Tupper knew this. He knew her. They’d practically grown up together in Unity, Maine. Starting at age eleven he’d followed her around while she picked up dead bugs and thorny branches. He tried to make a boat out of rocks. They used to see how long they could tolerate walking barefoot in the snow. Her parents were drunk and inattentive Icelandic artists. His parents thought he was gay because he didn’t play ice hockey. He’d followed her to every educational institution where she’d sought a degree: a BFA from CalArts, an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, an MA from Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies, and a master’s and a PhD in the history of consciousness from UC Santa Cruz, as well as artist residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, Roswell, and Kala. They were extremely well-educated. Eventually they’d married—a cheesy, quickie wedding in Las Vegas of all places—and Elizabeth changed her name from Elizabeth Fuchsdottir to Elizabeth Paulsen. The very next morning, she’d hitchhiked out of town and didn’t see Tupper again until she broke her wrist five months later during her Rodeo, when she rode a bucking bull completely naked, covered in live beetles and barbecue sauce.

Elizabeth knew she was eccentric. There were plenty of eccentrics in New York City. The thing about Cobble Hill, the neighborhood of Brooklyn where Tupper had chosen to buy a house with the embarrassing amount of money he’d made and continued to make from his Macaw design, was that everyone knew or thought they knew everyone else’s business. The artists all lived in Red Hook, not Cobble Hill. Elizabeth couldn’t walk down the street without a staring audience. She was conspicuous, over six feet tall and reed thin—her favorite foods were vodka and vitamins—with a white-blond braid that hung down her back to her waist. She made her own clothes, tearing apart clothing in the sale bin at vintage shops and repurposing it. She liked to wear vinyl because it was durable and warm and waterproof. And she never wore a bra because they were uncomfortable. What bothered her most about their Cobble Hill neighbors—most of them stroller-wielding parents; their children were their works of art—was that they were so content.