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into that.”
    But you once were. At least when you wanted me.
Edward thinks about the night they met and the promise. He didn’t know how quickly the promise would be met.
    And then reneged on.

Chapter Two
    1954
    The Tiger’s Eye was on Eighth Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, in the heart of Greenwich Village. It was a little bar, scarcely more than a long, dark hallway, almost a basement tunnel. Passersby would completely miss it, unless they were among the few who frequented the place. Those wise to its existence entered it through a heavy oak door, veneered with a drab coat of chipped and peeling paint. They’d take a few steps down a small flight of stairs—and be assaulted by the smell of beer, cigarette smoke, and a faint ammonia tang, which the discerning knew better than to think too much about.
    And then there was the interior of The Tiger’s Eye. Along one brick and mortar wall, there was a row of high tables and stools; along the other was the bar itself, an ancient, heavy wooden affair that rose almost organically up out of the creaking floorboards. How anyone might have ever been able to maneuver the massive thing inside these narrow confines to begin with would forever remain an unsolvable mystery. That no one would ever be able to maneuver it out again was a certainty. The bar had no stools along its length; for comfort, patrons could lift a foot to the brass rail that ran the length of the bar. Cobwebs hung heavy in the corners of a peeling painted black tin ceiling. Music came from a Wurlitzer juke, the only bright spot in an ocean of gloom. The selections on the Wurlitzer were all jazz: Art Blakey, Miles Davis, Sam Rivers, Anita O’Day, Dinah Washington, and Cannonball Adderley.
    A grimy mirror that was losing its grasp on reflection hung above the rows of third-rate bottles of bourbon, vodka, and gin. More exotic liquors found a home elsewhere. There was a tap with three choices of beer (Black Label, Genesee, and Hamms), and a cooler with chilled brown bottles of Budweiser and green ones of Rolling Rock. Nothing fancy.
    The bar had become a sort of home to Greenwich Village artists, poets, and writers. If you came into The Tiger’s Eye’s dank interior, you might hear a lively conversation going on about the worth of painters such as Lee Krasner or Philip Guston. You might hear a withering disagreement of critical assessments made by Clement Greenberg in
The Nation.
Beat poetry, the future of American art…. You might also hear the husky music of men propositioning men, or sighs and moans coming from within the red-painted stall of the restroom at the rear of the bar.
    The Tiger’s Eye was not a place where established artists and writers hung out. Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning would not have been glimpsed there, although they may have been nearby, perhaps in a cab with Peggy Guggenheim heading up to her Art of This Century Gallery on West Fifty-Seventh.
    But those who aspired to be the next Pollock or de Kooning took advantage of the cheap price of spirits and the “starving artist” ambiance afforded by The Tiger’s Eye.
    Edward Tanguy was one of those artists. For Edward, The Tiger’s Eye afforded an escape from his tiny studio apartment (and workspace) on Horatio Street. He could walk there, nurse a beer or two all evening, engage in conversation with other patrons, which might or might not inspire him to work, and perhaps catch the eye of a handsome stranger. This last was a rare occurrence, usually accompanied by racking guilt the morning after and a determination to “throw himself completely” into his art.
    Edward was tired. He had worked all day trying to create something that would move him from being the “crazy guy who fancies himself an artist” who lived at the back of a four-story walk-up inhabited mostly by drunks, heroin addicts, women of easy virtue, rats, and cockroaches to being “that crazy artist who fancies himself alive.” Edward still had primary