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restaurant, and I thought he was a figure of high glamour.
    He was an especially slender man, long and thin in every direction and every limb. “Artie,” he said after he saw me talking to a neighbor, a girl my age but already quite a bit more developed. “She’s too big for you. But I’m drawn in that direction, too. My lady of the moment?She and I? A Giacometti putting it to a Botero.” I didn’t understand the references, but the line made him laugh so hard he shook. I laughed, too, of course—a twelve-year-old having a grown man crack dirty jokes for him.
    And then, a few days later, he mailed me a photograph—apparently taken in front of the Greek temple façade of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts—of a grimacing, wire-thin Giacometti statue putting it to a plump Botero statue, beatific at the rear intrusion. The huge composite statue stood to the left of the grand staircase. I had never noticed it there before, remarkably.
    So I puffed my Huffy over to the museum, where I found the usual sculpture to the left of the main stairs: an angel with a sword standing on a wolf, or something, even more improbable than Glassow’s, all things considered.
    From nothing, from a passing joke that occurred to him as he said it, Glassow had made this crazy and pointless photo, implying a sculpture that never was, a collaboration and history between two artists who never met, and a ribald sense of humor in the city’s fine arts museum. He remade the world in his own taste for no other reason than that it amused him. And he shared with me the fruit of that imagination because I had laughed back when he first thought of it, though I had only laughed because he said “putting it to.”
    Glassow was (I noted with a dash of preadolescent bitterness) what my father
wanted
to be but wasn’t. (Of course, it was only due to my father’s training of me that I could appreciate and admire him.)
    I remember him at Embers one weekend evening, taking coffee in the brown plastic mug and giving ten different explanations for the ten times we asked him, “Why are you wearing a tuxedo?”
    “I’m going to the casino after, but I wanted to see you kids first.”
    “There was a mix-up at the dry cleaner,” he sighed, shaking his head, breathing out smoke from his Chesterfield, a line of gray that tracked along the top edge of the red booth.
    “Ask your dad. His idea of a practical joke, saying dinner with you three was black-tie tonight.”
    His imagination inspired me and Dana to try out personalities around him. Something as mild as this game led us to put on differentvoices, attitudes, vocabularies, to see if, in disguise, we could sneak closer to the truth. “Baby,” said Dana like a tender mother, “baby, really, why so swank?”
    “I’m going to a ceremony, a roast for a friend who’s getting a prize for his charitable work. Couldn’t
be
prouder.”
    “Cut the crap, Chuck.” I tried a twelve-year-old tough guy. “What’s up?”
    Chuck accordioned his cigarette butt into the black ashtray permanently stained gray inside its crenellations. “Fact is, compadre, I’m trying to impress a broad. I’m taking her first-nighting at the opera.”
    “Come on, for real, Uncle Charles, please,” cajoled a young, young Dana, avuncularizing Glassow for the first and only time.
    And this man, whom neither of us has seen in decades, now owns a quarter of my family’s coming fortune.
    But I’m ahead of myself.

6
     
    W HEN I WAS FIFTEEN , two gallants at school called Dana a dyke, and so I tried to fight them. When it was over, and my nose was broken into its current alignment, and the two bravos had triumphantly kicked me in the stomach, adding, “Arthur is a fag,” Dana, back home, set to work nursing my body and lacerated ego.
    She didn’t bother with “you were really brave” or “those guys are jerks” or “you were outnumbered” or even “thank you.” We knew all that, and we both knew the other one knew it. And