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and she’s mine, however that works, I needed her. And as soon as I started thinking that way, I saw that the stuff I’d done while she was there was the best stuff I’d ever done, it was vital and passionate, and I remembered what I was like with her, my base temperature was ten degrees higher, and you could see that in the lines of the drawings, especially the drawings of her.
    And there was the sex, too: boy oh boy, screwing tourist girls—thin wine after that hundred-proof brandy. I mean, there’s a kind of sex you have when you’re floating off somewhere, kind of watching yourself have it, and the girl is too, who knows what they’re thinking, and you know that you’ll have nothing to say to them after, and even if the girl is cool and pretty there’s a moment when you can’t wait to see the last of her and you have a sense that she feels that way too. But Suzanne demanded the full presence, she held on like it was the end of the world, like this was the last fuck before the bomb went off, the last fuck in history, talking through the whole thing, narrating it, and her body never stopping, clenching, and totally there .

 
    S o I came back and we met and it was the same in New York as it was in Paris, couldn’t get enough, and the first thing I did was rent a loft on Walker Street, a hundred bucks a month, five flights up, an old wire factory, full of scrap and filth, and that was where we stayed, on a big slab of foam I bought on Canal Street. We’d turn the lights off and light dozens of thick plumber’s candles and afterward wash up in the tiny workman’s toilet. I decided to turn it into a living loft; I would dump the scrap out the window into the air shaft or carry it down. I would paint it white and put in a sleeping platform and lighting and partitions and a kitchen, and we would live there and be happy.
    In the meantime I stayed in Oyster Bay with Dad, keeping out of his way as much as I could. He had some idea that we were going to be a family again—were we ever that kind of family?—the pair of us and Melanie, the girlfriend. The stepgirlfriend? And he kept going on about this church fresco, how it’s going to be a gigantic revival of that great art, with Wilmot père and fils as the ringleaders.
    When I happened to run into him I could barely stand it, those affectations, that straw sombrero he wore, and the walking stick, and the cape, strolling through the increasingly ragged garden. Maybe the gardener was not that delighted his daughter’d shacked up with a client thirty years older than her, or maybe it was just the lack of money. Mother’s entire income went to the luxurious madhouse she was in, and he was living on whatever commissions he could wrangle. Collier’s was long gone by then, and the Saturday Evening Post and the others. His main business had become fat cat portraits and selling originals of his old work, but this fresco was going to make everything okay again.
     
    J ust before I moved out I had a conversation with his girlfriend. I was sitting on the living room sofa watching a fire I’d just made and thinking about my sister and how that was one of our favorite things to do in the winter, make a big fire and watch it burn and throw in stuff we hated—bad photographs of us or toys we’d outgrown, anything that wouldn’t make an actual stink or explode, but occasionally that stuff too—and Melanie came in and plopped down in the leather armchair where my father usually sat. After a while I realized that she was staring at me. I stared back a little and then I said, “What?” and she started in on why was I being so cold and cruel to my father, who loved me so much and was so proud of me and all that. And I said, “You know, for someone who just walked in the door you have a lot of opinions about the nature of this family. For example, they just dragged my mother out of here with a crane. That might have something to do with how I feel about my father.”
    “You