“I mean,” her back explained, “with one part of your brain, you’re supposed to stay this divine idiot child splashing around in a way so joyful they’ll all want to try finger painting again and squish all over in perfect innocence. Then you’re asked to sober up and get parental and put on business drag and wander forth and sell the idiot-savant’s output. It’s as seasick-making as Lifeboat Number Thirteen.”

“Why won’t you look at me?” She shot me the finger. I tossed my brush her way. Instead it struck a huge blank board, prepared for painting. I tried changing the subject. “This the biggest one you’ve ever used? What is it? Six by nine? How you going to get a nine-foot painting out of this rat rec-center? Ever thought of that?”

She nodded yes. Still on her knees, yet turned away from me, she thumped toward the living quarters’ big ugly oval “early American” Sears rug. She flipped it back, revealing a nine-foot slot. She’d sawed directly through floorboards to the landing below, sawed right through joists, everything. The hole looked about four inches wider than it needed to be.

Still glum, she pointed to a cardboard box, and the brand-new red Craftsman ciruclar saw, still plugged in. She was the only person I knew in New York who still ordered things out of a Sears catalogue, one she’d brought in a suitcase from Georgia. Her landlord was not ever going to be happy again. I had to laugh. “I take it back. You never forget how to work hard at playing. I’ll nevermore doubt Baby Divine Idiot. If you told me you had invented a new form of competitive telephone that’d send Bell Tel into chapter eleven and that it involved tin cans and lots of string, I would believe you. You’re a genius. Along with maybe Robert, but, it’s his looks that make us say that. Truth is, you’re the only genius I’ll ever know.”

I understood, from practice, the kind of crying she was doing now. Type 5. Bobbing shoulders, steady gaze, and low-grade nose drip like a cold hardly noticed. “Weally?”

“Geniusgeniusgenius. Plus the best ass downtown.”

“Why only downtown? No, I’m a fat, lonely spinster. With a tragic need to be overly often fucked.” She said this in babytalk but I understood. Her babytalk was ironic, if still babytalk. I crawled over to retrieve my brush. It’d smeared enamel on her huge gessoed board. One, I now understood, that would get out of here.

“Start it for me,” she said.