sense out of stream of consciousness. Shit, fella, if these are your emulatives, you'd best stick to dog walking. Am I taking you away from something important?"

"At least I'm no longer 'dildo face' or 'fuck-nut,' " I think (with glee).

"We're talking," I say. "That's something. I've got the afternoon. Maybe you haven't had lunch. How about... you pick the place."

She takes me to Fairway Foods, on 72nd Street and Broadway, where I'm given worse looks than the bag lady I follow around and whom I let pay the bill because she nudges me aside, pays with a handful of coins she holds with skin so soiled it might have been a ten-button glove. Her nails remain acutely manicured, though unpainted today. We go back to the park and make sandwiches. She sees on my face that I had thought she would take me to her apartment. Her thin lips say, "Not a chance."

Amsterdam Avenue crawls with daylight shoppers, off-the-path tourists, truant teens learning how to smoke cigarettes (poorly), and city workers dressed in orange jumpsuits. Neither of us understands why these people are outside now, in this heat. It's another heat wave day. Birds keep quiet in the trees, sparing their energy. Karen has said she believes in the Spanish siesta, though not the Italian or French varieties (!?), because the Spanish sleep through the heat while "the wops and frogs" sleep through their work.

At one-thirty, we dodge softened bubble gum buttons sticking to the soles of the shoes on the otherwise careless. Karen's Tourette's-mimed hand gestures castigate passers-by. We step into a small café with books on shelves and ceramic sugar bowls on tables. The flint-eyed waitress frowns heavily at me (I'm to blame for escorting the skell), but holds her tongue. Her nose she can't control, which wrinkles under the assault. I take a surreptitious sniff while Karen scans the menu with her face pressed close to the plastic covering, and detect only a sourness in the air around our table. I must be used to her dumpster odors, I realize, though I wouldn't have guessed this possible. Coffee is not a siesta drink, so she orders us Campari over ice. I don't know why. I accept my drink as though I'm a connoisseur. Pressed into a window seat, Karen shakes her silver curls, which glint like sea foam. While resting the bulbed glass on her lower lip, she asks me a direct question. My grin, watery from the Campari taken in this heat and on an empty stomach, reveals my youth.

"Sculpture helps me to understand the subject."

"A horse's head?"

"Yes, a horse's head. Also the eyes, the nose. Ears, mane, and hide. The skull."

Our conversations continually meander through time. I haven't thought of the equine figurines since getting back into the studio.

"Those are important," she says.

"Yes. They are important."

"Animals. Objects. Geometric shapes." She taps the table with her nails. "People?"

"Sure. People."

"Love? Matching people or — its pursuit. And sex?"

"You won't catch me fitting round pegs into round holes. That's not my art."

"You want to understand the physical space of the subject."

"When I sculpt now, I have a naked skeleton over which plaster takes hold. It's wet material, heavy and tacky and slow to dry. Slow enough. Nevertheless, I must work quickly. Plaster is smooth, or sometimes pocked and veiny, like a map that charts rivers. Lots of things come through my mind that aren't physical."

"What kind of things? Temporal?"

"All kinds. Yes. I try to catch one or two only. No more than that. No time. The rest are out of focus. But they are whole. Then I stop one, or two. Static but vague. The possible shows itself. I ask myself, What is it, though? For example, what I know — or if I know — about the relationship between this static object and Love. Or Beauty. Or Death."

"How about a person?"

"Sure, that. Dead people work well for this — like Richter's newsprint photo paintings, and Brady's war photos. Both of these are good examples, don't you agree?" She stares through this question. I wait, but she doesn't comment on the book that made her famous. She also knows I've used these names deliberately. Their use is too obvious, maybe. Any use of her past might be too much of one thing or another.

I relent, admitting, "It doesn't have to be a person."

She says, "It can be a stick." She peers into her glass, rattles the melting cubes to make a melody against the side.

"Just a stick?"

"Not any stick. A person is more dynamic."

"A person can be more dynamic," I say. "A stick falling from a tall tree, caught in the winds of a hail storm, is more dynamic than a person sitting in a chair contemplating the death of a lover. Or her polished shoes."

She says, "I see what you mean."

Right. "Why Karen K?" and "What does Minus want?" Third person narrative is my only defense, sometimes — for all the torment I spend under her delusions of self-as-bag-lady.

"A connection with the past!" I almost yell. Some nearby boys in blue glance our way; we're a mere distraction, but worth a look to make sure. "The golden age of criticism means something to me."

"You're about two-hundred fifty years too late," she says. "The names Johnson and Hazlitt should ring a bell."

"So you've got something on them: I call it Art's Second Sight. Hemingway called it –"

"Don't dredge up his spirit. 'Shit detector' is machismo bullshit. He should have used the gun before he gave his Nobel speech. That would have been his ultimate shit detector."

"Maybe you should have written fiction and not become a self-stylized ivory tower scion of counter-thought... that... or... whose probity –"

"Jesus Mary. Give that a break," she says. "Next thing, you'll be quoting Jacques Derrida to me, and then those cops'll give us a good New York beating because I'll climb across this table and scratch your fucking eyes out. Understand, plaster-caster, criticism is not the same thing as pulling down the walls to search for termites in the middle of a snowstorm. Now that's allegory for you!"

Too much time spent with stone and soot and myself. That's my first excuse. And other, more lunatic, artists. Of course there's my girl, the adorable Cornhusker, who's escaped flatland for a Kubrickesque concrete paradise. I should see (or know by now) if Belinda has forgotten about asking me to marry her. Strange though, how I say this to myself in that way; she never asked such a thing, only made a plea for me to ask her.

It's in the record.

Sometime in July our talk progresses through a cloudy foreground onto a hazy horizon: books & titles; flowers & color; dirt, clay, sand & watercolors; photographs & faces & monochromatic shades. This next item is for the expectation of the unforeseen (but not, suddenly, the summation of momentum, or the beginning of a new phase).

We are in her apartment, drinking coffee she has made in an old metal percolator, a 1960's model with a glass bulb top (before the drip-coffee revolution), its black electrical plug fit snugly in the pot's ass (my images have been influenced by her vulgarity). We hear a faint gurgle at our voices' interlude, and the water turns from copper to umber.

China cups make small bell sounds with each lift and replacement in the saucer's round cavity. I keep my cup close to my mouth because inside her apartment, with the windows closed, the stink flows off her clothes and comes at me in waves. It serves me with the nausea of a mountain road car race. I'm not used to this after all, I think in pensive reflection. Only the bitter aroma of the brew that flows up my nostrils keeps me from retching. She took her shoes off at the door and is in bare feet; pale skin with blue veins like rivers seen from the air, and pink toenail polish.

Lying on the table between the cups is an open copy of Sculpture Review. Her reportage of May's symposium is titled "Sweet Labor's Sweat" — I found my name in the third and the second to last paragraphs. Something about "the sawdust of minerals like felled trees break around your feet" and helping entertain the crowd. The nexus of her essay is lowbrow culture and high art trapped in the equivalent of a snow globe. Something bought while you wait your turn to board the Statue of Liberty ferry cruise.

Karen asks, "Do you want to make love to me?"

It's a between-sips suggestion. Lipstick bleeds over the edges of her mouth. Heavy blue eyeshadow sticks to her eyebrows like finger-painted clouds. Burnt cork has been scored across her skin, which has exposed the striations of middle age. Her eyelids sit half closed, squeezing the black pupils that crowd the pale brown of her irises. I think of accident-scene photos and third-rate portrait artists.

"Why do you ask?" I say.

"I'm sexually alert this month," she replies. "In fact, these past three months. Nothing's come my way, though."

I look at the effect of her outfit on this ornate kitchen. Brown slime has marred the back of her chair; some has dripped onto the marble floor. Her bare feet have touched it and left prints on the polished tiles.

"I want someone," she says. "So I've been aware of who I meet."

"You're looking around."

"I'm not a whore, Minus, nor a prostitute. My awareness is about being ready for those who show interest. I've been in this state all month. Correction, I said three months. That's right."

"And... How is that for you?"

"Nothing's come my way."

"Perhaps it's your fashion statement."

"You'd be surprised."

"I bet I would be at that," I think. To wit: a short walk through Times Square reveals shops that sell — like some anthropological thesis — the myriad proclivities humans display toward sex. Perversity, you ask? Nay, nay, says I: the simple activation of adult prurience.

"Why isn't M.O. whittling today? If not interested in me, then why the rejection?"

"I haven't rejected you," I say. "I don't want to know you that way." My eyes travel along the table, the magazine again, her byline in bold and, next to the open pages, my sculpture of the hand she took as a (what?) souvenir on that cool afternoon. It sits on a varnished wooden block. She's had it fired. Its red ceramic finish matches the place mats on her stone-sanded oak table.

She reaches to adjust her wig. Re-settling herself in the padded chair, she awaits my thoughts to replace the lame reply by which I've tried to distract her from her real goal. She waits a long time, a stance for which she shows patience, between which she stirs her coffee without touching the spoon against the sides of the cup, watching the whorls screw in on themselves, and finally pulls the spoon out to see the eddy spiral like a crippled toy top. Through all of this, she hasn't looked at me.

"No," I say. "No way." My eyes calmly wait for her reaction. When she only raises one eyelid, a singular deed of exceptional control given her explosive temperament, I explain to her my devotion to one woman, without going into unneeded details. Would she be so cavalier about her explanation for the bag lady dress? Not on her life, I think. In finality, I add, "I'm in love with Belinda. I should introduce the two of you."

Her hand, those manicured fingers, delicate and filthy like antique ivory piano keys gone through a war and somehow survived, toss aside my rejection and its suggested replacement. For a long while, the tepid liquid inside our china cups await the vibration of our speech.

CHAPTER 17

"Do you want me to make you come again?"

She holds my tumescent cock in her hand. The Sandman has thrown a blanket over my eyes with such comforting heaviness that her question swims to me on the music's rhythm. My brain is caught in a frizzle; the thought of another orgasm makes my loins shudder. With this last come, I have experienced two fatally beautiful orgasms within thirty minutes. On my mind most is sleep. I've sandwiched her shoulders, along with half her body, between my thighs in that last orgasmic flurry. My heartbeat flutters below brassy Jazz notes sluicing from a tabletop radio near the open window. There's nothing to hear from outside (and no one to hear us) because we're in the middle of a forest.

I try to answer. My mouth moves, my eyelids flutter. It's no use. Belinda takes pity on me; she was the aggressor this morning. She had had her share last night, and this morning, a half hour ago, she wanted "just to play." So there's only happiness on this four-poster bed in some stranger's Poconos cabin, west of the Penn-Jersey border.

Playtime over, Belinda slides her hand from my aching cock, where it rests like a wounded sea cucumber, washed onto the beach after a storm. She gives the little creature a kiss before she releases herself from my legs, and saunters bare-ass into the bathroom. Behind the closed door, I hear her laugh with devilish glee. Suddenly the sleepiness of those moments when she had me in hand, so to speak, lifts as quickly as it had descended. I take in a long, chesty breath and let it rush out. Not a bad life, I think.

My Mythos are alive. I've nearly decided on a title for the cycle: The Age of the Mythos; Mythos Aged; The Mythos. Something like that. Belinda has ideas, too. She's filling her diary with marketing ideas, appointments to view my archived pieces, and sample price lists. I've agreed to "talks" that I'll have about the Mythos cycle with interested collectors, but have promised her I won't reveal much. She'll have to be content. I won't talk about something that continues to gestate while the plaster on the early sculptures has gotten their coat of shellac.

Plaster was my cleverness for this project. All the changes of texture I'm looking for to replicate aging — in skin's depleted elasticity, and brittle hair and knobby joints, and diminished muscle tone — can best be made in plaster. In the brevity of time available to sculpt before its moisture sweats out and the material becomes brittle, I've created faces and bodies of the immortals that look more authentically used than if I had taken months chiseling marble. Next time this may be different, but now is my moment to feel humanness from the heart outwards, leaving the head to wrestle with craft and dimension.

Yet here I sit, in the Pennsylvanian woods, surrounded by tick-infested maples and sumacs. There's a stream close by that won't shut up. Our cabin sits on the side of a hill, two of its corners held aloft and level by cylindrical concrete posts, painted to resemble tree trunks. The lower brook babbles with such proximity to the sounds of a mud slide that at any moment I'm aware of this cabin's potential to toboggan down the steep hill. We'd be trapped inside, like a pair of dice in a cup. I'm almost afraid to walk the trail (its precipitate drop scares the bejesus out of me) leading from the wooden porch to the stream bank. As I stood on the deck yesterday, after we'd arrived at dusk, I imagined the crest of a hydroelectric dam, with nothing but air between my leap and its consequences a quarter mile below the free fall, although nothing like that threatens me here. Only my imagination. We've rented the cottage for three nights; I have two days to survive.

Belinda pokes her head around the bathroom door. "Minus, let's walk down the trail today. Get out of bed, you big wussie. Put on your hiking boots and find a walking stick. I saw some leaning in the corner of the closet. Let's get outside, for Christ's sake. This is your vacation!"

"Maybe I don't want a vacation!"

"I can't believe you don't hear train whistles in your head from all the tension of working so hard."

"That would be Count Basie tuning up the band." Basie is on the radio. I lie in bed. My leg sticks out the side of the sheet and hangs to the floor. The room temperature is wonderfully cool, and I could lounge in bed all day, if I were allowed.

Belinda doesn't realize that the work is what has made me happy, and that it was her stress we needed to escape. I won't say anything. There are sacrifices one makes in a relationship that are obvious and not worth mentioning. I don't consider my orgasms a sacrifice, so there's another reason to shut up and enjoy the ride. I pull the pillow from behind my head and debate the pitfalls of ticks, splints, abrasions, wet feet, sprained ankles and wrists, even the hunger built up on a long walk. Is there a hotdog stand somewhere close? Belinda amuses me with "wussie pouts" that are supposed to demonstrate "tough love" and get me off my ass. In the end, her laugh is irresistible when I finally overtake my inner bitchiness and look over my shoulder into the mirror to see how painfully bratty I've become in only twelve hours. "Jesus, you must hate me!" I say, hearing my voice soar to an octave below a child's whine. "No, no," Belinda says in her typical soothing Nebraska twang. "You're worrying about not working. I get it. I half agree, but you have to relax your mind occasionally. Besides, you can't work at the Beehive while Al and Binny are fumigating the place. Let all that fertility build, Minus Mouse. Try tantric imagery." This is our "phrase of the week" to suggest chilling out without the emotional dart of hearing that you're being a pain in the ass.

I rise from bed and go stand at the window. The tabletop radio is too loud, its dual speakers pumping out deep bass and high treble. It's an old Philco model, designed as a '57 Chevy front grill, with the speakers in place of its headlamps. The hood is magenta, the grill and bumper chrome. The metal construction gives it a real-deal replication in miniature, not the cheap plastic found in '90's reproductions. It's a great piece for the room and the cabin. I told Belinda we should buy one, or just steal this one and let the owners keep our deposit. She ignored my larcenous suggestion.

I turn down the volume and hear Chet Baker's horn smooth out the day's rising tempo. The windows have been slid back to let in last night's cooler air, and now, outside, the sounds of birds and bugs fighting for mating space back up Chet. Sunlight plays hide'n'seek through the trees, making everything green and yellow checkerboard. "Okay," I say. "I'm ready." I take the time to shower, and then dress hurriedly.

We step outside onto the deck and nature awakens us that even Central Park's woodsy Bramble can't touch. Belinda leads us down the long wooden stairway and steps gingerly onto the path, a mixture of loose earth, leaves, roots, and granite stones. "Careful," we say simultaneously, and hold out a hand to grasp each other. I slip two fingers through her belt loop for added safety.

The slope is not so steep as my mind had imagined yesterday evening looking down from the balcony. I've dressed for this. Jeans, a yellow T-shirt with a "Dickies" logo, wool socks to fit snugly inside my high-top hiking boots, and a straw hat (ticks!). Okay, I say, we can do this, and Belinda takes two steps when suddenly her feet slide out from under her, pitching me forward, down, down on my knees. They hit slick dirt and my elbows scuff along the ground, fingers still caught in her pants loops, and suddenly we're sliding forward like we're on an amusement park ride. The sound of the bugs and birds and the babbling brook come over us in stereo, our cries of "Ahhhhh!!!" singing lead. Belinda's Roughneck jeans prove rough enough and stop her momentum, which stops me when my shoulder collides against her back. My arms end up wrapped around her, like Buster Keaton hanging from the clock tower's minute hand. The straw hat rolls down the trail in front of us, like a happy puppy leading us toward paradise.

"Ouch," Belinda says.

"If you'll notice," I say, using my scraped elbows to push up from the dirt and back onto my knees, "in the movies we would have slid all the way down the hill, into the water, come up with makeup still on, clothes dripping with spring water, and laughter bursting from our brook-refreshed lungs. Then we'd have a splash fight, your top might get wet and become see-through, from which my initial arousal would find us making love on a grassy deer bed behind tall bushes and, later, we'd pick a basketful of wild berries you'd carry back to the country kitchen to make a pie. It's the typical romantic comedy, where having once hated each other, this endearing show of humility, suffering, and togetherness logically transforms us into the loving couple as the credits roll." I show her my scraped elbows, streams of blood running over the raw skin, and dirt and leaf bits and granite pebbles imbedded in the flesh. "Of course, this isn't the movies."

"Looks more like Greek tragedy," says Belinda. She stands and brushes her ass. Dirt and dust drop away. Then she kneels to examine my injuries, over which she makes hush-hush sounds, presumably to ward off tears I might shed like a six-year-old. When she blows on the wounds I wince. She tells me she saw some antiseptic spray in the bathroom. I'm down here though, I declare, and the babbling brook is within sight, which will be antiseptic enough. I test my elbows for ambulation. No more hand holding on hills, Belinda declares. Good timing, I say. We walk down the rest of the hill separately, to the water. On the way, I pick up my hat that has stuck itself to a thorn bush.

"Tragedy is hardly the word for scraped elbows," I say, opting to over-think the experience. It's my adult method to cope. "People misuse the word. They claim a child's death is tragic when it falls from a window because a negligent nanny has left it open, or at the hands of a drunken father. Tragedy, in fact — and by tradition — happens when the fallen hero or anti-hero discovers that it's his (or her) own fault for their destruction. In other words, self-knowledge of your downfall brings about tragedy. That child's death? A simple case of coincidental happenstance."

Belinda shakes her head, incredulous. "Well, thanks for the lecture, Peter Ustinov. Didn't think I was on a PBS documentary."

"Just thought I'd clear up any questions, confusion, or misapplication. And PBS has great nature programs."

"Jesus Mary and Joseph, will you shut up already?"

At the brook, which is a good ten yards across but barely eight inches deep, lots of water flows over softball-size rocks. The swift water illustrates the brook as an Ogden Nash postcard. I kneel at water's edge and dip my elbows and forearms in the water, first letting its force flake away the dirt and debris. The water gives a nice sting before its icy temperature soothes and then deadens the sting. I know I'm going to feel this later.

"You're really going to feel that sting later, Minus," Belinda says. She kneels beside me and takes my arm for a look at the wounds, twisting it around to get a look.

"Ouch!"

"We should go back and wash those scrapes," she says. She twists the other elbow, bringing from me another yelp. "Don't fight! Hey, I can wrap these with clean underwear if we can't find gauze or bandages."

"Not on my life," I say. I take back my arms from her Devil Nurse treatment. "I was a rough-and-tumble kid once upon a time, and this Pennsylvania dirt can't be any worse than Illinois dirt. I'll be cleaned up in a second. Besides, can you see me walking into town with women's underwear wrapped around my elbows?" She grimaces. "Don't for a second think I'd use my underwear, chickadee," I say.

The brook follows the ravine's contours, nestled in a forest whose trees must all be at least thirty feet tall. Yet, in their abundance and density, each trunk is but the diameter of a fire log because of their fight for sunlight. Overhead, the canopy glows blue around the leaf edges, suffusing emerald tints through the air all the way to the forest floor. Downstream, the brook turns left and disappears around a sweeping bend. Belinda notices the far bank has a flattened path along its edge, and upstream twenty yards is a stepping-stone bridge made by kids or the surrounding neighborhood cabin owners. We make our way through the undergrowth of thorn bushes, dead leaves, and knotty grasses. We step carefully across the double-width bridge of flat stones, and safely onto the opposite bank. Here there is clear walking along the brook. Now this is nice, I whisper, and Belinda looks over her shoulder with a brief smile.

In ten minutes, our little hike takes us out to the brook's inlet at the wide end of a lake. It's twenty degrees warmer in the open air. The sun is up high, but short of its zenith. The lake smells sour and of gasoline. Three fishing boats idle at various distances from shore. Along the sides of the outlet, the banks are beaver brown and cracked from summer sun and drought. Last spring's thaw has left its erosion scars. A bouquet of white and cream butterflies, little nervous creatures, move like mist across the banks and erosion runnels. Youth and age, I notice, in contrast between earth and insect.

"This nature reminds me of another character," I say. "I won't be sculpting this myth figure, but here in the wilds –"

"The wilds?" Belinda rolls her eyes. "We're two miles from the highway, Daniel Boone."

"Yeah, yeah, you wait," I say. "When the biting flies and the ticks nest in your hair, you'll know what I'm talking about."

She kisses me. "Okay. Tell me."

"So I was thinking one afternoon, how we all speak of having a nemesis but do we know where that word comes from. It's frightening how much the gods and sub-gods and all their minions of ancient lore have added to our language. So what's the story behind the name? I told myself, 'If you present him as an aging prankster, like a grandfather who asks his grandson to pull his finger, the effect will be disarming of... I don't know, of knowledge maybe.' Or the way we see the world, maybe their own history. Then I look up Nemesis in my Greek book and do you know what I find out? It's the strangest thing, and –"

Belinda is looking at me with such curiosity that I stop talking; a first this week, maybe, because once I get going on the Mythos I'm hard to control. She's so beautiful and normal — not controlling or bitchy or high strung — that I wonder what has possessed me not to ask her to marry me. I don't know if her trust in me is justified, though. I'm a flake, I don't have a career or a job (dog walking for hourly wages, even NY wages, doesn't exactly count for much, not even in my well-worn book; it's a job for a near-do-well awaiting daddy's slap upside his head as a wake-up to the reality of life)... I need to stop this self-abasement.

"Look," Belinda says, and points over my shoulder. There's a strange overhang along the right edge of the lake, away from the water. Footholds have been dug out of the earth, and thick tufts of grass grow over the top like hair out of an old man's ear. Belinda looks at me. We nod. This time I stand behind her and help her climb up the embankment, her feet pressed into the holds. With a little boost from my palms cupped on her ass cheeks, she easily takes the ledge. She giggles through this operation, letting me hang onto her a bit longer than necessary for the job — good boy-girl fun — and then she's standing on the ledge looking all around.

"Hey, there's an old railroad track up here," she tells me. "It leads into the trees– Hey, there's a tunnel over there! Come up and see."

I fit my toes into the holds and hand-scramble up the wall, where Belinda clasps my outstretched hand for that last bit of help. She shows her strength and leverages me until I take the crest with a knee.

We walk over to the tracks and stand on the ties between the rails.

I say, "These tracks look ancient," and I realize how silly this sounds. "Correction. Railroads were laid sometime in the early eighteen-hundreds, so maybe they're only antique."

"Success," Belinda chides, and winks at me with her undying love (I know it's somewhere in there). I spank her ass twice, once for the sass and another for the wink. She yelps but playfully refuses to resist.

The rails are rust red, seated on gnarly, pitted wooden ties crawling with ants and centipedes. They must have been laid when only pine tar was used for wood preservation, and long-since flushed by rain and the harsh Eastern Pennsylvania winters. A quarter mile off, we get a glimpse of the distant tunnel's brick mouth behind overgrown trees and brush. I suggest we explore. Belinda is game, and we walk along the tracks and listen to the cicadas rasp in the trees while our feet rustle the tie stones. We act like kids and easily become our childhood selves. We walk a rail, arms stretched level for balance. And when we falter we link arms to march atop the ties in a three-legged lock step. We name the ties according to the states (alphabetized, naturally) as our third leg tags its center line. Our day is all laughter and freedom.

The tunnel mouth appears to gape at us once we step under the trees, which have arched high across the tracks. This is no secret place, just a neglected, cast-aside rail spur from the time before trucks took over hauling goods to the cities and towns across the valleys, or just because people moved to the cities — Jersey City on the Hudson, or Philadelphia to the southeast, or even west, to Pittsburgh. "Another relic of our civilization," Belinda says. I grunt. We're near enough to the tunnel that our voices echo against the high, steep wall of the hill that's made this tunnel a necessity for the rail line. The stone blocks make the entrance concave up along the keystone. Belinda lets loose a blood-curdling scream — I jump away, horrified — and the sound echoes with vile resonance. She smiles and claps her hands. I sigh my adult's exasperation to the youngster's hijinks. We walk toward the shadow of the hill and feel the cooler air at its dark hole, which wants to swallow us.

The tunnel looms, twenty feet at least from tracks to the keystone. The daylight stretches inside, ambient against the brickwork to maybe forty paces, and then blackness. The construction is all brickwork inside, not the cut stone used only for the entrance. I wonder and marvel at the engineering behind this site. How many men worked, and for how long? Who died? How many bricks were used? Where had they carried the materials from? Belinda says, "I bet someone could be living in there. A band of hobos, maybe." "Hobos ride the rails," I say, "they don't live inside abandoned tunnels." "Yeah, well hobos take vacations, too, you know. Who cares? They always lived beside the railroad tracks."

She launches into a story her grandfather told her over and over when she was a tyke, about the hobos riding atop rail cars — near empty because of the Depression — going from city and town clear across the country in search of work. Her grandfather, Paul, had hired a few of the rail riders for day labor on his grain farm in central Nebraska, small things to do that needed doing while he tended the crops, and didn't cost but pennies to hire someone — clean out the barns and pig sties, repair barbed-wire fences, bale hay in June's hellish heat, tassel corn in July's stifling humidity — and perhaps Grandpa Paul would give one or two guys a spot in the barn to sleep after a day's work, and an egg and healthy rip off a bread loaf in the morning (under glaring, shocked eyes from Grandma Jane) along with their few pennies of pay before they lighted out again for the yards to catch another rusty west-bound freight, tipping their hats — "they always wore hats" — to her grandma Jane. I can see from her description that those men had done what was possible to survive, and I pictured sandy-haired men whose families awaited money sent by Western Union as jobs were taken, worked, and lost; these men had cracked faces from too much worry and harsh, outdoor labor in all weather; their muscles ached continually or they walked irregularly with some long-paid-for injury; men that would die early compared to our times, but not so to their own ancestors, who had it much worse, with war and pestilence a constant enemy.

We stand at the tunnel's entrance and look tentatively into the deepening shadows. The light at the other end is a doughnut hole, far away and creepy in its steady shine at us, like a planet in the midnight sky. "I'll give you a buck for every ten feet you walk down that tunnel," I dare Belinda. She sticks her tongue out at me. A breeze comes through the long hole in the earth. Cool and damp, it smells of oil and moss, both tepid odors. "Go ahead," I say, my face a bully's dare. She thrusts her chest at me — "You first, chicken lips!" — breasts perky beneath a white tee, the hint of her bellybutton peeking between the shirt hem and the top of her faded jeans. I take a first step and stare back at her on the second and third. "The hobos will snatch you when I disappear in the darkness," I tease. She bolts after me, and then we're walking together, or nearly so, because Belinda is a step behind, using my body to block whatever might fly out — bat, werewolf, pterodactyl, or hobo's hat. The ceiling covers us and I feel we've crossed through to another world, a different time. It's no longer a tunnel to me but a cave, deep and strange and holding the elements of fable and heresy, unfamiliar and become unknown to modern humans raised on television entertainment. This tunnel-cave is where mythological beasts live and collect the bones of wayfaring travelers, stupid schmucks like me and my fright-shaken, maiden-like girlfriend.

With the light behind us, we see well enough as we reach a hundred feet inside. The far light hasn't grown any larger, though. The air has cooled, but is now steady and close; no breeze pushes its atmosphere on us, which makes me think this would be a great place for a wine cellar. The iron tracks between which we walk are intact, and no longer red with rust like those back along the embankment, but black with damp, a permanent sweat on their pitted surfaces. "This is getting eerie," Belinda whispers. She skips up beside me, crunching the rocks underfoot, and takes my hand. "You can use this, Minus. Lots of oddball gods and goddesses lived in caves. They must not have known practical skills, like carpentry." "Yeah, yeah," I say, "This is good." Our voices echo against the brick walls; I look up to try to make out the ceiling, but the light is only ink up there. We halt and look back the way we came. That white hole is still large, but far enough to make us take a deep look into each other's eyes, gauging our courage to walk further away from escape and freedom. I can't resist myself, and take a sinister tone with my whisper, "If the hobo bandits have heard us, they could be circling around to block off our escape." "Shut up, Minus!" She gives my shoulder a gentle but determined shove. I close my trap when the change in air pressure dumps a fat breeze from the far end, and it pulls at our clothing with a force. I feel goose bumps rise along my arms. When the pressure changes again, we're hit from the other direction with the hot moisture of the lakeside air. Its fishy odor is evident even this deep in the tunnel.

Since I've begun to tease, I take it a step further.

"They'll want to make us run deeper, Belinda. Right into a trap. We'll be strung up in a net and sold as slaves to the Pennsylvania Quakers, and made to work in the oatmeal factory. Or else to the Mennonite Amish as barn raisers. Never able to listen to the radio again. Punished for dancing in our slave quarters."

She folds her arms against the next shift in the breeze, and says, "Keep talking, chisel man, and I'll surrender to them."

A loud crack sounds from within, at the darkest stretch somewhere at the middle. Before the echo dies we're headed backwards. We spin around to run, heads down and charging toward the light. The stones grind beneath our pounding feet like the demented laughter of cave ghouls. I feel my skin crawl because I want to turn around but fear what I might find behind us, in hot pursuit. When the sensation of a hand snatches at my shoulder, just catching the fabric, we burst from the tunnel and into bright light, birdsong, cicada mating calls, and the warm sweat of freedom. The compression of the cave is long behind us when we stop. We turn to face our tormentor and find nothing but an old tunnel with rusted rails and cracked, black bricks set by men long dead and forgotten. The leaves on the tall plane trees rustle in a fresh wind, giving their own version of laughter at our fright. The air is suddenly sticky with summer's heat.

From inside the tunnel we hear movement, then obvious footsteps on the stones. "Hey, there is someone in there," Belinda says. "Or something," I mumble. We can easily take off now in several directions, or separate paths. We hold our ground, because the light at the far end winks at us once, twice. The soft grinding sound, like slow turns of a pepper mill, grow louder. Then, when we don't expect it, there appears a shape in the darkness. A woman comes forward into the gloaming. We're twenty yards outside the tunnel. She stops at its edge, the daylight making her dirt-smudged skin look like tarnished silver. She is all of sixteen, I think, as I see her in fresh light, gaunt in her malnourished state. Her short hair sticks out like a cartoon character that has stuck its finger in an electrical outlet. She has the look of a rat who has taken a jittery peek from the safety of its hole. Her face is pulled back in fear, but but there's menace in the eyes and across her lips.

"Hey, mister," the girl says, "can you spare some change?"

I pat my jeans pockets, but of course I haven't brought coins or a wallet. Who takes money for a short hike? I remember suddenly that the cabin keys still sit on the kitchen table where we dropped them last night. I stare at Belinda, who's also patting the pockets on her jeans with equally feeble demonstration. We look stupidly at each other, because this isn't something we've expected. The girl backs away, sensing the typical human response to her plight.

"What are you doing here?" Belinda asks, in a voice that sounds notes of the person who doesn't imagine an encounter like this can happen to her. At least she has acted, though, because I can't find my voice. I'm staring at this girl, a child, a waif bearing "the runaway" look about her like a yoke. Abused or fed up, it doesn't much matter. We can't change her story for tomorrow. We could only give her money, which we don't have with us. The girl shifts her stance, but she has stopped backing away from us. "It doesn't matter, does it?" the girl says in a hard-edged voice. It's a question with a sharp edge, but inflected downward, and the voice is softer. "I'm sorry but we have no money with us," Belinda says. The girl smirks. Belinda tries to explain. "We're staying in a cabin and we were just out walking." Belinda looks at me, asking a question in mime that I don't get. She raises her eyebrows, but still I don't understand. She turns to the girl, "Can we help you some other way? We have food back at the house. We can feed you. You could take –" She's cut off by the girl's violent shake of her head. Her arms come up, hands in the air now, checking her hair, looking at her soiled hands. She's wearing a T-shirt and jeans, stained and torn, and gym shoes without laces, everything grimy as though she's lived in this old rail tunnel her whole life. There's little evidence to suggest she hasn't.

She turns around and fades into the tunnel gloom, gone before new words can leave our mouths.

We hang our feet over the embankment and stare out, across the lake. Nothing is near, no one around us. The boats float in the harsh sunlight. I don't think they've moved since we first saw them. We might be lost ourselves, I wonder aloud. "Castaways, beachcombers." Next, I wonder (silently) if the thoughts come from the artist's sense of exile while working, a hermitage, sometimes desolation. My hand smoothes out a patch of sandy ground next to me. I start to doodle. Belinda holds my left hand, so I work solo and use my forefinger to design a groove relief in the dirt. I add stray leaves for trees, cut the earth with my nails for rippling water, press pebbles into the "sky" for storm clouds, and fashion a broken Popsicle stick as a boat. Belinda asks, for the second time in five minutes, if we should go back into the tunnel and find the girl. She knows the right answer but can't say it yet. Our feet swing out and back like the hammers of a player piano. In a while we push past the girl, leaving her at the back of our minds. We muse on the possibilities of a nap in the afternoon. There's talk about the rack of family movies next to the cabin VCR, and wonder where the good stuff might be hidden. We laugh at our silly fears that had lurked inside the tunnel. We play "scissors, paper, rock" and I lose in a best-of-five. Our heels kick together and we're kids again. But being a kid is tiring, and we drift back to the things we love about each other.

Awhile later, Belinda says, "Back in the cave, I said there was something there for you. That creepiness, the tunnel darkness and all that old brick, nasty and crumbling. In the way we felt trapped, too. At first I felt like an angel, and suddenly that sound shriveled my wings... you know?" I nudge her with my shoulder, but she isn't finished. "I had to run away like a silly damsel in distress. My hero, the Mighty Minus. You were so chivalrous, taking flight to protecting me from the evil cave ogre who eats virgin maidens."

"If that's the ogre's goal," I joke, "then you're safe. She takes my hand and we chivvy closer on the edge. "I was thinking in there, standing in all that gloom, how it was a cave. You just used that word yourself. It felt enormous, a demon's lair, where all kinds of danger and triumph were possible. I thought we had disturbed bats in that deep darkness, not spooked a runaway."

Then, like an unexpected spurt of summer rain, the experience is in me. I want to play with the fantasy that is its images tied to my irrational fears, and dance through the memory of its air, smell its age, and float on its energy to tantalize and frighten. Belinda's hand becomes the hand of fate, and leads me to the lake shore. We step onto the water. I look down and around my feet, where, below, the fish swim in schools across our path. The fishing boats move closer, but I realize it is us that are drawing towards them. The wooden boats have long, flat oars, pulled from the water while at rest and hooked onto the stern quarters. Men sit across the beam, below square sails hanging slack in the still air. Each watches us approach with a lazy eye while repairing torn nets using fat wooden needles and coarse twine sealed in beeswax. Belinda holds me close beside her, I feel her arm's wiry muscles brush across the hair on my arm. Her skin is cool, almost cold. When I look, her hair has changed, streaked gray, long and knotted in a witch's necklace. Her skin is nearly white, with an eggshell grain and velvet sheen. She tightens her grip as she guides me to a spot at the center of the boats. Here we stop. She lets my hand free and, our water levitation released, we drop like arrows below the water's surface without time to take a breath. Bubbles obscure our sinking bodies. My hands cannot reach through the water easily, and, deep down, holding the depth, we float apart. Her hair fans around her head like an explosion has happened in her mind. My fingers grasp the end of her arm, at the wrist, that same smooth-stone skin now a blue-dappled complexion in this strange light. What beauty death is, I think. So simple, how it can be. The stories our Greeks wove of their heroes, villains, and gods & goddesses, were complicated and extravagant, all the more extraordinary for me when Greek immortals interacted with Greek humans, produced children with them, influenced daily life but also the rites and rituals fundamental to life.

How wonderful and profane.

"I love you, Belinda."

The light changes on the bank when a cloud drifts over the sun. Colors wash away in the flash shade, and our eyes blink to adjust. I feel dizzy from the transition, and must reach a hand down, press it against the ground, and steady myself from falling forward, off the lip of the embankment. Belinda's arm slips around my back.

"Thank you, Minus." We stare into the short distance, at the watery shoreline, both a bit stupefied by light's change. She says, "I think about that all the time, you know. You have to believe me. I'd never have proposed to you if I'd thought there was a time limit for us to get married, or for you to answer. I already feel married to you." She lets my hand go. I look at its empty palm. I'm not to get a responsive I love you, too. This is okay, this is better than okay. Returns on endearments are overrated anyway. Once more I try to convince myself this is true.

A child's laughter strikes in the distance. We look along the shoreline. A family has wandered to this Poconos definition of a lake beach, wearing shorts and carrying inflatable water floaties. A little girl holds a pink flamingo around her waist and wades into the water, a single short step at a time, careful to keep in sight her father walking beside her. The mother has a handhold of a toddler boy dressed in blue shorts and shirt and a blue cap. She has fitted him with wrap-around sunglasses, which he claws at desperately to get them off his face.

Belinda bumps hips with me. "We should think about lunch." Her hand twitches in my clasp. "Say — what time is Peter coming out?"

The thought jolts me. "Shit! I forgot all about him. Do you know the time?"

We slide down the bank and make for the shadow of the trees overhanging the stream. I've forgotten something, though, and tell her to hold on. I scramble back up the embankment, find the landscape I'd made in the soil with my fingers, and wipe the bottom of my show across it to clean the spot. I catch up to Belinda where the stream begins its delta. She takes hold of my hand and we walk up the narrow side path. When we duck beneath low branches into the half shade, we're surprised by a figure in the emerald light. The runaway stands in the middle of the stream, waiting for us like a hitchhiker on a roadway.

"You think I can still get that meal?" she says.

I get back up the hill and find Peter sitting at the picnic table on the deck. The sun has found a space between the treetops and drenches the gray planks with white light and heat. Peter has hidden a Styrofoam cooler under the table's shadow, and nurses a bottle of beer while shooing flies. When I ask how he's made it to the cabin so easily, he pulls at his beer and answers, "A map, Mickey Minus Mouse." I pull a double take at his theft of Belinda's nickname repertoire. He shows me big white teeth. Before I can explain the cuts on my forearms and dirty legs and shoes, he lists my disheveled, post bicycle-crash appearance.

"I never liked Dickey's anyway, so you can leave the shirt on, if it's all the same to you," he chides. "So where is Belinda hiding?"

"They're coming."

"They?"

I put a finger to my lips as I hear Belinda and Anna's footsteps creaking the stair boards behind us. "We've brought a guest from the beach," I announce.

Belinda rounds the corner railing, says hi to smiling Peter, and looks back down the stairs. "Come on up, Anna. You're with friends here." Footsteps on the stairs stop, start, stop again. "Don't be afraid," says Belinda, and encourages her with a nod. To the side, Peter smiles, but when Anna appears his face crinkles in the way a flashlight makes you cringe when its light strikes you in the dark. Before Anna takes the turn on the landing to face us, Peter has composed himself.

"Anna, this is our good friend, Peter," I say. "Pete, this is Anna. She's going to have lunch with us."

Peter stands and holds out his hand. "It's nice to meet you, Anna."

We watch her stand on a spot of porch board, thinking what to do. She looks down the stairs. This time, running isn't her answer. She tries a smile and nearly makes it work, the corners of her mouth spread back but only nudge upward as a test. Not having been raised by wolves as we may think from her appearance, she reaches to shake Peter's hand.

Belinda says, "We girls are going to get cleaned up before lunch. Okay?" Anna looks around again, bringing her neck down between her shoulder blades. "Follow me, Anna. It's alright. I'll show you the cabin."

Belinda doesn't touch the girl, but leads her with a nod and a profoundly benevolent look past the picnic bench to open the screen door. When they've disappeared into the far room, Peter N waits on my explanation. I give him the short version while hunched over the cooler, fishing for a beer and hiding my voice in the noise of rattling ice.

Then I realize that I need to clean myself up, too. After a few sips from my beer and an apology for our tardiness, I head for the cabin door.

Inside, I hear Belinda and Anna talking in the second bedroom. Water is running. Belinda comes out and closes the door. She tells me Anna is going to shower. She's lent the girl jeans and a shirt while she runs a load of wash to try and work out the weeks of grime (I'm guessing months) pressed into her clothes. I go into our bedroom, turn on the Chevrolet radio and turn up the volume. Jazz again, the only decent station to come in with any clarity, here in the woods.

In the bathroom I pick the last bits of Poconos nature from my arms and apply antiseptic spray over everything, and then mercurochrome to the rawest of the scrapes. When I return to the porch, Anna hasn't reappeared, but Belinda is talking with Peter. They've moved to a shady corner of the broad deck, and have carried the table with them. Peter hands me my beer and I slide into an Adirondack, feeling my back and neck muscles ease with a notion of finality of their use for the day.

"Can we make our grilling a group effort?" I ask.

Fast music is playing from the radio, discordant notes that somehow make sense. Pete puts the cold beer bottle against his forehead and rolls it across, leaving water beads in its path. We make a few sallies about lunch, the cabin, the Poconos, and getting back to The City. When I drain my beer on what I think is my fourth swallow, I know I'm on a vacation of a different sort. Belinda opens the cooler and fishes out three fresh bottles. Pete says he'll be ready to grill the prawns and strip steaks we bought at a state-line grocers. We finish planning the menu — salad, chips, melon for dessert — and Belinda tells us to occupy ourselves while she showers. After a few minutes we hear new water sounds from the window of the master bath. It seems we're in a rainstorm under blue skies, or behind a waterfall.

Peter opens his arms and says, "It's a nice place to find yourself, Minus."

I look at the house, its screened windows, the shake roof and cedar clapboards. "We rented it through an internet site. They had pictures of the place and everything. You know, I think that web net thing — er, inter-web? — is going to be big some day. Can you imagine trying to sell art canvases on that?" He shakes his head. "All we had to do for the keys was drop by the owner's place over on the west-side with the rent and deposit."

"Hmmm," Peter utters. "Yeah, the cabin is nice. Just the same, I was talking about you and Belinda, bro'. The two of you are in a nice place with each other."

Pete's giving me this look that wants to say, or must communicate, Do you know what you're doing? I interpret this question as a warning. There's an ending that he's left off, and I'm to determine what it is: "...what you're doing with Belinda?" My long, evasive (or just plain stupid) stare has left him bored and he's looked away, into the trees, awaiting my eventual answer or total evasion by out-waiting his resolve to learn something through his trickery. Oh, yes, Peter can be tricky, apart from his bonhomie confederation. It's his honesty about life that scares me. Is this what success allows, a carefree life that appears nauseatingly simple?

"Jesus, Minus, say something," Peter demands. "At least move your face so I know you haven't had a fucking stroke. Otherwise we'll miss lunch to take you to the hospital."

As I thought: tricky.

Pete's relationship with his girl, Wendy, is replete with idiosyncratic notions of what a couple does for each other, even by modern standards. Idle talk at his studio, and my witness to their lives over the months I've been in NYC, have given me insight. In a word: conservative.

"Belinda wants to get married," I begin. His eyes flutter in mock amusement — or maybe he is amused. "She sprung that on me a few months ago. It's how I got the 'throw method' I told you about. Actually, my first try was accidental. I spewed Cap'n Crunch onto our kitchen window. Okay, I can live with her as my muse. We love each other; we have fun and our life is comfortable. It's the lifestyle and the goal of artists, right? Maybe that's men in general, but I don't think so. But a guiding fairy-of-my-mind she's not. It doesn't work like that. Not that she isn't doing great as my manager. That's her Siren side, that other thing I mean — and it scares me. I know, I know... but you and I have to forget the contradictions. So this marriage question comes up, not as a question because she demanded a proposal from me. Maybe demanded is too strong a word. The old 'fish or cut bait' argument, right? Then this other thing with the bag lady –" I stop, backtrack on my thoughts, and change tack "– the Mythos project came up. I asked her to give me time. Anyhow, she's pulled back from the ultimatum and we're... we're, yeah, in a good place."

Peter says, "Minus, what the fuck are you babbling about?"

There's only one way out: tell him all about Karen K. See what he says. He's my friend; I can't believe I haven't already told him everything. It's been months! But I catch myself. What's there to tell? Any admission remains unclear to me as for its significance. How would Peter see it? The idea, or process of confession to a mere thought, is all too parochial, I think. I try an argument out for example: I refused Karen K's fuck proposal — so my conscience is clear. In fact Belinda would be proud of me, I could say; I think she'd say this to me. Only, then she'd insist I stay away from Karen, which is why I've vowed not to tell her about her, Karen K, any more. If she asks, of course I won't lie, but otherwise.... Peter, though, he'll understand. He's urbane.

I open my mouth again, but instead of confessing to the sin of fanaticism, this is what I say: "What do you think about older women, Pete?"

He hitches up onto his elbows and leans forward; we're almost nose to nose. Suspicion pleats his brow, and I think I'm in for an interrogation, which is hardly what I'm prepared for or expected, but after what I've just heard myself ask, I couldn't blame him. Now I think a confession would have been easier, but he interrupts any attempt with a question.

"How do you mean?" His voice is low, gruff. I cock my head toward the screen door. Both showers still run. The noise has hidden the music's rhythm, leaving only the bass and tinny horns. I can't think (although I try for a second) what Anna has been doing in her shower for the last twenty minutes.

"You know how I mean," I tell him.

He takes a terrified expression and makes that scarier. "That's not for my imagination," he says. "Ick! Some sixty-year-old broad, gray roots hidden by monthly Clairol washes, but then she forgets to dye the chatte, right? Ugh-yuuuk! Think of this woman, Minus, all the loose skin, her tits misshapen. You know that Playboy comic-strip grandma with the torpedo breasts pointing at her toes? Yo! And you haf'ta remember, old people don't shower often. Like they get lazy and forgetful. Or maybe it's that entitlement syndrome old people get like kids get the measles. Smell me 'cuz I've smelled you my whole life! So there's the smell, the gray hair, the sag, the wrinkles, false teeth –"

"Pete, Pete!" I stop his obnoxiousness. "We began with an older woman who takes care of herself, and you've erroneously aged her to sixty, then juggernaut across all reason straight to the octogenarian day-care wing at some moldy retirement home."

Peter waves his hands. "Takes care of herself? Did you use 'an older woman' and 'takes care of herself' in the same sentence? Your dick ought to be fined just for thinking of that archeology pussy, my friend."

"Fifty isn't old, you asshole! Sixty isn't even old, not if she –"

"Don't say 'Takes care of herself' again. Please." Pete stabs the words at me. "You've laid out that plan already."

"Hey, put this in perspective. We're both going to get old, and our women are going to get old alongside us. Are you suggesting that, when they lose their youthful beauty, we should go trolling college campuses for the Pussy of Youth to keep us strong, maintain our manhood vanity? Older women have their own beauty, my friend, and maybe it just takes an older man to appreciate that."

"Different topic," Pete says. "In that story, we're getting old together, as a couple. That's what you said. Taking the same path that Time has given us. Here, though, you're talking about going gray when you're a ripe specimen of manhood at thirty-one. Young with old? Now that's mean soup."

I'm off track and feel defeated. A song from the radio is fast and dissonant, and bugs me enough to make me look around, as if I can stop it or change the station with a look, but that's not going to happen, so I try once more to convince Peter of something he's not seeing. "Listen, I've only been talking hypothetically, but there's a point you're not getting. Women can keep themselves in good shape. Look at Jane Fonda with her exercise tapes. She's gotten a whole army of America's fifty-plus crowd..." Pete's horrified look grows back. I'm not sure I believe myself anymore! "My point is, I think younger men have all kinds of potential with older women. Think of the pickings a guy can get from reading the classifieds in New York Review and Atlantic Monthly. There are plenty of classy broads out there looking for younger, youthful men that have their shit together."

"Okay, yeah," Peter says. "I see your point. Just not us, you know? We've got what we want, right? Is that at least what I hear you saying? Or are you telling me something's changed? Gimme a nod now, Minus! Okay, right. That's good. Okay. Pheww! You had me worried, buddy. I mean, this isn't a 'once black you won't go back' thing. That's a good sex rep. But, you know, once you go gray, no one's taking you back, dude. Shit like that gets around. Word."

We settle back against our chairs, the battle left in truce, and keep the silence of our troubled thoughts just there. Peter's holding a grin that's brutally wretched with thought and imagery as all get out, and I suddenly can't help laughing. The absurdity of his joke, the discordant subject with Belinda in the other room, my twenty-nine-year-old woman in the shower, naked, water running down that smooth, unblemished skin, no sunspots, no liver spots, no scales or rosacea blotches; meanwhile Karen K roams NYC in bum's clothing, hiding the fit body of middle age. I'm not attracted to her, not as she is now, nor as she could be. Can my future with Belinda, twenty-five-plus years ahead, be something like I see with Karen today? If so, I'll at least be there without a beer gut — and dressed like a gent, thank you.

I say, "We're doing great, Peter," circling back to the subject he'd begun. "Belinda and I are fantastic. Seeing too little of each other because of the work, maybe. That's why this weekend in this tick-infested wood is important touch-time for us. I should be at the studio, but –"

"I remember that throwing act you got going, though you didn't tell me about the Cap'n Crunch episode," Peter says. "That's the first thing I can think of that I'd take offense to missing: you owe me a good laugh, Minus. You know I'm joking, so be easy. Listen. Take it light, buddy. Give your mind a rest. We all get that 'work hard' attitude and then find ourselves overloaded with ideas. What that gives us is unfocused art. It's a waste of time. And sloppy. Makes no sense to work like that. Neither does the art make sense, in the end. I went through that phase when I was traveling through the states, doing those shows on the fly and organizing the workshops. All that great stuff that wasn't shit, or hadn't turned into shit, but the ideas sat too heavily on my mind to concentrate. Each piece wants its own time. Now, if this marriage question weighs on you...."

"Not so much," I admit. "She's let me off the hook. No — that's not fair of me. It's not a game, not a pressure tactic. In fact, I want to marry her. The timing is... somehow off. I don't want to feel like I'm struggling in life and work."

"That's a tough attitude to take," Pete says. "First off, you aren't struggling at your art. What did I say about your Myths project? You don't think I was throwing sand in your eyes, do you? Man, the success thing just doesn't happen like we want it to happen. Usually we're not ready for it when it comes. Whatever your vision of that is, take a chisel and chop it down to cubes. That's where you'll start to find the reality. You see, dude, the time comes when you forget that you're working toward anything but yourself."

I lift my hands from the armchair in a sign of helplessness. "Pete, I'm fucking broke, man. Dog walking and short sales are killing us. Yeah, 'arting' – that's what I'm doing. I'm arting hard and staying true to it and fair to myself. There is nothing else for me to do in this life. This 'happening' thing has to happen sooner than later, though. No, no, the Grandma Moses story doesn't impress me, and Modigliani was doomed from birth. I'm not one of those people with the luck of the Irish or what- what-ever."

"Okay, bro', okay. So you do the thing and keep it together and all is going to be okay. You have to believe that. It's what we do best. So, yeah, you have your Belinda and it's a nice nest. Take that for starters. She's a good influence on you, Minus. There's no denying her love for you, I see it in every glance she settles on your sorry Chicago face." Peter stops and stares over my shoulder. "Hey, Belinda, you foxy babe!"

My head fights against my neck's urge to whip around. The head wins. I reach my hand into the air and way backwards, palm aiming the all-seeing-eye trick at her, whom I guess has been standing behind the screen, but for how long she's been there is impossible to tell. I'd lost track of the shower sounds. The music is clearer; she could have been listening (inadvertently). Still no sign from Anna, either, but the water sounds have ceased.

Not that Belinda cares much about any of what we've been saying. All hypothetical and manishly lame. Guy blather. She has her opinions, and strong judgments they are, while I have mine. We've never thought we needed to share one brain.

"I'm organizing drinks," she says from behind the screen. "Tea or coffee? I've brought the froth maker. There's an espresso machine in the cabinet that looks seaworthy. One of those screw-together Italian models. Any takers?"

"I need to check the time," Peter says. Under our watch, he does so. "Okay. It's late enough for whisky to be involved. I'm a taker. Minus, are you a taker?"

"I'm a taker," I say. This feels like an admission and absolution. Belinda's voice has betrayed nothing, least of all that she'd heard our conversation, of which only Peter would appear the normal man. I lift myself from the chair and turn around. I feel slim today, muscled. This must be the grueling exercise of holiday making. "Belinda," I say, "are you a taker?"

She comes through the screen door and squats between our chairs. Peter and I pass a look, and she puts on a serious face. I'm afraid she's about to say something about Anna, like we need to take her home, or to a shelter or, worst possible, to the police. "I'm a taker, too," she says. "Now who's got the sixty-year-old whisky?" She arches an eyebrow. I feel a deep blush scorch my face. Peter deflates in the chair. Belinda slaps us both on the shoulder.

My head lifts upward, eyes to the sky, and I cry out, "I call on thee, Dionysus," in a great bellow. Birds scattering through the trees. "Bring us your liquid embodiment of life, distillates preferred. We, your minions and supplicants, await your libation and direction. I am the bull, he is the serpent, and she the fox, keepers of secrets that are good and just."

Belinda's countenance is blazoned with wonder. Peter coughs into his beer to catch my attention.

"Wow," he says. "You have spent a lot of time in the studio. Those statues start to come alive."

My own narcissism tells me this is the one day, and the place, to follow the chord sounds of treacherous youth. I throw up my arms and call out an incantation. "Son of Zeus, born of two mothers, you carry the madness of three in you. My humble theater before you now shows us in need of celebration and ecstasy. Speak to Bacchus on our behalf, if you must. A bottle of red, a flagon of white. What have you to bring these initiates to your secrets? We'll take wine, but we prefer whisky."

In the caesura, I look around. We can catch ourselves in reality only so much before we need a new reality to make sense of life. Peter's face is a sack of sand; Belinda remains crouched on the porch, holding to the subdued light of my gray shadow. The silence in which we find ourselves touches me. Then her beautiful smile arches in a delectable repose.

"What's happened to the music?" I ask. We're with the birds and the cicadas. Somewhere below us the sound of rustling is in the bushes; squirrels playing in the underbrush, or a deer spooked by my tomfoolery. The three of us pass blank looks. Belinda stands and calls out, "Anna?" She strides into the house with a quick whiplash of the screen door. On its return it rattles the rafters. We hear Belinda in the bedroom, calling for Anna again and again. One set of footsteps thud across the floorboards. Belinda appears behind the screen door.

"She's not here."

"What happened to the radio?" I ask again.

Peter says, "Uh-oh."

In that moment, I lose my trust in Anna's innocence. I lurch toward the screen door, but Belinda is already beating her heels through the house, and makes it to the bedroom before me. We find an empty rectangle in the dust on the dresser. A drawer is open. Inside, my wallet has been rifled through, my cash gone. Belinda finds her purse upended in the corner. We stare at each other.

"That little bitch ripped us off," Belinda says. "What are we gonna do?"

"Tantric imagery?" I suggest.

I hear a noise and turn. Peter stands out in the middle of the living room. "Her clothes are still in the washing machine," he says. "I looked in the fridge, and she's grabbed some food. But your rental car is still in the driveway."

