At the wedding, it was impossible to ask. Lauren paired bridesmaids with groomsmen. Jess was given a business school student and Lina his skinnier brother, who played guitar and wrote poems.

  “A troubadour,” Lina said.

  He didn’t laugh. Lauren told the troubadour that Lina was an artist and Jess was a scientist, as if they were each already what they hoped to become.

  Though Lina had known Mrs. Moses for years, this was the first time she’d noticed a deliberate attempt to beautify. Mrs. Moses had a look of settled permanence, a balance undermined, today, by a startling blue powder on her eyelids. People who didn’t normally wear makeup shouldn’t, Lina thought.

  A few people asked Lina if she’d met the art dealer at table eight. She hadn’t, but here was the troubadour, bringing her a flute of champagne.

  Watching Mrs. Moses arrange the veil around Lauren’s face before she walked down the aisle on her father’s arm, Lina felt she was glimpsing something important. Mr. Moses had belittled his wife for as long as Lina could remember, but the mother’s hope for her daughter’s future seemed to have stilled any impulse but joy. Why did he get to walk her down the aisle, anyway? But Mrs. Moses had no pride. Instead of being pitiable, this elevated her.

  Lina’s freshman TA had claimed that troubadours invented romantic love. But was that even a good idea? Lina hadn’t experienced it. Lauren was marrying her best friend.

  By the end of the evening, both groomsmen had acquired phone numbers.

  The lime-green dresses, it turned out, hadn’t prevented anything.

  * * *

  —

  The business school brother flew to Berkeley and Lina spent some evenings in New York with the troubadour. On a dull afternoon at the gallery, she wrote a note on drawing paper with orange ink to the art dealer from table eight. Sorry we didn’t meet at the wedding.

  The welder had gotten back together with Doc Martens. Did he think she was a better artist than Lina? He might not have picked her for her art at all. He might have chosen her because he had a thing for toothpick calves.

  Lina’s note reeled in a date with the art dealer from table eight. Drinks. He told her where. A guy in his twenties who knew hotel bars. She wore the white sleeping-bag coat; she didn’t always, though February of 1979 charted record cold. She’d been saving it. He wore corduroy jeans, a shirt and tie, and he ordered a Scotch and soda.

  She asked for wine. What could they talk about?

  They talked about the same things she’d talked about with the troubadour: college, their jobs, movies, only she was less herself and that subtraction tinted everything. His hair, in the back where it met the collar, curled.

  Romantic love, which was not frivolous after all—people lost their minds over it—came down to the high school question of Does he like me? Does this other person like me that way? As if that way were some anointment. Lina and Donnie believed their mother had fallen off course because of Learhoff, an Encino doctor with a potbelly, a less good person than herself. This probably happened all the time. People gave away their sanity for a person whom everyone else could see was inferior. A too-loud piano player pounded a rendition of “It Had to Be You.” Lina was thinking, Oh, no. His forearms were flatter than forearms generally were. Too many feelings started. This was what the great books were talking about. A clearing opened. There was a stillness at the center of her petaled feelings, a peace from the focus. The problem was she couldn’t speak. And the stakes felt dire: What if he didn’t pick her?

  A shift took place in her daily life. Her heart beat too fast when the phone rang, leaving a rough tunnel in its wake. She lingered in the clay room to hear Troy laugh, because alone, she no longer felt she was painting, but that she was trying to be the way a young female painter should be. (Larkin, who painted in slip dresses, smoking and whistling. That was how a young female painter should be.) This shift was slight but significant.

  “D’you know Jackson Pollock baked pie?” Troy asked, loading the kiln. “I’m teaching me to bake.”

  Six days passed before the art dealer called.

  But then he did, and a soundtrack clicked on.

  Love was not unlike terror.

  * * *

  —

  They kissed for hours, against buildings, under falling snow. There was nothing rough about the way he kissed, nothing pushy. Sometimes she did a thing back that made him laugh. It was a conversation. His name was Sacha.

