In New York, Abstract Expressionism was happening, Pop was about to happen, and my wife and I, who had met in art school, were on the verge of happening, or so we felt for three years. It was as if we gave a party and no one came. We had the loft, the devotion and asceticism, the paints, brushes, canvases, and welding equipment (I painted, she sculpted)—everything, in short, but the patrons, the audience, the profit. We had, in one of our few sexual successes, added a female infant to our baggage, and in a drastic attempt to lighten our expenses had moved to a seaside hamlet north of Boston, where once-thriving boat yards building wooden clipper ships had dwindled to a row of clam shacks and, along the hamlet’s central causeway, a kind of perpetual yard sale. Here, amid magnificent salt marshes and taciturn Yankee yeomen, my wife and I would definitively ripen our talents. In time, in triumph, we would return to New York. I had temporarily returned on this occasion for two days to close out the legal details of our sublease, and to arrange for the shipment of our horribly bulky, sadly unwanted works of art.

It all sounds more dismal than it was. I was twenty-five and felt that virtually all of my life was ahead of me. Just being in the same high-ceilinged room with Marcel Duchamp made everything seem possible and worth any amount of trouble. There was also at the party a woman I imagined I was falling in love with. We talked together a good hour, posing this way and that on the arm of a giant chrome-frame sofa covered in nubbly Haitian cotton. I forget the woman’s name but not the tint of her skin, a neutral calm color like that of a plaster cast “from the antique,” as they called it in art school. She was a Venus de Milo with arms. She wore a low-cut dress of bottle green, in one of those shiny stiff fabrics—taffeta, I suppose—considered sexy in the Fifties. Everything was in place, including my geographical distance from my wife and a nagging, hostile sense of insufficiency that had entered our marriage with its northern move. Yet I couldn’t quite deliver the punch, the pass, that might have made this Venus mine for the night. Instead we agreed I would swing by her workplace tomorrow; she was an underling in the newly opened Guggenheim Museum. When I arrived, blushing and baggage-laden, she was out to lunch, the front desk informed me; I wandered up the ramp, looking at the big smeared canvases. Abstraction was getting tired, but there seemed nothing else to do—like the void at the center of Wright’s magnificent, hollow temple.