We soon enjoyed a picnic on the bed. Ms. Byrnes made much of her nurse’s coat as we settled, shoes off. She laughed, pointing to her sterile garb: “Déjeuner sur lab!”

Here, safe alone together again, his pj’s seemed playful, a very good if overcute idea, free of others’ having—the sheep—rushed out to be the first to “copy” him. Clear of eyesore strangers in the same big leaky family rowboat—we felt ourselves regaining our own old consequence, our pique.

Her bad pun about the Manet released us into irreverent early days. Like kids just off the bus, fresh meat for this carnivorous town, we became kids with nothing to lose, at least nothing that the kids yet knew about.

Three, saucy, on a bed. Our lives soon seemed all before us, along with those lives’ aftermaths: Careers become reputations become memories. We were talking ourselves into everything again.

We talk talk talked, about old times. What else? There had been the insane Rasta man, his dreadlocks drumsticks, who lived in Robert’s building, who made an altar beside the elevator on the third-floor landing and left lit candles and food on paper plates, food that spoiled though it was jabbed with toothpicks wearing handwritten paper legends that read “Immortal,” “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,” “Bob Marley IS one pupa form of Pope.”

We had known dear Nina, the woman who finally got called out of retirement to sing again at the Met because a Hong Kong flu epidemic felled two alternate substitutes and—judged crazy all those years—for her studying every alto role for every Met performance—“working up my Hungarian” to perfect her incipient “Bluebeard’s Castle,” all those Health Department flu shots and the epic vitamin C she’d taken had finally paid off. Nina, fifty-two, stepped in for Carol Vanness twice and got an excellent though single sentence in the Daily News if not, alas, the Times. Still, she’d now sung at the Met repeatedly.

We talked about abortions, about one of our old friends who now regretted sacrificing Mick Jagger’s child because it’d come at a bad time for her, a girl who’d had the goods but went home to Idaho anyway. There were others who had little visible talent but who stayed put, politicked, persisted, and got semi-famous anyhow. Famous enough. Prose and cons. Team and variation.

Four huge works by Alabama Byrnes were still the hot topic from the last overly political so-so Whitney Biennial, where they were said to have been “the only real things in it.” She was now collected by the same museums we’d sneaked into with borrowed student IDs.

Bama sat crosslegged in stocking feet, toenails professionally polished, and we were soon puppies again, snug on the bed (not a downtown floor-through’s futon this time, not Robert’s busy fourposter, but a hospital adjustable upright, with hidden hydraulic motors we toyed with like a motorboat’s controls). We sat here downing whole containers of the tapioca just as good as Cal had promised (and warmed by him for us, special). I dragged over the phone and my textured address book (“You got some miles on this,” she said. “By now, Robbie, doesn’t Hart’s address book look like The Dead Sea Sc … I mean, St. Peter’s ledger … er …”) and we called people all over the world, and she’d smile, “Guess who we’re with?” and Alabama still sounded proud of it, of him.