Atlantis: Three Tales

ERIC, GWEN,
AND D.H. LAWRENCE’S
ESTHETIC OF UNRECTIFIED FEELING

I remember standing beside my father’s knee, while, in his blue-black suit, he sat at the mahogany kitchen table and taught me to sing, “Mairzy doats and dozy doats an little lambsy divey. A kidledy divey too — wouldn’t you?” It came out, when you actually sang it, “Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy…”

And at her club meeting, for the assembled women in their hats and long-sleeved winter dresses sitting about our living room, my mother would urge me, with my boy soprano, to Rose Murphy’s “I wanna be loved by you, just you and nobody else but you… Poo-poo-pa-doop!” till held-in laughter broke out along the green couch and wooden bridge chairs, among the gloves and hat veils.

Was I the same age? From black, twelve-inch 78 rpms, slipped from the brown wrapping-paper envelopes in their colorful book-like album covers (unlike my father’s extensive jazz collection, from Rhapsody in Blue unto the real thing: their covers were blue or maroon, every one, with white or pink dots), I lay on the living room’s rose rug and memorized Peter and the Wolf and (on the rag rug before the fireplace up at our country place) Tubby the Tuba and (back in New York) a children’s opera, The Emperor’s New Clothes. But all this was driven from current obsession when, in the city one autumn, Mom took me to see a little theater production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance. An obsessed month later I’d talked Dad into buying me the D’Oyly Carte album with Martin Greene as Major General Stanley (the first thirty-three-and-a-third rpm long-playing records we owned); and I’d sing along with the verbal intricacies of the very model of a modern major general’s patter.

Years before, from among many on the radio, I’d learned a song. It went:

A year or so after my trip to hear the Gilbert and Sullivan, an afternoon radio program called Spot the Hits became popular for a season. New songs aired on it, and a “panel of experts” discussed, with the composer, its chances of making the Hit Parade. While I was playing in the upstairs nursery one day, Spot the Hits was on the radio, and, from the three-piece orchestra and studio tenor, a pretty song wafted over the blocks and erector-set pieces spread around me:

When it was over, several of the experts (in those pre-rock ’n’ roll days) allowed as how it was lyrical, engaging, and likely for success.

“But,” objected one, as it struck him, “the melody is identical to ‘Younger than Springtime’!” He sang the opening lines from first one song, then the other.

It was.

The composer who’d written the tune spluttered that he’d been entirely unaware of the similarity. The program’s moderator spluttered; and there was a minute of that awkward confusion which occasionally plagued live radio and, later, live TV. I was convinced then, and still am, that the plagiarism was inadvertent. But despite my conviction, or perhaps because of it, the moment has remained indelible.

And that winter my cousin Betty and her boyfriend Wendell took me to an indoor ice skating rink somewhere in the city. After renting skates, with Wendell and Betty at either elbow, I made fair progress around the rink while the electric calliope played “Buckle Down, Winsockie,” to which Wendell sang the lyrics, till finally I could move about the ice on my own.

My father’s friends and family often spoke of Dad as someone who could get music from any instrument. Back then I had no idea what it meant to pull even a note from trumpet, clarinet, or transverse flute, each with its different mouthpiece — much less to get tunes from them, each with its different fingering.

But, however haltingly, Dad could play them all.

When I was eight, a few glimpses through the living-room arch at my aunt’s home in New Jersey, where my cousin stood before the fireplace with his instrument at his chin, under the wire-framed gaze of his young, balding, black-suited music teacher, grew in me, a year later, to a passion for the violin. (Boyd’s teacher was white; and, before my grandmother shooed me away to play upstairs and leave them alone, it was one of the few times in childhood when I was oddly aware that my family and I were not — possibly because Boyd wore, on his brown oval face, the same wire-rimmed glasses as that pale young man.) My mother nursed the passion on. And when it did not go away, I inherited Boyd’s old instrument: he had given it up for college and medical school. To ensure that the passion was not a whim, Dad purchased four beginner violin instruction books.

We also got Boyd’s music stand.

During breaks between funerals, my father would nip upstairs to give me a lesson. Sometimes he would set me up with stand and book in the evening before the dining room fireplace. By staying a lesson or two ahead, he proceeded to teach me violin — having decided he’d like to master a stringed instrument himself.

