“Right? It’s so dissonant. I want to be an individual, I want my work to be so unique that everyone says there’s nothing like it, but then, I’m always looking around, like, who’s making tracks? Who can I follow? How am I supposed to do this?”

“Yeah. I think it’s unavoidable.”

“I met her once,” I said. “Carey, I mean. She was the center of attention without doing anything.”

Jack, looked at me intently. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it—it wasn’t quite suspicious, it was more than that—it was—careful. “That’s the most accurate description of her I’ve ever heard,” he said. “If there ever is a retrospective, I’m putting that in the wall text.”

Or maybe—friendly. I breathed out. “Are you ever going to do one?”

“That’s a hard topic around here. My personal feelings aside, I’ve had a hard time at shows where the person died only recently, you know? I hate seeing the bad work. I hate seeing the ephemera. It always strikes me as something that the artist wouldn’t have consented to if they were alive.”

“Isn’t that true of all retrospectives? Isn’t it rifling through a dead woman’s purse, every time?”

He pursed his lips. “Well…not when it’s a historical experience that is de facto presented out of context. I’d do it in fifty years, when everything is so different, and there’s a lens, a conclusion about this time. But I personally don’t have any interest in doing it now. We don’t know what she would have consented to. And I don’t know who it would serve—only the secondary market. And fuck those people.”

I laughed. “I know what you mean.” I looked across the lake, toward Max’s house.

“Your painting looks great over there, for the record.”

“That was a definite surprise.”

“You should be flattered. They don’t have any of our work over there,” he noted. I was surprised that he didn’t consider Carey’s interior design—the concrete tomb—within that great big our.

“Ha. Well—it’s good to know that everybody’s burned by something,” I said, “even you.”

“You’re welcome,” he said, laughing in agreement. The stylish young man who once parked a convertible on the sidewalk in front of the Guggenheim—not the curb, the sidewalk itself—leashing it to the railings with a yarn woven from his own hair, had found middle age, sweatpants, and fatherhood, and I liked him so very much. Jack Wells made me feel, for a moment, like I finally had someone to look up to.