“I like space. I don’t have any feelings about the actual place place. I mean, what do I want?” I ticked off my wants on my fingers. “I want a studio and a nice bed and to not be a million miles away from everyone I’ve ever cared about. It’s what everybody thinks about upstate, right? Like, it’s the idea of the country, but the fact that it’s outside the city is what counts. If we genuinely wanted to be rural and lonely and authentic, we’d move to Nebraska.”

“Hudson looks like Greenpoint these days,” he said. “White people with bad haircuts.”

“On my way up here, I passed the nicest-looking union hall I’d ever seen. I asked somebody about it when I got gas and they said, Oh, Local 110 is a locavore restaurant.”

“We’re never on time, are we?” he said, laughing and shaking his head. “Baudelaire said we’re supposed to have our fingers on the pulse—that’s what makes us artists. But I’m late to everything.”

“If I spent any time worrying about that I’d have to kill myself,” I agreed, swatting at a mosquito on my thigh—before choking on my coffee with a cringe of regret. “I’m so sorry,” I said immediately, wanting to claw it out of the air. “That was a terrible thing to say. Thank you, by the way, for letting me use Carey’s studio.”

“Don’t stress,” he said. “It’s been a long time. It’s not Carey’s studio anymore.”

“What was she like?” I heard myself asking.

“She was a trip,” he said thoughtfully, looking out at the lake. His hands fiddled with his bookmark, pulling it out and lining it up with the bottom edge over and over. When he moved his thumb, I could see Eliot&Sprain engraved as the return address. “Did you like the work?”

“I—yes. I mean—there are not a lot of us. My work is sincere, to be honest, and I got the impression that hers was, too.” He changed as I said this—closed up a bit—and I tried another tack. “Women are minimized so hard that when she was alive, I felt like I was in her wake, even if our work wasn’t actually similar. Do you know what I mean?”

“I’m a Black man working in fiber, I’m sober, I’m a professor, I’m a dad. I’ve got about three role models and none of them are in my medium, even. Charles Gaines comes the closest. Jack Whitten, sort of, but he lived on an island. Hell yes, I know what you mean. I’m creatively lonely all the time.”