My father may have been a natural musician, but he was not a natural teacher. A wholly dogmatic man, he wanted things done his way — now. He had no sense that four-fifths of all meaningful instruction is the attentive silence teacher must proffer student, during which silence, among his or her own fumblings, the student actually learns — a silence in which teacherly attention must all be on which errors not to correct. Therefore the tension between us was high. It speaks well for us both that we were still at it three months on: I was still putting in an hour or two a day of practice on my own. In those months my father taught me to read the treble clef and got me more or less comfortable with up to two or three sharps, two or three flats. (Somehow, in the midst of it all, I also learned how to renotate all the music for B-flat cornet, that had been Dad’s first instrument.) But these lessons were not pleasant. Then the short-haired woman who wore green felt skirts and taught stringed instruments at my downtown elementary school rescued me.

In the sixth-floor music room Mrs. Wallace gave real violin lessons — a room in which, years before, with colored paper patterns and black and white magnetic dogs, along with questions and answers that a squat, graysuited, white-haired woman with an Irish name (Mrs. MacDougal?) had written down, smiling, on her clipboard, I’d been tested for reading and found lacking. My first hope at beginning the violin had been that I’d take lessons with Mrs. Wallace, like my schoolmate Jonathan, who was a bully, very handsome, called his judge mother and lawyer father by their first names, and never wore underwear — for which fact alone, I think, I tried to become his friend and got so far as to be invited for the weekend with him and his parents to their summer house on an island in Lake Placid, which you reached, across overcast evening waters, by motorboat.

But Dad had intervened.

After two months of Dad’s lessons, I’d brought my violin into school and reported for practice with the Middle School orchestra. For the simple pieces we played, I did well enough. But after another month Mr. Ax detected something in my playing… idiosyncratic? Or perhaps I just told him how I was learning. He spoke to Mrs. Wallace, who called my parents in. Both of them — quite unusual — came. I stood outside the open door and overheard Mrs. Wallace explain that there were certain things that could only be taught by an experienced teacher — that, indeed, to follow a book without real instruction could, for an instrument like the violin, do more harm than good.

Since I’d stuck to it as long as I had, it was possible I had real talent.

So real lessons began — just in time, too: my father and I had had a falling out over the interpretation of a single phrase in a song which, between the two of us, we’d been working on by ear. “The Autumn Leaves…” It came over the radio enough times so that we both knew it pretty well. But —

“No — !” I’d insist, grabbing for the violin, while Dad turned, with the instrument under his chin, out of my reach, as if protecting it with his body from my eager hands. “It doesn’t drop down again, there. It stays up, on the same note — the fourth. Then it drops down, only half a step!”

“Well, isn’t that what I’m doing?” he protested, turning back.

“No, you’re not — !”

Whatever it was, my father honestly couldn’t hear it. And, as an ear musician, what he couldn’t hear, he couldn’t play — even if you wrote it out.

It led to loud and insistent declamations from him — and tears from me, till my mother looked in from the kitchen. “What are the two of you going on about so? It’s only a song!”

“Look!” Dad insisted, “I’m going to show you you’re wrong! I’m going to get the sheet music!”

“Okay,” I said. “You’ll see!” while I tried not to cry anymore.

The third time he told me he’d been to a music store and couldn’t find it, I began to think some kind of shuck was going on. The song was still popular enough on the radio that, now and again, it would lilt into the living room.

“… Don’t you hear that, Dad?”

“And I tell you, that’s what I’m doing!”

Then one afternoon he announced: “Okay, I found it. It isn’t called ‘The Autumn Leaves.’ The title’s ‘September Song.’ That’s why the man at the music store kept telling me he didn’t have it in. You’ll see now.”

We set the sheet music up on Boyd’s old music stand in front of the mantel.

I got out the violin. Dad put on his glasses, which he needed to read music, took the instrument from me, and began to play. I looked over his shoulder —

“No!” I shouted, when he reached the passage. “That’s not what it says! You didn’t play what the notes are — ”

“Yes, I did!”

“No, you didn’t! See — it does stay up on the fourth. Like I said. And there — only a half step down…”

“… to E.”

“To F. That’s an F!”

“Well, yes, but — ”

“Here, let me play it.”

I did.

And messed up the questionable phrase.

“See, that’s just what — ”

“But I made a mistake! I’ve been listening to you do it wrong so many times, I just did it the way — ”

“Now watch your tongue! Don’t you get insulting!”

“Let me do it again.”

I did.

“And that’s what the notes say, too!” I dropped the bow from the strings — to take the instrument from my chin. Perspiration left a shiny crescent inside the ebony chin rest.

