That first day, I looked long, kept quiet. Angie’s place smelled of heavy solvents and light housekeeping. She said nothing, flats of her wrists still at rest on either hip, a cigarette burning, the smell of a bad mood. She tipped her head and squinted, time-out for a workshop elf. But my private showing felt like an excuse to let her peek at her own work one more time today. (I sensed she had a quota, to prevent herself from undoing what was good, from staying here full-time. She’d repeated Noël Coward: “Work is more fun than fun.”) I remained quiet for three minutes, an eternity when the painter stands right behind you, especially if the painter is someone with Angie’s edgy energy.

“The bride’s kitchen painted here on top,” I attempted. “It’s hanging over the pit like a necklace. It has no power to protect, but it believes it’s an amulet, a good luck charm. The tension you get, sandwiched, is what’s unbelievable. The real painting happens on the level between the two you’ve actually set down….”

“Something like that. Well,” she shrugged. “Seemed a good idea at the time …”

“No,” I urged her. “Don’t take it back.”

“Oh, I’m not, Hart, believe me. Can’t afford to. It’s just—here, now I see it, now I hear you gasbag some, if well … it’s still too much an idea. As if I’m doing this just to make it easier for middlebrows to describe later. In my head, it’s so … but by the time I get it out … it’s mud.”

I soon learned never to contradict, never to “cheer” her. She would later cure me of that by calling me, for three weeks straight, Hartley Hammerstein.

Now, I kept my mouth shut. That in itself became, as silence found its fulcrum, a weight of respect between us, an early lesson. (When placing my own first stories into anybody’s hands, I usually turned into a babbling contortionist of apology and protective preemptive self-doubt.)

“I’ve never seen anything like this …” summarized the gasbag in retreat.

“Well,” she told me. “It’s archaic Angie. I know when I look back I’ll see I’ve barely started.” And she eased the sheet back across it, a hundred Snoopys on a hundred doghouses. Her short hands tugged the cloth straight with a motherliness, a modesty, I’d never seen the girl award herself.

She turned to making coffee, her back to me. I loved her back. Almost a boy’s. I sensed she was upset. What’d I said? Already I was learning to read how her anger alternated with her breakthroughs, and from all angles. Through walls. “Did I do something?”