“No. I mean it’s a tool, a stylistic resource. I love the look of some dynasties, and Ming Dynasty painting is perfect for some of what I do, but … you teach writing? It’s like if you taught a class in sonnet writing, and I asked you if you wrote sonnets. You probably don’t, but you might use what you learned from sonnets in other poems.”

Jim nods. “So you sell your paintings?”

“Sure. Can’t live on what they pay us here, can you.” She laughs.

Jim doesn’t reply to that one. “So who are your customers?”

“Individuals, mostly. A group in the canyons, and in Laguna. And then some banks. Murals for their offices.” She changes the subject. “And what do you write?”

“Ah—poetry, mostly. But I’m teaching bonehead English.”

“You don’t like it?”

“Oh, it’s all right, it’s all right.” He regrets calling it that.

She chugs down most of her beer. They talk about teaching. Then about painting. Jim knows the Impressionists, and the usual culturevulture selection of others. They share an enthusiasm for Pisarro. Hana talks about Cassatt, then about Bonnard, her special hero. “Even now we haven’t fully understood aspects of his work. That coloration that at first looks so bizarre, and then when you look closer at the real world you see it there, kind of underneath the surface of things.”

“Even those white shadows in that one painting?”

She laughs. “Cabinet de Toilette? Well—I don’t know. That was for the composition, I guess. Haven’t seen any white shadows, myself. But maybe Bonnard did, I wouldn’t doubt it. He was a genius.”

They talk about genius in art, what it consists of and how those without it can best learn from it. Jim, who will concede in an instant that he is no artistic genius, and only hope that he is not pressed further to concede that he is in fact no artist at all, notices that Hana never makes any of these concessions. She makes no claims, either. This is intriguing. They continue to share enthusiasms, they find themselves interrupting each other to elaborate on the other’s remarks. Jim is intrigued, attracted.

“But you can’t just mean that paying closer attention to what you see is all of it, can you?” Jim asks, referring to her lecture to her class. “I mean, that’s just like getting a good focus on a camera, or a telescope—”

“No no,” she says. “We don’t see like cameras at all. That’s part of what makes photographs so interesting. But focusing your eyesight and your vision aren’t the same thing, you see. Focusing your vision means a change in the way you pay attention to things. A clarification of your aesthetic sense, and of your moral sense as well.”

“Vision as moral act?”

She nods vigorously.

“Now that’s not postmodernism.”