“Well, then,” my father declared, which was pretty much his way in an argument, “the music’s just wrong! And so are you! Look, I’ve been trying to tell you all along: I know how the damned song goes! You’re just too pig-headed to listen!”

“But look, the music even says — !”

“Well, I don’t care what it says!”

“But…!” And, like a mountain climber who has suddenly had the foothold struck from beneath the toe carrying the weight, I tumbled from the heights of logic, reason, and evidence into the pit of steaming tears, which rose about me, to scald my eyes. Putting the violin down on the varnished table twice as dark as it was, I stalked from the dining room.

Angrily Dad called after me: “Come on back here! Don’t you walk out on me like that! You’ve got your practicing to do!” Then, in a moment of total frustration, he added: “You are one hard-headed nigger, is what you are!”

“Sam!” my mother called, outraged, from the kitchen: but it was both my father’s name and mine.

Dad shouted after me, in what — today — I suspect was an emotional plea rising wholly outside the realms of reason: “Can’t you ever admit you’re wrong about anything?”

What I heard, though, as I stood in the hall, quivering by the entrance to the walk-in closet (in which, at Christmas, I could never find the presents that must be hidden behind the winter coats or somewhere on the upper shelves with the eight-millimeter movie camera and the stenotype machine — from the unimaginable time before my birth when Mom had been a stenographer — and the piled-up hat boxes) was the absolute and obscene, to me, contradiction with all reason, so that when tears and words broke out together — “Why can’t you!”—I’m surprised that, back in the dining room, he even understood what I’d said.

He shouted: “Don’t you talk to me like that — !”

Maybe it was because we’d shouted it so many times before.

But that’s what Mrs. Wallace’s lessons rescued me from — rescued us both from, really.

At school, in the small sixth-floor room at the end of the hallway, with its green walls and its tan shade lowered over the wire window guards, Mrs. Wallace, sweater mottled with the sun outside, ambled about the little space, attending to my scales, tunes, and, finally, at our twin stands, my duets with her. With her own violin against her hip, her estimate of what my father had been able to do with me ranged from the professional musician’s disdain for all things amateur to real surprise at what he’d accomplished. On the one hand, I was already comfortable with the circle of fourths (for the flatted keys) and the circle of fifths (for the sharped ones) that she did not usually give to students until they were much more advanced than three months. On the other, that most important arch of the left hand, as it supports the violin neck, that allows the string player to turn strength into speed when moving among the higher finger positions, was something neither Dad nor I had ever paid much attention to.

“The violin,” Mrs. Wallace would explain, her face near mine, forcing back my hand beneath the slim neck’s shaft (she was almost without chin), “is not a dagger that you clutch. Nor are you trying to cut your throat with it. Here. Pretend there’s a hard rubber ball in your hand, between your palm and the instrument. Don’t ever let your hand close through that ball. Come on, now. You’re a violinist. You’re holding it like a country fiddler!”

And sometimes, when I would make a mistake, she’d say with the faintest smile: “Did your father teach you that, too?” which, as he was no longer there to badger me, I was now free to resent, however silently: without him, of course, I wouldn’t have been there at all.

My father was also a fairly good artist. When, as a four- and five-year-old, I would come to some adult and ask, “Draw me a bird…? Draw me a lady…?” Dad would take the paper, and the figures he’d sketch would have form, dimensionality, even personality. Once he showed me, for a cat I’d requested, the basic geometric forms I could build it from, that later might guide the modelling of more detailed features.

Dad never tried to teach me to draw. Had he, I’m sure we would have had the same conflict as we did over music. But, in 1951, we acquired our first television set — a huge console Zenith that also contained a record player and a radio. Once I’d finished watching Pat Michaels and the Magic Cottage, Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, Howdy Doody, Buzz Corey and the Space Patrol, Tom Corbett — Space Cadet, Captain Video, and Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders, the Saturday morning show I always caught on the black and white screen was Draw with Me, a Basic Art Course led by “internationally known artist John Nagy.” The day I first tuned in, in the middle of the program, right up there on the screen were Dad’s basic forms — John Nagy might have even been, that show, drawing a cat.

