Troy shrugged. “Learned some anatomy. She has a kid now.”

  This was their last fall in school. One weaver was moving to North Carolina to take over her grandfather’s cherry farm next summer. The department secretary, a person with an abundance of silk scarves and bad news, seemed fond of reminding Lina, the minute she turned in her thesis, the university would evict her. Lina was beginning to understand that New York was a place people came to for a while before moving somewhere with yards.

  Troy trekked, even in the October cold, to Lina’s apartment, his grandfather’s coat buttoned to the top. She baked cornbread in her toaster oven and dripped coffee through a cone. By now, Troy’s graffiti artist had been discovered; he was living in a famous dealer’s Los Angeles house. “He paints in thousand-dollar suits,” Troy said.

  Troy got a job at an East Side clay studio, run by a woman in her seventies, where serious potters threw. One had had a solo show. Others sold bowls to Barneys, boutiques in the Hamptons, and private clients. Old women liked Troy, Lina noticed. They found him tutoring gigs. “I’m coaching these kids to make SAT scores that will get them into schools like Columbia, so, after they graduate, they can eventually become SAT tutors. Good money but not so good on the meaning-of-life scale.”

  Walter warned Lina that when she got out of school she’d need health insurance. She asked Harry Beckstein, the owner of Evergreen, and he looked offended.

  “I’ll have to just not get sick,” Lina said.

  Troy’s new boss said, “If you go to the doctor, just bring me the bill.”

  This was Donnie’s first semester in college. Lina remembered that at odd times.

  * * *

  —

  Sacha had taken a client to a Brooklyn dockyard to see a di Suvero protégé’s work and now, three months later, that client was a collector, and the kid and his girlfriend—who turned out to be the welder and Doc Martens—were on the guy’s yacht in the Aegean. “I can’t believe it,” Sacha said, amazed that his actions had effects. The client commissioned three new pieces for a house in Colorado. Sacha seemed to Lina very modest. “I watch the news and follow politics. You’re the one with a slash of brilliance,” he said. Sacha’s boss gave him a bonus check before Christmas, and when he showed it to her, she grabbed it and ran; he chased her in a spontaneous round of tag in his small apartment, bumping into walls and finally falling down in a corner. They stayed like that, on the ground, their bodies breathing together. Troy thought Sacha didn’t love her. But there were moments when he indisputably did.

  * * *

  —

  At the hotel bar, the night Lina met him, he’d said, “I’ve slept with men before but I don’t consider myself gay.” They had been talking about a movie. He’d said it nonchalantly, and it had fallen into her like a slender needle.

  “What about your bisexual past?” she asked now, out of breath. “Should I be worried?”

  “No one can hold a candle to us.”

  She pressed him for details. Once, a man had looked at him on the subway; they’d both gotten off and walked to an apartment. An afternoon cut out of life. Even after he described it, Lina couldn’t imagine what that day had felt like. Or the sex.

  “A little dangerous,” he said. Did they exchange phone numbers? No! He certainly didn’t want to see that person again.

  Lina tried to picture the man. Older, blond. The face a blur. Sometimes when they talked, Lina had a sense of them outside of who they were to each other now, as if they’d stepped into a different room where they were older people.

  “What scares me is, since it’s harder to be gay still, I think that if you’re bisexual, maybe you’re more gay.”

  “You could look at it that way. But you could also say I’m attracted to obstacles. Like a shiksa girlfriend.”

  “You’re wearing that sweater.” His last girlfriend. It had been her father’s.

  “I’ll take it off.”

  “Sometimes I’m afraid I’ll never be what she was to you.”

  “Come here. I just like the sweater.”

  “But when you talk about her, there’s emotion in your voice.”

  “She left me. That’s a whole different thing.” He balled the sweater, threw it into a corner. Why a whole different thing? Did he mean this time he would be the one to leave?

  His college friends were falling into couples. Buying blenders, painting kitchens. Brunch, for heaven’s sake, he said. Some of them looked like identical-puppy twins. He and Lina had had dinner with Lauren and Paul; Lina couldn’t believe they were their same age and married. Sacha rolled on top of her, his eyes closing as he reached his hand down. She numbered the drawings in her book, nearly sixty now. Maybe she was too available. He put himself inside her without kissing.

  “I can imagine a situation in which I’d be married now, can’t you?” he asked.

  “No,” she blurted. It just flew out, as it had with the bald dealer who’d asked her what she did. She meant no; she was sure, but she didn’t understand why. When she’d doubted the existence of romantic love, she’d been privately hoping for this. She’d wanted to fall in love and to be an artist. She was in love, but she wasn’t an artist yet, at least according to the IRS. She knew her bank balance exactly. She owed $257.00 every month for her student loan.

  Was that a proposal? Had she refused? What did he mean, a situation? He meant pregnancy, she assumed. The notion made her vertiginous, as if she’d be left behind in a shapeless cotton dress. Of course they were using contraception. It was just now dawning on Lina that the problem of love was more than existential. Not only whether one was loved but why one was loved mattered. She hoped to be loved for what she could do.

