The rough walls have been painted a muted oyster white, ideal for displaying art. Bright, primitively executed canvases and collages predominate. Vnn is a prolific artist, an industrious artist, one can see. The largest canvas measures approximately six feet in length, five feet in height, a vivid, shimmering wash of colors in the mode of Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler. There are looming humanoid figures covered in white gauze, like bandages, in the mode of George Segal, with pinched, anguished faces and sightless glass eyes. More original are kites hanging from the ceiling, spiky in design, also very colorful, in the shapes of gigantic bumblebees, bats. The most clever is a five-foot butterfly that, as you approach, is seen to comprise hundreds of small butterflies. (Are these real butterflies? Captured, embalmed? L.K. notes that many are monarch butterflies, an endangered species.) “This is ingenious,” L.K. says of the giant butterfly, though she isn’t sure that she approves.

“My dear, the butterflies are not ‘real.’ ”

“I wasn’t sure …” L.K. is doubtful, disbelieving.

“It would take me forever to capture so many butterflies,” Vann says, wincing and smiling, as a naughty boy might do. “I would have to anesthetize them one by one with chloroform. And I would have to be very careful to keep from tearing the wings.”

L.K. sees that some of the delicate orange and black spotted wings are indeed torn. She imagines that she smells something sweetly chemical. (Ether? Chloroform?)

L.K. has to concede, Vann’s loft/studio is very striking. Not what she’d expected. (But what had she expected? Something smaller, less ambitious? A pigsty? Mediocrity?) She had expected his work to be clichéd and ordinary, just another variant of Pop Art, but really it is far more subtle, and the paintings are intricately painted—brushstroke by brushstroke. She is not condescending to him now.

Like all genuine artists, Vann has hidden his deepest nature beneath a personality worn like old clothes—indeed, like an artist’s work clothes. He is slovenly, but only in his being—not in his art.

Indeed, L.K. is drawn to this mysterious person. Vnn.

“Would you like a drink, dear?”

“I don’t think so, thank you.”

“Yes, a drink. To celebrate us.”

Us. L.K. is touched by this, though uneasy. What does us mean?

She thanks him and tells him she prefers sparkling water, club soda. If he has it, ice.

“But don’t go to any trouble, Vann! Please.”

“Call me Vanny.”

Vanny. L.K. feels a sensation of sudden weakness in the region of her heart. The wild thought comes to her—He will be my lover. Vanny.

While Vann whistles thinly in the kitchen area, pouring drinks, L.K. continues to look about the living area. The setting is a work of art in itself, objects on display. Art books, photography books, framed lithographs. (One of these is a Chagall lithograph, near identical to one owned by L.K. herself. Another is a Ben Shahn.) Pottery, weavings. An antique urn, badly cracked, very likely bought at auction at one of the great old Palmer Park mansions. Sculptures fashioned of burnt wood, painted cotton, and burlap, like oversized moths. Startling to think that out of his own work and the work of others that Vann has collected over time, the slovenly man has created such beauty.