And there was a sacred flavor to advice, whether it was the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, an officer in the Air Force advising him to scrub his weenie with hydrogen peroxide after a trip to Juarez, his father telling him to abandon art in favor of business because “art didn’t dollar up on the hoof,” which summoned up a vision of a painting of a field full of fat steers that no one would ever buy. Art was the runt pig in the far corner of the pen; the last to shyly feed on the stray kernels of corn buried in the mud. Art had been cruel when he was finishing his M.B.A. and living with Marilyn, his first wife. They lived in a small, Spartan apartment in a married-student compound and he worked long hours at the desk of the business library to augment the small salary of his teaching assistantship. It was a warm spring evening and he could smell the flowers of the horticultural garden through the window. With the aid of Dexamyl spansules he had finished a long master’s the sis on the irrationality of the small-business tax the evening before. For the first time in two years he was left with nothing to do, so he wandered up to Arts and Letters on his cigarette break. An attractive, rather Levantine looking girl in rakish bangs had suggested he read the recently published Doctor Zhivago. He preferred something more racy, frankly prurient, but didn’t want to admit it to the girl. It was a heartrending three days: the novel virtually overhauled him, pulled his pistons and ground his fatigued valves. He moaned around in disgust with business trying to recapture the nobility of the palette he had ignored for two years. He refused to attend the commencement exercises that featured Richard Nixon as speaker. The onerous responsibilities of being a junior executive in data processing—did not the great Gauguin work at the Bourse?—freed him of his melancholy, though when the movie came out there was a resurgence. It would be a bitch to choose between Geraldine Chaplin and Julie Christie, be a doctor, turn out your art, all during the Revolution, he had thought.