Nagy was the perfect television artist: he wore plaid shirts, dress slacks — never jeans. Often he made his entrance smoking a pipe. Sometimes he even rolled up his sleeves. He had a beard — a small, neat one. Everything about him was redolent of autumns on Provincetown beaches. He had an oboe of a voice, and his bearing was that of your most sympathetic summer camp counselor. The show was aimed wholly at making pictures that looked like something. Weekly he went over those principles that have organized Western figurative drawing and painting since the Renaissance: vanishing points, horizon lines, one-and two-point perspective. (“For objects sitting on the ground or parallel with it, the vanishing point — or points — are on the horizon, which is always at about eye level, even if it’s behind a hill or a house. Always sketch it in, however lightly. And even if you don’t, always be aware of where the horizon line is in your picture…” What a revelation for the nine-year-old sketcher of city streets and Central Park paths!) The program’s teaching plan was wholly imitative. Nagy had his sketch pad, his pencil, his eraser, and — mysteriously and most importantly — his paper stomp. (Could anyone draw anything without a paper stomp? Apparently Nagy didn’t think so.) You had your sketch pad, pencil, eraser — and used your fingertip for the stomped-in shading (then got prints all over the rest of the page). Nagy would draw a line or a shape; you would draw that line or that shape. (“If it doesn’t look exactly like mine, don’t worry. Just relax and do the best you can. You’ll still be surprised at the results.”) And at half an hour’s end, both Nagy and you would have a basket of flowers on a table, a boat hulk beached against a grassy dune (like I said, P-town), a dog sitting before a fireplace, or a small house at the end of a path among the trees and hills.

Two or three times, Nagy actually had a young woman sit and model for him, while he, I, and how-many-thousand-more New Yorkers spent Saturday morning “trying for a likeness.” There was much analysis of the young woman’s head into those eternal basic forms; and he would point out how the rectangular solid that made up the lower part of her jaw was much longer than the one that made up the lower part of his.

By program’s end, we both had faces on our sketch pads. But neither was much of a likeness. “Well,” Nagy mused on the screen, regarding his sketch, clearly dissatisfied, “to get a likeness in a half an hour — with ten minutes out for commercials — is difficult.” (His show, too, was live.) “If you want to do this kind of thing, figure on spending an hour, an hour-and-a-half at it. Maybe even longer, at least when you start.”

Another revelation!

Now, beginning artists throughout the city had an idea of the duration of the task we’d undertaken — and an example from the internationally known Nagy himself of what would happen if you rushed it.

After the show, my younger sister and I would chase each other up and down the stairs, from the second to the third floor, bawling at one another, “Salagodoola! Menchicka Boola! Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo — !” unaware that the song’s writer was the same Walt Disney staff musician who, twenty years before, had written “Mairzy Doats.”

Our art program at school was, however, entirely different. The move from Third Grade to Fourth Grade — from the heights of the Lower School to the bottom rung of the Middle School — was, at least for me, primarily the move from art classes with Miss Dorothy Andrews, a tall, black-haired woman with a bun, who wore dark turtlenecks and long gray jumpers, but with a wholly open and experimental policy as far as the art room was concerned (whose limits I only strained once when, in my earliest years, I took off my shoes and socks and painted both my feet blue: it was reported to my parents), to art classes with Gwendolin Davies, an irrepressible woman with an English accent, bright red hair, cool-colored sweaters, and frequently some enormous piece of free-form aluminum jewelry. Older students had storied her eccentricities to us by then, so that on our first day in the new art room we were all expectant.

“No, no!” Gwenny said (we already knew we were to call her that), as some of us made tentative moves toward the paper piled on the shelves and the paint cans on the counter — as would have been proper the year before, upstairs with Miss Andrews. “We’re going to talk a bit, first. Find a seat, now. That’s right, you can sit over there. Up on the counter with you. And you lot can sit over there under the window — that’s right. No talking now; we’re big Middle Schoolers and quite grown up, all of us — aren’t we? So let’s have some attention here!”

Here, apparently, not only were we going to make art; we were going to discuss it.

Once the dozen of us were seated and silent, Gwenny clapped her hands together with the sober-eyed satisfaction of someone who had just created a masterpiece. “Now — ” (We were perched around the room, some on the shelf running under the window, some on the waist-high table with cabinets beneath, down the room’s center.) “I have a question for you. What is a picture made of?”

On shelves to the side were rows of clay and wire sculptures, piles of finished watercolors.

“Has the cat got your tongue?” she demanded of one of us. “It must. You’re not saying anything. Now, tell me. What goes into a picture?”

The gravity with which she put the question made it clear that she did not want an answer such as dogs, cats, or flowers. From my seat under the ridged wire window guard, I raised my hand.

“Yes…?”

I ventured: “The horizon line — ?”

“Absolutely not!”

The crisp denial startled me. However tentatively I’d given my answer, I’d expected praise.

