Her paintings possessed the surest sign of early promise, an energy quite absolute. Three ideas were forever being worked out and with obsessive daily care. In bed, I’d heard, then heard from others, Ms. Byrnes was the most supple and specific, inexhaustible, and funny lover. Her eyes met yours and there was no deskclerk-negotiator on duty in between. You were already upstairs. It was a child’s guilelessness combined with lessons learned from her Poppa’s pals smoking their cigars and talking statehouse scandal on the mildewed side porch; while their wives, Mom’s friends, weekly presided over needlepoint loveseats, exclaiming, “Welll, see? Start with a can of Campbell’s Mushroom Soup, add …”

From her work, her lovers and friends, Angie held nothing back because, I later learned, she could hold nothing back. At the time, I thought she had a choice. Because I did.

She’d begun to show under the name “Alabama” Byrnes. That name outranked frilly Angelina; it had an edge over A. Z. Byrnes, an earlier try that meant to hide her sex from competition jurors.

One day at her place, as she upgraded to a rat trap and slathered the thing with Philadelphia Cream Cheese, I admitted that I found her new name memorable. “But, honey, how do you just pick a thing like that? True, I chose to use my middle name and not Dad’s first. But, I mean, have you ever even been to Alabama?”

“Not that I know of.”

“You’d remember.”

“Thomas Lanier Williams,” she answered, trap in one hand, loaded knife in the other. “Ring a bell? As a hint, I can quote you the low-on-potential opening line of his first story: ‘Hushed were the streets of many-peopled Thebes.’ Does Thomas Lanier Williams not sound like some fifth-rate Midwestern college teacher poet with a rat-colored moustache and cracked white cheese for skin, who writes about lilacs and cottages? Sure you don’t know his stuff?”

No. Angie told me that, since her mother was also a no-count Williams, she’d felt attracted to any Major artist who had survived the curse of so lackluster a country name.