“Leaving work.” “So we won’t be seeing you at my lavish birthday breakfast for sixteen at the Plaza, which’ll include every chic person under forty from North Carolina now living in New York, for you, on me?”

“Cain’t tell you how much I ’preciate your offer, honey, but I really …” Next morning, at seven a.m., I called her hotel room; I’d changed my mind. She’d already checked out.

I never heard from Dorcas again. (If she reads this … forgive me? Understand.)

Finally, for such sweet trust-funded pals who took fewer chances, who believed New York to be only fun and merely a street address’s difference from their own, we had no words. How to inform them?

How to explain that in the evolutionary race, the strongest know enough to swim beyond the horde, to paddle right into cornering darkness straight ahead, a darkness that is terrifying fertility itself. A darkness that threatens you with your shadow-black death while promising platinum self-perpetuating immortality. (We young mortals simply didn’t know yet how little time we had to make ourselves immortals.)

The Immortal part, we worked at with endearing school-supply diligence.

The Mortal, we assumed.

I.D.

ideon’s paintings were all still done on boards a foot square. One of them had stunned even Angie into respectful silence, a hard-earned nod. The brushwork was broad and supple, gorgeous in its automatic certainty. Gideon’s color sense was unusual and, given the prettiness of his subject matter, that reversal of the sweet and sour became most necessary. If you are going to paint the harbor at Nice, a blue bowl triangulated by white sails formal as the starched collars of some ambassadorial dinner, you’d best offset the view’s calendar familiarity with a rind of bitter green at the horizon, with some bruised plum clouds so sullen in arriving.

Gideon was a slow worker, so as to always give the appearance of utter ease. He would scrape away, like a flawed meringue, one pound of pastel paint gone mud, in hopes of making the next try seem effortless, his first. Gideon destroyed eight out of his own ten pictures. As a young man his standards were so high, he’d had little work he felt was good enough to sell. So, it was his very artistic integrity that drove him to the slippery world of Buy Art Low, Sell Masterworks High. He soon spent more time at auctions than at his easel. Not to worry. He was, he told us, buying himself the decades it’d take to become a master.

Each of us tried on personae like cheap and brilliant store-bought ascots, sometimes a few a day. Angie gathered collage materials off street corners; she curated her own hairstyles and that show could change three times weekly. She also “found” Ansel, a rangy boy painter just in from Montana.