At some point, I succumbed to the gravitational pull of the bookshelves and let myself wander over, as Howard followed. Besides dozens of novels, the shelves were lined with thick art books, from the Renaissance and Flemish masters, to books on Dadaism, the Bauhaus, and numerous individual architects and artists—Corbusier, Zaha Hadid, Eva Hesse, Joseph Beuys, Rachel Whiteread. Howard pulled out a monograph on Albrecht Dürer, and as he slowly leafed through the pages, we spoke about Dürer’s woodcut of the rhinoceros he had made without ever having seen one. In their quiet way, these books communicated to me that Howard was my kind of person. Someone who wanted to feel part of the conversation; the immortal conversation of words and images that began with the first humans, and would continue long past our deaths, perhaps even past our extinction as a species, carved on the sides of cliffs, and beamed through outer space. As a girl growing up, eating baloney sandwiches for dinner while my mother worked the night shift, a desire to enter that great, thunderous conversation was a desire to liberate myself from the silence of poverty. The silence of a one-bedroom apartment without books. The silence that comes, not from any lack of intellect, but from the lack of time and means to nourish it.

After a few moments, Howard’s much younger partner, Jo, walked over to us. Jo felt as calm and deliberate as calligraphy. She was a yoga instructor who spoke without a single unnecessary or unconsidered word. As I rambled about switching to decaf, and arguing with the phone company that morning, she listened as if excavating layers of meaning in my words that I wasn’t even aware of, nodding and hmm-ing like a therapist. For some reason I didn’t find this annoying, perhaps because it seemed to come so naturally to her, and I actually began to find the effect strangely calming. I later watched her interacting with others in the room and wondered what it must feel like to move through the world with such an effortless grace, like a swimmer in a calm, cool lake.