I know I said I’d come in time for spring, but I’ve already bought a plane ticket to visit Jane in California over Easter, so I think I’d better wait until summer. Also, it would feel lousy telling the Institute on such short notice to find a replacement for the upcoming semester (my fault, I should have said something back in September), and now the chair has asked me to organize an exhibition of student work for the end of the school year.

SAM DECKER: One night when we were setting up the darkroom, Lilly asked if I ever wished I’d had children. I laughed so hard I almost spilled the stop bath. I told her I couldn’t think of a time when that would have been possible or anything close to a good idea. Lilly nodded. She said she guessed that was the biggest difference between women and men. I asked how she’d liked it. It had been hard, she said, but it had made her a better photographer. Which one, I wanted to know, being a woman or being a mother? Lilly looked at me the way a teacher looks at a kid who can’t spell or tell time. She told me it wasn’t a question she knew how to answer: she’d been one for about as long as she’d been the other.

I figured out pretty quickly that Clyde boys and Clyde in general were much more interesting than anything or anyone at Holy Mount. Instead of going out for my school’s production of Tartuffe, I acted in so many of Clyde’s contemporary performance projects—as Snake Queen, as the Ocean, as Enoon the Voice of Us All—that some people thought I was enrolled. One day I came out of a rehearsal to a bunch of students sitting in the solarium, passing around a joint. If she was such a genius, one of them said, then why didn’t she do anything after that? Because the system shut her down, said somebody else. Or maybe she and her daughter both got fat, said somebody different.

What are you guys talking about? I said, even though part of me already knew. This was an art school, after all. There were classes with titles like “Issues in Contemporary Photography.”

That chick who did the naked photographs of her and her kid, the first one said, who was all over the news back when we were seven or eight. Man, I wish it was still that easy to get famous, he said, and everyone laughed.

The light—not just in the room but in the world—dimmed and then got really bright, like all the electricity in the universe was deciding whether to snuff itself or blow up. Once it got normal again, I suppose I could have walked out of that room or laughed along with everyone else, but neither of those options occurred to me.

She wasn’t trying to get famous, I said. Those pictures were personal. They weren’t even the sort of thing she usually did.