Angie explained how certain subjects, adored by males, made her space out so: ball scores, cars, inner-office politics, college frathouse hijinks, mothers as saints. Chat concerning a flaking unplayable Jacksonian-era harp was, she suggested, wasted on these dateable fellows. To us, of course, the loss seemed theirs.

Angie admitted she craved male companions. She conceded being a Daddy’s girl. But the guys she longed for were verbal, expressive, could dance, knew five good wines, and some art history, plus the names of colors, and told hilarious jokes as filthy as hers. Somewhere, there must be men alive on earth as self-mocking as she and therefore as self-aware? Were there fellows who saw language as a playground, not a minefield? And who lived at comic ease with themselves and who could acknowledge sex in all its comic technical details. Angie said she needed to be near men who did not view younger women painters’ intense opinions as just “cute,” Foreplay.

Once at a party, I expressed an emotional opinion. A self-confessed CPA, hovering at one edge of our talk, his face not-showing, half-hollered my way, after one of my emphatic clipped opinions about an overrated stage actor, “Excuse me, but would you say you’re from Mars?”

He snapped it like some drill instructor, hard as my father’s disciplinary voice. Angie stepped forward, tensed to protect. “No,” I said first. “From Falls, North Carolina.” My first impulse was to stay bland, to seem to miss this putdown. If you were emotional, you became a public nuisance, you lived as a visible threat and enemy. You never knew when such dudes might hurt you with it publicly. When you met a good straight guy, he only made you more scared of the others. They’d been getting away with this for years.

It was safer to stay around the few that you could trust. We did have some married friends; but we noticed that, if both were painters, one was always called The Talented One, and the other The One Whose Parents Bought Their Loft for Them. At dinner parties, they often seemed midfight, they were gathering votes, just putting off the final round till the dramatic cab ride home. In company, they seemed to give us only half as much as any Single one of us offered them.

So, I was Martian. Okay. In the long run, however accused, it was easier being kind. (My mom, wife to my complicated chillsome dad, had taught me that.)

Still, it shook you every time they called you foreign, not quite human. Over coffee, after the CPA, Angie “talked me down” as we then called it.