  He gave her choices. Movie or museum. In an exhibition, he called time out for “a restorative cup of hot chocolate.” He was in a book group, reading To the Lighthouse. He liked the part when Mrs. Ramsay isn’t sure whether Walter Scott’s novels were written by Jane Austen or Shakespeare. Lina hadn’t read To the Lighthouse, but she didn’t say.

  She wanted to seem better than she was to him.

  Every time they met, she gathered some new scrap: today, she learned he loved his father more. Coming home, she stopped at the bookstore and found the Everyman’s Library edition of Virginia Woolf’s supposed masterpiece, which Etienne rang up for $00.00. He looked at her with an I-know-you expression. They both laughed.

  Should she tell Etienne she had a boyfriend now? She wasn’t even sure Sacha was her boyfriend. He might be, she thought, if she kept still and didn’t do anything wrong. She listened acutely for any words suggesting claim. When he finally said they were “going together,” she felt a thrill, as if she were now breathing brighter air.

  * * *

  —

  In a basement hamburger place, Sacha asked about her parents. She looked down at the paper placemat and told him her mother was in a state institution. As facts of her mother’s illness spilled out, it sounded as if she were exaggerating. Lithium. Elavil. Thorazine. There was no way to translate the truth about her life that sounded sincere.

  When she lifted her eyes, she saw his face ratcheted into high alarm. He tried to talk, but his jaw moved without words. “Has she been there long?” he finally managed.

  “Six years.”

  Everything about him was exactly right, even things she normally wouldn’t like—his relish for Cokes, for example, or red meat.

  “Is she getting better, do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” Lina said. She’d once sent Jess a list of the drugs her mother was on and asked if she could tell her what they did. Jess tried to explain. Lina asked Jess if a normal brain made by itself the compounds that were in the drugs. “The chemical imbalance model, it’s just a metaphor,” Jess had said. “We develop compounds to treat an illness. Usually cancer. That’s where the money is. Say it doesn’t work but they notice the trial subjects report feeling a little happier; then they do another trial. So we have these drugs that sometimes work. That’s really all we know.”

  Lina’s father was easier to talk about. For most of her life, they hadn’t had a working telephone number for him, but now, at sixty, he had the first job Lina had heard of since he’d married Lucille, decades ago. He was the general concessions manager in a casino on the Idaho-Nevada border. She could talk about him the way most people their age talked about their parents, with patient, understanding scorn.

  * * *

  —

  At a subway station, on a gray spring morning, he said, “A good thing about seeing each other once or twice a week is that we make love every time.” Lina hadn’t known that they saw each other only once or twice a week on purpose. Couldn’t they make love more often? She treasured their sex. It always started with kissing, which went on and on. She lost all sense of time. He didn’t ask her about orgasms. She slept in the declivity below his shoulder and felt a profound sweetness as she slipped out of consciousness. She started a notebook after their first night, drawing every morning when she got back to her worktable. She drew their bed. His loft, the night it was snowing. Once, at the beginning, he hadn’t slept. He’d just watched her. She’d made a sketch of that, too.

  Every morning, he put on a shirt and tie. They worked in the same world, but he was on the other side, an arbiter. When she unlocked the door to her dim studio and moved among the unfinished canvases, her attempts felt futile. She was one of thousands trying to be something. She didn’t even like saying the word.

  Too much depended on how good she was.

  She dreaded his judgment of her work but he asked to see, so she cleaned up, the way her mother would have wanted her to, put grocery-store flowers in a water glass.

  He stood before the sheath in the corner, then looked at the painting on the easel and picked up canvases leaning against the wall. She told him that they were her mother’s arrangements. “From memory.” Her heart was beating overly hard.

  He seemed a higher authority. If he liked what she was doing, maybe she could relax.

  “You don’t render the hospital,” he said, lifting a canvas from the floor with vague off-white shapes that were the buildings in the background. “But you feel it everywhere.”

