The intimacy of sexual intimacy seemed, especially in a girl so bodily immodest, far down the list from the candor her average good-night phone chat to me yielded—about how slowly oil paint dried during a New York January this arctic, about recurrent yeast infections, about avocado facials and whether, come morning, strapped as we were for food, you dared eat the green you scraped off the face. But how flippant came the wink “my” Angelina snapped me as she oozed out of the party under the arm of some Cro-magnon. He appeared to be from Passaic, wearing gold neckchains, a doorknob-sized poly-tech class ring, trailing a store’s worth of Old Spice odor. Angie later said she’d wanted the dude in the worst way, and so—it turned out—did Connecticut and Rhode Island, for mail fraud.

—Yschh. Poor child had perfect taste in art, but as for clothes and men, hopeless. Her men friends, of course, excepted.

The girls that Robert and I now met everywhere (beginning not to like being called “girls”) were the same kinds of artists we men were. We all loved shoptalk. But, from field to field, it proved too specialized to bear.

Angie’s women painter friends discussed solvents, a brilliant new Japanese framer, and conspiracies. “During meetings, we mainly gripe,” said she, “but at a very high theoretical level. And for the best of reasons.” Her crowd was often taken for lesbians: They wore men’s jeans and knew what they wanted.

Our fellow artists, who happened to be female, did not resemble the sweet funny girls we’d vaguely dated back home. Friends here seemed to descend from a different species. The stronger.

They were so unlike the kind of tractable deb whose local life often meant decades of decorous waiting—near the phone for dates, then for appointments with Raleigh’s top society bridal consultant, then for contractions in the maternity ward, then in the van—with its heater on—listening to public affairs radio or advanced French tapes, hoping to outlast the son’s clarinet and daughter’s dressage lessons. Then the resigned wait for menopause, retirement, death of husband, own death.

No, here were singular New York single “girls” in denim, who, having found their gifts, having learned their own hard lessons early, were now mostly only in action.

Reversing the gravitational field of expected ladylike passivity, their forward motion required twice as much energy. The joy boys (who liked men) and these overdetermined half mannish girls (who also liked men)—banded and—our differences transcended—male-bonded. We were similarly disadvantaged and underrated, enraged by an itch that offered us artistic immortality in place of so much else that a “real” life daily denied.

We were serious. Which meant being seriously militantly playful. (A.F. ELF of C.I.O.)