I’d grown used to finding Robert depicted amid society dames and those patriot comics who tour for our troops abroad. It’d even been a pleasing shocker to see her, with the President’s wife. Like Ang, the painting behind them photographed so well. But discovering my two best friends alone together, my darlings, beaming, she in her Alabama top yet again—that was different, that felt somewhat harder. They were no longer the decorative young lions asked into the shot. They were the event now. Both of them appeared, arm in arm, absolutely made for each other and … happy. Plus, the picture rested equidistant between the Society page and the Arts section, so you didn’t know if it meant fluff or news: “Composer Robert Christian Gustafson, whose Symphony no. l: The Titanic was previewed last night by emeritus guest-conductor Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, enjoys a light moment with companion, the young painter Alabama Byrnes, whose work was recently featured in the First Lady’s White House ArtsAlabama Talent Showcase.” I got out Scotch tape, I dutifully affixed my best friends’ grainy image alongside the postcard of van Gogh’s retreat. But every time I sat down to type, my eyes flew right to them, I lost the power of speech.

Their Clipping Service

e had a cold snap that May and my two-hundred-dollar-a-month apartment felt freezing as I sat looking at a clipping from the Times, my two closest friends at a party I had been such a good sport about missing.

I would not say I was feeling directly jealous of my friends. Not exactly. It helped to know that each person depicted was carrying his/her address book. The roving photographer must’ve caught them as each was headed to the bathrooms where the pay phones lurk. Robert was shown holding “The Bag,” a green brocade sack that Christmas liqueur had once come in, one he stuffed with scraps of paper, names and numbers of the mythically unlisted. Under Angie’s right arm, the same red cookbook binder she’d worked from when I met her, a work long since revised, since the thing had binding rings and pages could be replaced, as the entries’ quality rose. Anybody else, seeing such objects in the hands of these two handsome productive youngsters, might have thought he held her purse and she the score of his symphony. I knew better. But this offered me not all that much consolation.

When my parents phoned from Florida and left a message on my machine to say they’d chanced to see the picture “because the Albertsons subscribe” and to congratulate me on my friends’ doing so well, I breathed deep, and tried to write fiction about the traveling gospel choir that was, for reasons now lost on me, my current pathetic subject.

I was glad for my pals, but I would’ve felt somewhat more happy if there had been three in the picture. Three is such an interesting number, don’t you find?