Then I remember the sound behind the house, the animal sounds in the bushes. That had to be Anna, running away with our money, food, and the vintage radio to hock for booze, cigarettes, and drugs — the runaway's staples, I uncharitably think — or maybe a bus ticket home (though I don't have much hope or altruism for this thought, while I stand at the dresser looking at the scratches across the wood).

Belinda wants to call the police, but Peter thinks we'd be wasting their time as much as ours. Anna knows her terrain, Pete argues, and could be getting into a boyfriend's car right now to speed her way to Philly or Jersey or Trenton (Belinda's jaded guess is Trenton: "Lots of riff-raff there."). Besides, I've lost only twenty dollars and Belinda twenty-five. Peter suggests this is why Anna burgled the radio — she thought we'd have more cash, and spite made her throw in the radio for the trouble we'd put her through, coming all the way up that stream and climbing the trail. Unexpectedly, we all laugh.

In the end, we wander back to the kitchen, check on what Anna has left us in the fridge, and find in the bottom drawer a wheel of Italian sausage and Vidalia onions and one fresh sweet bell pepper. When Peter tells us he has more beer in his car, we decide to party and drown our failed charity in a feast that, if the wind blows right, will send the teasing smells of our "honest" food down to wherever, Belinda sneers, "that bitch lives like a rat."

For the next two hours we do just this, grilling over mesquite charcoal and sipping cold micro-brews. In between we tell Peter about Anna, what little we'd learned on our walk back up the brook. Peter does duty and nods in the right places, or challenges when we've proved easy pawns in her scheme. At the end of this short biography that includes teenage angst, parental verbal abuse, and "a little coke habit," we realize that nothing Anna told us could be believed, in light of what she's done.

When the food is in our bellies and a few beers remain bobbing in the cooler water, Peter slides his long legs from beneath the picnic table and says farewell. In just a few minutes, Belinda and I stand alone at the foot of the drive, listening to Peter's truck move through its gears down the road.

After we clean the dishes, Belinda walks the house to close and lock every window, checks that the rental car's alarm is activated, and turns on all the outdoor lights so the exterior looks either like the cops have surrounded it or it is a redoubt of unquestionable security.

In the bedroom's semi-darkness and growing heat (a product of the windows having been closed), we undress and lie on top of the cotton sheets, the duvet pulled down to the foot of the bed. Once more we tread the waters of Anna. "It's less than fifty bucks," Belinda finally says. "I'd have given her that much for the asking." In my enmity, I take a while to nod agreement, but can't help thinking about that bitch'n radio.

We lie close together, face to face, and I can't think of a time when I've been happier. We begin to fool around a little, touching and caressing, not knowing where this will lead and not caring if sex happens. We're relaxed but not so tired. We admit our non-horniness but reserve the option of becoming aroused later, sometime in the middle of the night. Belinda likes to laugh when we play around, and sigh while we have sex. I want to hear her laugh tonight. In the darkness her smile is unusual, a non-bedtime smile. I see in this face what it was like our first time; "you're only a virgin once" is not the same as being a virgin with the man or woman you've not yet slept with, and then you do sleep together. I can guess she's thinking of how hilarious we were together that night, how my hands shook while taking off her bra, vibrating in their shaking and it was this that started to really turn her on. "Touch me over here, now lower, lower – there! –" She whispered and gasped and moaned like a woman of all men's dreams and fantasies. And when she said, "Now vibrate my button!" we began to laugh so hard my hard-on shrank and we had to start over.

So this was the sex part of the lovemaking, but the emotional part was its scenery and aura, how we looked and smelled and tasted. When we finished, had had enough, and lay side by side as we lie side by side tonight, what we felt was different than what we had an hour before. A good sort of different, an understanding different. We wanted to remember what we were before, and what we had become. I know Belinda's thinking this now because she's nodding in the way we've learned to nod when one of us has been brought back to that time and place. This isn't meant to re-live the moment, but re-see the imagery. Sometimes it's almost as good as the original, if we let ourselves be.

CHAPTER 18

Mental acuity diminishes when effort is forced. Inspiration, however, is not demanded. As the man said, Find it in the work. Sculpture's labor affects each of the five senses: the smell of the oiled chisels, and the ozone in the air after a glancing hammer strike; flying stone slows under visual concentration, until it appears like cosmic dust caught in terminal orbit at the edges of a white-on-black galaxy; taste your plaster to measure its consistency before committing your knife to its first cut; listen carefully to your sandpaper, and the sheet yields a pitched voice of surrender at those last seconds before losing its polishing grains; touch your fingertip to the end of your tongue, rub the hot saliva onto your forearm, under whose skin the muscles have just completed their surge of blood and oxygen through each hiss of the file across zinc or granite or olive wood. Do this through your soul to bring the Mythos alive. Make them beautiful, Minus. Make them kind to us humans.

(Today he dances slowly around her in balanced orbit. Look – Touch – Scrape – step – Blink – Peel – Blow – step – Dip – See – Move – step. She's in white, from wrapped hair to curled toenails. She grins at him and to the world opening around her. He moves, turns his shoulder, and she waits for him to circle back around: shuffle, toe tap, the light scrape of moccasin leather on floured boards. He senses her visage change. Impish, she is, because another awaits his attention (patiently) to one side of this performance; she knows he will attend to her alone — until she is satisfied, until he is satisfied.

Yesterday her grin was wise in the morning light. This evening's shadows have harried that aspect. His angle of perception helped find and define her mouth, how it changed, overnight or, minutely, through hourly intervals. And with the changes, he saw her uniquely exposed: come to her from behind and she is the essence of the quiver-limbed woman, as much by thought as perceived age; walk straight at her and she forces a slower pace on you, reticent of her stare, always on a moving hand despite its station; and in your movements (the motions of the viewer) she does not rest inside an altering gaze — first slanted here, then there — because you're trying to catch her eye, find her at rest, in her stare that never moves but absorbs what notion glistens on your lips.

Tomorrow he'll moisten her. Cover her in oil. She will blush under his eyes.)

CHAPTER 19

Walking its streets after days away from The Big Apple, car horns explode to test your bearings, and people your patience; that memory of the countryside Earthy bouquet gives over to its industrial cousins — car exhaust and sewer fumes — a connoisseur's aromas of parfumerie d'urban. Comforted by the pressure of commuters' elbows in your lumbar, you reacquaint with the patterns recently despised (and softly regretted): dog fights, construction crew catcalls, noisome plumbing, domestic disputes spilled into hallways, panhandlers, garbage truck hydraulics (mimicking sexual groans), coffee bar babble, street performers, people-watching on the steps of the Met, the out-the-door line at Curry in a Hurry, reading a book at a bus stop, wine tasting in the cellar at Abbracciavento's, and a hundred other images of life as we want it; as we want it for now. You feel as the spoiled child does, whose manipulative tears win the toy: triumphant, but a little ashamed.

NY is not to blame.

Henry's eyes hold this thought as he greets me on the street under The Parkview's green awning. He cuts me a curt nod and a lofty smile. I don't know why he continues to bully me, when I've become a frequent caller of Karen K's. Outwardly, his manner is unimpeachable, tone deferential, attention respectful. Behind this composure I see that he still wants to beat his brawny fists against my bones. I know this because one day I asked him if he wanted to beat my bones with his brawny fists, given the chance. He answered enigmatically, with obvious thought at the absurdity of the question. "Why, Mr Orth, I think we know each other well enough by now. Violence has always been unnecessary." He concluded with a curt nod and a lofty smile.

Lightning flashes above the park, reflected against Henry's gold tooth. "You've just missed her, Mister Orth." Raindrops drum on the awning. "She left a while back, and I think..." He pauses, puts a big hand against his neck, looks up and down the street. "Which way, now, which way did she go?" I ask him what she was wearing. "A gentleman doesn't notice every woman who walks in front of him, only the woman he's wedded to." His deflection tells me she's wearing bag lady chic. I remind Henry that I'm not the enemy, and zip up my blue hoodie against a newly rushing north wind. Henry animates himself, turns heel and points downtown. I take off at a jog.

Pelts of rain spatter my parka. I scan far ahead for a green medical smock, or white painter's pants, or a brown sports jacket, or a prison-orange jumpsuit. Karen's wardrobe is limited. She's nowhere close, though, not with that hound's gait. If she's stopped along a side street for a garbage can snack, I have half a chance to come across her. I've seen her do this, always when lots of people are around, to maximum effect. Her china tea service comes to mind, the white sugarcakes and salmon finger sandwiches she has shared out between us, so quintessentially English High Tea. I know what this woman has in her refrigerator: freshly braised meats (turkey and roasted pork loin), juice cartons of orange and golden grapefruit, two dozen eggs in their containers, bottled water and cans of beer, milk in a crystal jug, two heads of lettuce, and enough leftover containers to feed a family reunion picnic.

At 69th Street the rain shower passes on a rush of wind. The pavement reflects a sealskin's sheen. When the wind shifts, the sun breaks through the clouds like a laser. A traffic light stops me at 68th opposite one of Central Park's gated entrances. She could have gone into the park, here, or have gone straight, or turned right and marched over to Broadway. Her outfits I know, her routes tend toward the random.

I have a hunch she's taken Amsterdam Avenue or Broadway, streets where lots of people can mind her and ignore her. I hustle through a group of tourists when a blurred trail crosses my sight line, a chartreuse splatter. I stop at the corner and, across the street, forty yards ahead, I see Karen K's stooped body. She's in line to board a southbound bus with shoppers, school truants, and lunch-hour commuters all jockeying for position. If I'm lucky, the bus driver won't allow her stink to sully his passengers' air.

A bus pulls to the curb and its doors spring open, people pour out in ones and twos. I'm not yet across the street; the light changes and I want to launch myself off the curb, but have to reel back as a red-light scoff peels past my kneecaps. Then I'm off in a sprinter's dash. I see Karen through the crowd, she's getting on the bus. The line shrinks. The last in line gets on as I dead-run between a gaggle of females staggered by shopping bags, and step through the door. The driver looks at me like I'm taking up his time. I give him a New York glare as my chest heaves, fish my hand in my pocket for a token, and he hits the gas as soon as the silver disk slides down the slot.

I peer along the aisle. Left and right. Something's wrong.

She isn't here! That chartreuse jersey she's used to transmit the slogan, "Look at me, I'm a fucking bag lady!" isn't in me view. All the seats are taken and people stand in the aisle, but the bus is not so packed that I can't pan the passengers with one sweep. Except for the truants.

Four of them gather in a huddle at the rear doors, their backs to me and the wandering eyes of the driver. They're speaking a Spanish patois mixing street English and Puerto Rican slum, hands fly up and around, like gesticulations of the nervous and violent. I hear slaps on skin but this isn't happy High Fives. There's no laughter, swearing, what you'd expect from street punks getting their rods up on a jolly ride. I walk down the aisle, feeling the bus rock side to side. It's how they're standing that makes me notice them.

They've surrounded someone. The flying hands are taking aim at a head, a violent passion dance that escalates. I see them push-pull a chartreuse jersey like it's a beach ball. Karen's face appears between their shoulders, her white teeth bared like a cornered she-wolf. She has her hands up, managing the boys' slaps pretty well while jabbering back at them in Spanglish filled with (if my Spanish isn't too rusty) taunts and insults. Frustrated that their slaps aren't having much effect, the truants fold their hands into fists. Karen yells at them. "Pierdase! Fuck off, you punks! Vuelva a sus mommas!" I'm halfway down the aisle, side-stepping immovable riders who stand casually ignorant. I get to the middle doors when the bus slows so quickly that I'm knocked backwards. With hope that help is coming, I look at the driver, his head framed in the wide rectangle of mirror. But his eyes are forward. The bus is merely at the next stop, and I'm to get no help. He'll mind his own business until blood is spilled or a gunshot reports a casualty.

In the back, two passengers slide past the truants and out to the sidewalk. The exit doors snap closed with a thwack. The truants turn their heads, distracted; they're kids, but big kids, with wiry arms and fierce faces, the look of anger and po'boy that itches to let out its frustration on the weak. I catch sight of Karen's face again, and see she wants to teach them otherwise. The bus jolts forward and its momentum moves me toward these punks. My heart pounds in my chest because I'm one and they're four. Except now we're two-on-four, because Karen K's voice grows above theirs in challenge. "Cunts! Cunts! Get me off this bus! I'll fucking kill you spics!" Her shouts draw the attention of other passengers. I move closer, still unacknowledged by the punks. Karen blocks two blows, full-on punches, but three more blitz from up high and underneath, striking her head and chin. Her eyes roll in their sockets.

"Hey!" I yell. The punks look my way. Adrenaline surges through me and I feel lightheaded, not strong. They square up. Karen lashes two of them on the necks with her open hand, cat scratches that leave red lines like angry tattoos. They spin around and give her more shots to the face, harder now, that send her sideways and off her feet. She sinks to the floor and her head bounces on the runner. She's dazed but still mobile, and brings her legs into her chest for protection.

Then the biggest boy screams at me. "What the fuck you want, ass-fuck!" Spittle flies. He's smaller than me by half a head. I answer on a fast jab to his sneering face and feel his nose flatten beneath my knuckles. The kid cries out and falls backwards. Blood flows down his mouth and shirt. The second punk squares up, but, on the floor, Karen kicks him between the legs, the heels of her construction boots leading the force. This boy buckles, his hands clutched to his crotch while his eyes try to jump off his face. Karen rears back and kicks again at the third punk just as I throw two more punches, sending this kid into a seat next to a frightened passenger.

The one truant who remains standing backs off, his head swiveling with indecision now that the fight has changed tides. I shoulder my way past him and take my bag lady by the lapels of her jacket, pull her off the floor and back up, up the aisle, and stop at the center doors. The punk yells at us and kicks his fallen warriors, urging them to fight, but he's toothless without a gang. The bus stops and I shove Karen out the doors.

She stumbles on the pavement and, with my hands so strongly hitched to her clothing, I trip, our feet tangle, and we both go down on the pavement. We're flat on our backs facing at the bus. The punks flip us the bird behind the windows. One holds his bleeding nose. Another kicks the rear doors open and spits. The bus lurches forward and its fumes cover the sidewalk in blue mist.

Karen yells, "What the fuck's the matter with you!"

She rolls on her side and pushes up on an elbow. Blood beads across a pear-shaped abrasion on her right temple. Her chin sports blue knuckle marks and her hair is cockeyed. The hat is gone. I look around. People stare and try not to stare. The bulk of the crowded sidewalk waffles on, their legs and feet dangerously close to our hands and heads.

Karen sits up, wipes a palm against the side of her head, and says, "Mind your own business, sculptor." She looks at the blood that's come away on her hand. She frowns. Then she laughs, wicked, short palliatives, soft and private sounds that go on a moment longer than street theater should. People have moved on; we're now an obstruction. I stand so that I can wave people aside. I crouch to help Karen up because she's still laughing and looking at her bloodied hand.

I feel wild, out of control, and snap at her. "Look at me! Hey! Wake up, you crazy bitch!" She stares up, addled and blinded by the sun. "Is this some kind of experiment with you? Thrill-seeking. Dangerous living. Picking fights with street scum!"

She pushes my hands away and rolls onto her hands and knees. I take her by the arm anyway, a gesture of support and protection, but she'll have none of this and jerks her arm out of my grip. I step back. When she finally gets to her feet she fixes me with a mean look and grits her teeth.

"Stay away from me!"

I step back, worry striking me that Karen has a chicken knife and is in a mind to use it. She turns up Central Park West, towards home. People are not giving way, though, and she pushes at them, and begins to flail her arms and legs. The crowd moves around her and she takes three steps before she must stop. She wavers like a tree in a storm, takes two more steps, and collapses on the pavement. Three people bend down to help but, seeing a pile of filthy clothing and the rancid hair of this un-person, they pull up and leave her where she lies.

I run forward and kneel at Karen's side. A trio of suits, red ties flapping, laugh and say something about my "mother." A few Oh-dears and Look at this! and one Jesus, the filth that washes up from our clean sewers, these taunts come and go with their passing shadows.

Karen struggles to her knees, this time accepting my help. Her hands reach over her shoulders and clasp me for support. I look in the street for a police car, and sure enough a cruiser has slowed to see what has caused our sidewalk commotion. I start to say something, call out, but with a violent gesture from his partner, the driver rolls forward and is gone in traffic. The Good Samaritan helping The Bag Lady gets no leverage with NY's finest.

"Take me home," Karen says. She looks at me, the right side of her face bruised, streaked with blood. "Please."

The doctor has been with her for half an hour. When he arrived he gave a long look at her clothing but didn't ask the obvious question (he already knew; he'd introduced himself as "Ms Kosek's doctor"). The doctor only casually acknowledged me as he handed over his hat; I was the help, perhaps, a person he needn't concern himself with because a patient commanded his professional attention. A wealthy patient. I dropped his hat on the chair beside the telephone table. He went into Karen's bedroom and shut the door, leaving me in the living room with Henry, who looked at his watch and then at me. I wondered if he thought it was his job now to escort me downstairs, now that I'd done the right thing, the good deed, or to leave me here, alone in Karen's living room. His decision would be motivated by loyalty, but having allowed me upstairs three times before today's sudden reappearance at the front doors with a bloodied Karen sagging against my shoulder, he wasn't sure how far his influence reached. Henry checked his watch a second time, nervously, and told me that he needed to return to his desk.

Standing in the hallway, his silver buttons gleaming in the chandelier's light, he said, "Thank you, Mr Orth, for bringing Ms Kosek home." I nodded, but was so flooded with one question that I needed to ask, "Do you know why she does this?" He shook his head and left.

I found myself alone, then, in Karen's big, silent living room. The kitchen clock counted seconds while, through the double doors of her bedroom, I heard muffled voices. The doctor's angry tones overrode the clipped argument of his patient. As Henry had done earlier, I checked my watch, though the kitchen clock's ticking struck me louder than my own thumping heart, and with equal time. I realized that I should be home now, dressed appropriately to meet a pair of collectors Belinda had scheduled for a visit. Not of the importance for the falling sky, but a commission is promised food money. If the doctor wasn't long, I thought, I could talk with Karen a moment and still get home.

I wasn't supposed to have been anywhere near here today. Mrs Cowper and Napoleon had veterinary appointments for their yearly distemper shots, and I'm in charge of that because their owners prefer to pay me for that time-wasting chore. In fact I didn't mind, and had put aside two hours with the pooches. But the vet had had three cancellations and, when I got to the offices, she was practically waiting with syringes in hand to stab the little mutts' tushies. We were out of the office, strolling down the street, in twenty minutes. This "chore" earned me a flat rate. I dropped the dogs back at their homes, collected my fee under the stink-eye of both butlers in charge of household accounts, and skipped out the door, like a pirate on the deck of a captured treasure ship. Business is business. So I'd saved two hours and was six blocks from Karen's place. Why not a quick chat? That's what I had thought, anyway.

Now I feel the need to wait around, not steal away to the elevator, past Henry with his eyes burning shame into me for upsetting the routine he'd surely come to accept, and even depend on. What I really want is for Karen K to give some sign of recognition that what I did today was more than a good deed; I don't know what this might be, though. Maybe a smile is all I need. Her world has abruptly penetrated mine — a crazy-minded impulse for a pat on the head — which leaves Belinda waiting impatiently at our loft, no doubt, wondering what has befallen me this time. I wander toward the bedroom doors, seeking curio objects that can keep me near the voices without seeming to eavesdrop should the door fly open and Karen exit on a broom, the doctor's severed head dangling from her hand. I want to listen for words, catch a phrase, just one sentence or the back-and-forth spat the doctor has surely waged over her foolishness. He has to be doing this, I think, I hope; she needs more than a warning. Will a stern reprimand from someone she knows and respects bring some sense to her delusions? That's a question.

My first step is tentative, the floor creaks — sounds of an intruder — but my thoughts move my legs and quickly I'm next to the fireplace, conveniently positioned beside the bedroom doors. It's no use, though, because the voices are smothered and unrecognizable. Wild turkeys might as well be roosting on barn rafters for all I can decipher the sounds into voices, and voices into speech. The mantelpiece holds a big, round-faced alarm clock, the kind with two bells and a hammer between them. I'm reminded of the Pocono's cabin. The clock's body is wood, red and highly varnished, with a matching wooden key fitted into the side for winding. It's a circus clown's clock because of its size, bigger than a breadbox. And it's broken, or just unwound. The hour reads three-eleven, with the second hand frozen just past the brass numeral eight. I risk looking further at this piece, and pick up the clock. I upend it in my hands. Its back bears a silver plate screwed into the frame with an inscription:

To Circle City's own, with affectionate praise and congratulations for a promising career. Your hometown holds you in its pride.

Karen's from out west, I remember, the California pine country. Of course, that's why the sequoia redwood. The inscription is dated 1969. I replace it on the mantle.

Beside the clock are two framed photographs. The frames are identical, old-fashioned silver filigree rectangles, big enough for eight-by-ten prints. They must take the maid hours to clean, I imagine. Both pictures are black and white portraits, colors that match the frames. One is a family shot. Pictured on the left is Karen Kristine Kosek, a girl between seven and ten, dressed in a fluffy white dress. She's sitting on a three-legged stool, smiling happily into the camera. Her mother and father stand behind her, their smiles less jubilant, more formal, parental. One might even describe them as staid. The incongruity is striking, when you look long enough. They must be her parents. They're dressed in their Sunday best, patternless dark fabrics, their daughter in white chiffon, so multilayered that she looks covered in whipped cream.

The second picture is one taken in her early twenties, by my estimate. Yes, I think, she had once been pretty. This picture is also a set shot, but less formal, a portrait for her first book; a print that wasn't used but that Karen Kosek had preferred, only she was overruled by the male-dominated publishing establishment. Was that a problem, then? I'm pretty sure it was. On another long, lasting look, I find she's younger in this picture than I'd first thought. Perhaps college aged. Her face is slimmer and the skin around her eyes unblemished by time or sun. In the bloom of womanhood. She's recognizable against the image I have of her, the image of the woman in the crowd at the round table, and then that other one of her at the sculpture exhibition. They are images I'm forced to justify, and to mitigate. Karen is still pretty, the woman behind the mask, glimpsed like one sees a ghost, an effect of precise lines clouded in memory's elusion.

Out front... what has happened? I change my mind again; the two images blend into a brackish mess. No, she is no longer pretty, not really. My sense of beauty is tied to something else, these days. "Say 'Belinda' and you'll be safe, Minus," I remind myself. Then my lips move to mumble, "Of course she's recognizable" — the aged Karen K, the one in the bedroom nursing bruises and a knotted skull, she has lines on her mouth, eyes, and jawline; the young Karen Kristine Kosek shows enigmatic emotion (lips parted by a hair's breadth, as though she's just spoken; eyes focused at the camera, yet not fully open and without that "flash stung" expression; her black hair is long, and frames her face). When she smiles, her life transforms all her history of that young woman to the pained creature whom I know. She disappears into that image, and the protracted beauty is art wrought as realism, whose hold to society is tangible — the eyes track and allure me to her side; I know I'm not the first nor the five-hundred-and-first. Her countenance — of a Caravaggio bust in a Venetian piazza — is a mix of command, curiosity, and vulnerability, this last a sign of intense compassion for her subject, I have to believe.

I turn away from the photographs. There is a fourth possibility, and it touches me with remorse: she is neither the person of these two photographs nor the woman under the filthy clothing. There are a few ways for me to find out, and I no longer see it as a puzzle. It's an illusion.

I catch my breath and hear... nothing. No sound escapes from behind the doors. I cock my head. I hear only the tick of the kitchen clock. I glance toward that doorway and see the table around which we've sat. It, and the room in which I stand, are like the rooms of a museum, or the settings for a stage play, or the set-up inside an antiques warehouse, where you can buy a complete room furnished in the period-style of any modern decade. I turn to take in the rest of the room and the apartment at large. A long sofa, two narrow chairs; both upholstered in fabric that shines irregularly, silver and pewter tones. A rectangular coffee table holds a thick, glass ashtray, centered. Two matching side tables keep lamps, with conical shades. Rugs of various sizes lie beneath the furniture. A TV and Hi-Fi are shoved — nicely tucked — into a corner below one of the room's three windows overlooking Central Park. I call it a Hi-Fi because it's an old player from the Sixties, and that's what it was called back then; two square speakers like breadboxes. According to Angie and her boyfriend, those teens from the park, the Sixties were the Stone Age.

Through the window, from this vantage point, I can see where, below the green canopy of plane trees, I had talked with them; further on is the black band of asphalt on which I first saw a bag lady, and recognized her under that disguise. Further yet, the benches along the lake, whose blue reflects the sky far more from up high than sitting next to it, is where we'd sat many times, she writing and me noodling. I turn away from the window and let my eyes adjust again to the indoor light, finally bringing the gray and brown colors of the TV and record player into focus again. I hadn't figured Karen for a television watcher. Music, sure. I turn and scan the floor, looking at the boards and rugs for signs of wear along a path from couch to TV, signs that it's in frequent use. No scuffs or impressions mare the hardwood parquet; I see a few loose threads but no flattened nap in the rug. I take a closer look at the setup and find, behind the TV and Hi-Fi, that their electrical plugs are pulled from the wall socket and gathered with twist ties. She doesn't even watch the news.

Here she lives, in this stately four-roomer, its decor 1960's West Side fashion of its day, designed for those disinterested in building families, who inherited these charming apartments from those who had been the 1920's fashionable set. High ceilings, wood-framed windows almost to the floor (window seats), all non-standard dimensions that give one room to live. On a table by the door sits a telephone, and goddamn if it's not a Sixties rotary model! Can Karen Kosek be living in a past of her own making? The highlight of her life was the year that _What Beauty?_ marched up the best-seller lists, which attracted her to the City's elite: literary, political, artistic, high-society — she had tasted it all. International success and recognition never became what it could have been during the media supernova that was the Eighties. How swift was her fall (in her mind) according to that moment she disowned American culture as a subject for commentary, and art for criticism? She claimed in an interview published a few years later that she'd stopped writing not out of any refusal to write, but her decision was the beginning of another journey, of the sort women must make after a divorce. Journey? I'll say.

I look around the room again. The red velvet drapes, the iron-grate fireplace, the sound-stage furniture, the pop-mod rugs laid in geometrical calculation to each couch and chair and table. Then I come back to the telephone near the door.

Before there's a moment to think twice and balk, I take the phone in my hand and rotate the dial seven times. The rotary's response is loud in the quiet room, the sound of chattering teeth. "Belinda, it's me." Her voice is strained. I wince at how she must feel. "I'm going to be late. Sorry. I ran into some trouble." Silence, and some talk, and more silence. "No-no, nothing serious. I ran into Karen Kosek on the stree– right, the bag lady and... she was bleeding from the side of her face, honey. I couldn't just leave her. Someone had beaten her. She asked me for help... she got mugged by–... well, a doctor is in with her now. What? I'm in her apartment." Belinda has something to say about this. "I'll tell you about it later." More talk; we've got a business deal in the works! "Jesus, Belinda, I'm not walking out of here without a good-bye." When she replies, I think of the excuse I need for everything to make sense. "Listen. One good word from Karen K is worth the collectors 'missing' me this time around, and a dozen times more before Christmas. I'll be home when I can." Belinda's response is breathy and firm. "I'll be just a while," I tell her, "and don't worry." She says she'll disarm the collectors. That sounds fine with me. "Okay. Hey, I love you, so I'll see you later." I hang up. I notice my breath has slowed. Every told lie must have some truth inside, like a painting or a novel. Something strikes the bedroom door from within. I turn around and the door indeed flies open.

The doctor walks out through the open door. He's smiling. He doesn't think she needs an MRI (he tells me this as though I am – suddenly! – the man of the house) for the record. Behind him I see a pea-green carpet, an ivory chair, the edge of a bed and a woman's leg. He has used three stitches on her head gash, he says, hidden above her hairline, which is where all the blood had come from, not the quarter-size abrasion on her temple. He puts on his hat, the old-fashioned kind from the Forties that his white-haired generation still wears. What you see on men's heads in gangster films. Karen K suddenly appears in the doorway. She's still in her bag lady outfit, minus the chartreuse coat. The doctor nods at me, steps around my body that has been blocking the door as I spoke to Belinda on the phone, and leaves.

