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the people who live here. There are locals who won’t go downtown at all till the tourist season is over.”
    Ricky shrugged faintly. “Modern colonialism in one of its guises, with a racist element, no doubt?”
    “Yes,” she said. “With the Indians and the Hispanics on the receiving end, as you might guess. But I don’t really know much about any of it, Ricky, only what I read in the papers. I’m a newcomer myself, remember, an outsider by origin, and I’ve chosen not to try to become a local. Not to pretend. Living out in the country, beyond the edge of town — and not even this town that’s the center of things, but a more peripheral town — that’s my privacy, my solitude, my peace.”
    “Your studio,” he corrected. “Your work, which I must not keep you from, much as I enjoy taking the local tour with you. I can’t keep you on holiday forever.”
    Tell him now, show him when you get back this afternoon: show him what you chose for, when you chose against plunging into local issues. Instead she heard herself say in an evasive tone that made her cringe, “I’m not painting, Ricky.”
    “Oh,” he said. “I heard you tell that to George, but I thought you were just putting him off.”
    She shook her head, thinking, why is this so hard to talk about?
    “When did you stop, if I may ask?”
    “A little while before Nathan left — about two years after we settled in Taos together.” Better. Talking about Nathan seemed to restore her normal voice.
    Ricky sat with one thin arm draped along the back of the bench between them, a line drawing of a man in a cotton turtleneck that bagged on his stick-frame. “What happened?” he said.
    “I don’t know,” she answered truthfully, offering more candy from the white bag: delicious, sinful stuff! She was grateful for this shift of the conversation onto accustomed ground (she’d been over all this with her gallery, with Claire, with many others besides George). “Coming here began the process. At first I thought a new setting would stimulate something fresh in me. I was fed up with doing all those damn bridge-paintings — you remember my first pictures when I started out in New York, the ones that stunned me more than anybody by doing so well? I wanted something more ‘authentic.’ I hoped I might find it here, and Nathan encouraged me. The idea was to shake those bridges, which had become my signature-image and could so easily become my prison, at least commercially speaking. But it didn’t work. I petered out. I stopped.”
    He studied her with those remarkable blue eyes, ignoring utterly the tourists ambling past talking camera-talk. “But then what in the world have you been doing with yourself?”
    Dangerous ground again, but she felt ready to handle it this time. Infusion of sugar registering, probably. “Well, we had the bookstore, of course. After Nathan left, I kept it going. I only sold it last year, and I still go in and help out with stock and things once a week as part of the deal. And because I like to.”
    “Nice for you,” he said, digging in the candy bag, spider-fingered, as she held it out for him. “And I suppose there’s a very active artistic community, lots of coming and going, lots of demands on your time, especially after this ‘retrospective’ George was going on about. After all, this whole area is supposed to be an artists’ colony, isn’t it? Plenty of socializing and company for you.”
    “Not exactly,” she said lightly. “I mean, yes, it exists, but no, I don’t get involved much. I’m a private person, Ricky. Even in New York I was that.”
    “Yes,” he said. “I remember. You were shy. I suppose I thought if you’re not painting, you’d welcome more social diversion than usual. Isn’t it painful for you, having your talents just lie there, unexercised?”
    Damn it, what was he probing for? It was none of his business, what she did with her talents, such as they were! “I wouldn’t worry,” she