The live-in half of Angie’s dive looked colorful if messy. Tonight its scent mixed turpentine and curry. There was a huge ugly Sears rag rug, “Early American,” braided like Saturn’s rings. But her studio itself stayed white, cleared, Windexed nearly scientific.

Seated, I now watched my harp-finder, four feet eleven (though she called herself five two and nobody’d ever had the nerve to contradict). You could tell she considered herself “Major” but only because she had no choice. Everybody in our VD holding-pen had known so too, on sight.

I watched Ang—gossiping seven-deadly-sins art world gossip, making strong coffee, dealing with her gorgon phone and its twenty-foot cord plus our group’s first “call-waiting feature”—rush all over her tiny studio-apartment while stretching a canvas eight feet by eight feet. I watched her, phone still crooked against neck, grapple this immense white canvas across stretchers while stapling the cloth in place. She fired a few staples into the air just for playful emphasis. It was like studying a single if mighty quail—ropes bunched in its right claw—captain some four-masted schooner, and sail it very well.

Nothing about Angie had ever been miniaturized. She stayed Major, despite her frequent crying jags, despite an erotic interest mostly in the guys who answered her own dad’s appetite for waitresses. She was Major despite her professed insecurity that lumbered along on a scale only Cecil B. De Mille could stage if way overbudget.

Before canvas, squinting through the Camel smoke that seemed a byproduct of hyperactivity, she knew everything. In restaurants, she could never decide. Seeing her, staff hid. “But how do you personally feel about the chewiness quality of clams in your chowder? Because I’ve finally got it down to that or the tapioca you described so well,” she overconsulted our waitress (did she hate them all?). The woman gave Ang a look, pure blue-plate-special ptomaine.

Angie’s was a character that only seemed inefficient. As I envied Robert’s negotiable beauty and sexual prowess and social ease, I studied Angie’s character, tenacity, her tuber knottedness. I wondered, being milder myself, if it were learnable. Might I not render her daily forward traction into my own small achievable steps, a How-to Guide for Gaining the Necessary Strength Artistic? Paranoia prepared her: She had a teaching hospital’s worth of emergency generators forever backing her up.