"I need your help, Minus," Karen says. She beckons me with her hand, fingers outstretched. In the hall, the electronic tone from the elevator sounds. My eyes flitter left, then back to her. She has the bedroom's double doors open. She says, "I need to take a bath, and I'm shaky." She has a bandage taped to the right side of her face. Yes, the bum clothes are still on her, but the silver wig is gone, and her hair, short and dark, is matted no less like a bum's than if she hadn't bothered with a wig at all. My protest sticks in my throat.

I follow her. She staggers back to the bed and sits on the edge. She motions to the bathroom. I look at the darkened doorway, and at her raised arm. Her finger points like a statue directing some unseen person toward the way. "What else did the doctor say?" I ask. "He says that I need to see a doctor," she replies. I say, "Sounds like good advice." She nods, or this might be her head lolling under the strain of keeping it upright. She looks tired, or dazed. Both. And she says, "I can't well go to some other doctor looking like this," she says. Okay, I think, her plea must be serious; her house-call doctor has released her to self-care, pending (on condition of?) a full checkup at a hospital that has proper medical equipment to detect internal problems. Is there one for her mind, too? I'm scatting here, I know, but what does she want me to do? "Draw me a bath, Minus," she says. I'm too distracted to argue, or question her command. I look at the bathroom, the darkened doorway my guide. I walk inside and turn on the light. The room's sudden brightness agitates my senses. The bathroom is four-square mirrored. I see myself from every conceivable angle, and in the corners only half of me.

I peek out the door; she is taking off her shirt. This is semi-madness, I don't want to find myself embalmed in this potency. The collar is pulled back across her shoulders and she's pulling at the shirt tails while trying to undo a cuff button one-handed (using the cuffed hand!). Three tasks at once is the essay of the concussed mind. I slide back into the bathroom and my hands turn the faucets to run the bath. The spigot is shaped like a lion's head, a nearly life-size brass sculpture. The water roars from its mouth with a stream as wide as a fire hose. I kneel beside the tub and drop the rubber plug into the drain, its brass chain wound through my fingers. The tub fills quicker than I could have anticipated. I make the water hot but not scalding.

I feel her presence behind me. When I turn, she's there, leaning against the door, using the handle for ballast. "I can't undo the buttons," she says. Her words wash through the water running into the tub. Her face is fixed in a childlike pout, hands and wrists thrust forward through the buttoned sleeves. "Come here." I put my hand on the edge of the tub. The edge is flanged and wide enough to sit flat. She steps forward and plops herself down almost on my hand, a near fall. Her rankness hits me, but it's mixed somehow with perfume, or body lotion, whose sweetness reminds me of the wild honey I used to find in the forest near my childhood home. The bees made their hive in the nook of a dying tree, and when I got close, the sweetness of clover honey surrounded me like the heavy air of a summer thunderstorm. Karen turns her palms up to show me the defiant cuff buttons. I take hold of the left and quickly undo the two buttons (one is loose enough that its thread breaks in my hand). Next, I undo the right cuff. This was not difficult. Her face is mild misery, jumbled resignation for one who must accept help. Her head rolls forward to rest the black-and-blue chin on her chest. She keeps her hands above her knees, like a zombie. I take hold of her arm and pull one cuff over her hand, and work her arm back as the sleeve slides forward and off. I pull the half of the blouse behind her back, and I pull the other sleeve from her right arm. I roll the loose button into the blouse and drop it on the tiles. She's left with a man's white undershirt covering her, soiled as a grease monkey's rag, tucked into a brown gypsy skirt, something once pleated but now flattened or otherwise creased in every which direction. Her feet are also in men's socks, white cotton athletic socks stained gray with dirt. "Shouldn't... wouldn't you prefer someone else to help you bathe?" I say. "This is a friend's duty, a female friend, or a nurse, and I'm neither." Her chin rises long enough for her to look stolidly at me, and maybe even with impish delight. She whispers beneath the water's roil. "The doctor has left. There are no other... friends." Then her eyes fall to the fluffy white mat beneath her soiled socks. I watch her wiggle her toes, and two pop free from behind a hole. She leans forward until her hands grip the edge of the tub, fingers splayed along the vertical white porcelain. I pull up the hem of her T-shirt. She raises her arms to match my progress, fast but easy enough to prove to her I'm not struggling with this situation. Her head rotates, she looks up, and I'm standing over her looking down through the inside-out shirt as this slips over her arms, catches her chin, springs upward with a pull, scrapes and catches her ear lobes until they fold over, and finally I'm looking through the neck hole at her face receding with the rise of the shirt. She lets her arms down slowly, back to the tub, which she again grips. I avert my gaze from her breasts that have appeared suddenly without their brassier harness. I soften my focus and toss the grimy shirt on the floor with the blouse. I kneel and take off each of her socks. Then I undo the zipper at the side of her skirt, from the hip. "Stand up, please." She complies and the skirt falls around her feet. She places a hand on my shoulder as she steps free, pulling one leg over the tub and then the other, where she stands in the hot water. "Ah-ow-ah!" she says at the water's temperature, but there's no further complaint. Her fingers hook into the top of her panties, these are unsoiled and modern and silky. She slides them down her hips as she lowers herself into the water. More "oh"s and "ah"s. The elastic band has left hyphenated impressions across her hip and thigh and the soft bulge of her belly when she bends. I watch her sink slowly beneath the water, where she pulls the panties free from her legs and feet, folds them in three, and hands them to me. I place the dripping material on top of a pile I now make of all her discards at the base of the door. I've looked for a proper hamper, but nothing is visible. She has pulled her legs to her chest, chin on her knees, wrists wrapped around her ankles. The hot water has come up to her armpits, and steams around her sunken face. I turn off the faucet and the room is quiet.

A bar of soap in a scallop dish sits beside a natural sponge, both on a silver tray against the back-splash behind the lion's head. I get down on my knees again, take hold of the soap and sponge, and dunk them in the water. While my hands work to make suds, I look away from her. The mirrored room, however, reflects her face and shoulders and knees from various angles. My sight trains itself on the milky water, made by my over-busy hands because I can't seem to start the next task. "Please," she says, finally taking me off this trance, "before the water cools." I look at her. She's thin and pale. I want to think that her skin is fair, so this is what I do. Finally I pull my hands from the water, which steam as I drip hot suds over her back and shoulders. The sound echoes through the room. I take more water into the sponge and bring it to her shoulders to let it run down again. Then I touch the sponge to her skin, move it in circles across her shoulders, up her neck, and then down her spine all the way under the water to her waist, back up her sides, out of the water and across each arm. Her skin ripples at the sponge's touch on her forearms and wrists and hands, which she's allowed to float up from her ankles, and they bob in the water like driftwood. The soft sound of wind through trees is how the sponge reveals its presence, and the dripping water plays tiny notes of a winter stream. Through this she is docile, silent, chin-to-knees, eyes somewhere that I cannot see until I peek in the mirrored corner which reflects her downward facing nose, pointed at the water like a horse or dog or some animal that is used to getting its bath, only a mild nuisance to be endured, and today is no different. Her eyes watch the bubbles burst on the water's surface and dissolve as the current constantly pushes out from her knob knees held above the waterline. The white bandage on her temple is affixed with surgical tape. "How's your head?" I ask. My voice is hollow, dream-captured, its echo hollow, too. "It hurts," she says, an equally hollow sound. I run the sponge along her skin and watch the grime wash away, diluted in the bathwater. I take one wrist and her arm comes up with it for me to wash underneath, the armpits shaved smooth. I see her breasts jiggle in the water. Her skin is magnificent, I notice, now that she has come clean. It is nicely taut around the elbows and wrists, beneath the triceps, as well — always the bane of women who've discarded athletics or exercise. "Will you see another doctor?" "Maybe. This one says my head has not been concussed." I doubt her, and her doctor. My hands move to her legs, first to the knees; next, the shins; then the thighs. My fingers are flushed from the hot water, the skin has pruned, spongy yet rough across the fingerprint ridges that have swelled. When I pull her leg up clear of the water, to clean her right foot, she leans back and rests against a cushion affixed with suction cups. Through the suds I see her breasts again, afloat, and how they wiggle as I scrub her soles vigorously enough that her body ruffles the water. She makes no move to cover herself. She has closed her eyes. If she's not trying to provoke me, I think, she's only thinking of me as the helpful man, not a savior or knight. I can accept this. I soap the tops of her feet and begin, without thinking about how or why, to massage her toes. As I work the muscles and the joints between my fingers, her face makes appealing movements for more. The water runs down her shins, around her calves, and merges with the pool at the convergence of her legs. In this pool I see her pubic hair, a hazy shadow under the nacreous water. My eyes slowly rise toward her face, across her breasts; the nipples softly breach the surface when she inhales, and drop below at the exhale. She has kept her eyes closed, her face now in peaceful repose.

I wash the other leg, and massage the left foot as I did the right. When I replace this leg in the water, she opens her eyes. Her expression is neutral. "Can you do your hair?" I ask. But she says, "I'd like you to finish." This is manipulation, I think. She wants to see if I will cross the line, some line that she's drawn as part of her game. A line that began with her having me take off her clothes, or perhaps earlier. Isn't this true? She couldn't act innocent if I were to reach over and cup her breasts, or kiss her on the mouth. Is this true? "Are you feeling better?" I ask. She says, "Not brand new, but I'm past that anyway." There's no sign of her concussion now, the one the doctor claimed she didn't receive from the blows inflicted by the punks, or from the fall during which she struck her head on the bus's metal floor. Her body is in fine shape, I notice for a second time. Must be from all that walking. Maybe The Parkview has a gym and exercise room in the basement (or the penthouse, with park views), where a personal trainer books residents for weekly workouts to keep their bodies toned, looking NY chic, ready for the cocktail circuit. Her legs resemble those of a long-distance runner, thirty years on, supple but, only, no longer youthful. On the other hand, I think, in a fit of uncertainty whether to wash her hair or say good-bye now, she could simply be undernourished and in need of breakfast. "Where's your shampoo?" She points to a half-dozen bottles I've seen all along, next to the soap dish. I reach across her to make a choice. Just grab any bottle. One has eucalyptus infusion, another apple-cinnamon (I imagine her head smelling like a warm pie), and a third announces "triple-dandruff" protection in a mint scent. A forth bottle holds cream rinse. I select the apple-cinnamon, just for fun. I walk on my knees around the tub to position myself behind her. She has leaned her head back. She rotates her shoulders in yogi fashion. My view is of an artist inspecting his model.

"Do you like what you see?"

Her voice is a sudden intrusion. My surprise sounds out in my answer. "Is this why I'm here?"

The question makes her flinch. Her hands come up slowly from her sides, and her palms cover her breasts, while her thighs instinctively pinch together, making her patch sink deeply into the fold.

"No," she says. "I wanted your help. That's all I–... that's all I've asked for." I look from the top of her head into the mirror and we abruptly sight each other for the first time since entering the bathroom. People think they see one another when taken altogether, in the flesh, face to face and from corners across a bed, or when the subject isn't expecting she (he) is being watched. What I think is that we really don't see people until we see them through a mirror, not in the nude, as an image taken at an angle at once familiar but wholly unique. Unique to that person. The difference appears at the two-dimensional surface and its reverse symmetrical image, that which we're otherwise used to seeing of the people we know. This is how she and I see each other now.

I upend the shampoo bottle and squeeze a dollop of liquid into my palm. The snap of the closing lid against my wrist is a penny-splash in our minds. My palms come together to spread the shampoo before they touch her head, then the fingers work the liquid through her hair, avoiding the bandage, hair that's not as greasy as I'd thought from wearing the wig. I cup my hand and take water from the tub to further wet her head. Suds rise and my fingers work across her scalp. We look at each other in the mirror again. No words pass. I massage her scalp for a while — moments during which her hands slide from her breasts, sink into the water again, back down to her sides. Her legs, too, part into a natural position at rest. "Face soap?" I say. She reaches up for a bar that's in a separate dish next to the lion's head. I take handfuls of water and pour this over her head, rinsing out the shampoo. A lot of the water and suds drain outside the tub, but I don't care. This isn't going to be a perfect job, I think, although it'll do well. She holds the facial soap while I finish rinsing her hair. Then I take the soap and lather my hands. She turns her face up and holds her eyes open for a moment, then closes them tightly when I begin to paint green soap circles onto her cheeks and chin and forehead, and move over to the un-bandaged temple (which I've forgotten about and see that it's wet and must soon be changed). I finish at her nose. She senses this is the end and lets herself sink completely below the water. She comes up and allows the water to rinse her hair and face naturally, without wiping her skin with her hands. She repeats this submarine maneuver twice more. I worry about her stitches, but I realize this is her worry. Soon she blinks the watery remains free from the corners of her eyes. It's now that I find my hands have been on her shoulders and have remained there since finishing her face. Perhaps I had even helped her slide into the water, and to resurface. I don't know for certain. And as I think to wonder, she reaches up and covers my cool, water-beaded hands with hers, so warm and fragrant from the water's depths. She grips my fingers like grasping flower stems, and brings them down to chin level, where she kisses the left on the wrist, and then the right at the same spot. "Karen," I say. She nods her head, then shakes it, leaving me unable to know what she means, or wants, or wants from me. I want to leave. This would be easy: take my hands from hers and stand up and walk out. I watch her lips part as she pulls my hands down below the water. My arms follow this descent, down and around her shoulders, until our heads come close and her lips reach for mine. Our eyes stay open as we kiss, her pupils fixed on mine. My eyes wash through her emotions, lying startlingly clear behind those golden brown irises. My hands are taken far below the water, where they are slowly fitted into the crease of her thighs. Her eyelids flutter. Her tongue comes from its place in the middle of her mouth and touches the tip of my tongue, playing with its own tentative probes that are like kissing fishes. The tongues then do a slithering dance. I hear her breath through her nose, and feel it on my cheek. My shoes squeak on the wet tiles behind us. Our chests rise quickly and fall in fits. My fingers are wet and inside her, but with friction, moving slowly, around and in and out and around, back in, deeper now. Her hands grip my wrists and help my fingers move. She's become moist, less frictious. Her eyes close and our lips roll and move and mash. My eyes lurch left and in a fuzzy vision I see her knees lift up to her chest, and her hand lets go of my right hand and takes the left in both of hers and now my right hand comes away because the left needs more room to move deeper or else I'll lose contact with her mouth against mine. Her breath is hot against my cheek and lurches in gasps. I feel my dick against the side of the tub, rubbing against it as she rocks her hips forward and back, her knees out of the water and hitting the bathtub waves like a boat moored in a storm. She lets my fingers go deep, then back out all the way, slowly, on the out-pass dragging up across her clitoris, then back down and in, deep again, until she's rocking and gaining speed, speed that becomes pulsating quick. The water splashes against the sides of the tub, crests the rim and runs over. Her hands hold my wrist, helping my hand move to her tempo, how she wants it to move faster but I resist and make her do this with me. Our lips are yet tender, but fervent and writhing. She moves and ruts and then softly grunts and lets the air out of her chest in gasps, closes her legs around my hand and slowly ceases her rocking.

I close my eyes and wait for her. In a while, no longer than a few breaths, she releases my lips from hers, and her hands float to the surface, while my hand is still in her possession below. I keep my eyes shut while I hear Karen say, "It's okay, Minus. Everything will be okay."

CHAPTER 20

Peter N sits on the model's stool in my honeycomb. He has looked through the original sketches for the thirteen Mythos I've finished. He wants to trace my mental processes. We've done this for each other before, in the past, but not for a long time now; a critical exercise, but not a critique. I watch him from a chair across the worktable. I've kicked up its front legs to rest my shoulders against the shelf casements, stuffed with plaster maquette heads, hands, feet, wings, tridents, ears, seashells, breasts, thunderbolts, bows, orbs and scepters. "How much longer?" Peter asks. I tell him. "You work fast." "I'm working at one pace, which happens to be... swift." My globes had taken eighty-seven weeks, an inconceivably long time after all I've done these few months. Peter holds up two sketches, and wonders aloud how well my inspiration has come through so cleanly between sketch and sculpture. He says he means that he sees a theme in the series well beyond the obvious; at a fourth, or even a fifth, layer. I hadn't seen a fifth layer, but if he says so, I'll accept that. I remind him: idea, sketch, sculpture; I've stayed firm to what I first saw. I'd expected him to say something encouraging, but now that I've heard it, my elation is effusive. He sees this and says, "I'm an artist. They're only collectors." I concede the point. "We work all the time, Pete, but we work best when there's something more." "More?" "Don't play games with me now. I'm still halfway vulnerable." "Hey, I know what you mean. To some people out there, though, this is one part of a larger game. When you get that magazine cover and the rousing interview, they need to know what it means." He stabs his finger at "they." I reply, "You cannot ask the Mythos to explain themselves. It is we who must find explanation in them. This is all that any God of Religion has asked. Simple sculptures can hardly demand more. You understand, neither of these is absurd." Peter agrees by his silence. He puts the sketches back into the order he'd found them. "Show me the pieces again," he says, returning the box to the table. In the alley between the honeycombs, nine of the finished sculptures stand covered in muslin. They are one-tenth scale. "Next week," I say. He frowns, but the incline of my head reiterates my determination to wait for the unveiling, even for him. Again, I know he understands, because the artist has limited power, and what can be horded for a rainy day works to an advantage otherwise unrealized. "It seems a transgression, though," he says. Now I frown; I don't like this word, lately. "Why?" I ask. "Thirteen pieces. Not fourteen, or twelve. What gives?" "That number doesn't scare me." "Thirteen sculptures in four months. That's a transgression of nature's laws to complete fine work." "You haven't seen them all, yet." Peter taps the pile of sketches. "You know, Minus, I've been thinking about something for a while. I can help. The organization. The art world thing. If that's what you want, or need. Is that what you want? I wasn't sure of myself on that question, not until things started happening for me. You know, you only get one chance." "Pete... I've got it under control."

Transgress. "To infringe or go beyond the bounds of (a moral principle or other standard of behavior)." I recoil at the illustrative sentence: "They must control the impulses that lead them to transgress." I read this definition in The American Heritage Dictionary that Belinda and I keep at home. If this is where Shakespearean tragedy appears on the level of Lady Macbeth's malady, she of the speaking conscience and blood-slick hands, then I'm almost there. I had to read that play in high school English class, and didn't get anything out of it. Murder? Not in my vocabulary. Neither was "transgress." The other story close at heel is Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. Also in our high-school anthology. Murder again, but I associated the "knowing" of the phantom heartbeat to masturbation. If I stayed in the bathroom too long, looking for zits or just leaving a dump, I would get weirdo looks from my parents. Especially my mother. The Karen K episode is different.

Belinda was waiting for me when I got home. She had something to say. She also had questions. "The collectors liked your stuff, but I could tell they were pissed off that you weren't here. Your Mythos trio saved our asses. They'll spread the word, get others talking. Why did you help this fucking bag lady, anyway? She's, like, this sixty-year-old has-been and, and okay, now she's down and out, sure. So what? She's leeching off society while.... You know she makes more money than we do from panhandling all day long. I've met bums who say they get ninety bucks a day. That's enough to live on the West Side. Well, rent control."

"She isn't a bag lady," I told her for the um-teenth time. "That's what I know for sure, now." It's how I looked away after this that made her take renewed interest. I tried to explain what I knew, in a way that sounded like I didn't know anything more than what had happened yesterday or what I could deduce from other times we'd met. Yes, I caved and confessed, only not to everything. "She only dresses like a bag lady," I went on. "She's acting. It's a part she's playing. And fuck if I know why. We've talked. We meet in the park. Yeah, it's been a secret, but nothing like... like something to get drunkenly angry over. Mostly in the park, that's where we've met, in public, every once in a while." Belinda angled her head. I'm not sure if the expression on her face was curiosity or the look a psych doctor reserves for the mildly insane patient laying open confidences best left untold. "She's had me to her apartment for tea. Twice." I said this to confirm what had been squeezing her face.

Belinda didn't like this admission. She said it was a sign of guilt and lying. And that there could be more. How can it be lying if I've told you? There's no subterfuge here. She said, It's after the fact, and you could have told me all along what was going on. Only nothing is going on, I corrected, and reminded her that I did, once before (twice!), tell her about my Karen K sightings and her eccentricity, and all I'd got from her, Belinda, was, "Who cares what she does?"... which was enough of a hint to me that she, Belinda again, didn't want to hear about Karen K because a bag lady doesn't register on her care list of things, items, news, that demand attention. "You're pressing," Belinda said outright, which got my tell-tale heart beating quietly. "Of course I'm pressing," I told her. "I've kept something from you that was unneeded. I stand guilty of that, and I'm sorry. For that. Period."

We were standing at the kitchen island, she with elbows on the counter like a prosecutor at a court podium, I with a slice of sandwich, bread in each hand, fixing a snack because it was after six and my stomach had been grumbling for two hours, ever since I'd left Karen's apartment with a short good-bye at her door, my mind abeyant to the facts of the day. I told Belinda, "I'm pressing you to not be so inquisitive, suddenly, on a subject that you discounted out of hand, so neatly, five months ago." "Was it so long ago?" Belinda asked. I put the sandwich halves together and took a lunging bite. While I chewed I tried to count back the weeks. I spoke around a lump of food in my cheek. "I don't know." We left it there. Belinda wasn't going to accuse me of having an affair with a quinquagenarian while we were on the verge of success. Why should I tell her more about that evening? Honesty won't bring anything good; it would likely end us. Foolishly so, because nothing had happened. Nothing so defined as to serve any purpose other than experience. Experiment.

Selfish? Yes! Telling her would only make me feel good. I can live with my private guilt. As to future meetings with Karen K, the subject was neither broached nor abolished as a subject. Besides, if I'm not completely wigged out, a kiss and a forced-to-diddle act doesn't constitute cheating, having an affair, or keeping a mistress. It is — or was — a transgression.... STOP!

Breathe, Minus!

Okay, I need to be honest with myself: all this introspection is no excuse for my character flaws. The thought makes me suspicious. Am I not the good man I've always believed I was? One's delusions are as troubling as the reality. Change is possible; in my state, essential — as a man and an artist. I must control the impulses that lead me to transgress.

CHAPTER 21

It's charming to have Karen walk with me (me and the big dogs) after our moment in her bathroom a few weeks back. I'm trying not to be schizo over this; confront your fears. Karen throws the stick for Boilermaker, who chases it but neglects to bring it back, which makes Karen snicker. Charming, too, is how Chief's muddy paws leave prints on her green-smeared smock or musty painter's pants. She rarely speaks to me in her alley voice anymore.

I am a good man, and I've stayed clean. In thought and deed. Have I helped her open onto a new life? Or new-er life? Have I teased out an affinity for me? Sometimes, as we walk, I keep my eyes forward and listen to her voice; while her appearance is blocked from immediate imagery, I separate reason from self-awareness; hers is the voice of boisterous calm, of attitude with its pitch-perfect evidence; and at those moments I feel as though I do stroll alongside celebrity — Karen Kosek: polemicist extraordinaire (Tonight Only! 8 – 10 pm in The Big Apple ballroom). Then I look sideways and find myself beside a wretch, a ghoul, a living nightmare of endless failure. This visual attack is arresting. She is beguiled, or this is me.

The clothes are her routine, something about her that I have come to accept. They act, any way I like to look, to balance the weight between that persona and her intellect. Publicly, they make her both a spectacle and innocuous; a bundle of wonder after my innocence.

My perception on the subject of Karen K, naturally, is of the outsider-now-accepted-into-the-parlor-game. I still have little idea of her purpose for the clothes, nor what she thinks she looks like to the world beyond her B.O. I've had to discount the rhetoric she used after being pummeled by the bus-terrorizing punks. This is not to suggest I haven't tried asking her. She answers me in one of three ways. 1) Change of subject... ("Isn't it amazing? Of course not — not when a hundred billionaires walk the earth."). 2) Abuse... ("Look in the mirror, Artist! Garbage men dress better than you on their days off."). 3) Ignorance... ("I like. She likes. He likes. They like. We like. [... silence...] Like I. Likes she. Likes he. Like they. Like we.") If these are clues, they're red herrings. If they are riddles, they lack a syntax.

One day I caught her off guard. She was writing, thinking, writing some more. Next, she stopped to stare across flower beds at a lawn quilted with picnic blankets. We occupied a bench in the English Garden, a stone's throw from the Harlem Meer. Phalanxes of pastel-clothed tourists rushed by like we were lepers whose leg irons trailed strings of empty tin cans. All at once, Karen K came up for air, and I fired my dart: "Zappa can understand what this is all about." In a half whisper I heard, "Keep an eye on what I do to your –" But she stopped herself in time, and I didn't catch the next word. She bit the end of her pencil, a fang tooth buried in its wood-pulp. I'd missed a key ending. Or the start to an extended thought. This was a jump through the barrier of her snow-blind stare, but it was hardly the looking glass moment I had hoped to find myself stepping through. Afterwards, she became more careful with me. And I have kept an eye on what she does to my... (what?)

Since then, I haven't asked pressing questions of philosophy, or her intent, not even obliquely. Instead, we continue to talk in short sentences, sometimes in monotones, because — I don't know why; it's she who started that. This makes me feel like a sailor on a ship, a lone sailor, piloting a two-master with triangular sails. I keep the port-starboard tacking short because my bow is pointed upwind. I sail close to shore, close enough to hear the surf echo against the sails. The experience is not so much eerie as of a dream that gives you fitful sleep: when you wake, you're glad for the renewed consciousness, but have the feeling that the dream wasn't over, so you want to sink your head into the pillow, cover half your face with the blanket, and let your mind rest with the hope you can return to the dream where you left off, knowing, in the moment of listening to your breath rasp against the linen, that your best attempt will be in vain.

Let me give examples of such conversations over the last days.

Near the lagoon, after one late-summer rainstorm, dozens of people, couples linked by an arm and groups spread across the path, kept us company along this green ribbon. Many were too fidgety — smoking and talkative and bitchy — to see the beauty that lay before them, and we could tell they itched to get on with their day, away from here. Karen was on to her day. She hadn't moved in ten minutes, and was otherwise focused on the sky's reflection in the water, clouds drifting along to mock the speed of our city's streets.

I said, "Nabokov would've loved this park today."

"There is an abundance of pre-teens running about."

"He was a lepidopterist, and Dolores was thirteen: a teen. Same age as Juliet Capulet, as it happens."

Karen panned the scene without moving her head. A girl-scout troop leaned dangerously over the Bow Bridge in their green and yellow uniforms; squadrons of butterflies blitzed the flowerbed's colorful targets; three unicyclists rolled by in silent concentration, their arms outstretched for balance. Then she said, "Sure. I like the broad backs of the monarchs. Frenetic industry slowed to the beating of enormous perforated wings attached to a glorified worm. Of course we must recall, Romeo was just seventeen to your Humbert's forty-five."

So the character had become my Humbert. "Watch the butterflies," I said.

"Watch your referents."

"Listen to their beating wings."

"Hear your mature lover request a glass of wine." Her aim was to provoke. I am not her lover. She knows I am not her lover. "They're skittish. Like little girls."

"Then I'd like to be a butterfly," I admitted.

A squad of joggers in matching blue tank tops and black stretch shorts passed in a whoosh and slap-paddle footfalls. The lepidoptera flew up in the vortex, caught themselves, and spun around and back down to the flowers, like parachutists in casual descent beneath a cerulean sky.

"A glass of wine does sound refreshing. Boathouse?"

"It'll have to be taken in to-go cups." I raised an eyebrow at her orange pants and green shirt, the combat boots, the hounds tooth overcoat hung on her shoulders as on a square hanger (it was seventy-five degrees in the shade, and we weren't near any). She didn't flinch at my condescension, but she knew I spoke the truth.

"I'll race you," Karen challenged.

"How about a placid stroll?"

Her frown was monumentally admonishing. "You big pussy." Always said to provoke.

