rule and phone Jack. He’s so pleased for me he diverges from our Wednesday-Saturday-Sunday routine and asks me out to dinner that very night—a Tuesday. We agree to meet in Washington Square Park, midway between my apartment and Jack’s loft on the Lower East Side. Walking through the West Village I’m not sure what I feel giddier about: Phoebe Nix’s response to my story, the warmth my good news kindled in Jack’s voice, or the way the unseasonably warm weather has coaxed the trees into bloom all down Bleecker Street.
When I get to the park I remember that it’s only been a few weeks since I walked back from my class at The Art School and stopped to watch the snow falling through the arch. I remember thinking that the snow was a sign of something, but not being sure of what. Now I know. The snow foretold this good fortune, this early-spring evening and the way the last sun hits the slow drift of white petals so that they seem suspended in midair. The park is full of NYU girls in midriff-baring tops and boys skateboarding in circles around them. A crowd has formed around a pair of street dancers and the air is sweet with the smell of the white-blossoming trees and marijuana. What a magical transformation! Like a fairy-tale kingdom released from its spell of winter.
I look for a bench in the southeast corner of the park to sit and wait for Jack, but he’s already there. Another surprise—he’s usually late. He’s changed out of his usual paint-splattered T-shirt into a soft blue denim shirt—faded but clean and ironed. Is it the shirt that makes me notice—for the first time in years it seems—how blue his eyes are? Or is it that I hardly ever see him in the daylight anymore? How long has it been? What time he has left over from his teaching schedule at The Art School and Cooper Union he spends in his studio painting. His best working hours—and the best light—are in the early morning. He likes to wake up in his loft and start painting right away. So he comes over to my apartment Wednesday and Saturday nights, but never stays the night even though we see each other again on Sunday night. Sometimes he cooks me dinner in his loft (Jack’s a great cook and in the summer he grows his own tomatoes and basil on his roof), but I’ve never spent the night there.
Aunt Sophie says I’ve done a Lee Krasner, subordinating my art to his. Which is pretty funny considering Sophie gave up her own studies at the Art Students League to join her brother in upstate New York when the hotel desperately needed a bookkeeper. Or maybe that’s exactly why she’s so anxious I not repeat her mistake.
What she doesn’t understand, though, is how well our arrangement suits me. I’ve always felt that we were just the same and, since we met ten years ago in a “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” class at the Omega Institute, lucky to find each other. How many men would put up with my erratic work schedule and understand the time I need to write? How many would understand the hours I spend in the late afternoons, sitting at my desk, staring out the window and waiting for the muse to wing over from New Jersey?
But as Jack rises to greet me—shifting a green paper cone in his arms (Why, he’s bought me flowers!)—I think two things at the same time. One is that there is something odd, even vampirelike, about a relationship that is always conducted outside the light of day, and two, How handsome he is! How much I love him!
“Hail the conquering hero,” he says presenting the bouquet—white irises, my namesakes—with a sweeping flourish. When he leans down to kiss me I notice specks of light in his hair, which I think are paint splatters, then petals, and then, I finally realize, are just streaks of gray. Honestly, how long has it been since we did something as simple as meet in the park?
“I thought we could eat at Mezzaluna,” he says. It’s our favorite restaurant in Little Italy, but it’s been so long since
When I get to the park I remember that it’s only been a few weeks since I walked back from my class at The Art School and stopped to watch the snow falling through the arch. I remember thinking that the snow was a sign of something, but not being sure of what. Now I know. The snow foretold this good fortune, this early-spring evening and the way the last sun hits the slow drift of white petals so that they seem suspended in midair. The park is full of NYU girls in midriff-baring tops and boys skateboarding in circles around them. A crowd has formed around a pair of street dancers and the air is sweet with the smell of the white-blossoming trees and marijuana. What a magical transformation! Like a fairy-tale kingdom released from its spell of winter.
I look for a bench in the southeast corner of the park to sit and wait for Jack, but he’s already there. Another surprise—he’s usually late. He’s changed out of his usual paint-splattered T-shirt into a soft blue denim shirt—faded but clean and ironed. Is it the shirt that makes me notice—for the first time in years it seems—how blue his eyes are? Or is it that I hardly ever see him in the daylight anymore? How long has it been? What time he has left over from his teaching schedule at The Art School and Cooper Union he spends in his studio painting. His best working hours—and the best light—are in the early morning. He likes to wake up in his loft and start painting right away. So he comes over to my apartment Wednesday and Saturday nights, but never stays the night even though we see each other again on Sunday night. Sometimes he cooks me dinner in his loft (Jack’s a great cook and in the summer he grows his own tomatoes and basil on his roof), but I’ve never spent the night there.
Aunt Sophie says I’ve done a Lee Krasner, subordinating my art to his. Which is pretty funny considering Sophie gave up her own studies at the Art Students League to join her brother in upstate New York when the hotel desperately needed a bookkeeper. Or maybe that’s exactly why she’s so anxious I not repeat her mistake.
What she doesn’t understand, though, is how well our arrangement suits me. I’ve always felt that we were just the same and, since we met ten years ago in a “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” class at the Omega Institute, lucky to find each other. How many men would put up with my erratic work schedule and understand the time I need to write? How many would understand the hours I spend in the late afternoons, sitting at my desk, staring out the window and waiting for the muse to wing over from New Jersey?
But as Jack rises to greet me—shifting a green paper cone in his arms (Why, he’s bought me flowers!)—I think two things at the same time. One is that there is something odd, even vampirelike, about a relationship that is always conducted outside the light of day, and two, How handsome he is! How much I love him!
“Hail the conquering hero,” he says presenting the bouquet—white irises, my namesakes—with a sweeping flourish. When he leans down to kiss me I notice specks of light in his hair, which I think are paint splatters, then petals, and then, I finally realize, are just streaks of gray. Honestly, how long has it been since we did something as simple as meet in the park?
“I thought we could eat at Mezzaluna,” he says. It’s our favorite restaurant in Little Italy, but it’s been so long since
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