  Decades later, she still feels grateful for his response. Some things, she believes, you can’t fake.

  * * *

  —

  Lina flew home for Donnie’s graduation and Walter picked her up at the airport.

  When he asked, as he always did, if she was dating, she smiled, concealing a mouthful. “I met someone,” she admitted.

  “I can tell.”

  Graduation was a ghost town. The same buildings, the same lawns, but no Mrs. Anjani. Julie didn’t look like herself. She was wearing the dress Ceci and Lina made for her years ago and she seemed taller—had she lost weight? Or maybe it was just a really good dress. Ceci had insisted Julie come into the store to have it tailored. Ceci pinned it herself. Today, the dress fell a little loose, still elegant. Ceci must have understood, more than Lina had then, how much Julie gave. This morning, Julie had been to the hairdresser. But that wasn’t it either. Maybe Lina had never before seen Julie happy.

  Why wasn’t their mother here? Couldn’t they have driven her up for the day?

  “Do you think he’s stoned?” Walter whispered as their brother, now taller than both of them, stumbled, crossing the lawn for his diploma, and fell flat on the ground. A wave of applause rose when he got up. He hugged various gowned administrators, tilting the shorter principal, almost tipping him over.

  “Remember when we’d be walking and someone would stop and ask Mom if he had representation?” Lina asked.

  “I’m glad he’s going to college,” Walter said. “And a decent one.” A small school in an inland town. They both thought that would be good.

  Lina told Walter she’d panicked every time the phone rang late at night. He admitted that he, too, felt relieved whenever he called Julie and nothing was wrong.

  “She’s bringing up retirement more,” Lina said. “She owns that cabin in Michigan.”

  “She told me not till after his first semester. I used to wonder if he’d get in. Worst case, he could live with me. But all those special ed classes and it turned out okay.”

  “Whenever Julie called to defend him,” Lina said, “I got the sinking feeling that whatever she was saying he didn’t do, he might have.”

  Lina wondered what Sacha would make of her life here. There were things she wouldn’t tell him yet. She smiled to herself, thinking his name.

  After the graduation, Donnie stood with an arm around Julie. He was going to the beach, he said, with friends. Lina looked at his pupils. He didn’t seem stoned or drunk.

  On the way to the airport, Walter drove her to the construction site of his new shopping center. He didn’t like to call it that. It would be a community park, north of the airport, east of the ocean. How do you like the name, Aviation Park? They drove up to what looked like a large empty crater, dotted with bulldozers. The building that had looked like an enormous empty garage before was now a skeleton of wooden two-by-fours.

  I wish you could stay and see them build the lake, he said.

  * * *

  —

  At Lina’s terminal, they sat in the car.

  “Well, it all turned out okay,” Walter said, sighing. “We’re growing up.” Walter was ahead of her, as always, but she was making incremental progress, too—it all rested, Lina thought, on their having left their mother in a state hospital and Donnie in the care of someone who had no obligation to them. Julie had never before raised a child. Once again, they’d gotten away with something.

  From the airport pay phone, Lina called Ceci to thank her for her help long ago with Julie’s dress. She thought of calling Julie, but that was too big a thank-you to say. Julie would be embarrassed. She wanted to call Sacha but stopped herself. She tried not to call him too much. That may have been the only rule daughters and mothers could agree on in 1979. Not that daughters said so to their mothers. They needed to prove that theirs was a new world in which young men didn’t need to be tricked or trained.

  Lina attempted to contain her feelings. She pictured a thimble brimming. It took discipline to walk without tipping it. Most of what she felt was longing. She’d swept all her desires into one pile and named it Sacha. It would be decades before she understood that her yearning had little to do with the twenty-five-year-old man.