I felt privileged to be with her that day. My plan was to swing by the library's main branch where, in one of the upstairs salons, Vladimir Nabokov's notebooks and sketches of his butterfly collection were on exhibition. What a fun field trip, I'd thought, and had invited Belinda that morning. That morning, however, Belinda said she'd just as likely skip the exhibition to work on advertising for The Mythos Project. Through her description of her pre-planned day, I detected her eyes adroit inquiry: Why aren't you sculpting at the Beehive today? Ten sculptures in seven weeks, and I'm not working hard enough? At least, that's what I heard by implication. Meanwhile, now, she was talking to a videographer and here I sat. So I decided to make the Nabokov a surprise for Karen. Before that, we would have wine. I sprang off the bench and beat her to the boathouse by thirty yards. Big man!

Another day, at her apartment, she handed me a book of photo essays on Europe's urban parks. I turned the pages and read her descriptions, her captions, and her commentary.

I was keen on her ideas. "How does sound play into photographs?"

She spoke without looking at me, almost as if she were some no-name government employee getting through the day. "You listen to the people. Your photo subjects. Sometimes to the landscape. Whatever else you have. Everything makes noise when you take time to listen. Think of wind as it moves through winter-frozen branches. That's about as simple is it comes. You see the sound in the picture before you hear the scene. You must feel the same vibrations come through sculptures."

This is not the speech of someone who has gone mad. Her sorted madness (I have to call it something) is yet contained; not so her eccentricities. Outwardly, her world appears normal to her, and she lives normally. (I've had tea in your kitchen! I can describe what's in your refrigerator!) Almost, that is. I see another madness in her essays, those that I dug up at the library, studious thoughts on pain, disease, loss, and death. All the parts of life that can drive one into madness, if one's wheels jump the rails. Her examples have fictitious names (first names only) and paragraph-long extracts. Anecdotes, to which she added, as lyrical and smartly written as anything she'd published before, platitudes of super-coherent statements about the connection between life as the healthy among us know it, and the near-to-death life of those up to their armpits in the end-game. Her conclusions amounted, frequently, to screeds on class warfare, religious politics, gender hatred, and corporate greed. I'd heard it all before, through Reagan's two terms and the politics of Us vs. Them waged silently, heroically, by the shrinking middle class saddled with taxes to pay for corporate subsidies and loopholes made for the super rich. Only, Karen's arguments had wit (though not charm).

On this reflection, I see one of her objectives: she is dreaming a better world. No more and no less a dream than her adversaries have done, are doing, will always do and re-do, ad infinitum, until all is knocked down, rolled flat as a cemetery, and the building recommences. "It's what they do," she concluded. "It's what they've always wanted. Their influence comes from doing, getting it done. Practice what you preach. Do you want to save babies from abortion? Go out and kill the abortion doctors. Do you want to stop war? Send in the troops. Do you want to help the homeless? Ignore them. And... and, and, and."

How could I explain to her my perfect understanding of this, her book of essays, nearly twenty years on? She didn't agree, when I tried. She said, "Look at the text" — and then she said nothing at all.

"I've worked long with mood," I said, later, returning to the subject of using the five senses in art expression. "Countenance, mostly, along with the angle of their heads. They don't avoid sound. Not exactly... only let me be contradictory here. The noise of thought can be impressive. I've always wondered."

She leaned close to me. In a voice like someone taken off a canvas painted by Bacon, she said, "We are all storytellers. Humans hear something from the world around them that doesn't have anything to do with their thoughts. It isn't incumbent to be an artist for anything to sink in and emboss experience onto one's brain. Art has always told stories. You don't want me telling you where to find it in your work."

"But... I'm listening."

She grabbed my chin in a hand smelling horribly of stale tobacco (I haven't seen her touch a cigarette, let alone smoke one). "It's not enough to make people see," she said. "They want to live another life in the now. Which often enough has little to do with the present. Forget what they say; there is no next time. This is the meaning of art."

Perfectly chaste thoughts, exchanged over tea and a coffee table book.

Karen writes on tabloid-size foolscap folded into sixteenths, which she makes by hand at her kitchen table. She matches corners on each fold, presses hard on the edge as her thumb runs along the fold to make its spine sharp and thin. These are what I saw her scribbling on in those early days, when she threatened me with Henry's psychotic sexual wrath. She always writes in pencil. At unmeasured intervals she rotates the pencil in a small blue sharpener. The action, I think, is her subconscious exercise between sprinting thoughts. I don't dare ask her if she notices.

When she fills one page with her diminutive, looped handwriting (speed printing that combines single letters with cursive couplets and triplets), she turns the page like a book. As this is a sixteenth folio, she must unfold and refold the foolscap every fourth page. When the folio is covered in so many lines of her neat, penciled letters, she stores it in a bookcase shelf, stitched between hundreds of others. When she retrieves a folio from this shelf, she unfolds it completely, out to its tabloid size, spread across the kitchen table, over which she stands and reads. The pages of handwriting make geometric patterns, rectangles resembling artisan ceramic tiles, or an ancient manuscript from a time when writing — hand lettering — was new, special, mystical. Karen must rotate the tabloid to read each of the now disassembled pages. She places her index finger on the bottom of the page, and when done, spins the tabloid or flips it over to find the next page. It helps that she has numbered each page. She moves fluidly, never with the need to hunt, and understands her tile pattern like a cartographer her treasure map.

Another day in the park, we walked side by side, keeping our own silence like a wizened married couple. This lasted forty minutes, after which she told me she would have to get home, and I should go back to the studio (I promptly did, once we'd nodded good-bye). We had met earlier for an hour, on a bench specified by her. She came late, dressed in dirt-streaked orange stretch pants, a man's suit jacket, and the polished shoes. The silver wig goes unchanged, although she's found another pee-wee straw hat, after the last was lost in the bus brawl. People stared because we appeared to be together, like twin escapees from an asylum. I wore my own trans-variable costume: jeans and a white T-shirt (clean) with black sneakers and a student's backpack slung over a shoulder. While she wrote in her folio, I listened to her mumbles, strings of phrases and half sentences (subjects or predicates) given sound so — I think — she could check the rhythm. I guessed that this is what writers do. I don't know for sure, but the pattern fits. Sculptors don't talk to themselves, generally, but we do sigh a lot, and cough (to expectorate the organic fumes and rock dust). Then Karen stood and walked off without warning. I followed and followed, and followed, rushing like a poodle to keep up.

When she wasn't carrying the Duane Reade bags overfilled to the point of stretching the shop logo like cartoon 3-D, her hands stayed in her pockets, one holding a pencil, the other a folio. An endless parade of people watched us — quick muzzy glances, open hostile stares, and lots of whispers; children gawked; new mothers piloting prams turned up their noses; business suits liked to smirk their pink, daily-shaved faces at us, holding the ever present "Get a job!" wise-crack that encouraged our lips to wriggle in pantomime. The faces on these nosey neighbors always strike me comically. Lately I've become so interested in them, that a future sculpture cycle came to mind, and I began to sketch heads in my book under the title Urban Faces: Eras of Anxiety.

So there we were, Karen and I, she of the diddle and I of the noodle, writing and sketching, talking and staring quietly. Across from us, and down a hill, workmen set about cleaning up the Wolman Ice Rink for the not-so-distant winter season; they raked leaves and fixed side boards, swept paper trash and garbage from the wooden seats. "I like to see you writing," I said. Karen laughed her crazy bag-lady snigger. "It's not a hobby," she said, her alley voice redundant for such a lazy comment (I was supposed to be above the obvious by now).

I see from the corners of my eyes how she snatches looks at me, at my hands, my face, how I walk and, most unnerving (her eyes stray from direct focus), the way I talk. She's been lately catching looks over my shoulder at what I'm sketching.

All of this gives me the feeling that her mind is running ahead of my own. She has the annoying habit of stopping on a dime to drop her ass on a bench, hands wrenched from her pockets. All to write a sentence or a full page. Watching her write quickly on one page, or explicitly flipping to another, where she makes a correction to script bridging the left edge with the right, in the minutest print, the thought occurred to me that she had never stopped writing. Her work continues. I feel pride, knowing her as I do. The thought upsets me a little, too.

"I think about past lovers." My answer is as sincere as I can make it without providing examples; I don't want to do that. "And I think about present lovers."

"You make comparisons."

"That's inevitable. Unwise maybe. We are humans."

"And future lovers."

"Future lovers?"

"We humans contemplate the future. We brood. We cannot be truly human without knowledge of our past. We live in the present. That changes constantly."

"Yes. We change."

"Your idea of me has changed. It's changing now. Yes. So the future lover is a part of your life now."

"I like to.... This subject can be incendiary if discussed in the company of one's present lover."

"That takes some delicacy."

"Yes."

She asks, "Can sculpture represent the truth of human existence?"

"I don't know. I think so. That's why I sculpt. I'm trying to find out. I want to find out."

"You need to find out."

"No. I doubt if not learning will kill me or harm my feel for art, or my want of the creative impulse to continue, however it can. And it will. Knowing 'either – or' helps me when I do it well. When I mistreat the obvious, the subject is incapable of exhausting itself. I can then call that 'art.' "

"It's timeless."

"No, again. Not timeless. Art never stops questioning the viewer. Timeless art is something within itself. Period and movement have no arching effect, none that I've discovered. Art is made to let viewers see themselves. But if art causes viewers to question their position in life, or society, or the universe, that is merely existential. But it's not timeless."

"Do you have something in mind?"

"Yes."

She waits for my answer. I shake my head, or at least I don't say anything. Her face is calm. Slowly a flush rises from her neckline. Karen K pulls the sheet up to her chin. She turns away. On her bed, we are quiet. Her ribs rise and fall steadily. Her shoes stick out from the sheet. Where her hand has gripped the edges and folds of material, there remains black smudges of burnt cork. She's getting worse, I think; or else I'm just noticing more of her. There doesn't seem to be a difference that I find tangible. The wonder of failure to ask the right questions, or speak of the right ideas, strikes me like a bell clapper. I feel sleepy. Watching her body beneath the sheet helps me close my eyes, finally.

I wake in an hour. My watch shows 9:40 in blue, day-glow bars. It's the evening before The Mythos Project is to open, for a private showing, to that handful of collectors, critics, gallery owners, curators &etc. Belinda has devised this, after we agreed it was time. Some friends have been invited, and Dad. I leave Karen's bedroom and close the door behind me. I reach the kitchen and turn on the light to find our teacups left on the table, two oatmeal cookies grown stale on a matching dish between them. The chairs are pulled out halfway. A chaste scene. If Belinda saw this, she would laugh, laughter that masks an inability to understand; the bedroom scene would take away that passion. She thinks I'm at the Beehive, and it's best not to move that thought into the light. Karen K is my friend. She is amusing, and she is amused. She said tonight that I was like a boy at the seaside, playing in the water with a plastic shark. I asked her why she thought of that image. "Because it's true," she said. "That's how I think of you."

CHAPTER 22

The Beehive bylaws have a clause that gives "display and/or show privileges" to each resident artist "as long as rental fees are not in arrears." This consideration wouldn't make a hill 'o beans difference if the shared space was of normal size. However, its saving grace is its cavernous size, and ideal capacity for a party, or an art show. Belinda seized on the clause and I reserved the date and time weeks ago, to the surprise, if not angst, of Binny ("Is this for real?") and, in order of appearance at my honeycomb, Alfred ("Congratulations. Hey, is this something we all can get in on?"), Bert ("Good for you. So, what kind of security can you guarantee for our artwork stored in the hives? You might want to get a ten-million dollar theft and damage policy, just for the night." I told him, "Fuck you."), and Vendulka ("I heard what Bert said. What a dick, yo? You just watch me on him that night. I'm a buzzbird and he's a rotted meat."); on the other hand, Zeppo's drop-in wasn't expected ("I won't anticipate an invite. You've got outside people to please.") because he's the most private of us all. It irks me that he doesn't exhibit his work.

All bon mots in place, Zeppo and Al helped me move the powwow table to a spot beside the elevator (while Bert seethed behind his tent flaps) so that my showcase pieces had the entire alley to display well. We also collected the assorted paint cans and easels and stored canvases along the back wall, de-cluttering a further one-thousand square feet.

This morning, I sprang for breakfast and tickets to a MOMA exhibit for the hive Queen, Consort, and drones. I wanted to have the warehouse for Belinda and me to position the Mythos. The group trooped out early. Belinda sat on the couch with her ear attached to the black bakelite phone, on yet another call to someone, through someone, known by someone.

Now I race around the studio to set the stage before moving the sculptures into place atop squares of tape I masked out last week. We've drawn the curtains across our honeycombs, and wisely zippered or tied shut the flaps. When I stand at the end of the aisle, I notice that the height of the canvas walls is at least eight feet, from the back wall straight on to the elevator. With door flaps in place, the space looks more like a military encampment than ever. Belinda thinks out loud and groans. I recommend to leave it, and can see its advantages. The ancient mortals were warrior peoples; their lives often opened and closed on the battlefield. Their gods and goddesses represented this glory and sacrifice. "If our guests don't get it, I'll tell them in my speech." "Are you nervous?" "Are you?" We stand together, twitchy and nailbitten.

In two hours we have five sculptures set on their square wooden pedestals up the main aisle. By mid-afternoon, the remaining eight figures are positioned. Classic motifs — swords and hammers, tridents and lightning bolts — mix with the unexpected: a wheelbarrow; a rocking chair; fishing tackle with rod; a swollen female belly; the sigh of "checkmate"; sparse hair and baldness; creased eyelids; and the blind sight of a wise smile. The aura they create is infective of their beauty. I walk around them like a general inspecting his staff, or a convert his new brothers and sisters. If this is pride showing, my sister must be hearing this through her daily prayers, and praying all the harder for the fall not to crush me. I shake my head, breathe deeply to loosen the tightening in my stomach and chest. With the distracting work completed, butterflies tickle my insides, and I consider the helping hand of a drink. But I don't want to rely on alcohol, and so put this out of mind. The warning is obvious: too loose a tongue yields foolish words.

Belinda herself reacts pensively, as the work has slowed. She paces the aisle, makes figure eights through the sculptures. She phones the caterers, worries over the spotlights (we debate over their positions). Her nervousness is funny to me, but I don't laugh. I nod to her, my chin up. It's our sign to give it to me straight.

"Minus, I'm confused."

I point toward the back wall. "Zeus doesn't have to lead, but he has to be in this first group," I explain. "Not around the far corner. It's more than an expectation. My idea has always been to disassemble the learned ideas we have of the ancients. Hey, I can use that in my speech."

"Yeah, honey, I get that," Belinda says. She turns around and walks a few steps, and, turning again, she sits on the low bench swiped from the powwow table. She doesn't face me when she says, "Why are you palling around with Karen Kosek?" She doesn't give me time to answer. "Everything you've told me makes her certifiable. Where is– is this going somewhere?" She looks for my answer. Grief has lined her face, and, here under the intersecting lights, it is shadow-brightened, scary. She looks suddenly older, and far less the naïve Heartlander come to the big city. I think this has been my disrespectful notion all along. Shame drops my half smile, which she takes for some admission about Karen.

"That was all before I'd really talked with her, Belinda. She's not schizoid, not deranged... not beyond any normal name-calling we all suffer from. Would my relationship with her be simpler to understand if I labeled her an eccentric?"

Belinda thinks that I'm meandering from the point, her point; her overall objection.

I say, "We're all perfect oddballs in our unique way, which consequently makes her, hand on my heart, 'normal.' Belinda?! Don't be jealous, or feel threatened. There's no reason for it. I'm a — well, not a disciple — I'm interested in her. Like a boy at the beach who meets –"

"People have seen the two of you, Minus. Together. In the park. And you're not a boy."

"Not holding hands, I hope you don't mean to imply. Or... or anything else."

"No, no. I've been told... nothing like that."

"And your inference?" I'm not surprised by her half-accusation as much as I feel sideswiped by why this hasn't happened sooner. And why now, of all days and hours in the day? I don't know, and I don't think she's planned for this moment. "Or is this a... no, I'm not stepping in that river. Lots of slippery rocks."

"Oh God, you and those silly metaphors." Belinda slips one hand into the other and twists. "Do I have to be worried about this? Hand on your heart."

So I am to be mocked. Mocked, and I must accept it. Justly deserved, perhaps. There's too much circumstantial evidence floating between us. Nights away and disappearances. And, lately — longer than lately — too much distance in our words; conversations we'd come to look forward to, even rely on after long days under the city's heavy, dirty thumb, have cut themselves short. Too little of the getawayfromitall joy we'd grown into before the work buried us. Only, I've done nothing wrong. "Convince her, not yourself," I hear my mother's voice say from the back of my mind. I say, "We haven't seen each other so much, lately. You and I, that's what I mean. I'm beginning to... it's not like us to... we both have separation anxiety, or something."

Belinda rolls her eyes. She's not happy. "I'm not a fucking child standing at the kindergarten doors, you idiot. Jesus Christ."

"I was actually comparing us to my childhood dog, Blackie," I say. "He hated it when I left for school. Mom told me he'd go nuts and...."

Belinda isn't listening. She's looked away, exasperation spilling out as a sigh. Does she want me to back down? I don't like being tested. It spells of game playing. The second time in a month. Telling her to mind her fucking business is not my style, nor what she deserves.

"Are you sleeping with this Karen Kosek woman?"

I raise my arms, and they make two exclamation points to my answer. "No," I say. My voice is calm, not too soft. Not imploring. It surprises me. I drop my arms, the exclamations slap against my thighs. Silence grows, but we don't turn our backs to each other. Nevertheless, the Titans won't come to my rescue. Mary Catherine's God is not standing behind any of the curtains. Dad is waiting at the loft, though, probably eating potato chips and sipping a cold beer. That's why she has chosen now to confront me. We're alone. Finally. "Define sleeping with?" I ask myself. Belinda is searching my face for those clues we learn about "the cheater" who is unable to hide his shame, taken from Masterpiece Theater tele-plays (turgid pre-Victorian novels or, further along, Edwardian farce).

"Okay," she says. She holds herself back from saying more; though not before thinking about what I've said. What I've just admitted. The muscles in her face slacken, she chews on her lip, looks down the aisle at all the canvas tarpaulins hanging on the wires. I wait, unmoving. When she speaks, the noise startles me in all that silence. "I'm not going to disbelieve you. You're the love of my life, Minus." I see a tear, many tears, cupped in her eyes. This is the time for me to hug her. I don't want to, though, and I walk behind the line of sculptures and feel the canvas walls brush my arm. Then, with an abrupt passion, I turn back and stride to Belinda, who now has hunched her shoulders, one hand wiping at the skin below her eyes. The moment is with me to do more than the chivalrous gesture. And the moment is magical among my Mythos.

"Belinda," I say, and feel my knees bend, taking my body on a slow descent. When one knee touches the floor, I take her hand. Her eyes grow large, and she tries to pull back her hand. I don't let her. We begin a tug-of-war until she cries, "Minus! Don't ask me that question."

"But I want to! I have the words. Let me –"

She's relented only to let me hold her hand for now.

"And the feeling?"

These words strike cruelly at my heart. "Of course there is feeling," I say. "That's how I'm able to find my voice. Don't doubt me now. Not now, when.... At least –"

"I already know the question!" She nearly shouts. "You don't have to say it. I asked you first, remember? Only now, it's different. Not changed, but different. Your love, I cherish that. I sense your feelings all the time, honey. You do so much for me. It's just that –"

"Just what?" I stand up.

She hesitates. Now when she pulls on her hand, I release it to her, which she slides out from my fingers, slowly, sensually. "Minus, your heart is with me. That's what I really needed to know anyway. I wasn't playing a game. Not then. Not now. Don't think that. Back in May, everything was different, and I was upset, and anyway I loved you less then than I do now. And back then I loved you a real lot. I know that sounds stupid." She looks down at her feet, putting her hands on her hips. "Just – let me think a while." When she looks at me again, she sees something I don't even want to imagine. "Come on," she says. "We need to go change for the show."

We wait for the elevator, quietly, side by side, and hold hands spontaneously, as we always had before that day in May came along. She wipes at her eyes, asks if she looks rodent-like, and knows the answer from my pause and idiotic inspection of her face. The clank which the door makes when I raise it offers Belinda some cue I'm not aware of, because through the noise her voice scores a clear tone.

"Thanks, Minus." She takes a look at the sculptures. "You chose to ask me with your creations looking on. But I pushed you into that." She wipes at her cheeks once more, looks at the smudges on her hands, wipes the grunge across the seat of her jeans. "I'm not sorry for that. Your ancients really must have known something. Look at what they gave us."

I say, "I think they gave us the chance to tell ourselves, 'Live while you can.' " I don't confess that my interrupted proposal had nothing to do with the Mythos. What would be the point of that? Besides, age and death is not something you think about when you want to propose marriage to a woman. On the other hand, both subjects get due voice when vows are exchanged.

"Sure," she says. "So, yeah, that." Another pause, during which we both must hear the other's heartbeat, the buzz from the overhead lights, and a jet making its final approach into JFK. "Minus. I want to tell you that... I want to answer you. I – I'll let you know."

We move into the elevator and I reach for the strap. Was this more than a guy in my position could ask for? This is what I believe.

CHAPTER 23

Now it's best to stand aside. Be my own statue. Let my Mythos act in my place. They are the issue of my quiddity, and, though voiceless, their eyes bear history like the worlds spinning in the timeless cosmos. Worlds which their shapes resemble a history of their own making, messages from that past born to the here-and-now, and for the future, where new heroes shall try to take their place. Tonight, the guests shall wander, appreciate and criticize; sum up; and take their message to the people — as oracle, or Paul Revere.

Not so fast.

The artist cannot play the role of the shy debutante. And this is a debutante's ball, in a manner: the grown-ups, the leaders of The Society of Artistic Fashion, have come to see the pretty girls and handsome boys, have come to judge who's dressed nicely, whose teeth are bucked, who can stand upright and walk gracefully, speak without a lisp, and stay free of vulgarisms. We can't allow our pretty maidens to marry stupid boys, or see our going-somewhere men fall under the spell of common, gold-digging sluts.

Oh, if it were as easy as all of that! Now, step into the spotlight, Minus, and give the crowd a little hip shake. Dance, monkey, dance!

I introduce the Mythos as art's example to the restoration of the life-image gods, who fertilized our imagination thousands of years ago. I am the center of an atom, whose electrons swirl on their elliptic paths, hands held firmly to fluted glasses filled with a spiritual nectar whose golden bubbles tickle the nose. This atom tracks the sculptures, guided by a voice I can narrowly place.

"THESE GODS NOW RESTORE OUR PRESENCE TO THE EONS THAT HAVE PASSED. Their resurgence shows our loss, having come to know them in name alone, or in legends forgotten."

Music plays in the background: piano and violin, single notes, sonorous, processional. I pronounce the show's title to our thirteen guests: _The Mythos at Twilight_. Their faces reveal interest by ignoring me and consigning attention to the sculptures, as duly commanded by their raised presence, seated on pedestals to befit their awesome, lofty station among us modern mortals. My hand holds a corner of one pedestal, an act both of prelude and possession. The guests have dressed variably in white and black, or bold prints. Hair is coiffed for a formal evening.

The Mythos Zeus stares at us from his rightful, venerable position. In a collective pose, the audience regards the statue while I gaze, adulterated with love. Does my expression show such hints? I have lived in their company for months; my desire matches theirs, my confusion matches theirs, my flirtation matches theirs. I must guard their exposure to the world. Inertia is my appearance, but roiling tubercular energy churns beneath my hot, moist skin. My voice, attendant to the mood, rises to my sculptured god.

"We know Zeus as the all powerful, and the 'father of the gods and men.' Yet he played the imp and trickster, who mocked lovers' oaths. Here, as you see, Zeus is placid, immortal, and tired. The erasure of death and promise of eternity does not mean, however, time has been cheated out of its usual ravages. Look into his eyes.

"My plan has been to disassemble the flimsy ideas we have learned of the ancients. My Zeus, though retired and in his rocking chair, has, with the nearby basket of lightning bolts, his clear look onto history, his own and the world's, created and lived, triumphs recorded, and passions avowed."

This voice I use has found a burnished elegance in the soft, cloudy echoes of the Beehive, ringing that settles into the canvas honeycombs almost before it's been noticed. I make eye contact fleeting, use it as a leash on the guests' attention to the pace of my remarks. Those in the front row think I'm addressing the people behind them; those in the back want to move forward. I stay out of the white spotlights trained three ways onto Zeus. My voice could be any of the immortals.

"Tonight is a peek outside Calypso's grotto, down along the gnarled cliff to the red sand beach, into the shallow waters where skeletal shipwrecks lie awash in barnacles, teasing our desire to flee. Where memory is brutal, and not ephemeral."

We move on.

I lead us down the aisle, thrusting a pointed finger at the figures — Narcissus, Aphrodite, Poseidon, Apollo — interposing my voice between the spaces, and stop at Calypso, lying alone in her claw-footed bathtub, her knees thrust above the waterline, fright hidden behind a visage of calm. "Calypso's skin hangs from her bones, her muscles depleted, arthritic joints gnarled by age. For this Mythos, time has finally trapped her against the same rocks sirens used to shipwreck sailors. I give you the Nymph, at ninety. Gone is the coy smile of the artful woman. She has been cast aside like hundreds of her kind. The Mythos are no longer devious tricksters, pernicious interlopers, or clashing Titans, and cannot squabble ever again over courtly favors. Their power is inert to all but their daily chores. Mortal in every way but name."

The guests circle Calypso. The tub is raised on its front feet to expose the goddess's folly of youthful temptation in an old woman's body, a tempestuous gesture of freedom while imprisoned by her immortality. I watch the critics' faces: some see fear on her face, forlorn in those soft-lidded eyes, while others seek the true nature of her turbulent bath, whose water slaps against and over the sides, as her hands and feet flutter beneath the surface. Is she swimming in place, or escaping?

I lead them into the heart of the exhibition, and their necks twist and crane to see more.

"Apollo was known as a healer, and what doctor didn't appreciate a round of golf on a Wednesday afternoon?" The electrons stir and murmur. Apollo contemplates each of us as he leans on his driver and pities his latest shot to, sent into the fairway rough. "The Greeks believed life's most important events were physical acts. Their honor-based warrior mentality saw to it that, live or die, men marched into battle and women grieved when they didn't return. Is it no wonder, then, that their gods were electrically and sexually charged beings? Mortal men and women had reason to follow by example. These deities were heroic models for the everyday man and woman. They have walked thousands of years on this stolid image, yet...."

I turn, walk a circle around the pedestal, one hand lightly touching the beveled edges, and then stop at the adjoining corner.

"Yet, even in age, they command our respect — look at Apollo's resolve; look again at Zeus and Narcissus and Artemis — and they charge that we treasure the drama they've endured, and that which they created, too. Those natural leaders throughout our history felt this; they took energy from it. They also died by the cartload because, let's be serious, since the age of gunpowder there has been little glory in war. Which is a means to say this: the images of the ancient Greek gods and goddesses are stronger than anything contemporary. And they are more resilient against fashion, or the notion of abstraction, in art. Renaissance artists undertook the job to raise their vocalic image from the poem and the song. Their spirits became visual. Now, as a swan song, deities in the golden light of sunset, they can turn a wise expression and the artful gesture."

I step away. The atom moves along, releasing a few electrons to sail out on long, elliptical corrections. One by one, the gods hold forth in their moment of lordly paragon. I indulge on this fantasy to keep my legs easy over my feet. The eyes of my Mythos know me. I hope they won't sing tonight as they had done on so many other evenings, alone with me, where I saw but half a figure emerged from the plaster. Whose voice was it, then, mine or theirs?

At the thirteenth Mythos — Prometheus, who leans against a tree, his exhausted muscles and ragged sinew all patchwork beneath gossamer skin; but the fire-giver holds his wily, wrinkled face up to the light of his heavenly successors — I walk forward to extol the Titan. "Shading his wrinkles like a cloud, you can still see the cicatrice across his belly, where the eagle ate through the skin to get at his liver. What's wrong with growing old? Nothing. We can relish in the signs of life-sought-and-opponents-bested, women pursued and captured, young men enticed and relieved of their seed."

