KENNETH LOWELL: After our “conversation,” I spent a few weeks trying to catch Lil by surprise, hoping that if we got carried away, nature might take its course, but Lil never let things go beyond a certain point. When I started fantasizing about using force, I knew it was time to stop. Instead of staying home after putting Sam to bed, I started going out. In the years since we had arrived to the neighborhood, Brooklyn Heights had changed. People could now say “the Hicks Street scene” as something other than the punch line to a joke. I started spending time at a bar around the corner from a building where artists rented studio space. I would leave without telling Lil, drink a few highballs, and then come back to see if I’d been missed. Well, I had picked a lousy time to test Lil’s powers of observation, since she was working at all hours to prepare for the Picture Shop show.

At the bar I met a cartoonist who drew for the Voice, and an abstract painter whose day job was creating steamy covers for pulp novels. The cartoonist told me that if I really wanted to stop wasting my time on Hollywood biographies and self-help manuals, he had a friend over at Gryphon I could talk to. A week later, I was having lunch with the Gryphon man, who said if I was willing to work for half my current pay, he would hire me in a heartbeat. I told him I would have to talk to my wife. I had not meant to use that word, and it was the only time in my five years with Lil that I did.

I invited the cartoonist to Lil’s opening on what I thought was a lark, but when he came, I realized how much I had been counting on him showing up. He, Grete, Paul, and I made up Lil’s crowd. The rest had come to see Ostrund, who was apparently well established on the West Coast. It was an odd scene. Ostrund’s animal photos were so peaceful and composed, each one a perfect little still life, that they made Lil’s work seem almost random by comparison. Paul was the only dark-skinned person there. When he beat an early exit, Grete reluctantly followed, which left just myself and my drinking buddy on Lil’s side of the room. From his regular barstool the cartoonist always talked a blue streak, but that night at the gallery he was almost grave. I wondered if he wished he had gone back with Paul and Grete or maybe not come at all. Finally, I worked up the nerve to ask him what he thought of Lil’s work. Honestly? he said. I think your girlfriend’s a genius.