Hometown friends we’d already outgrown, wrote: they truly meant to get around to someday working on their college poetry again, they really did. News of their early divorces reached the North. We heard hints about our quarterback’s probable alcoholism, a habit till recently considered somewhat glamorous—but not after his red Corvette struck and maimed a black schoolgirl as he left the crime scene. A boating accident, one unexpected grease fire at the Country Club, the usual gore and flareups. We absorbed these local disasters with an avid, shaming interest. Bad hometown news allowed our city lives to seem more clean, and—oddly—safer. We might be gunned down on the street. But at least our mistakes were not the ones our folks had made. At least we’d chosen this difficulty—this impossible, because universal, goal.

We wanted our lives to be representative; we wanted our experience to go all dramatic and to become unique; we still expected to be known as our age’s record-keepers in paint, word, and permanent eighth notes, full-stops. Be careful what you wish for.

One thing we never told the ones left home: how hard we worked. They associated Manhattan with vacation, shopping sprees, Lerner and Loewe. They assumed the art we sought to create was something like a pleasing dusky odor we exuded—something they’d opted to stanch with suburban Right Guard. The art scent was simply by-product, as wasps’ spit turns to wasp nests. Our sitting before some rental room’s desk or easel, our stewing over a created surface, then scraping everything off to start over more perfectly, our making it daily better? That was quite beyond them.

One old girlfriend-deb-date from Falls arrived the day before my birthday and phoned to insist I have breakfast with her at the Palm Court to celebrate. She was a darling person, funny, self-effacing, generous. “I don’t do lunch or breakfast out. Dorcas, I work till two or three every day.”

“Now by ‘work’ you mean what? The teaching?” I told her, Writing.

“But, Hart, that can’t be work, not for you. You’re a tale-teller. We used to look for you at recess, to find out what’d just gone on in our own class. It only made sense after you told it and imitated Miss Wart-Tongue Watson, remember? Hon, it’s your birthday. I’ve made fairly elaborate plans. Play a little. What’s your idea of the perfect way to spend your birthday?”

“Work.”

“But don’t you like to goof off anymore? We used to. You were a master at it. Remember our treehouse and the back of your parents’ Buick and how we clouded up the windows and went only so far, but far enough to at least feel very naughty? What’s your idea of play now?”

“Work.” “And to round this out, what’s your worst fear?” She, intelligent, made a joke of it.