I notice the women chuckle more freely than the men. I move to the edge of the atom, where I turn to address the group within their ranks. "The ancients lived and thrived at a time when 'belief' had strength behind it, like no single god could possibly presume. Men and women had gods and goddesses with whom they could identify, and in whose faces they recognized themselves. On the battlefield, or in the boudoir."

Belinda, who has been at my side from the beginning, draws away to let me finish.

"The gods' true gift to us? Why, themselves. Old, young, and middle aged; youths without enough hairs to pepper their chins; girls in the blush of womanhood taking all the risks a goddess assumes, by her right. However, this gift was also their pox on us. So glorious and powerful they stood, leading us into battle or even out of the womb. Yet their capacity for failure lay in their stories of great triumphs and tragic mistakes. Through these, they taught us that godly qualities — excellence they knew we humans tried to emulate, only the best of us with humility — remain hidden until we show our vulnerability, the creases in our human nature and those that crisscross fate as the experiences mount. If we didn't heed their words, we soon learned, the gods provoked us to folly, as they often provoked themselves to commit."

More laughter flatters me. A chuckle settles a score. A cough strangles on its own truth. To the side, fingernails tap against a crystal flute in the sudden refrain. The servers at the back of the room quickly throttle their chatting.

"The Mythos Project has a subtitle," I say, reaching towards a conclusion. " 'Serendipity in time, balance of age' " I turn my head and look up, into the rising throat of Prometheus. "Exalted, feared, mocked, and finally transgressed upon by the future they thought would always be there for them, theirs to rule, the Mythos's stories moved from mouth to song, to paper to stone, and to canvas — eventually also to comic books and radio and the movies." More laughter; sucking of teeth. "Depravities of nature brought them down — first by their own, godly sort, and then humans pitched in. To bury them. Find new gods, one god. Less fickle, perhaps. Almost. As you look at these sculptures tonight, you shall see yourselves. We've used the gods for this sort of folly. We always shall." I nod to my guests, vibrating on their energy to get at it all. "Thank you for coming tonight. Please continue to enjoy yourselves."

The clapping is polite or it is robust, nothing in between. A few hands rise like paper leaf caught in a thermal draft. I trouble myself with the decision to play the effete artist dude, to pass on their curiosity, or to be the normal guy who happens to make good art. My curiosity gives me the goose, and I nod in the direction of the hand held highest. I hope this isn't to ask where he can find the bathroom.

"I need to ask," a man says, in a voice used to making questions. "What's the aesthetics of form you're working in?" His head rides above the others, with its furry brown eyebrows and beaked nose. Belinda introduced us earlier. Jack Sander-something.

I answer him instinctively. "What Julia Child said of cooking, I'll let that to explain my form: 'It's so beautifully arranged on the plate, you know someone's fingers have been all over it.' "

The laughter this gets, though not my intention, settles like a snake on a desert rock.

Jack, however, hasn't come here tonight to let me do shtick, as I think he's heard in my bon mot. He says, "Yes, yes. 'Beauty.' But, as you know, sculptural realism has been played out for years. Decades. At least in the major galleries."

"Has it been played out?" I reply. Okay, I think, no jokes, no soft soap, no hard sell. "I find life sculpture everywhere. Museums are filled with it, often from every era, all movements. And people fill museums! Magazines are devoted to the art, Jack, so either sculptural realism has caught on again, or it never left us. Now the answer to your first question is that I'm working in naturalism and balance. I think life figures have usefulness that strips the metaphor away from the non-representational, and let's us see what we know, the familiar. That says much for the craft. We are asked, once again, to recognize ourselves. Dare I say we don't see that on gallery walls these days."

A woman in front gestures, and says, "Are you saying critics and gallery owners, not to mention collectors, don't know better?" Her mannish, gummy face, tempered only by rouge and pink lipstick, demands from me confirmation, either for her opinion or mine.

"Know better than whom? From what?" I look through the group with a frown, but when I come to Belinda, her smile grows waxy. "Sorry, I have little idea what critics and gallery owners think, other than what I see in the galleries or read in the trades. Just because something's on display or is given a blue ribbon, doesn't guarantee its purchase."

At the rear of the pack, Viscount Bruce raises his eyebrows and spreads his surprise (at my answer or her question?) to others on my right. This look catches the primed inner-tension of a fat gent in white blazer and red bow tie. Their communication transmits through everyone, which make them shift where they stand, like soldiers at muster, or locusts. I can't care; I feel already further along. I tell them more: "Look, the best work comes to light whatever its medium. I'm confident that realism can never die as an artistic subject... not if artists look at the complete breadth of life subjects. See this, if you please: the lives of the gods progressed after we mortals set them aside, pushed them away for the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God we know today. But not everyone trashed those myth stories, and thanks to them — the artist, writers, and sages — the best, most fertile minds — art has never relegated Mythos to obscurity. Tonight, I give you my interpretation of the Mythos in their twilight. Even in this, our so-called post-post-modernism, I must take my art to its logical progression."

Many unknown faces stare at me. For the purpose of calm, I find likenesses in them to Hollywood legends, snatched (for me) from my boyhood television obsession. There's Cary Grant, combing back his hair with a stiff hand. Ingrid Bergman looks amused. Joan Fontaine's surly puss (another happy customer) divides my mood. Sidney Poitier looks angelic, tall, and slightly miffed. And can that be Bogart? Each has a clever face, the same used on screen to play their popular characters. Marquee names of the silver screen's Golden Age, who are already buried or have one foot in the grave, the photogenic clubby set that lost cache when the 1960s let Joe and Jane Average walk onto Hollywood's sets. Then a tall woman, her short black hair makes me recall Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday, with bone horn-rimmed glasses, raises her flute to toast The Mythos Project. Next to her, Hugh Hefner leers at her slim neck. She's an obvious arts patron by her wired look, dressed in a smooth wool skirt and short, fitted jacket, black with white oblong polka dots and a reversed-pattern silk tie. I bow my head, and mime a tip of my hat. The guests take time to survey each other, waiting for the next question. I feel like I'm playing footsie with the boss's daughter, at his dinner table, and suddenly unsure whose foot is returning the favor.

"I like their look," says another woman in the center of the three ragged rows. "For expressiveness alone you've shown restraint, and remarkable talent at developing their personae we know from the legends. I think you've got their godly beauty — age and wrinkles beside the point." She's spoken in a soft though self-reliant voice. Her blond hair (Lana Turner?) is straight and long, curled down the back of her neck and around one bare shoulder to caress her breast, held up by the spaghetti straps of a little black dress. She has advocates among the guests, but more people give signs of conflict, or displeasure, than they do agreement. And I count seven — eight — demonstrably look at the floor, or just away, and shake their heads. "The question I have is really for me, however," Lana Turner says, her voice suddenly laced with unease. "Will my clients merely like them, or will they see what you and I see, Mr. Orth, and purchase them for their collections?"

I glance at Belinda, who has been patient with my oratory (unplanned, though now that I've come through that, I feel okay). She says, "Their size is marketable for municipal and corporate collectors. Dimensions fitting for the board room, or an estate's formal parlor or the foyer. Or for the garden, when casts are made." I sense she's heading off tough criticism, or more loaded questions. I wonder how far from the aesthetic everyone is willing to drift. The show has only just begun, right? But I'm only the artist, as the man and woman have justly said.

"They'll need good reviews," says the fat gent (Sidney Greenstreet?). From his rapid blinks and wheezy breaths, my manager and I sense he'll not be the one to write the rave. No one raises a further hand or makes a comment. I'm content with the silence. I've already told them to mingle, so there's nothing more for me to do. Shoo them? I wish.

Belinda steps forward, stops beside Prometheus, and at arm's length from me, to thank our guests in her prairie twang, taking up what is the business half of our duet. People break apart and move off on their own, some with signs of the short-form impression, leaning to a summary verdict. Two take themselves quickly to one side — Bogart and Turner — and start a loud discussion that makes my stomach churn.

I need a diversion. Released from my audience, music opens my senses first, then sight and smell. Belinda chose Arvo Part's piano and cello to help lead the party. The composer's sonorous notes are made with the slightest pressure on keys and strings, sleepy fingers of overfed cherubs. Waves of stomach-happy smells drift across the room, canapés and skewered meats, held warm at the caterer's station (china dishes and silver forks, linen napkins and stainless steel hor d'ouervre toothpicks) placed next to the elevator. The sofas have been pushed to the side, the television stashed. The dome lamps spew light at half intensity, making the room glow with the gray tones of winter morning. The white beams come from the spotlights trained on my Mythos, three beams for each sculpture, whose features and postures freeze the dramas of classical art and modern culture.

Belinda takes my hand and draws me away from people. I'm nearly speechless from shock. "Did I do okay?" I ask. "You did your kind of okay," she answers, and "That was a brilliant description for someone who hates explaining his art." "Look where that's left us." "Don't fret. We've got friends here. Some."

We look across the floor. Thirteen people mingle with thirteen sculptures. The combination is intentional. Their scattering from the window end of the aisle has been like gold dust blown from a palm. I watch for a show of favorites, when a person returns to one sculpture for a third time. Only four people take such further interest. I'm not surprised, given how I read their angled body language as we moved along. Returns to the food table and bar are expected, but disturb (they're only here to eat and drink!) more than delight me (take its measure... weigh the second view with the first... walk into the story that she's telling... move through time), how they make careful inspection of the wine vintage, and casually view a sculpture across its spatial plane, the arms and legs, blunt torsos, a sword or garden spade, a ribbon, and the face that holds them steadily as if to say, You're lucky if we can swap roles.

I know four of the guests (I made the case to include Peter N; Belinda saw its wisdom immediately). The other nine are Belinda's inspiration: no august names among them, but they carry enough contacts, clout, and collector's cheques to make the buzz audible through the next month, for which the gala opening will be one place all the others want to be. That is, if they decide to create any buzz at all.

Not every invitation was accepted, but Belinda had secured the spread she was after. Two latecomers were people whose names meant something (I'd recognized them from bylines, not their specialty) but whom Belinda hadn't met before. And when one of these two had to cancel last minute — a right old stalwart of American sculpture from D.C. — he'd put a call through in a "dauntless voice" (Belinda's words) suggesting an equally valuable replacement; we pleasantly accepted, thanking him for that kindness. All are clothed smartly. I've worn a black suit and white shirt (no tie); Belinda stands brilliantly in a strapless navy dress and pumps, a string of pearls around her throat that draw the eye to a bit of cleavage. (I think she's taller than me tonight.) Belinda insisted the honeybees (smirk) not be allowed in the first group. The number thirteen was pre-set.

More guests begin to circulate after quick hits on the hors d'oeuvre table, and, more auspiciously, hover as singles and duos around several Mythos. Despite the criticism I deflected, no one is looking around for the coat rack and the exit. They hold their wine glasses at the stem or the foot, never with hands around the bowl. They talk to each other while looking at a sculpture, not from the sides of their mouths, like gangsters, but turning their heads. Another sign of strength? Why not.

"I can't measure them rightly," I tell Belinda.

"Your sketches and maquettes surveyed well," she replies, speaking like a gangster. We baste ourselves in those words as if it's our epigram. She smiles and makes a little bow to the passing Audrey Hepburn. Cary Grant breaks away from Lana Turner. Poitier lurks for a refill.

Conversation through the aisle becomes free as the minutes pass. Some speakers get loud. Hands rise and point, follow a line from leg to shoulder, circle the head; a thumb juts out to gage the torso or bust; notes get written. There is disagreement also, bursting like dogs run amok at a kennel run. Laughter, too, glides on sugared phrases. Good, bad; bad, good. The worst thing an artist can get is the equivalent of an Irish wake. That's not what's taking place here. We begin a walk down the aisle, Belinda and me. To avoid groups, we let our expressions speak for us, and we don't stop.

Dad looks retrograde chic in woolen slacks and a dark, paisley shirt, neatly wrapped in a leather jacket, henna brown, one of those Seventies' belted designs that hug the hips. Only a tall, lean man can carry this style into a third decade. He told me these jackets are what the "artsy types" wore back then. I believe him. All he needs is a pipe and a devilish grin to be Hugh Hefner working the Playboy mansion terrace. Dad's taken advantage of his invite and status, making the rounds to give sage comments ("Her cheeks suggest wind... The force is mathematically precise... Those little boats in the washtub don't have a chance in hell for escape"), he speaks frankly, keeps friendly acquaintance with all the women — ages are not a factor — holds his wine glass adroitly, takes expert sips. I think he's missed his calling, somehow, or more likely has infused me with what I am today.

Then someone begins to clap behind us. My skeleton vibrates. Is this appropriate? I can't say; I've never been its recipient. Belinda helps me turn around from the buffet area, where we have ended our journey. A few people join in the applause — Lana Turner, Don Ameche, Cary Grant — while others stand rigid (or look askance, toward a cohort — Sid Greenstreet — pity and boredom dark lines across their foreheads). Now it's certain that reception is split; I have one critic, one dealer, and one gallerist. We're at a disadvantage, and the opposing rank gathers like centurions at the city gates. Nevertheless, they have social graces, and join the applause in gesture, but without much volume.

I look for the applause's inception. Peter N stands in the center of the aisle, beside Poseidon dressed in overalls, bandy-legged, with broken corn stalks around bare feet, his face a bouquet of fissures and lines, a trident held between two muscular hands, which have put it to practical use: its three tines aim earthward, the points used to till the soil that awaits, from a cloth bag slung over his shoulder, the seeds he'll sow for his country garden.

The guests step around the Mythos and come forward. Belinda urges me by the elbow to do something — I make a short bow. It's like a fantasy and nightmare in the same dream.

Suddenly, people speak in a rush, words cross, everyone is in on the argument. Conclusions and deliberations come in flurries. And these people aren't shy: "I don't see anything unique here. Your modern objects break the historical continuity that we look for." "It's camp... that can't be what you've wanted... it's reaching for Warhol's pastel iconic '-isms' — he wouldn't have tried this!" "You're both wrong — They're gutsy portraits — There's edge to them when we just need that again in art." "Oh, they're right, but they say it the wrong way. Orth has vision and craft, and no market voice. I say they're mostly a miss." "We can do the market!" "Can you?!" "Friends, please!" "Friends?" "How many more Mythos can we expect to see at the gala?" "Too contrived — style and craft, okay, I get it, but this all speaks of art colony." "Nothing wrong with that!"

Laughter and derision ride strong from the harshest critiques; breathy cheers for the kudos. This is important talk that I must take seriously. But I'm not here to argue. Others want a map of my direction. The people speaking up for my Mythos can't overcome my disappointment. Belinda looks shattered, which only makes me feel worse. More defense comes from Maharani Smrtee, who pledges her purchase of Zeus and Narcissus. "Get me the moving men tonight!" Dad guffaws; he harbors a street fighter's glare. Peter N argues for me: "Take the pieces as a whole to see the structure; they're not meant for critical cant, and they stand up for realism." "But that's low-end market, Pete!"

Then Belinda takes control of her mind and emotions again, and speaks confidently: "Best get on board Harvey, Claire, Rico — before you're left with mop-up critiques that'll be months behind the glossies. We're opening with twenty-one Mythos on November seventeenth." Sid Greenstreet yells, "Good luck!" Cary Grant shouts back, "Minus doesn't need luck, but he'll take praise, mister." Lana Turner chortles, "You got that right!" Joan Fontaine howls, "They're cartoons! Superheros!"

I want to slink away. This is hyper-realism. I feel like a carnival barker confronted by angry customers; they've paid to see the World's Fattest Woman jiggle her jellied arms and legs, and in walks Miss Twiggy. But I have Athena at seventy! Chubby, sexy, holding her hands under two sagging breasts. With a flourish, six of the nine arts people sift noisily through the others, headed for the elevator. They find a waiter to take their glasses. This is it, I think, the show and my future. Over. Then Viscount Bruce calls for champagne, and waiters appear from the sides to distribute fresh-filled wine flutes to all who've stayed. Behind us, while Zeus waxes happily on his rocker, seeing off the visitors with his casual resignation, the elevator door drops with a drum's throbbing hollowness.

Belinda and I get our first drink of the night, having abstained from mind-clouding substances until our roles have finished. I want the cloud now. The viscount and maharani toast me, and the Mythos's success, and Belinda's "snapdragon" leadership. We hear a "here-here!" and a "Bravo!" — which make me wonder if that's all for bonhomie, or pity.

The remaining guests become jovial and celebratory, for our benefit, Belinda and me. But I feel the anxiety of dread. Nevertheless, three different hands reach for my arm. Their owners laugh and proffer dibs on my company. "I don't get it," I think, before I'm led away, finally, by just one hand, with a few following like confetti in the wind. The defection of the six is not to spoil the majority, after all. Is this how I should read the crowd? This is really too much. What about the haters? They'll torpedo the show! Well, if that's to happen, then at least I have one idea. But the hands stay affixed to my upper arm and one sleeve, and I'm walked to one Mythos and then another. I hear their voices, see spotlights make white cones through the foggy ceiling lamps, smell sweat-sour sauce and brandied fruit. I'm asked to explicate for the audience. ("I saw a man on a bus, a defeated man in purpose and past; he spoke brilliantly of the future.") The sculpture of Calypso in her bath needs deference. ("It's assured that none of us loses. Until it happens to us. Then we're left to diddle away time.") Platitudes and artsy banter, of course, but I need the practice. I hope that I have cause to use what I've learned.

I'm released for a moment by one admirer, only to be taken away by another hand. This hand belongs to the maharani. She leads me back to Narcissus, behind which awaits the viscount. I'm afraid I haven't given the FaceCards their fair merit in this story. Not enough time or space. They lack roundness, and are stained in secondary purples, greens, and oranges. Everyone can be important to a life. People come and go. Tonight, my FaceCards — a Jack and a Queen (not the Tarot, but good 'ole Bicycle) — excel in magnanimity and solace.

The leonine-voiced viscount and contralto maharani speak to me. "Fabulous work, Minus." "Of course, you know that, and don't worry about –" "Mustn't mind your critics, eh? — they'll be late to the party." "I'm not so sure as you two seem to be." "It's past, lad. Have a drink. Get yourself a goddamned scotch, old boy, and relax." The maharani's jewels rattle when she shakes my hand. "Have you found it terribly taxing?" I defer to her worries. "We'll talk on Thursday, Minus. Our poker night marches on, lad! You must be there to hear us tell the others about tonight. They shall accept our recommendation." "Don't sell another piece! Not until us four get our share." Then they wave me off, a shooing gesture, back to the lowly party.

Dad appears from behind the Titan Iapetus's red-painted legs. Dad's hair is whipped like a troubadour working for hat-money in the village square. We nod like strangers who are confronted, suddenly, with society's rules for hospitality.

"Dad."

"Son."

"You look good. Real good. Is this something they're piping through Chicago's taps these days?" I'm stabbing at anything but the present agony grating across each nerve. My lips tingle under the effort at composure.

"I wonder," he replies. A sheepish look follows. "O-kaay. Truth be told, I feel good. Now if they really want to sell some snake oil, they can pump a few tankers worth of whiskey in the water supply. Just for flavor, you know." Dad rummages in the pockets of his leather jacket and, finding nothing, he looks at me. I don't want to talk politics.

Dad's intuition on this is strong. He says, "Seems you've been given lots of advice on how to cope."

"Bad and good."

"People walking out can't feel right, not to an artist. More counseling to come, too, I suppose."

"You?" I ask.

"Not from me! Wouldn't know where to begin. Besides, all that's too easy, when you're not the guy standing in the soup."

"Is that where I am?"

"Where else? I mean, you'll want to get perspective. Soon. Success or otherwise, it's all the soup. Just different flavors."

"You could have been a chef."

He shakes his head, a wry grin goading a joke to come out. "Mathematics has its own kind of seasoning."

"No advice then?"

"Son, you're a rock. Buck up. Nothing's been determined."

"That's as good as I deserve," I think. But now I need to change subjects, because my head buzzes with disquiet alarm. I ask, "Did I see your eye on a few of the ladies?"

Dad puffs up his chest. "Two eyes, Minus. Three women. Four competitors — no, two are left, seeing a pair have gone." He nods at a few of the women mingling, and leans toward me. "I got one reply," he whispers.

"You're a devil," I tell him.

His mouth performs a mischievous wiggle, like a naughty rabbit in a carrot patch. His fast recovery gives my mind peace. "You've done well, Minus. I'm not surprised. Always, you were the builder, of some thing or another. You played with blocks as a tyke, but not like other kids. Do you remember granddad's erector set? I thought you'd make a fine engineer. I didn't want to push you into anything. Your name was enough already. It's best to let kids find themselves, do what they want."

I wonder if Dad is thinking of Mary Catherine, at least a little, of whom he has said (as a joke, but that's how things start) he'd lost her to the Bible's rhetoric and to "that God." With mom gone, he really only has us to worry about. Parents forever worry. "Engineer? Huh," I say. "Not me. Never. I get motion sickness on train rides."

Dad wraps his hands around his elbows. He might be using all his strength to hold in a belly laugh. "It was on one Thanksgiving that I knew you were different," he tells me. "You wanted to carve the turkey. I don't think you were seven, then, but you had perspective. And a keen eye for dimension. Dimension and perspective. You talked about both all the time. It was weird, the words you knew at that age. All those colors, and how they mixed to make hundreds more. You hated numbers, but you could see geometry by putting your thumbs together and spying through the notch. Dummy me, I thought you were playing soldier, sighting targets. I never treated you differently, though, than Mary Catherine. She would have noticed."

I remember some of this, not all. Dad has missed something important, however, and I must contradict him. "I don't think she would have noticed. Her priorities were already outside my life. Outside the family's, too. All the same, it's what the good parents do, as you said."

I want to say something about fond memories, of Mary Catherine and mom, but this distraction has done its part to lessen the blow taken from the evening's program. I want no part, however, of a trip across some river of forgetfulness. One or two clips from childhood might start one of those bullshit family arguments that no outsider should witness. Dad sees this look on me. I could be wearing a sign around my neck. A woman with natty hair, its long, brown tendrils curled out at the ends below her shoulders, passes us on her way to a waiter with razor-burn cheeks, standing straight-backed and holding a tray of half-filled champagne glasses. Dad gives me a Hefner nod, squeezes my elbow, and glides off. I should be intrigued, but I'm only saddened.

Earlier, between my near-proposal to Belinda and my almost-flight-of-sanity as the Mythos unveiled themselves, I took a phone call at the loft. A voice from out of memory's fog spoke quickly after my "Hello."

"Minus, it's your sister. It's Mary Catherine."

She seemed to use her name as a re-introduction to the custom of speaking with an estranged sibling. It's only now, standing under the disinterested stare from Iapetus, whose concentration is on his next chess move (or is it the bottle of beer in his hand?), that I'm able to see the phone call's ominous portent.

"Hey," I said, or was able to produce. "This is a surprise. Unexpected. Wow." I wanted to ask, What can I do for you? but is that how someone speaks to an estranged sibling? I let her lead, it was her phone call.

"Dad told me about your sculptures," she began.

"That's a surprise, since he hasn't seen them," I replied. "The show is tonight." I have the feeling I should be glad you aren't coming.

"You told him the theme."

"Ah, well, I might have. Motifs. Themes. Genres. People tend to see art in their own private way." Silence from her end; I heard audio static and a faint ghost of a voice-over crossing our line. "Where's this going, M-C?" Silence. Sudden convulsive breathing. Silence again. "Is there something –"

"I never liked that you turned my God-given name into a city dialect. A codeword." Her voice boomed an odious signal, and my hand flinched around the receiver. "Some home-girl's initials you used to taunt me with. Now you taunt our loving savior with pagan idols."

"Mom and Dad gave you your name, Mary Catherine, not God. Hey, is there a reason why you've called?"

"Your sculptures are an abomination, Minus. That sinful art spreads lies to an already defiled world. Your talent is being exploited by people who don't love you!"

"Come again?"

She thought I was taunting her (again), for which she unleashed invective, then launched into a homily straight from Sunday's Holy-Rollers broadcasts. I listened, not for politeness' sake (or pity's) but for it's own curiosity, how she took such interest in something that had essentially nothing to do with her present God-given world. I was only its link to a program, a ploy. When she stopped speaking, yelling, stammering — and while I listened to her catch her breath — she said suddenly, "Can I say hi to daddy?"

My memory of the call (I don't know how Mary Catherine's face has changed — I'd seen her two years ago, but that image hadn't come through clearly, triggering a drift backwards to the more salient childhood) and the slow calm of the moment with Dad just a few minutes ago suddenly fall forward and out of reach. I look around. Faces I know or have made to look familiar by fantasy have now become strobe lights of featureless color. I walk through the guests like an eel swims through limpid water. I gain focus when Belinda catches my attention with a wave, and I make for her on a smooth path that feels like I'm staggering. Next to her stands a certifiably handsome man, who bears Teutonic markings in height, jaw, forehead, and his blue, deep-set eyes.

"You look so calm!" she says to me, and reaches for my hand. I look at her with what I think is a horrified expression, but she only smiles wider. "Let me introduce you to Arthur Mason. Arthur middles for Atlantic Coast collectors, auction houses, and museums. You know how that goes."

Older than me, Mr Mason nods once and shakes my free hand, the left, which I must turn, palm downwards, to grasp his right hand. This doesn't matter because what I really find strange is how he doesn't notice my horrific eyes any more than Belinda has, nor have they mentioned how I've staggered through the spot-lit Mythos to this location, aimed at salvation from myself. Perhaps I'm confused by the difference between how I feel and what I must look like.

"You've angered a few of your critics," Arthur Mason says. "I like that!" His eyes glow their soft cornflower blue in the subdued light, which I suddenly notice is dusky outside the spotlights. "Anything negative that's worded a particular way — and they're the ones that do this especially well — will get more people interested in you than perhaps if all you got was a handful of decent reviews."

"I'm sorry," I say, "Are you trying to convince me that all publicity is good publicity?"

"Listen. This isn't the Fifties. People like controversy. In the art or the artist. Sometimes you have to shake the snail off the side of the terrarium to make them move. Don't look so worried. There's always a chance for failure with critics. But I like your chances for success."

I say, "That's where Art has come to. Art as chance?" I've asked this rhetorically.

Mason reaches up and adjusts his tie, a striped power tie in blue gradients. "Minus, I like you," he says. "Your attitude is up front, really the opposite of your sculptures, which are nuanced by design, and your ambition." He reaches to shake my hand again. I give him the right hand this time, why not, first extruding it from Belinda's grip. He tells Belinda to phone him in a week, and then excuses himself.

"How does it feel?" she asks, when I've turned and we're both facing the long line of sculptures. "I don't know yet," I say. "This will take time to make sense, and I don't know the reception." Truthfully, I think, I'm more confused than before. Something needs to enter the picture to set me in the present. Belinda says, "Your dad told me he has a girlfriend in Chicago." "Really?" "One of the adjunct professors. Not from math, but in that scientific world realm thingy place." "As I live and breathe." "He says he misses you. Us." "Why are you telling me this?" "He asked me to. Don't look as if you've been double-crossed; I think he's been trying to work out his own angles, finally. He misses you. He says 'us' but we both understand the difference, don't we? I know you miss him. Chicago, too. It's something I can tell." "How do you know that? Why do you think that?" "You talk in your sleep." She's mocking me. "I can tell, Minus."

In my inability to protest (this is all her way of keeping me calm, approachable) she senses the truth. This new truth. She says, "I think I was punishing you. You didn't deserve it, but that's how I felt at the time, alone, traveling this noisy, stinky city. Not even Gretchen would help me, you know, like to give me a whinny or two for comfort. You have the dogs, remember, when you're not at the studio."

"Working at the studio."

"Working, yes." She opens these words to cover the dulcet room, its ambient music and lights, and my Mythos. There are deep shadows along the periphery, a wholly conceptual demonstration of her own impressive talents. "Here they are. Finally."

"Finally." I say it with a febrile grunt. "Finally? I see it as... fucking glorious. Sometimes, a miracle."

