“You don’t know me,” my father said on the telephone, “and this may be impossible. But the invitation is given in concern and passionate admiration.”

The artist said he could not join us on the boat, he had to sign new prints in Europe. So he suggested we come to his house, he would put us up in the guest quarters.

My father and I chose a simple shirt, classically tailored in fine toast-colored suede. It looked like the kind of thing an artist could wear in the fancy Connecticut suburb where he lived.

I did not want to spend that Christmas with a stranger, a reportedly depressed stranger who was an intellectual and aesthetic titan who would, I feared, nail me to the floor with pointy-headed lectures on modern art. I forgot to set my alarm clock for the morning we were to leave; we were the last to board the plane for New York after a race to the airport that cut through corner gas stations so as not to hit red lights.

Brookmyer owned several houses on the property. It is not so far from your house. Since he did not own the manor house itself, he referred to himself as the tenant farmer.

In his library upstairs, I found volumes of poetry, philosophy and erotic drawings, plus catalogs from his friends’ shows, including several of yours. In the guest house, the bedroom ceilings were painted the uncannily beautiful color that was, according to the tubes of paint we found in his studio, “cerulean,” but which we had always called Brookmyer Blue. We’d painted the ceiling of our kitchen this color, and it was comforting to find it here, as well.

We took long walks on his property, and met up with our host at lunch and dinner. My father was in his element, but I felt immeasurably awkward. Brookmyer was thoughtful and gracious, and suffered my questions with patience. If I had known that I would meet you, I would have asked additional questions. How did he feel, I wanted to know, when a person looked at his work and said that a child could do as well? He said that it meant something when an artist arrived at a single line late in a serious career. Which did he like better, I asked, painting or drawing? “Drawing is a racing yacht cutting through the ocean,” he said. “Painting is the ocean itself.”

My father showed him a photograph of the artist’s painting where it hung in our living room. Brookmyer told him to lower it an inch. “You should look into a painting, not up at it,” he said, “especially in a room where people are sitting down.”

He took us to his favorite place to eat. I was just then old enough to order a real drink, and was sipping a Bloody Mary. “It’s good,” I said. “What would make it great?” he asked, and when I told him he signaled a waiter and asked him to bring Tabasco.