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Voltaire, the easel—these were my grandfather’s artifacts and amulets. In the studio, there were also two damp, domed closets. One contained canvas by the roll and stretchers and tacks (my grandfather always stretched his own canvases and nearly always bashed his thumb), and another contained mysterious clothes left by mysterious sitters. A general’s dress jacket, but no pants or hat; an evening gown of a style to do Mme. Vionnet proud (all paillettes and pastel chiffon); a double-breasted blazer which might have been worn to Cliveden by the Duke of Windsor.
    â€œPapa was a portrait painter for a living (in the thirties he’d done movie posters for MGM) and his sitters were all posh, upper-class, and gentile. They rarely deigned to come, but sent instead their photographs, their clothes, a lock of hair, a swatch of fabric.
    â€œ ‘Who’s that?’ I used to ask about the pink-faced, pinstriped, three-piece-suited man whose glowing oil-painted image (still wet) was perched on the easel.
    â€œ ‘Mr. Johnson,’ Papa would reply.
    â€œ ‘Who’s that?’ I would ask the next day, when the easel bore his white-haired consort in pearls and robin‘s-egg blue silk.
    â€œ ‘Mrs. Johnson,’ Papa would say.
    â€œI soon found out the two were no relation. Johnson was simply the most goyish name that came to mind. All the paying customers were Johnson—while the voluminous black nudes who posed at the Art Students League, or the Spanish guitarists lured in to pose for a day, all had their own particular first names. Velda or Luis or Roberto or Geneva. Only the clientele were scorned and nameless —painted for money, not love.
    â€œ(What I learned from this was: always write for love not money, but try to be paid for it, too.)”
    Aha, thought Isadora, this is true. My whole life’s lesson, gleaned from Grandpa: write for love, but do not love merely in order to write about it.
    â€œHe passed his legacy on to me—he who painted at the top of the house (as I now write above the family roar). I was never banned from his studio; nor is my daughter banned from mine. ‘I am writing a novel, Mommy,’ Amanda says, at two—as I, at two, painted ‘Mr. Johnson’ and ‘Mrs. Johnson’ alongside my grandfather.
    â€œ ‘Who’s in your novel, Mandy?’
    â€œ ‘Kermit the Frog an’ Mickey Mouse, Mommy, Daddy ... But not Lucinda.’ (Lucinda is the little girl Amanda loves to hate, her best/worst friend in the world.)
    Yes, thought Isadora, such relationships begin early. Catullus was right: “I hate and I love” is the essence of life.
    â€œThe smell of oil paints and turpentine so infused my childhood that I’ve only to pass an artist’s studio to be plunged back, through the infallible offices of that Mnemosyne who lives in the nose, to my childhood.”
    Smells, she thought. Why do smells trigger memory so insistently? She’d read once that the olfactory lobes are the oldest parts of the brain, what we have in common with the “lower” mammals —if you considered dogs and dromedaries lower, which she didn’t. Isadora was a great smeller. She had always liked gamy men, found them sexier than the overbathed variety. And as for herself, she spent fortunes on perfumes, her current favorite being Opium. “If you smell good, you can conquer the world,” she used to quip. Her perfumes had “progressed” from Chanel No. 5 in high school, to Shalimar in college, Ma Griffe in graduate school, Fidji when she first met Josh, Bal a Versailles and Joy for their good years, and Opium since the birth of her daughter made her, at last, a woman. What could that possibly mean? That womanhood itself required an opiate?
    â€œThe tools of the painter’s trade are as familiar to me as the tools of my own trade—and as precious. The sable brushes: Papa always washed