During the siege, even if she was out on the road showing slides, out bucking up the young and the visual, she still sent perfect flowers, she mailed our sick pals art books (some now about her, her work). Bama was a “name” generally known and therefore specifically lighter in bearing, even better company for that. It let her gather bigger better taller tales for us, her being major. She was producing something called “mature work.” Most people who stumble into what others term “the arts” get only sweeter with their own hard-earned successes.

In the beginning, we boys had sometimes been a bit prettier and usually better dressed than our gifted blue-jeaned women friends. Back then they valued our stylized talk, sought our advice about their paintings, plus the right color for so small an apartment. Angie, having scouted Federal harps for me (I let the one go, and only a hundred and sixty bucks!), had advanced from paint-smeared denim and makeup like fingerpainting, to the sculpted worsted of a glamorous vaguely-French cosmopolite. Our Angie, a respected woman of a certain age. Her notoriety suited her. Literally.

In she swept with bundles. No backpack now. She wore three beautiful deco silver bracelets (long-ago gifts from Robert—shoplifted, we suspected but never asked). These baubles clanked as she embraced the sketch of a beloved former boy she’d fucked (once?) some years ago. Who knows how many times over how many years? I’d never learn that.

No hard feelings. Mostly, none anyway.

She now wore her best gray Chanel suit and the beautiful bone-colored Italian shoes. She trailed just a memory of scent and made the visit feel so glamorous a distraction, a blessed one. The broadness of her humor and its killer timing had grown even more refined. New York had robbed us of so much; but it’d given us all Jewish humor. The essential flotation device. Yiddish inversions, “You should be so lucky.” The low expectations and high hilarity of Borscht Belt jokes. Ghetto humor helped us goys survive the ghetto, and each other.

We three sat on his bed watching some dumb TV docudrama about a dad molesting his little girl; the father was played by a dent-chinned Hunk of the Moment and the child actress was washed-out and snively. And when sexy Dad admitted to his girl, “There’s good touching and there’s bad touching,” Angie begged him, “Promise?” I cannot explain why her tone and sulk in saying this was so hilarious. But almost fell off the bed and Robert laughed till he gasped until, for a sec, we feared we’d lost him. By now, we were such experts in New York Jewish gallows humor, even that seemed funny. Robert dying laughing? He could do worse.

Angie brought us personal clippings—about her big show now being hung in Berlin. She had wrapped up a scale model of the exhibition gallery with all the pictures we knew, reproduced two inches square and hung in this scale model dollhouse of art. It seemed a magical toy from the hand and workshop of careerist Santa himself. She held it out to us. “Couldn’t you just sprinkle a little salt on this like so much celery and just eat it?”