“See what the critics are saying?” I pointed to wiseguys’ jottings. This being a nursery had not restrained them—comments rested above the five-foot level. One ballpoint arrow pointed to the genderless juncture of massed emerging legs: “Will she or won’t she?” Someone else’s red ink had made a dotted pleading little line where one small vagina opened to this huge being. “Best offer I’ve had all day,” she did her Donald Duck voice. The third mark was the work of some kid who’d probably stood on one of these midget chairs. He (or she, but probably he) had added a black blimp shape that swerved off to the right, intending to show an erection, seeming based on one he’d glimpsed. I felt myself, below the belt, quicken to brief life. “Nothing like good reviews.” She half-smiled, fingers tracing the words, her lines. We heard a sound and started. The small head of one dark living child poked out the crenellated window of the cardboard fort.

“You like my lady?” he asked. Ordered to, we looked again at the wall’s image, both nodding back down at him. “My name’s Jamal. I kept real real still, didn’t I? My mother gets off soon. She helps sick people. I am going to be in here from now on, but play like you don’t know, okay? Okay.”

And then his brown face retreated into blackness.

We two glanced at each other, shaken but grinning. “Sick people,” he had said as we stood looking at our only form of proof and health.

“Hartley, what are we going to do?” She straightened her bent arm, studying the cotton’s sample of her own blood. Head tilting, eyes going in and out of focus, the painter gauged, “Not half bad, this color, hunh? Dried like this especially. Take a little Mars Red. Use Permanent Green to cut the sharpness, really take it down toward flat, almost to khaki-ish. If,” Alabama said, “if … if he … or you … if I …—Hart, maybe you’re contagious, ever thought of that? Maybe I caught your Wannabe Happy bug. Maybe all along, I’ve been closet-case Happy? I mean, hey, I’ve finally got a Fifty-seventh Street gallery that puts my name onto its second-floor window in letters as tall as … that fort with no boy in it. I’m just beginning to like it here … My twenties were Jaws, my thirties chewed every mouthful of me a hundred times. Who knows how custardy and nice my forties might feel?—Honey, if it gets us, what are we going to do?”

We stood here, looking at her art for lack of any vista finer. “Best we can. At least, there are several of us. It’ll just have to play itself out.”

“If only we could’ve fallen for a nice dull clean little four-inch CPA …”

“Ysch, I’d rather be …” Then I changed the last word … “I’d rather be us.”