He was just some hireling she’d brought in to tear down a studio partition. Unconsulted, from the top of a ladder, he had pointed down at three huge canvases: “Ma’am? You think that one’s best, because you’ve worked on it longest. I see all the rags and coffee cups around it on the floor. But, if you don’t mind a far Westerner’s far-out opinion? The end one with the least paint on it is still the most amazing. Looks like you breathed it. Dance of the seven veils. You get you seven paintings packed in one. Aren’t too many painters living as can do that. It’s almost weird, the pileup. The longer you ‘work’ ’em, the more of the play you squeeze right out. It’s a heap of artists in New York City that’d try and bring off that finished one, not that they could get it lathered up to where you have, li’l missie. But, of all the lofts I been in my three weeks in New York, I’d say only you can start out like that. So, leave off there, ‘d be my minimum-wage advice.”

She smiled up—from his for-real cowboy boots toward the three yellow crowning cowlicks—not hurrying. Larceny lived in the grin of Albam. “Number one: I like your particular level of interest. Two: great buns, excellent eyes. Now, crucial, Numero trez: Are you, by chance, also heterosexual?”

“Welp, when it suits me to be, ma’am,” he scratched the rearmost of his cowlicks—and smiled the open spaces, the scent of sage after a recent driving rain.

So, if this Ansel, at a flea market, picked up two bird-shaped rhinestone pins for a quarter, we considered it original that someone so farmboy butch already had “a jewelry collection.” Since Angie liked to paint late, she’d become our “night person.” We were mytho-maniacs, inspired by a city whose major industry that is.

If our motley circle stayed put, it was because we knew that giving up and going home would be far worse. Leaving would mean quitting our whole group ambition—leaving one another alone here, undefended. That’d be a form of suicide harder than taking the forty-one sleeping pills washed down by vodka. With a life-ending suicide, at least you need not hear others’ catty remarks as they prod your remains.

But, artistic suicide was destined to be autopsied (i.e., reviewed) in your own hometown hearing: