“Yeah—then it’s over. Everything for me is about giving birth, I think,” I said. “Somehow I get pregnant, and then eventually a painting comes out, but I don’t have to maintain it or nurture it beyond the moment it is ‘finished.’” I made exaggerated air quotes with my hands.

“What about if your paintings fall apart? Don’t you preserve them?”

“For a hundred years of hanging on the wall, maybe, but I don’t use varnish anymore sooooo…uh. No. And they fall apart anyway—Leisure Leisure lost its pound of real gold last year. Fifteen thousand dollars fell on the floor because I hadn’t properly attached it. I told the curator to put it back on with a blowtorch and she told me to call her back when I was sober.”

“Did you?”

“I was sober! I even sent her a telegram saying the same thing but she’s ignoring me. So now it has a big patchy hole in it and they left the gold exactly where it fell, and there’s a guard standing watch all the time. They framed the telegram and put it next to the painting. So. Win some, lose some.”

He laughed, an easy sound. Sipping the wine, I was once again astonished at how too good for me it was: The taste was broad, like a field, and loamy with dirt, sharp with minerals.

“Wow,” I exclaimed—like a little girl. I sound like such a clod.

“A case of this was a gift when I got divorced. Well, when Hen left me. I’m drinking it down.”

“Nice gift.”

“It was,” he said. “It should have been. It was from Hen.”

“That’s…exquisite.” I shook my head in disbelief. “I’ve never left a relationship on a high note. Only low ones.”

“Hen’s the most socially adept person on earth,” he said, looking out across the yard, over the Goldsworthy wall and toward the lake. “She has no enemies.”

“Whose idea was it to have Carey do the house?” I asked, lightly—casually—as though it were an afterthought, like I was merely curious in the way that normal people were curious.

“Both of us. We thought she’d do a wonderful job. And she went bonkers for the idea—she literally accepted on the spot, which was very un-Carey. She usually deliberated over everything for weeks—then took years longer than she was supposed to.”

“Were you here when she died?” I heard myself asking the rudest question in the world.

“Yes. It was terrible. Tyler found her, you know.”

My arms, folded in front of me, went rigid. I glanced down—yet they hadn’t moved. They were the same old arms—the same old legs—crossed in the most unpremeditated kind of way. I felt rooted to my chair, the sensation of it suddenly overwhelming.

“I’ve heard that. He hasn’t mentioned it.”