But Gwenny went on. “Horizon lines, one- and two-point perspective, incident light, reflected light, isometric projections — that sort of thing: that’s precisely what we are not interested in, in this class!” She glared at me. “And I never want to hear you mention them in here again!” Then, incongruously, she smiled: “All right?”

Bewildered, I nodded.

“Good!”

Today I wonder whether Gwenny had ever caught Nagy’s Saturday morning show, to loathe it for the anti-art experience it was.

At the time, though, I was only awed by her knowledge: Nagy had never mentioned anything so complex as “isometric projections.” “Incident light…?” What, I wondered, could they possibly be; and why were they not for us?

“Now.” She turned to the rest of the room. “Can somebody do a little better than that? What goes into a picture? Someone else. Tell me… What? No idea? Well, it’s not an easy question. But, here — I’ve got a piece of paper, all tacked up. And I’m going to make a picture.” She picked up a crayon and rapidly drew an informal amoeboid line that came back to close on itself. “What’s that?”

Was it Debbie, with her pale blond hair, who volunteered from where she sat cross-legged on the central counter, “It’s… just a kind of… shape?”

“Very good!” Gwenny whirled about, practically to incandesce! “What was that word again?”

But Debbie was as nonplussed by her success as I’d been by my failure.

“You had it right!” Gwenny declared. “Just say the word once more!” But it was someone else who finally offered: “… shape?”

“Correct!” Gwenny turned back to the paper. “And here’s another one!” She drew a circle. “And here’s another!” She drew a triangle. “And another!” The outline this time, drawn with a sureness that shamed Nagy, was of a child: we laughed. “And another!” This one was of such intricate complexity, with so many inroads and curlicues, peaks, dells, and harbors, it made both child and amoeba look circle-simple. “And another!” Another circle, but with two points near the top. Adding a few whisker strokes and some eye dots, Gwenny turned it into a lopsided cat’s face. We laughed again. “Shapes. Lots of different shapes. All there in my picture.” She stepped back from the paper tacked to the painted wallboard, galaxies of tack holes across its gray enamel. “So — what is one thing that goes into a picture?”

We smiled, but we were still — at least I was — confused.

“After all this,” Gwenny said, “you must have figured it out. I’ve told you ten times, now.”

So, very tentatively, someone said: “Shapes…”

“Absolutely!” She closed her eyes and breathed in as though she were scenting a fire — that suddenly turned to roses. She opened her eyes again. “It’s very hard to make a picture that doesn’t have any shapes in it at all. So, let’s all say it together. What is one of the things that makes a picture?”

This time, we cried out, emboldened by unison: “Shapes!”

“Well, then, you’re not such a bunch of little wooden noggins! I was beginning to wonder.” It wasn’t like a Nagy lesson at all. We were grinning now. “At least one of the things that makes up a picture is… shape.” She turned back to thumbtack up another yard-wide piece of drawing paper over the first. “But what else goes into a picture?”

We were silenced again. I couldn’t think of anything else of the same basic import.

Suddenly Gwenny raised her crayon and put a diagonal slash across the off-white sheet. “What’s that?”

Wanting to redeem my previous failure, I raised my hand.

“Yes…?”

“That divides the picture up into two shapes,” I said with analytic certainty.

“Oh, I can tell,” she said. “You’re going to be a scientist. But you’re in an art class now.” She looked at me sternly. “You see, what I want to know is: what is it that does the dividing?” And she was looking around for another hand.

I’d failed again.

But nobody else answered either.

“Well,” she said, making another slash across the paper, “what’s that?” She made still another — only this one was a wavery curve. “And that.” It was kind of a squiggle. “And that.” The next was a longer, softer curve.

Someone had apparently gotten the idea and called out: “Lines!”

Gwenny loped across the room, grabbed the very startled boy by both cheeks. (For an instant I thought she was about to strike him for some unimaginable infraction!) She kissed his forehead loudly. “Yes, my little strawberry-custard confection! Lines!” She stepped back to clasp her hands again. “That’s exactly what they are!” For a moment, the rest of us were as startled as he. Then, once more, we laughed. But Gwenny had our attention, and as soon as she spoke again we fell into (anxious) quiet. “So, we have two things now that go to make up a picture: shapes and lines. But there must be something else.” She furrowed her face, began to pull at her chin. Walking slowly by the low counter where the gallon cans of watercolors stood on their ledge, circled with stalactites of lazuli and alizarin, she gazed into them. “I wonder… what… it… could… be?”

