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“He said the Surrealists were right in that the subconscious must do the moving, the talking, but wrong in that they were all literary, and wanted just to play word games and politics. At the same time, he was turning out these society portraits of pampered women and their pretty children and even their pretty dogs. Ruk was at his best with dogs, certain breeds. But he drank. I had never seen a man drink like this, my grandfather didn’tdrink at all and my father just wine at the occasional special meal; the fathers of my friends maybe had a whiskey in their hands when I’d peek into the library, but I thought it was just a prop, I didn’t know it could be a religion, drinking. I drank, too, as I said. But if it isn’t a religion to you you aren’t a real drinker. At any rate, Ruk—I was too young to see that he was going to seed, getting puffy, his hands shaky, yellow from nicotine, despairing that he wasn’t a rough genius, one of the great brutes. Also, any man of that time who wasn’t in the armed forces, it made you a subspecies. Men felt it, even if they laughed at feeling it. Ruk had a rheumatic heart, I guess. Rheumatic as well as romantic. There was a lot he didn’t tell me, or made up lies about.”
    “I have read,” Kathryn interposes with a considerate smile, adjusting by an inch the Sony’s position on the varnished yellow sea-chest, “that he bragged of sleeping with the society women he painted.”
    “He did sleep with some of them. I knew it, though I didn’t want him to describe it to me. He wanted to. That was his thing, showing off. But it wasn’t meant to be a big deal, I had flings too, those two years we were together. Maybe I was trying to make him jealous. Or just doing it for its own sake. I had come late to sex, and it was like a glorious toy. It was power and submission and danger, it was a way of getting to know somebody and having them know you. It was a way of weaving a kind of costume of secrets. Isn’t that how it still is?”
    Did Kathryn blush? Certainly she moves her head a bit away, adjusting its angle as she had that of the tape recorder. “Yes, perhaps,” she says, “I suppose. But we have AIDS now, and there’s very little of the glorious-toy feeling left. The idea of its being part of some revolution is quite gone. The quality-porno-film idea. Sex as a cause.”
    Hope says, feeling rebuked and taking a brisk chastising tone in self-defense, “Well, my dear, we didn’t have AIDS, but we had pregnancy. And the clap, they called it. There wasn’t all that talk of crabs, as there was in the ’sixties. And syphilis if you were ever so unlucky. I was always lucky, I figured because my heart was pure. And I didn’t sleep with just anybody, as some of the girls and models did, I had to respect the man. I had to think he was serious, at least about painting. Anyway: Ruk, whom you seem to care about a great deal. He was kind to me, as kind as a self-infatuated alcoholic can be. He broadened me, he showed me around. God knows what he saw in me.”
    “If he was sinking, as you say,” Kathryn supplies, “you were a straw he was grasping. You were Hope.” Another joke; her eyes, heavy and opaque like plums, widen and glisten, watching the older woman’s response. Kathryn’s jokes are spoiled for Hope by the suspicion that they are maneuvers and not the spontaneous, selfless embrace of absurdity that humor should be. Ruk and she, on a night of champagne and vodka, would laugh and laugh; everybody looked ridiculous and pathetic, his rumbling choir voice with its slurred consonants slipping one caricature after another into her ears. “His portrait of you shows what he saw. You look extremely vital and confident.”
    The closeness of this approach—the fact of another person in the room breathing, like a humidifier softly hissing—makes Hope uncomfortable. She is used to the dry quiet of solitude, of parched pure winter days. She says, to restore a distance, “It was