Every night, for the next week, I found him waiting for me on the deck, in one of two chairs pointed out at the water. Mostly we drank beer, though sometimes we had tea. I would carefully take my seat and stare straight forward, and that was how we would talk. He didn’t touch me again, and I never let the moments between us slow down, and never stayed on the deck for more than an hour, and so—we settled into a space of deliberate physical distance.

It made everything easier, that distance, pushing the tension away, over the horizon. I knew it was there but it wasn’t in my face, and that was enough. We sat on the deck every night, looking out at the lake, talking about our work, our lives, the city, everything we had in common. Before the week was over, I caught myself thinking about him during the day—wondering what he was doing, what we would talk about that night—and looked forward to our evenings with a nervous pleasure.

I learned about two periods of his life: what I came to think of as before Carey and after Carey, but he never said her name—not once.

His early life was what I expected. Tyler was from Sharon, Connecticut—not far from Max’s upscale hometown. His parents were both doctors: father, a surgeon, mother, an oncologist. His father died of cancer when he was in the fifth grade. Drowning in responsibility, his mother sent him to boarding school in nearby western Massachusetts from sixth through twelfth grades. He played tennis well enough for a D1 scholarship at UCLA. After a year he dropped out and attended the Academy against his mother’s wishes.

“She wanted me to have a real job,” he said, leaning back in his chair, wine in hand. “I don’t blame her. But I wasn’t going to be a professional tennis player or go into finance. I wanted to be a painter, believe it or not.”

“Really?” I couldn’t imagine him as anything other than what he was.

“Yeah. I wanted to be the next Gerhard Richter. But—I didn’t have it.”

“It’s not entirely about talent,” I said, though that wasn’t true.

“You don’t have to do that,” he said, reaching over to me, forgetting our boundary—before remembering it and stopping midair. The physical distance remained, but our emotional proximity had grown like moss, lush and alive and nearly too detailed to measure.

“Gerhard Richter wanted to be Jack Whitten, anyway,” I said.