  That first summer with Sacha, they went to see art on Sunday mornings. Sacha always knew a cool bakery, where they could buy coffee and rustic pastries. Lina liked the work by women but also felt competitive with it. Sacha was drawn to some paintings that looked ugly to her. When one of the weavers (the less talented one) found representation, Lina told him that she and Troy had made a vow on New Year’s Eve to try to be artists for one more year. “Each year we think it’ll be our last.”

  “We’ll find a way to change your life,” Sacha said, and the sentence fell into her, a deep charm.

  But why did her life need to change? Her socks had holes, true, the elastic of her underwear was spent, but she was painting every day; she read on slow afternoons in the gallery and she’d fallen in love with someone who believed she could be an artist.

  She looked up at the old city with hope.

  64.

  A watercolor of Martine’s dollhouse was chosen for a group show in the East Village. Lina admitted she was jealous. Sacha asked if she’d sent in slides to that gallerist. Lina found the rejection note in her file cabinet.

  “I don’t see why they wouldn’t work with you,” Sacha said.

  A flower opened inside her.

  “They rejected Troy, too.”

  “Troy may not be as talented as you are.” Sacha had never seen Troy’s work. He was saying, in an offhand way, that he believed in her. It mattered that he worked at a gallery and would know. She felt less like one of thousands.

  Even Walter, when they talked, would pause at the end and say, “You really think you can make a living at this?”

  “I’m making a living now,” she would answer, quietly.

  She confessed to Sacha that she was lonely. Besides Troy, she hadn’t made many friends in the program.

  “That won’t be a problem for us,” he said.

  She trusted him to take her into a thrilling world.

  * * *

  —

  At the end of the summer, they sat at a round table in the sand at a Long Island party with a bald gallerist who had put up a show, which included the welder who’d mounted the flush-valve gasket. The bald man asked Lina what she did. Before she answered, he turned to his date, a flawless blond person, to pass the salt.

  “I do nothing,” Lina said with white-fingered intensity. “Nothing at all.”

  The man and his date looked down at their plates. They sat, in the torch-lit dark, as the waves broke and boomed.

  Later that night, in a guest bedroom, Sacha suggested, “You could say that you’re finishing an MFA program and that you work at the Evergreen Gallery.”

  She could say that, but what she’d said was truer to the spirit of the man’s question, which was a perfunctory demand for a display of rank and status. Impress me had been his bored dare, fingers flicking ash from his cigarette into a cup. But it was like a joke falling flat. You couldn’t explain why it should have been funny. Lina didn’t answer Sacha. It wasn’t that she had no use for rank or status. In fact, her need for legitimacy had ignited the outburst. She felt insufficiently pronounced. Troy would understand why she’d snapped. But Troy was where she was. He didn’t know, either, how to make their lives work. Sacha understood the economics of art, and he’d disapproved of her tonight. The exquisite safety she usually felt with her head beneath his shoulder didn’t enfold her. Her heart was beating too loud. The crashing of waves came in regular intervals.

  “I’m wild about you, you know,” he said, but without much push.

  The question of whether he liked her that way had never been definitively resolved. She believed in the one after all. It didn’t mean he was the best person, only that he was the one for her. And there was sex. She could still remember every single time. Lina had filled forty-two pages of a notebook with drawings. Tonight, she drew their clothes flung over the four-poster bed. Every night held revelations. They had each cried. She hadn’t come yet. She didn’t let herself go to that other place; she wanted to be just her with him. She didn’t want to miss any of it. She knew this was a high point of her life.

  * * *

  —

  “He’s not in love with you,” Troy told her as they unloaded the kiln in the clay room in September, “no matter what he says.” Troy had been in love four times and claimed he could identify the signs and symbols. But Lina had seen Troy in love. When the Kenyan nurse had entered a room, Troy’s eyes had opened too far, as if in astonished pain. He’d crossed his arms, protecting himself from the next atrocity. He’d helped her study for her boards with index cards. And who was she? A nursing student with big calves who told him Black Americans were lazy. But to Troy she meant a bold society, dangerous and real. He was miserable but better off when she left, Lina thought.