It was amazing what the promise of money could do. Everyone pitched in to clean the place up, which was long overdue, and because Tim felt the atmosphere was too staid—too bourgeois—they went around painting mandalas and third eyes on the walls and then sawed the legs off the furniture so as to reduce everything to floor level, Arabian Nights style. Or Japanese. (It was around that time they’d all piled into a couple of the cars and driven up to Bard for a showing of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, which really took Tim’s fancy—“That’s the way to do it,” he said, “go minimal, sit right on the floor and all you need for a table is a block of wood. Right?” he said. “Right? Which, by the way, is also your pillow.”) She did her part and more, though she knew in her heart it was all wrong, that they were selling out, constructing some ersatz version of the life they’d chosen in a way that would be hard to shake off, as if the artificial were the real and the real the illusion. Still, it was better than going back to work at some shitty job, waitressing in a café or typing up index cards in some tomb of a library in Poughkeepsie or Newburgh.