  And no one could love her for that yet. She was still trying to figure out how to make something beautiful.

  * * *

  —

  When Lina told Troy about the welder and Doc Martens, he got a peculiar smile.

  “What?”

  “I knew her pretty well once.”

  “You had a thing with her?”

  “I don’t know about a thing, but something.”

  “I didn’t think you dated white girls.”

  “I date all kinds of women.”

  Suddenly, Lina felt bereft; Troy was attracted to white women after all but not her. Then she remembered Sacha saying he could imagine being married. It was a private candy she fingered in her pocket. He wouldn’t have brought up the word, would he, if he didn’t mean married to her? The phrase tumbled in her mind at irrelevant moments, polishing itself.

  She called Donnie to ask about college. “It’s all right,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  Sacha had tickets to an opening at MoMA—this was the glamorous side of his job. Lina was excited but also nervous about fitting in—maybe those two things were the same. She put on and took off clothes for an hour, trying to remember Marci’s tricks for adding body to your hair. She finally decided on the old May Company suit jacket over jeans. When she arrived, she scanned the crowd and spotted Sacha, talking to a woman with wild blond hair. Lina’s heart beat overly loud. They seemed to be laughing. She bent closer to him. Lina walked across the floor, brittle with fear, her shoes making too much noise on the terrazzo.

  Sacha introduced her. Sound echoed in the large room. Lina felt a knife in her spine, sure there was something between them. “Can we see the work?” she said, maybe too sharply, because they both looked at her. It was a normal thing to ask, though; this was a show, not a cocktail party. Sacha put his hand on her back and they walked to the galleries, leaving the pretty young woman alone in the clattery room.

  They stood then, looking at the small mounted boxes. Incredible. It was like being able to see inside someone’s mind and finding a joyful playroom.

  Lina asked if she could call and invite Troy.

  “They gave me only two tickets, but tell you what.” Sacha yawned. “When he comes, I’ll give him mine. I have to get up early tomorrow.”

  Lina found a pay phone. By the time Troy arrived, wearing clay-splattered work boots under his grandfather’s coat, clusters of people were streaming out the glass doors in beautiful, amusing clothes. Lina hurried Troy upstairs and they stood before each box, reading the cards next to them and the longer paragraphs painted on the wall. “A wholesale fabric salesman,” Troy read out. “Never went to Europe. Lived his whole life in Flushing with his mom and disabled brother. Didn’t graduate high school. He sold appliances, door to door.”

  “He had his first show at forty-six,” Lina said. “Wow.”

  She and Troy had talked for years about their work and their careers, or lack of them. They complained about other people in the program. As they stared at the strange boxes, those irritations fell away. They weren’t thinking about who was overrated or underrated, better or worse.

  “Guy made boxes to send to starlets. Ballerinas,” Troy said. “That’s probably as close as he came to love. Living with his mom.”

  They stayed until the lights dimmed and janitors began to sweep the large room where the drinks had been. Neither of them had eaten. But when they came up out of the subway at Ninety-Sixth Street, neither suggested stopping at the Cuban Chinese or V&T. A soft, dense snow was falling, and they each hurried home.

  Lina worked most of the night, eating two chocolate bars she’d been saving. At four in the morning, she felt like calling Troy—she wanted him to see a six-by-six canvas of a bunch of violets, held by a rubber band—but didn’t. She was ashamed of her old insecurity about whether or not Martine’s work was better. After seeing those boxes, none of that mattered. The great belonged to everyone. Somehow this made it easier to work.

  The next morning, Troy called; he’d been up at four, too! She walked over to his place to see what he’d done. It was a freezing day. Then he came to her apartment. Then they went to the Cuban Chinese for eggs with rice and beans.

  * * *

  —

  Standing in the bookstore, Lina read about Joseph Cornell. He was born on Christmas Eve, the same year as her mother. He hung out with Duchamp, Rothko, Motherwell, and de Kooning. For years, he didn’t sell his work; he couldn’t let it go. He once had a thousand boxes in his house, and when he sold a piece, he made another copy to keep. He preferred to give them away. He sent one to Audrey Hepburn.

  First, he’d been a salesman, like his father. When he was thirty-seven, he resigned from his job. He kept dossiers on butterflies, clouds, fairies, history, and planets. His little brother played with toy trains. They lived in a rented house on a street called Utopia Parkway.

  Later, Lina learned that he’d had a friendship with a young Japanese artist, who’d come to New York after writing a fan letter to Georgia O’Keeffe. O’Keeffe introduced her to Eva Hesse and Warhol. The young artist wrote a letter to Richard Nixon offering to have sex with him if he would end the Vietnam War. She staged a nude “happening” in the sculpture garden of MoMA and had a brief affair with Donald Judd. But then she became friends with Joseph Cornell, who was twenty-six years older, and stayed for days in his Flushing house. They sketched each other. Once, when they were sitting under a quince tree, Cornell’s mother poured a bucket of water over them. Cornell, infatuated, made the young artist collages, and gave her some of his work to sell when she was living hand to mouth. They corresponded every day until he died.