"That's decamping. The artist's view. Okay. So be it."

"The work, I speak of. Their number."

"Don't cheat your imagination."

There's room for commiseration between us. I want her to know something she might not feel, in the end (although this is only the beginning, I make myself try to feel) when the work has come to this, one night. "You're responsible for the show as much as me," I say. "My statues are here because you're here. There's enough pride to share in that."

"You're suggesting I should feel more. I do. Tonight, though, that's inexpressible."

"Talk about decamping. What is it, really? Have you missed the catharsis in all of this? Let me give you a hint: it feels like death." I must pause, to let her feel this, before I deliver the coup d'oeil.

She looks away. "I suppose I am a rookie. First-time jitters? The manager carries the load for... I know there's something, but my thoughts only swing at it. Yeah, that's it. I swing and swing, and I miss. That's all it is. But then, you're the artist. Next time I'll feel everything."

I actually believe her. Not wholly, but there's far more truth behind her sarcasm than I could possibly get her to believe just now. Part of me, though — the incredulous side of Psyche — wonders if the lure of her own ability was how she made herself do it all, made herself happy. Too many comparisons make its justification risible.

We watch the crowd. Nobody else has left since the early desertion, but there is some handshaking going on. It's time for me to thank everyone. Thank them before they begin to leave. Just then, my Hepburn caricature with the bone glasses steps from a threesome and walks briskly to us. Her outfit, the big black polka dots, is too young for her, but she gets away with it because of her stature, and the way she carries herself.

"I'm sorry to bother you," she says. She addresses Belinda. "We haven't had time to talk after that quick hello. Al Dent's telephone call made my day, I must confess. I said, 'Albert, sorry about your ankle, and you shouldn't play tennis on a cold afternoon, but I'll sub for you any night you choose. Ha-ha-ha!" Her voice is all Manhattan. Up close she shows her age, which distance, that dress, the Hepburn elfin hairdo, and those scallop size glasses, had covered. My guess is sixty, but her skin stretches nicely around the chin and jaw, holding up slack like one tucks in the stomach after exercise. She's tall and steady on patent leather heels, commanding the assurance of experience. I picture her in ten years, twenty, a doyen holding court in someone's East Side parlor, or outside Christie's after a gloriously successful bidding war. "And look what I get to see," she says. Her head moves side to side, like an old auntie reunited with her wide-eyed niece and nephew. "I've been hearing about this Minus Orth and his project for months. You could sell one or two sculptures and still make a name. Are you kidding? Go on.... Hey, sales help, but later! You position yourself by making fabulous art, is what I've always said. And Belinda, you have a way with the community, I'm sure. Saul called Paul had nothing on you, my dear." She takes Belinda's hand without it being offered, a byway gesture executed during her rhetorical montage. I stare at her nose, powdered like butterfly wings, lips painted coral. With one hand she pulls off her glasses and, caught by light falling from behind, shadows etch her eyes as smoky holes. Her voice becomes the essence of crime. "I called myself Kristine to make things easier, but my name is Karen Kosek," she says. "I want to write about you and Minus for the journals. On my dime, of course." For the first time, she steadily looks at me. "There is so much to talk about."

Belinda loses balance off one heel. On instinct my hand catches her elbow, while Karen still has hold of her hand, which she uses to help steady Belinda. The shock has drawn back Belinda's mouth and made her eyes bulge. I can only look the same. Belinda pulls her hand away; or Karen has let it go.

"Minus," Belinda says, her voice wired, "what's going on?"

Hardly recovered myself, I point at Karen K and try a washout comment. "Ask her. Out of her bag lady getup, I don't recognize this woman." This is hopeless. "I know I've been taken," I think.

Karen doesn't acknowledge me, and pulls from her bag a silver case and a black pen the size of a cigar. She flips her wrist and the case opens to reveal a reporter's notepad.

"Let's not cause a scene, you two," she says. "The press is here, I mean the ones who haven't abandoned you. They like you. The photo-perfect artist couple, captured in the limelight, make good among New York's golden pockets. Quite the catch, you'll be, when you know how to play the game. You don't want to give them a different story to write: the artist and his muse, caught losing control, caught with hayseed in their hair, left to sweep the floors and pay the caterers their tip."

Belinda's hand reaches up to stroke her forehead. "Good play, Karen," I think. The thought pours from my eyes to her, Karen, where she senses my disbelief but does nothing for me. Her pen is stuck between her fingers, and she taps her notepad.

"So, Minus," she says. "The woman in the bath. Did you use your girlfriend-slash-lover as inspiration? Perhaps the model thinks, though I don't agree myself, that you've done her a disservice, aging her like dried fruit. She's masturbating under the water, isn't she? Knees up, eyes closed. Look at the glee molded to her quivering lips, wrapped in the ecstatic pain of wanton release. Her chiton is deftly bunched up over her breasts. The Brits would call you 'cheeky.' Using Calypso is telling. You claimed she never got her man, but she must have got a man, along the way — or at least the help of a digit or two, in the end, no? But alas, you've left the statue untitled. An oversight, I'm sure. It's for the viewer to guess all of this. Is that what you were after? But look at me: such impertinence. Okay, one question at a time. Minus Orth... how is that spelled?"

From out of nowhere, a man steps into our threesome. He has gray eyes and broad shoulders, which present a gubernatorial bearing as they square our sudden foursome. He's one of the collectors Belinda introduced me to when I was on auto pilot. A man who's sure of himself, with a pedigree he was only too agreeable to share (Yale Law, Harvard Business, Wall Street Brokerage, Bonham's Fine Arts Auctions – London). He jumps through my sudden hesitation at his appearance to ask Belinda a question, his lips moving like radio frequency lines. I don't hear what he says, in a voice that hides behind the music, but Belinda's head turns slightly to catch every word, the last of which worry her eyes. My gaze fidgets between this man and Karen K, who has ignored him completely. Her hand hangs steadily over her notebook, with that Freudian pen clutched like a fat turd in her hand, still waiting for my response, is all I can guess. She's so close now that I can see my reflection in her eyes, a microscopic figure with clownish, or Mongoloid, flatness. The collector makes glances to and fro, and sets his shoulders to leave, which prompts Belinda to gesture that she'll follow in a moment. He walks off, leaving us three in a Mexican standoff.

"Your appearance tonight doesn't feel like a coincidence," Belinda says to Karen K.

"It is." "It isn't."

Karen's voice collides with mine, but it's hers that holds longest in the air. She's like a spiteful sibling who gets away with saying something just out of earshot of mom and dad, but rankles under the whole family's skin. Worse, her face has become ratcheted tight. Belinda breaks our mental scrum.

"Minus, I have to meet with Tony. That man. Later y-you'll talk me through this, I imagine. It's not that I'd like some answers, but I could use a good story. Seems like I've heard enough of them." Her voice has been strong, level, unfettered, until a plaintive, speculative, "Right?" jumps out from her throat like a frog hidden in the clover. I nod as reassuringly as I can without coming off like an ass. It's a fierce movement that makes my scalp tingle when my hair wags with each jerk of my head. As flummoxed as I am, there's also the side to this moment that leans into the surreal, in which I watch this comedy of manners from behind us, where Thetis stands on her pedestal in mannered observation, her plaster flowers flattened between a heavy book's pages as her water-diluted eyes tremor with memory.

The idea that my Mythos know where I am makes me aware of myself again, finally, and I laugh. The sound, genuine, if only higher than its normal pitch, isn't what Belinda expects. She wants the utterance of my faith in us. Instead, I give her Borsht Belt schmaltz. "I might need an army of analysts to help me understand," I say.

"You've found the right city for that," Karen says. "Beware. The best shrinks only listen. You'll talk yourself into bankruptcy only to learn your life is not your fault after all, and you can't do anything about that. Ha!"

We react to this comment with cadaverous silence.

Belinda flees to the waiting collector, standing softly unfocused in my eyes through the distance. Her need to tend to our business is an atavistic need that keeps her feeling normal at the least cost to us with everything that has happened. I'm left to manage Karen, who asks another question. Her hand writes with scratching quickness on the notepad, although I've not said a word. Or perhaps I have, at that. Half of me wants to play this straight: you don't know this person, Minus; she's here to interview you; she's a dispassionate observer, the hack journalist who's slid from behind the ropes to get her story. My other half is struck by the voice of Karen K, pulling me in, and I'm bent by her power, lured to my death by my own foolish disregard for self-preservation. That, and, what I really want.

"Don't worry, Minus."

"I've heard that a lot tonight. I'm beginning to disbelieve it. More now than before."

"Some critics you'll get, and some you'll lose. They're fish in an afternoon pond — hungry, sleepy, fat, lazy. Others... they'll always hate you or love you, no matter what shit you put out. Your job is far simpler than you want to make it. Far easier than you could imagine. Enjoy it all."

"You can't do this," I say.

"No. But I can. It's been done." Her voice is entirely matter of fact. "You knew this the first day you followed me out of the park."

The elevator door makes a metallic sound, like an asthmatic's attack, on its way up from the ground floor. I watch the bees fly back into the hive, take aim, vibrate at the sight of the Mythos, and swarm through the room. When I look away, Karen is staring at me with the faintest hint of amusement, a look I'd seen many times. And have misinterpreted, I wonder now. Memories pull me toward contours and angles and color-strands, a slender nose, flattened ears, bangs and curls, floppy hats and summer dresses.

"Were you at the Y debate? And... and at the –"

"Minus," Karen K interrupts. "I'm everywhere. I always have been. Now –" she points with the shiny nose of her pen "– you need to be here and there, too... up-side and inside. Have a look at your wannabe-artist friends."

Binny and Alfred walk toward us, through the guests who are spread thin, whom I realize never really made up a crowd. Al is drunk, wavering on his feet. "Where is everyone, Minus?" He's slurred his words. "Have your sculptures flopped? I'm not surprised. Too traditional."

In vino veritas, I think. I feel the deep heat of embarrassment. Not for what they've come into and seen of the show, but for whom I'm standing with. When I look at Karen, I'm surprised to find she's not in her bag lady costume.

Binny says, "You should have work-shopped your Greek revivals with the hive. We have experience, and could have helped you. Teach you to find your –"

Karen growls, a NYC noise that shuts Binny's mouth, and makes Alfred raise his hand in defense. "I'm conducting an interview, here, you assholes." Her words, their butchering delivery, repels Queen & Consort, and I step back in alarm for what she's capable of doing — throw a punch or stab one of them with her pen. Karen glares, and says, "I know both of you. I've seen your clumsy work. Turn around and get lost, you talentless pieces of shit!"

The caricatures of Binny and Alfred's smarmy conceit wash off like theatrical makeup. For the first time tonight, I can smile.

CHAPTER 24

I've been fooled. Taken for a fool and gladly played the role. Or have I only fooled myself into thinking this? I can find answers from each perspective (right or wrong), and the feeling is similar: a psychological terrorism.

Retrospect is an easy window through which to criticize thoughts and actions. Our desire to see things better than they are, however, confuses us. Truth is distorted by one's point of view, always; and if you're too careful, truth gets smothered by opinion. It's only human nature. Offense and defense. The roots of instinct. Later, the stories we tell ourselves — the ones we need to believe in; because we don't want to step over the edge and into free fall — these stories have deceptive narratives. If you have doubts about this, think of all the times you've questioned the motives, the love, the trust, and even the rationality ("Are they crazy?" "What were they thinking about?") of the people you otherwise know, love, trust, and believe in ("I should have listened to her!"). Our world is filled with incongruity: good verses bad; yes or no; rich and poor; heaven or hell; ugly vs. beautiful; alive but dead.

One day, recently, I saw a kid get schooled in that classic sidewalk con game, Three Card Monty. He was Asian, Chinese I think, no more than sixteen years old, a vacationer stuck with his mom and dad in New York City, out for an evening walk/shop along Canal Street to peek into the knock-off stores along Chinatown's busiest market, looking for a deal on knock-off brands. In the middle of a block, at curbside, a lone black guy, east African — owning to the typical skinny arms and legs of his tribe, knobby knees, sharp elbows, and blue-black skin — he had a wooden tray balanced atop two milk crates. Here he juggled three red, lattice-print playing cards with dizzying quickness in the center of the board. He barked to the crowd as he worked the cards. The audience stood two and three deep in a half circle around him. Four stooges were on hand in the teeming crowd: one watched the street for cops, one watched the crowd for thieves; another marked potential suckers; the last played the game as the loser-cum-winner to draw another pigeon. Near the epicenter of this con story stood the Asian teen, his eyeballs dancing to the rhythm of the cards. The shark was fast, enticingly precise, although easy to follow if you watched the red lady whenever he showed her face beneath that latticed hat. The boy watched; he could see her. He tagged her three times when the shark stopped his shuffle, pumping his fist at his side when the stooge chose wrong to his own right choice. Finally the stooge won, picked up his winnings, held the bills high (the shark tossed him an affable grin) and stepped aside to make space for the next player. The boy took the bait and stepped into the vacated spot, his chin hanging above that makeshift table. He pulled a crinkled twenty-dollar bill from his front pocket and laid it down. His eyes jumped just once, noticing the shark call out the new player – him! Then his eyes focused on, and never left, the three cards. The crowd jockeyed and murmured. Everything began to get very loud. The street stooge watched the street. The crowd stooge watched the hands near the tray, where the money sat. The shark nibbled at his prey with easy hand speed and that deft movement, the wrist flip, to show off the queen, to tease his prey. More noise came up with each sighting of the red lady; movement and jostling; catcalls. The shark made a final flourish before laying the three grimy cards out on the table. The kid took no time at all to choose; he knew where the queen had hidden herself. With a big grin, he flipped over the center card and found the ace of spades mocking that stupid grin. Fooled. The crowd grumbled its disappointment. The shark snatched the money up from the table, under the kid's nose, and put it in his front pocket. Without even looking at the poor sap of a teen, he barked out for the next player. Suddenly an arm reached through the crowd, laid claim to the T-shirt on the boy (and the boy), and yanked him from the clutches of New York's less subtle means of commerce. This was the kid's father, who gave him a good what for! once they'd come away from the shark and his stooges. His humility was on display for all to watch. The kid hung his head. Mom got in on the act, yelling louder than the old man. The boy stood thoroughly chastened. On up the street they went, then, teenager with hands shoved deep into his empty pockets, marshaled between dad's flapping pants' legs and mom's swishing dress.

This boy. He'll grow up, get married, earn a living, raise children, and see them off into their own lives. Later, he'll retire to Florida, Arizona, or San Diego — one of America's golf Meccas. Life will slowly recede over his shoulder as he nears the void. This ending isn't something he fears. It's the cycle humans enjoy, and endure, along with all the small miseries, to make their lives happy. Inside this man lies the image of himself as a kid, standing on that NYC street, thinking that he can follow that card through all the weaving, the change of direction, misdirection, people with their elbows poking him and voices calling out, hands pointing and shrill whistles. When the cards stop, he knows where the red queen sits. This game is easy, he thinks. Afterward, as he's hustled away, minus his twenty dollars, you cannot tell him, then or seventy years later, that that red queen wasn't even on the table when he touched the card he knew was the queen. She'd been palmed a moment before the shark dropped the cards. But I saw her, he says to himself. She was there. She stopped in the middle. I blinked, that's all. When he says this, you know that he's never told anyone about that sweltering night on Canal Street.

Better than all the stories of buried treasure and shipwrecked sailors.

Zeppo and Vendulka appear together at my honeycomb entrance. I've pulled back my tent flap; there's nothing to hide anymore. Vendy scratches on the side of the canvas because there's no proper way to knock, the Slavic custom before entering a room. The scratching is creaturely, a dog or cat's message. I give them a short wave. Boxes crowd the floor and clutter the table, some closed and taped, marked with a felt-tipped pen.

"What's up?" I ask.

"They're interviewing your replacement," Zeppo says. Vendy waves me toward her, guileless now with temperance, "Come see." My hands release the books I've been looking at, into the bottom of a box.

Beyond the powwow table (We haven't heard the call, "Powwow! Powwow!" since days before my show. My anger yet smolders, though now it's like a peat fire.) Binny, Alfred, and Bert stand with a stout woman whose long, curly red hair has been tied up and over with two colored bandanas, letting the mess fall around her head like the remnants from a hurricane. The four of them are elbow to elbow, talking energetically, although if this knot is meant to convey secrecy, the volume of their voices will sink ships. Not that I care. Queen & Consort received my registered letter of release from comb and hive two weeks ago. I hadn't done this in haste, and used my studio and the hive's space to complete my Mythos cycle. Barely a word was spoken between us in that time — I hadn't seen the point. Now it's time for me to go.

The three of us watch them from this safe distance. They're so chummy that I think I've missed something. But in sideways whispers Zeppo tells me she's never been here before, and he doesn't think she's family. She's from down south, and the gallery names or solo shows she's dropped into her spiel are almost as annoying as her voice. Laughter erupts in their huddle and Bert nudges the woman. She winks at him and touches his arm with chubby fingers that show off shiny rings as thick as pipe fittings. Her hand stays on his arm, making dents in the muscle. This lasts a few moments too long for Vendy's comfort. She bristles. I hear her teeth gnash when the woman's voice — a foghorn on the bay — says, "You're so funny, Bert." Vendy breathes fire and whispers to me, "She'll get the funny, is what I can say. He's dead beef."

Zeppo glances at me over the top of Vendy's head.

Not once has this newly formed clique turned our way, even though we are obvious spies. Seeing them like this, for the last time, wearies my patience; memories of their tedious dramas and foolish authority. I step back behind the flap and into my soon-vacated sanctuary. Vendy pushes a box with her foot, and after a few seconds slides it back to its original place. Zeppo chews gum, a horse munching hay, the face and teeth and lips to match. I'm bored with packing, but also bored with their moping. For artists, they don't seem to accept my concept of 'new,' of 'change,' of stepping outside yourself and finding different colored grass to tamp down into your own smooth path. I don't want to invite them along for this journey, not even to the end of the road, where they'll want to shake hands and wave and expect me to turn around at least twice before I enter the woods, within which they see only darkness and danger. But I'm being ungracious to them; this, too, shall pass.

"I'll see you both at the show in a couple weeks," I say, wanting this time to finish packing the boxes. "The invitations say eight, but come at seven-thirty for a champagne toast. I'm going to need some lubrication. Belinda expects me to speak."

Vendy steps over the boxes and wraps her long arms around me, where those big Slavic hands pat my back. She kisses me on both cheeks. Zeppo nods, but he's distracted by the space inside this honeycomb. He measures it with his eyes, and I think he's wondering if he can make the move over to this side of the hive.

CHAPTER 25

I don't need to see Karen K again. The allure has been rinsed from my mind by her own hands. Blind spots shall always remain, I think; that's how she wants herself to be known, if she wants to be remembered at all. The effect is like a chronic migraine that has lifted: you joggle your head every once in a while to see if you can bring back that knife point's touch, as memory or reminder of its hold on you.

Manhattan island swells to eight million people on the weekdays, yet you're liable to run into the sundry character or two that you've seen before. We are creatures of habit, long after the need to hunt, and hide from the hunters, has ceased to be critical skills. All morning I have the feeling of being watched as I walk from place to place. I scan across the streets for a bag lady bearing pin eyes and a hound's stride. None of the neighborhoods where I find myself are the neighborhoods we, Karen K and I, had walked through, when we walked together, alone or with the dogs.

Today has been a long day of interviews for the upcoming gala show at NYgallery (around the corner from the Dia:Chelsea galleries, whose "people" have told Belinda that _The Mythos at Twilight_ is too classically oriented for consideration; perhaps she would like to resubmit transparencies to the curator of the proposed Dia:Beacon — slated for opening around the new millennium), so this suspicion of spy tails has me stymied.

My next appointment is at Piranha Café. The journalist for In Studio magazine waits for me outside the corner storefront, smoking a cigarette. He's older than me, nearly Dad's age, with dusty black shoes to match his hair. White, scrub brush whiskers surround his liver-lipped mouth. He introduces himself as Vince Vaccarello ("Call me Vac" he says in a Jersey accent) and says he has a tape recorder set up in back, away from the door and the espresso machine. I reach for the door handle, but he stops me with a question. "You been doing a lot of interviews lately, Minus?" He takes a drag off his cigarette and turns his head to blow the smoke downwind. I see he doesn't want to waste the cigarette. "Anything with 'art' in the title, my manager has me booked," I tell him. I've gotten used to calling Belinda "my manager" in the many weeks since the Beehive exhibit started the phone ringing. One major magazine invited me for a lunch. However, these smaller publications are catch-as-catch-can meetings, which I don't mind because, right, any publicity is good. "Vac" nods with the journalist's faked-interest glaze across the eyes. I've gotten used to this, too. "If you don't mind," I say. "I'll answer any questions you have, but let's get on with it. It's late, it's cold, and I can use a beer." He drops his cigarette and blows the smoke into a chill wind coming down from the north end of 2nd Avenue.

Piranha Café has maybe fifteen tables, two- and four-seat bistros, second-hand, with ring stains worked into the laminate, cigarette burns at the edges. Some have folded pieces of napkin stuck under the feet for balance. Most are empty, the others filled with leaning-in or laid-back couples that nurse mismatched big-cup coffees, whose foam and cream drip down the sides of mugs fired in chalky pastels — strawberry and orange and winter wheat. Their talk vibrates the air into subdued tones. Solo drinkers hide themselves behind newspapers, books, or thoughts. Vac has chosen well. It's warm inside, away from the November chill, despite clear skies and a blazing sun low in its southern zenith and sinking westward quickly. Canned New Age music whispers through hidden speakers. The smokeless room surprises me, which gives over to ground coffee aromas and burnt toasted-cheese. I don't see beer on tables or any listed on two chalkboard menus hanging on the side wall, next to the bar. Behind the coffee bar are built-in shelves stacked tall with cups, saucers, mugs, float glasses, and flavored syrups. A middle shelf displays glass coffee bean containers, with black and white labels marked by the country of bean origin, inside which hold the various colors of roasted beans. Dark chocolate, mouse hair, sienna, dung, tanned leather, burnt umber — somehow all the colors remind me of the people one finds in places where coffee grows. Skin and tribal markings.

A young man, college-aged, sits on a stool pulled close to the bar, in white sweater and black pants, waiting for an order. A low whistle escapes from his puckered lips. Vac ushers me to a pre-arranged table.

I order mineral water from a teenaged waitress, who shows the attitude like she'd rather be anywhere else. Back here, the walls have framed paintings and photographs of local artists, cityscapes and park views devoid of people, with white cards stuck into the lower-right corners, its title and price written in ink. Vac tells me he's nearly ready, just needs to find a blank tape. He rummages in his bag. I take the chance to use the toilet before we get started. I spend an extra minute washing my hands, smile into the mirror to check my teeth for remnants of the potato knish I ate at the last coffee shop (23rd and Lexington, two hours ago), read a few graffiti drawings ("Jim Morrison pissed here in 1974" — Below that: "Morrison died in '72 you dumm fuck" — Below that: "he died in '71 you dumber FUCK!").

Back at the table, I listen to the fizz in the glass as I pour my water. Vac is tapping his pencil on the table next to the microphone. When I look at the pencil pacing time, and casually roll my eyes up to his, he stops himself, but can't hold still long, and begins to rapidly tap his note pad. The pad has numbered questions listed down the page, from which, reading upside down, I catch a few words. The last line has the numeral 12 dug into the paper with dark lead. If he's to be so noisy, I think, the tape will record sounds of a time bomb sitting in his lap. Or maybe he wants to create the effect of us sitting in a clock shop.

When my eyes linger on the pad, he stops this second round of tapping. I apologize for my own slowness; the urge to look at my watch is powerful, and I hint a beer would be helpful. "It's just a coffee shop," he says. Vac is chagrined by another artist booze-hound looking for a free drink. I suggest we get started. Vac makes a tick next to question #7 and reaches to press the record button.

"How do you create your sculptures, Minus?"

I try to suppress a sigh. It's become automatic, like the faint blink of lighted consciousness. Vac's muscles harden around his jaw. Finally I know what Hollywood stars feel like at interview junkets. In four days of these dialogues (Belinda's word), many with city papers and regional magazines, I've answered this same question. The problem is that I've tried to answer it differently each time, from a new angle, even if only to make a small change. But what can be said differently about something that I want to remain as much a mystery — at least, to myself — as possible? Now that I've deconstructed it seven ways to Sunday, I feel drained of inspiration. I'm glad I'd agreed to these interviews only after I finished the final Mythos.

Vac loses patience with me and stabs the recorder's button to stop the tape. "Let's try this again," he mumbles. He rewinds the tape, sets his smile, and asks the question a second time, reading the same words written on his pad. He doesn't scratch a second tick.

I don't want to be a pain in the ass for this guy, and taking a drink of water might push me into that category. But I'm thirsty, so I raise the glass, take a swallow, and look over the rim just as the bell above the door jingles its warning of a new customer. Karen K breezes through the door like a leaf blown down the street, and sits at a window table. She folds one leg over the other, and the top leg swings up and down. Her foot holds onto an open-toed shoe that rocks back on the downward swing. She's wearing jeans and a green sweater, with a black scarf wrapped and tied on her neck. Her hair still sports the boyish Hepburn cut. Her eyebrows flash me, but I ignore her. She can wait. She can leave. I don't care. Vac draws an emotional breath and reaches for the recorder again. My hand shoots out to stop him.

"I've learned to trust what I see, Vac ... all my senses working, but not necessarily together. Whatever might come, I let that steer me. If you allow it to be the other way around, it's easy to overwork a strong image or motif, and then you've ruined the piece. That only gets worse if you take the attitude, 'Oh, I have to use that right now!' approach to inspiration. I avoid these pitfalls by focusing on the imagery of my subject, what it evokes, and its ethos. I'll give you an example. When I was painting in oils, I was fascinated by the diversity I found on Chicago's streets — I'd just moved into the city from my suburban log cabin [here I give my self-deprecating laugh, but I think the Abe Lincoln allusion is lost on Vac] — how people sat, the looks young couples gave each other, not the lovey-dovey looks but smart, knowing glances laid on each other: of youthful remonstrance or even snark, or otherwise wry, owning, and whimsy. Similar to, but naïvely pushing against, that same mirror held to couples when they're sixty... or in their eighties. Caillebotte found these people. Rembrandt, too."

( _They all found them, Minus the Artist. Artists always do. That's why they're artists. It's what makes you think, dog walker._ )

Vac nods, smiles, doesn't comment or follow up. "You last had a show as one of the — let me get this name right... 'the artists three'... okay — how does your upcoming show compare?" He makes a second tick on his pad.

"It doesn't," I say. "The spheres were... they– they were– they were otherly. I took shape from the possibility that we have something else beyond our experience, beyond our world. The how of how we perceive our world, as taught from school textbooks verses the difference in the way we think of ourselves. Umm, existentially, I think you can say. Now, 'The Mythos at Twilight' is about... it's our history as defined by the ancients. Certainly not existential. The pantheon of gods and goddesses, given image as flesh-and-bones people, if you will. Updated. Immortals caught in mortal bodies, at what we true mortals think of as near the end."

( _You're no different than the separation found between Shakespeare's star-crossed teens and Albee's Martha and George. Somewhere among the Humberts of society. Wake up, fucknut._ )

"Is there a bit of tongue-in-cheek blasphemy going on here?"

"How do you mean?" In fuzzy image behind Vac's head, Karen shifts in her seat. Is her chair too hard on her ass? Is she bored? Her legs quickly unfurl and flip position without throwing a shoe.

Vac explains his question. "I mean this presidential campaign, winding up with next Tuesday's election. Lots of religion has been played on both sides. Control is the game, or can become the game, or will become the game. People have taken sides, Mister Orth. As I see your sculptures," says Vac, in a blunt tone, "some of their implication lean toward word-play and that same 'ethos' you mentioned. They're old, tired, used up. Is there a statement there about modern culture?"

