“Yeah.” He laughed. “It didn’t matter, though. I wasn’t talented enough. I ended up being overly influenced by Experimental Studies. I didn’t realize at the time what a class-specific pyramid scheme it was—to make work that can’t sell—and we completely bought into it. We graduated believing in making work that nobody would or could ever buy. Galleries pumped us full of drugs and sent us to parties, but we didn’t make any money. They say one thing and do another. We were too young to understand the difference. We were marketing, so they could sell thirty-year-old paintings. I mean, eventually we figured it out. But the first few years out of school were hard. I had huge student loans.”

“I remember that you were famous already,” I told him.

“Famous at the Academy.” He laughed. “I did these big installations of taxidermied animals. It was nonsense. Marlin was doing wheatpaste murals—everybody was so hot on, you know, graffiti, trespassing, fucking whatever, but you can’t sell graffiti. Jes’s films, I mean, that was the right place in the right time, but you don’t make money on art films, only performances, and it’s barely a living. She was more prepared for that, though. Did you know, she went to Juilliard? For cello. Anyway—Jack never wanted to make objects that went on a market. He wanted to intervene differently.”

“But Carey was so successful, right from the start,” I blurted out. “Wildly.”

“She was built that way.” His eyes flicked to and away from the water. I felt something, then, in the air—the tender charge of his anxiety about everything Carey—and he turned to say something—I could see it on his face—but then he discarded it. Disappointment gathered in the back of my mouth. I swallowed it down.

“Lucky that you met her.”

“It wasn’t luck,” he responded argumentatively—and he stopped himself again, and changed the subject.

“May I ask a question about your work?” he said instead. I nodded, and he continued: “I saw you in Tomato Tomato, I mean, really saw you in the painting, clearer than I’ve ever seen anybody in my life. And then I met you and you were so exactly that,” he said.

“What’s the question?”

“How do you do that?”

I didn’t know what to say.