  After his death, she returned to Japan with a box of his cuttings, Ping-Pong balls, and dime-store trinkets he’d been saving. She checked herself in to a hospital for the mentally ill, where she still lived now, by choice. She had her first solo show—collages, a tribute to Cornell—two years after committing herself. Lina felt vindicated, for her mother. How different were collages from bouquets?

  Lina spent an afternoon at the MoMA Library to find pictures of the collages. There was one picture of the artist nude, overlaid with polka dots. Lina found seven images in all. But she didn’t really like the work.

  * * *

  —

  That year, and every year after, Lina went home for Christmas. She drove Julie’s car to Norwalk, to be alone with her mother, but they never again returned to the way they’d talked the holiday they were apart. Lina had the iron sheath as a trophy from her one solitary Christmas, when she’d had a magical conversation with her mother, looking out the window and trying to describe the snow. Her mother told her things she hoarded for the rest of her life.

  Oh, go. One night won’t make such a difference. I keep to myself. You know. She remembered her mother saying she was a beautiful girl.

  65.

  Over eggplant-and-anchovy pizza, Troy and Lina decided to re-up one more year.

  “I’ve painted so many flowers. I don’t know if I’m getting any better,” Lina said.

  “You know what I love? That wire bouquet.”

  Lina had made a bouquet out of wire, felt, and fabric scraps in a can. She kept it on her worktable. “That was fun. But I can’t turn it in. People would think I’m trying to make artificial flowers. You did a whole wall.” Troy had directed a mural project on the side of a public middle school. “My brother’s on me again about health insurance.”

  Troy told his seventy-four-year-old boss that a catastrophe could wipe out his mom. She finally agreed to buy him a policy. But she was getting ready to retire. Somebody had offered her ten thousand dollars for the studio, but she wanted it to go to Troy.

  “Ten thousand dollars, that’s for the building, too?”

  “Just the business. She leases. It’s a decent deal. Artists can use it during the day and you could rent it out for kids’ birthday parties weekends. But I don’t have the ten grand.”

  “I met Sacha last year. So it wasn’t a total bust.”

  “Well, I should talk.” Troy’s latest girlfriend had dumped him, after opening his Christmas present. A sweater. She said it wasn’t the gift of a man who was ready for commitment. “Probably right,” Troy said.

  “Sacha brought up marriage once.”

  “He asked you to marry him?”

  “Not exactly. He asked if I could imagine being married now. He said he could.”

  “Does the guy ever pay for you?” Troy asked. “Like help with the rent?”

  No. She had to admit. So 1980 would have to be the year their lives would change.

  * * *

  —

  Troy brokered trades with the guy who painted arachnids so that they would each own a piece of his art. Lina traded a flower painting for a twelve-by-twelve of a bee against a deep cerulean blue.

  They subwayed to a small, white-painted room where Martine’s watercolor hung in a group show. Lina hadn’t invited Sacha; Martine was too pretty. Lina understood that Sacha could never show her paintings; but she couldn’t bear it if he signed up Martine.

  Still, when she saw Martine’s watercolor framed on the wall, Lina gasped. It was beautiful.

  * * *

  —

  Sacha found a new apartment. He hired a painter and was thrilled with the brick walls, newly white. He and Lina felt the uneven smoothness. The walls and floors were so nice. Lina admired them but with complication—his old apartment had been better than hers but still a genre she recognized; this one could never be confused with graduate-student housing. In the small extra room, they stood looking out a window that faced the backyard of a church. “You can work here,” he said, holding her shoulders. She closed her eyes. She thought he might ask about marriage again, but he didn’t.

  * * *

  —

  Lina never felt finished with a painting; she always seemed just on the verge of becoming better. But her thesis was due. She asked Sacha to help pick out what to show.

  “What’s this?” he asked of her wire bouquet on the table where she kept the turpentine and rags. She couldn’t tell if he was asking out of excitement or dismissal; his voice seemed to carry a little of both. He agreed that the most finished paintings were in the series of increasingly chaotic bouquets in old cans, some with the brand labels still on, with weeds and strange pods mixed in, and in the last one twisted old newspaper, bits of garbage. Lina thought of these as arrangements her mother made in the hospital. Troy talked to her about how to contextualize. With a small brush, Lina wrote diagnostic notes (she’d seen patient charts). She could get a prescription pad from the medical student Troy was dating. She listed medications and painted a small four-by-four gouache of dentures in a glass (something she’d seen on the ward; her mother still had her teeth, thank God).

  While he was in her cluttered room, Lina showed Sacha the two paintings she owned: the bee and Troy’s large aerial landscape. If Sacha took on Troy, maybe the two men would get along.

  But Sacha was not impressed.

  * * *

  —

  Lina’s work hung in the student lounge of Dodge Hall for five days, and a month later, she opened an official letter from Columbia saying she would receive her degree by mail in six to eight weeks and would have to move out of Butler Hall at the end of the academic year. Lina showed the letter to Sacha, ostensibly to complain about the lack of pomp and circumstance.