I have an idea of what Vac is after, but he wants something particular, and perhaps peculiar, from me, and has willed himself to answer his own question if I don't. "Election?" I say. "Hasn't that gone away yet? I thought I'd felt the change already. People were less gloomy on the Park Avenue bus this morning. Must have been the light traffic." Vac isn't playing along with my answer. He gives me the fish eye, so I stay with some truth that sounds rehearsed in my head (while I listen to Vac renew his tapping fetish) – "This isn't politics, Vac. There's no political statement implicit in art that trumps the social statement already inherent in this republic. Not unless, of course, you're on the party payroll. I'm working in human experience, not the future tense of any single society."

Vac's jaw performs a jig before he clenches his teeth. The fucker is swallowing a yawn. Across the room, Karen holds a tall glass with a straw in it. Vac checks his laundry list of questions, so I steamroll ahead to make sure the recorder hears me. "Art is always akin to our own experience. We live longer today than we did one hundred years ago, and longer still than one thousand years ago. The faces of the gods match our own, as they surely did when the prime beings of the day met with Fate. The major difference between the eras is technological."

( _A cereal spokesman for the graven image of God. Nice show, numb-skull. Take your statues down to Georgia, where the Baptists rejoice in hell-fire's damnation of artists' souls. That's for all the good of modern technology._ )

Vac laughs to himself. "Here's something our readers would like to learn. Share with us something funny that has happened to you recently, please."

"Wow," I say. "I- I'm going to have to..." –my self-described older lover pulled a surprise visit at a private show, only I didn't recognize her (neither did my girlfriend-slash-fiancé) because she, the so-called lover, appeared like a Shakespearean ghost dressed in Chanel to camouflage her bag lady persona I was used to seeing and you know what I wasn't even her lover she was just playing a role in a farce but if you want to look over your shoulder– "...let me think for a minute, Vac. Umm...." I take my water glass and watch the mineral bubbles rise, reach the top, and explode. I can almost smell the gas. "Let's see, it'll have to be from just a few days ago. I ordered a bagel with the works over at Asa's, you know, the schmeer, and it's in my hands and then it's not, because the weight of everything on top made it topple, like that kids' game, 'Don't Spill the Beans'? Eh? No. Anyway, long story short, I caught it, the bagel, face down. My hands smelled like lox all day. Kind'a funny, because I was around women and — you know how females hate to think that any fish smell is coming from them! Okay, not so funny, because I forgot to tell you, I was on a photo shoot with some magazine. The ah, you know, the guy– the guy with the camera who shoots the–..."

"The photographer," Vac says.

"–and... yeah, right, the pho-... hey, don't step on the story, Vac! So he catches it all with some nifty camera work. We had a good laugh, but you had to be there. Anyway it could be a great cover."

( _Click. Click-Click. Whirrrr. Click. Click. Click-Click. Let me write the caption: "Ham-fisted artist, Minus Orth, juggles his breakfast"_ )

"That's a funny story, Mister Orth. Okay, next question." Vac waves his hand above the pad like a magician. "What inspires you most? What keeps you going to the studio every morning?"

I look at the tape player and see the wheels turning.

"That's still undefined," I say. He's asked the best question of the lot, and it's not even in his crib notes. "Which, in fact, is why I continue to create art. I'm a representational artist, so what I see every day is inspiration enough. I either meet a lot of people, or else I'm caged in my studio. Sometimes I have to think about the ridiculous first, to discover what's important. Inside-out, upside-down, through the looking glass. It's not so cliché as the phrases sound, because what you see can't be told in words. That's not my medium."

( _Relate art with the nightly news to reach people where they think: on their asses. Hit them with a powerful image to make it stick. Use commercials as sharp sticks poked in their eyes, as necessary. Or up their asses. Don't tell them this is how it works. They might say, "Oh."_ )

Vac picks up on the cliché line. "Are you saying that– is there a– what are you saying?"

"I'm saying the abstraction of art has confused people for nearly a hundred years. They don't know how to look at it. Perhaps that's because we have failed to educate them, I mean the artists. Isn't that the question? People who like art are going to find it, learn about it. People who don't like art go the other way. It's those people standing in the middle who need a map. Finding the relevance for them can be difficult, so artists must understand the relevance for themselves, first. The artwork, the final piece, is always a distillation."

( _Play bag lady dress-up. You become a blur on the canvas._ _You_ _are a blur. You_ _are_ _a blur. You are a_ _blurrrr_.)

Vac writes something on his pad.

"Describe yourself in five words, Mr Orth."

"Worried. Happy. No... YES! Underemployed."

( _Crap. Shit. Feces. Excrement. Waste_.)

I get a laugh from Vac's real self. (He might be an aged Odysseus — why not — who's taken up a part-time job with Ithaca's local rag, once the hullabaloo of his homecoming became old news, and the olive harvests turn over year after year without another Iliadikos expedition.) He supposes that if we had two hours, he could reach me and find something to write about. Then he wouldn't have to use set questions. This is what I sense in his laugh. I don't know if it's real. I can't know. Talk to me, Vac. I don't want to know. Life, and art, are better that way.

"Lastly, Mister Orth, do you have any words of advice for aspiring artists?"

"Whatever you do, it has to be art, first. Begin with the possibility of the material, the form, the subject. Make mistakes. It's only ever about trying. Don't be afraid to contradict yourself. Whitman said, 'Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself.' And then let the subjects do for you... what they can do."

( _You should teach. Art students eat those clichés up like puppies devour kibble. All that, and summers off, too!_ )

"Okay. That's a wrap! Thanks for your time, Minus. I'm running late myself. I'll let you get away from this coffee house so you can go have that beer." He double winks at me. "The mineral water is on me." Vac lays down exact change, plus a six-percent tip. He's out the door in a minute flat.

Karen K stands up as Vac lights a cigarette outside the window. A hard wind rattles the door, and pulls at Vac's hair as though it's tied to a kite. Cigarette ash gets in his eye, and he stoops to recover his balance. Karen K blocks this image when she stands. The ends of her black scarf flap with the speed of her approach. She places her glass next to Vac's coins and my effervescent water. She doesn't sit. I haven't moved a muscle since Vac shook my hand at his exit line. The waitress sidles over. She doesn't know if she should pick up the coins, address us, or walk away. She hitches one shoulder as though finally deciding this, or everything, doesn't much matter, and asks Karen if she wants something. Her glass is empty, its red straw chewed and crimped over the edge, looking like someone's fat lip. "Ahoy," Karen says to me. "Got some wind left in your sails for a dance?" She's tall from my seated perspective, hovering with a softly powdered face and a pair of wire sunglasses hooked into her hair. Overall, it's an image I hadn't thought of before.

The waitress looks between us. I wonder if she notices who this older woman is. Of course she doesn't, not unless she's a Women's Studies major at NYU or Hunter College. Karen suggests another round. The waitress twirls her hair around a finger, wondering if she should remind us this isn't a bar. Karen drives her away with a glance. I want to learn how that's done.

"You never answered me," I say. She angles her head. "Were you at the debate?"

"An artist," she says, "should take everything as a one-off to make each piece of art the only true thing his life needs before death. Cleave it from your soul. Then go get drunk to find the meaning of life, and start all over with a new tenor in your breast."

"Do you think that's me?" I ask.

She tips one shoulder. "What you should ask yourself is 'Who was following whom?' that day in Central Park."

I think she says this to confuse me. (Which day?) She needn't bother trying. I believe only in me, now. Me, and Belinda. The café music changes from a soulful wail to Michael Jackson pop.

"A word, please," she says.

I nod at the empty chair. She sits, moves her bottom around on it, luxuriating, I imagine, in the warmth Vac has left on the seat. She folds her hands on her knee, crossed left over right. The crease in her jeans points at me like the shaft of an arrow. She asks how the interview went, how the interviews have gone, what interesting questions I've been asked. I think how she might already know the answers to these questions, has gotten my schedule through her grapevine, has known where I've been and who has talked with me, even the transparencies I've chosen to lend the magazines. Indeed, she may well know the number of column inches each writer has been allotted.

"There's always a bit of the bizarre in an interview," I tell her. "That's how I learned to have fun with them, to wait for the outré comment." I recall how I've been asked to explain myself by the interviewers. My answers also must preserve, emote, advance the need (or is it use?) for art. There is also a patina of "edge" and ego and satisfaction at having been noticed; that itself has been a long-time coming, though a deserved wait.

"And why not?" I answer from somewhere in the whitest blue of wonder.

I'm lured to her home, or I go willingly. Or I am intrigued to follow her. Or I have a "need of approval" neurosis. The distinction is hardly important: I'm curious if anything has changed in her four rooms. Reversed throw pillows would be enough. When we step inside, however, I'm disappointed. This is all the same, and I need to get away. It's here that Karen starts in on me, as soon as she closes the door.

"You are a rube. I was trying to talk myself out of believing that. Fat chance. You can't convince me otherwise. You won't even try! The simplest action would do it, but you have no idea what that looks like. Hopeless. Hopeless!"

There is no tea offered. She points at the furniture. We sit on the divan. I'm speechless and like myself this way; she is speaking like a child, a smart child, but one who may just talk herself into silence, or tears. "You make such good art. But one thing needn't equate with wider connections or an understanding of society –"

Sound has been muffled for weeks, in my world; it's become easier to squelch. I've been walking through a tunnel, dark, quiet but for the echoes made by passing cars, subway doors, children's voices, chattering old men — it's lighted end is near enough to show the city in motion, just beyond the round, hazy edges. Karen's voice, though, comes clearest of anything that I've had, or needed, to hear.

"Dear Minus, let's start somewhere in the middle, shall we? You wanted something from me. God knows what — you still don't. I gave it to you. Paragon of Virtue, Woman of an Era, the Trickster Troll, or whatever and however you wanted to see me. And I... I grew fond of you. It's not that I had pined for recognition, or for comfort (from what, I only know through my nightmares). Friendship is only a by-word for interruption and obligation. Do you wonder at my routine, my choices of fashion, my baggage and transportation, my diet?"

"Is this a Hitchcock film I've woken up inside?" My voice is loud, by comparison to hers, but needs to be to cut through her voice.

Karen folds her arms. "We all work in our own, mysterious, way," she says. "I can't question how that works for you, or why."

"Why didn't you just ask?" I say. Her expression, now, defines that for me. She had. I am looking at myself in twenty-five years. Or I am looking at Belinda. Or (and this is the best of my hide-and-seek thoughts) I hadn't really cared to look in the first place, and this is what I get.

"The product is what makes sense," she says, "otherwise it's none of my business. Naturally, though, I can appreciate the whole gestalt thing. Watching you outside the Guggenheim, you should have seen all the little parts coming together. You were a magnet picking up steel crumbs among all the dust and wood through ages and ages of stale thought. The weeks before that day were one kind of revelation for me — I said 'for,' not 'to' or 'of' — and the months since, have been quite another. Watching you agonize, listening to you work it all out. That is art's prophecy, young man. Someone like myself doesn't give that away, not for reality's sake. And there are few left who are like me."

First she berates me, then she praises me. I don't get it.

"What's this all about? I don't understand. The bag lady outfits. It's a... trick. All the while you –"

"Such confusion. It's okay, Minus. You don't need to know everything. None of us can, even when we ask nicely. You know your gods by now, I should think. The Greeks understood the power their gods held, and freely used. Oh, they hardly believed in them privately, but on the street things were different. In public you must verbally lay trust to those things that society professes to know. At least, that's how life used to be. Otherwise you'd get a knife through your fucking eyeball. You see, the mix between the two made for some riotous comedy. Poignancy was the gods' greatest effect on the mortals. The people could tell the difference between a siren and a muse. We latter moderns are too introspective for our own good. Or the complete opposite, as horrid and obscene a thought as that is. We think we have the answers, or we know we can figure them out. I, on the other hand, think we're wrong, and are headed toward the abyss. The rare animal is the confused man: you!

"The liberal arts education has been a failure. The leaders of the world have always read classics. That's a British phrase. It means bathing in the words of ancient writers, those who had already dissected the importance of life a couple thousand years before industry and 'work' choked off reason from society." She raises a finger — into the air, not at me — but I don't think she means to refer to the gods or some higher power. "You're on the way up, Minus. About to make your splash across the marquees and banners of print, television, even the radio. Surely you can let a few people ride your coat tails. You know that none of us gets these chances without some help. Just another of the unwritten axioms that makes sense."

She fits a cigarette into a two-inch holder made from horn. Her mouth is red and moist, cheeks paunchy with over-spilled sass. She lights up and blows smoke from her nose. This is the first time I've seen her smoke; she has all the mannerisms of a pro.

"And then there is us," she says. "We artists, I mean. We have a certain feeling inside us from the beginning. _This_ feeling. That's all you have to say to people who have it; the rest aren't part of the tribe, and pity them for that. We have it like some people hear in color or can write sentences as musical scores, or musical scores as audible sentences." She takes another drag and blows it out, `a la the Forties' dame. "What you know is far more important than who you know. For all that's worth, we still need the suits, the accountants, the curators and the librarians, to make it happen."

She stands up and walks past me on the way to the fireplace. Her sweet perfume mingles with the ascending smoke curling in her slipstream. She leans an elbow against the mantel. I see her as the missing trio of the two pictures in their filigree frames. If it's true that our personalities are set by age four, what spirited thoughts, and deeply held secrets, already lurked in that little girl whose stern parents stand at attention behind her? Where have her youthful reading and early writing taken the young woman with the long hair and the intelligent eyes? The culmination is who I'm looking at in the flesh.

"So," she says. "Do you get my drift, or what?"

"Yeah, Karen. I think I do."

She shakes her head and laughs. "No, no. Not yet, you don't. You _don't_. In a while you'll hear a voice in your head. It's not a woman's voice, but an older man's voice. Perhaps you'll hear it as your father's. I heard mine as my mother's. She said something – the voice I mean – that gave me a soothing stroke. Ever since, this has made all the difference. Ten years later, ten years after hearing that voice, I went to the Salvation Army thrift shop. I never realized how many people gave. So much stuff. Well, I went there to buy. I picked clothes out at random. Funny, sometimes I closed my eyes and matched, if you can call it that, pants with shirt with boots with jacket with hat. Then I took my first walk as a bag lady." She finishes her cigarette with a last drag and stubs it out (half-smoked) against the fire screen, and tosses the smoldering butt onto the cold grate. The crinkled white stick has a touch of her red lipstick on one end, and the other end a pin-size orange ember. "I'm still walking, Minus. People won't notice. I'll see them. I register everything, everything that I need. It's what keeps me alive."

She walks me to the door. With my hand already on the knob, I feel her fingers touch my arm. Her hand is pale, the color of dishwater, her long fingers thin, with a plastic sheen to the skin, the image of a ghostly touch used to frighten children, and old men with bad dreams. When I turn to say goodbye, she leans in and kisses me. The feeling is sensual and disturbing. I'm supposed to accept this gift from her because she is the one I know. Her fingers release my arm and slide up my sides, where her palms run over my ribs and I feel their cold beneath my shirt. Her mouth tastes of burned tobacco, a scorched flavor and deeply bitter. I feel my cock thicken in my pants. Her hand slides up my throat and takes it in a soft grip, those cold fingers like threads of a frayed rope.

"You'll make a middle-aged woman proud." Karen K leers at me from up-close. "Happy." I'm practically pinned against the wall now. One hand presses on my shoulder and the other is around my neck.

"Not that this will make any difference," I say, but get another of her kisses that quiets me. Her tongue darts through my lips again and again, a serpent, berserk in rape. I turn my head to make it stop. "I'm engaged to Belinda," I say. She draws back. Her hands grab my upper arms and she squeezes with her nails, attached to me like raptors' claws.

"What the hell are you talking about?" she asks.

I tell her. The story is short and, I think, makes a touching, romantic scene to the hours we spent together organizing the statues before the private show.

" _Marriage?_ " Karen explodes. "You must be smoking crack! Jesus, Minus, you're an artist, not a husband." She looks at me with animus; a jolt runs through my body. "Artists don't take wives. The artist-wife gets bored. She becomes fat. She loses her beauty, or whatever allure he thought she had. She needs to blame someone for these failures. She becomes vengeful. Fitzgerald is the poster boy for diminished beauty and premature death because of that crazy bitch Zelda."

"You don't know what you're talking about," I yell. "Belinda made all of this happen. She _helped_ make it happen. You said so yourself."

"You're not listening," Karen says. Her voice is aflame with heat enough to suck away the oxygen I need to stay conscious. I fight to keep my lungs from compressing. She speaks so close to me that I feel her breath smooth down the fine hairs on my face. "Here's the best advice you'll get, Minus the Artist. _Drop_ her. Do it! Do this now, while you're on the rise. If you wait, your magic will be gone. Lost. She'll have you moving to some backwater. People will hate you for all the infidelities that'll come later if you don't cut her out now. Do it now, do it, drop her. Do it, do it, _do_ _it_."

Her nails dig deeper. I can almost hear the fabric tearing. The muscles in my cheeks flinch. "I need to leave," I say. My hands grip her wrists and pull them off me, away. "Goodbye, Karen." Her fingers, still outstretched into claws of a scrapping animal, pull themselves in and close tightly.

"Okay," she says. She looks at my hands gripping her wrists, my knuckles white. "Can you release me, please, Minus?"

I let go, and the current that has flowed between us breaks. She brings her hands to her sides and steps away from me. Her eyes glimmer in the light-stoked room. Her face is smooth again, the skin around her mouth tight. Its edges then turn up. She says, "You're a star, Minus. I'm going to make that prediction into a declaration for the New York papers, and then I'll make it stick in the trades. Book offers will come in. You'll be known around the world. I think the art world can absorb a coating of reality this far into its fattened, self-absorbed ego trip. I'm thinking of painting a broad canvas — the auctions, the fairs, the prizes, magazines, art schools." Her hands clasp on themselves; the cook has come alive in her kitchen.

"Don't be selfish," I say. "Save some for yourself."

"The writing shall do that," she replies. "They will love me." Her arms fold across her chest, and I believe there is no more she has to say. Either I know everything or else I haven't been listening, is the implication. With a toss of her chin, I'm excused.

Standing at the elevator, I hear her door shut behind me. The sound strikes my back like soft rain, or the reassurance of a tombstone dropped into place. Now I can draw breath again.

CHAPTER 26

"A letter from your dad," Belinda says. She hands me a white envelope from the bundle in her hand. My name is written in Dad's print-writing penmanship. Half the letters are block formed while half are cursive, linked with obvious letter combinations: r and t, n and u. I'm reminded of Karen's peculiar scrawl. Belinda paces the floor as I look for a chair. "You'll crease your pants," she says.

"Then I should bring them to the show on a hanger. I'll be standing all night anyway. The car will be here in twenty minutes. Have a cocktail with me. Make us a drink, one to share."

She retreats behind the kitchen island, where a bottle of gin and a retro pitcher with a real glass rod stand next to a jar of olives. Martini glasses and a sweating ice bucket complete the cast. We've been celebrating more, lately. Once I unburdened my conscience to her, told her what I'd been "up to" with Karen Kosek, there wasn't even the hint of frost. The debriefing was surprisingly brief. White lies are harmless. I hadn't slept with Karen K, which eliminated that king of lie. This made unloading to Belinda a pleasure. The bathroom episode stays hidden. My Mythos rejoiced, the ones in my mind trying to free each other like clever gods.

She listened, didn't judge, took me at my word. Drama was for Gala and Salvador, she told me. "We aren't there," she said. It was nice of her to omit the "yet."

Belinda drops the mass of letters on the island, many addressed to me c/o her and _Mythic ARTS Management_. Then she notices one officially labeled envelope with a cellophane window. "This is new," she says, and uses a nail to wedge open one end. "Well, I'll be damned."

"What?"

"It's from the Samuels." I tell her the name means nothing to me. "The people we rented the house from in the Poconos? They've sent us a bill for their radio. They say our deposit didn't cover its replacement."

"It was a burglary. Don't they have insurance?" I'm not angry. Just the same, when I hear Belinda sigh through her nose, I wonder aloud, "We'll probably find the damned thing for fifty bucks at the downtown flea market."

"Well, we don't want them to sue us. Might get in the papers. Bad publicity." She pouts, but lets the gin splash into a glass. I catch the sparkle from her engagement ring in the center of my eyes.

"Minus," she says, her voice totally changed, dreamy. "Tell me something. What was it about Nemesis — you know, the day at the lake, you were going to tell me –"

"Oh, that. Yeah, yeah. It was sort of obscure. Did you know Nemesis was a female deity? It's antithetical, really. I mean, we think of 'a nemesis' as masculine, perhaps because the idea of one's adversary, or strife or vengeance, are masculine features of life. Maybe. War, to begin. War to end, too. I hadn't thought to ask myself how I saw him until I read about her. Little do people know that Nemesis, a lesser deity in that whole lore, actually stood for the retribution of evil deeds."

Belinda strikes a queer look.

I explain how this made sense to me. "She is the one myth goddess none of us can ever truly put aside as aged. That feature connects to my sculptures. Perhaps she is the link between past and future gods, or monotheism today, and what's in store three thousand years ahead. On the other hand, teenage boys talk about looking like Adonis. That's their connection to the pagan gods. They use the phrase 'an Adonis' ― which doesn't really make sense. But that's the nomenclature, these days. Neither does its built-in vanity make sense. Adonis is a myth, bestowed on the strong but stupid boys. Then I had this to wonder about: Do teenage girls use Aphrodite to describe their sense of beauty? I haven't found it anywhere."

"Teenage girls don't think they're beautiful, Minus," Belinda says. "They worry about their weight when they're skinny, and they worry about it more when they're fat. Pimple creams and deodorant and bad hair days are their nemesis. If any body image can be thought of, a teenage girl can use it against herself. That may not be particularly philosophical of the ancient kind, but it sure describes 'woman versus man' in the late twentieth century. Give Athena breast cancer and it'll make us all feel a little more positive about our thickening waistlines and sagging tits and the new wrinkles we find on our faces each morning."

"Aphrodite in bandages," I say. "There's a thought. I'm not being facetious. But Nemesis isn't beautiful. She's plain, if anything, chaste, and subtly threatening. She looks at you with this macabre stare that suggests scrutiny and judgment. Not the goddess I want to fall for."

Belinda laughs. "I'm glad for that."

I tear open Dad's letter. He begins his letters as he starts his phone conversations. The math is easier, written on the page, where I can play out the figuring in visual pencil that makes erasing easy. This is Dad's third letter in two weeks. He's lost his phone and the "Here I am, stupid!" locator buzzer, linking the base station to the handset, doesn't work because the batteries in the phone are sapped. He can't find the phone in the couch, or in the bathroom, or in the bedroom. He's even looked in the refrigerator, twice!

The ice tinkles in the martini pitcher. Belinda is a stirrer, she's discovered, and thinks it best to leave shaking to fictional characters. I read Dad's lines quickly because the story has become familiar.

I fold the letter and return it to its envelope. I'm saving Dad's letters. He's written so few over the years, and once he buys a new phone I'll miss them. I might do a mural, some day. Lately I've searched through trash and wind-blown papers, on the street and in Central Park. Discarded letters are amazingly fertile grounds for solicitude, enmity, ardor, sorrow, covetousness, greed, self-pity, and love.

I tell Belinda, "He now writes it plainly. He wants us to come to Chicago. His girlfriend dumped him." Belinda looks at me over the olive jar. "Yes," I say, "he used those words."

Belinda pours out the martini, expelling a breathy "Huh" to punctuate a hidden thought. She hands the glass to me and we touch our lips to its opposite sides, and take a sip. Her tongue darts out and wipes the glass where a drop of gin has hung along the rim. She licks her lips lightly, the white of her eyes glistening, and she says, "So let's move."

I feel my foot tap the floorboards, the sound like our combined heartbeats as one waits for the other to speak. I lose count somewhere after forty. "Not now," I think.

"I don't mean tomorrow," she says, and takes another sip, this one languorous, leaving a ginny vapor between us. She lets me drink the rest, and it's a quaff. "You'll know when our time is up, Minus." Her hand retrieves the glass for a refill. "You're an outsider here. We both are. We're appointments in an otherwise overcrowded pastiche on modern life. All the great artists have been."

I wonder if she's only halfway right, or if this is manipulation in action. Leave NYC? I stand near the center of what millions of people believe is the Center of the Universe. Where else could I go? What else would take me so handily into its fleshy bosom? Tonight, all is mine. Tomorrow is the unknown, again. The id of _i_.

Mom would understand.

NYC bends against the reputation of being crusty. Littered streets match soot-dusted facades, tattooed storefronts, and bird-shat statues. The City's people are foul-mouthed and brusque. Its political battles own to prizefight status. Newspapers wage war using 90-point headlines. Sharp-elbowed competition at the deli counter is a pastime. Legends all.

Step into a cab and you might need a foreign language in your pocket to get where you're going. Get off at the wrong subway stop and you might not get home alive. Urban myths? We hold these truths to be self-evident.

The Big Apple. The Great White Way. 23 Skidoo! Take the A Train. The House that Ruth Built. Canyon of Heroes. The City that Never Sleeps. I ♥ New York. All the News That's Fit to Print. Excelsior. In a New York minute. Give My Regards to Broadway. Gotham.

Such riddles are the cynosures of the city dweller's streets, from Berlin to Bombay, Marrakech to Murmansk, Gdynia to Grand Rapids, Tokyo to Tijuana.

One evening I said to Belinda's mom, "We need the key to the cipher, the riddle of our own lives, otherwise everything is arbitrary." It was something Dad had told me when I was a boy. Alice responded by crying into the telephone. The words seemed so innocuous to me, as a boy; less so as I was saying them into the telephone to someone I'd never met but whose daughter I loved. Dad had told me the saying had something (or everything) to do with the nature of art and words, but not of science. If this is true, then we know something unique about people, how different they are to each other.

A red carpet protects my feet. I think of moon dust footprints, and almost look behind me to find the impressions shadowing me, like a sinister twin. He wants this more than me, I sense. He would slit my throat for the chance. I want to look, although my fear of finding no memory in the plush fabric keeps my neck rigid. Belinda holds my hand, which feels even to me like a soggy sponge. She's out front on the carpet by half a step. Her diamond ring digs into the knuckles of my index and middle fingers, where I have it fitted like a bolt. Our link keeps me walking, a tethered animal being led into the ring, frightened by the overture bracing it against its wont to wander from the runway's center groove. The Mythos reach for me, arranged in the hall as sea-floor impressions of a shipwreck: keel and fo'c's'le and ribs are all that lie visible. Atlas sits cross-legged atop the world he once carried — the globe has deflated, taking shape as a punctured beach ball — holding his withered hands folded across his narrow chest while that bold chin points at me. _Are you ready for this?_ White lights blanch my sight. I squint, the pupils crowding out the color in my eyes. Strobe flashes capture the insecurity. My skin feels atomized. This effulgence is theater, dilution, the opaque body of a paper doll whose perforated loveliness is delivered by the transom winds of clapping hands and hot breath. _You only get one chance_. As mortality puts us in a grievous state, its antidote is arrival. This becomes our swaddling.

July 2009 – December 2011

Prague

Acknowledgments

I wish to express my gratitude to those who helped make this project possible, and to others who made this project a pleasure. Many thanks to Calvin Rambler for his early comments on the manuscript and his editorial questions. I am indebted to John Mitchell and the Siren & Muse Publishing group for their professionalism and loyalty, but above all for their commitment to keeping "the book" alive. A special thanks goes to Lia Gallegos and her Sleepygirl Solutions graphic arts. Much love to my family for their undiminished support.

Also, and as with everything else she does, thank you, Asia, for your love & devotion — and for your steady encouragement to make story-writing my life's work.

About the Author

Mark Beyer was born and raised in the Chicago area. He has taught fiction writing at Columbia College Chicago, been a book editor, and worked for many years as a journalist. He has won awards for short story writing (Columbia University Scholastic Competition, 1998) and news features (Florida Association of News Publications, 2004). Beyer lived in NYC for five years, during which time he came to know artists and the homeless, subjects of this novel. An artist himself, Beyer has worked in acrylics, oils, and watercolors. He's currently working on a new novel, and blogs at http://www.bibliogrind.com.

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