“I didn’t see anything in town I wanted to buy, but Chatty insisted I spend the money,” Karen says.

Karen and I have the same shopping problem. You could set me down in Paris, I would not find a thing to buy, if what I was there to buy was something for myself. To shop for yourself requires you to know yourself. I shop for myself by default, dressing in black (though the day we met for tea I had taken a chance on gray), buying only things I have bought before that fit. I can’t even think about the choices posed by makeup. To try to pick a shade of foundation is to end up in a place like this. What is peach and what is pink, what is sallow and what is fair? Skin is skin, to me, though of course you would disagree. You would know what shade of lipstick a woman should wear—a blue-red or coral, a brown-red or frost. I wonder what color you would dress me in. The moment I think a thing like this I no longer need to rouge.

But send me to find a gift for someone else, I’ll show you what I can do. Christmas is never a problem for me. Most years I finish my shopping in the fall and throb until December. Although there was one year I did no shopping until December, and that with my father, in a leather store in San Francisco, for a person we had never met who was going to be our host for the holidays three thousand miles away.

My mother had died in November, on the day the United States shot off a five-megaton nuclear blast underground in Amchitka, Alaska. It caused the largest earth tremor ever produced by man. It registered 7.4 on the Richter scale, and I felt the shock in our hundred-year-old house.

People had been good to us; we had seen a lot of casseroles. We had offers of a ski house in Tahoe, of a beach house in the dunes on Monterey Bay. Someone offered us a boat—a new sixty-five-foot Chris Craft—and his captain for as long as we liked.

That was the plan, Christmas on a boat cruising the inland waterways of Florida. Then my father and I attended a lecture on American art of the postwar period. The speaker illustrated his talk with slides. Nothing, given time, is random; one of the slides was a painting of yours. Another of the slides was a painting by Arthur Brookmyer. This particular canvas hung on a wall of our living room. It was one of a series that was the artist’s self-proclaimed obsession.

The lecture ended, and my father introduced himself to the speaker. They spoke about Arthur Brookmyer. The speaker confided that he was worried about the artist—he was said to be depressed following his wife’s death.

Driving home from the lecture, my father had an idea, the kind you can only explain as the partial result of shock, the shock of my mother’s death. He wanted Arthur Brookmyer to join us for the cruise, to put on boating togs and hoist a “sea breeze” with us.