The stripped-down quality of her esthetic had registered. (I had my own suspicion as to the answer, but I’d failed twice and wasn’t going to be caught out a third time.) Someone called out: “Paint!”

“Paint?” Gwenny pondered the paint pots. “But what do we put the paint on a picture for? What do we use the paint to achieve?”

Why I blurted it through my initial hesitations I don’t know: “Color…!”

Gwenny looked up at me, scarlet-nailed hand splayed across her mouth in glaring astonishment. Then the hand swung out toward me, over the class’s heads, and the gesture became a grandly blown kiss, as flamboyant as any by fat, black Rose Murphy. “Color…! Yes, color! I kiss you too, my little mocha eclair!” (In my seat under the window I went tumbling down into the pools of hopeless devotion to this brazen-voiced redhead.) “How could we have pictures without colors! So — ” she addressed the whole class once more — “we have three things that make up a picture. What are they, now — ?”

Shape, line, and color…

“What are they, again?”

Shape, line, and color!

“Once more…”

Shape, line, and color!

What I knew was that we were chanting and having great fun doing it. What I didn’t know was that we were inscribing the tenets of a formalist esthetic on the pedestal of our souls.

In the essay from which I’ve taken my epigraph, Calvin Tomkins locates the same three terms in the same order to describe the esthetic of minimalism — that austere outgrowth of abstract expressionism that came to the fore in the late sixties, once the first furor over pop art had died down. But it was back in September of 1951 that these three terms rang out in the art room on the sixth floor at 89th Street — as they had rung for a handful of Septembers already.

“But there’s still one problem,” Gwenny returned to the tacked-up paper. “How do we put the shapes, lines, and colors together in our pictures?”

“With a brush!” someone volunteered, brightly.

“With a brush!” Gwenny declared, darkly.

Then she repeated, “With a brush…”

Now she made a sour face: “With a brush…”

Breathlessly we waited to see what these accents meant.

It was disdain, but what sort none of us knew.

“With a brush…?” Gwenny shook her head. “Oh, you’re just too clever by half!” Again she took up the crayon. “Pay attention now. Because this isn’t easy. I’m going to put a shape in my picture. But do I put it up here, like this — ?” She drew another amoeboid, but it began in the corner, and in a moment she was drawing off the paper and on the wall itself.

“No!” we chorused.

“Well, why not?”

Someone called: “Because it goes off the paper!”

“Yes,” Gwenny admitted. “But I want you to say that in another way.”

So we tried for a while. Pretty soon we came up with, “It goes over the edge.”

“And what edge is that?” Gwenny prompted.

A minute later, we’d ascertained that it was the outside edge of the picture that was her perimeter of concern.

“So, once more. What is it that makes up a picture?” Shape, line, and color! (We knew we were to chant it with her and came in on cue.) “And how do we arrange them, in order to make it a picture?” (By now we knew the second part of it too.) “In relationship to the outside edge! That’s wonderful. Now, go, loves, and spend the rest of the period making just the most beautiful paintings in the world!”

We broke from our seats for the paints and papers around us that, for the last ten minutes of Gwenny’s lesson, I, for one, had been itching for.

I was a little surprised just how single-minded Gwenny was about her formalism. While I was looking at my own edge, looking at my paints, and arranging blue, green, and brown expressionist blobs as carefully as I could, Debbie came up to her and asked for help in painting a… cat. As I overheard and watched from my eye’s corner (while I worked on my own abstraction), I wondered if cats were not as forbidden here as horizon lines. But before the paper spread out on the counter next to mine, Gwenny stood beside Debbie’s shoulder and said, “Now, you’ve got your color. You’ve got your paper. You want to paint a cat. But basically, you’re going to put a shape on your paper — if it’s a cat shape, that’s certainly all right with me. But run your eyes all around the outside edge — go ahead, do it, look at it. Now think about the shape you’re going to put there. Is it going to be a little tiny shape like this…?” Gwen balled up her knuckle and put it down in one corner of the paper.

“No…!” Debbie laughed.

“Is it going to be a great big shape like this…?” With both hands Gwenny outlined a form even bigger than the paper.

“No!” Debbie protested; she was really a very serious girl. “I won’t get it all in!”

“Well, you just look at that outside edge, think about your cat shape. Then you put it down.”

Debbie bit her lip — and looked up, down, sideways. A moment later, she turned her paper around ninety degrees, so that it was the long way, and began to paint a large green tabby.

Soon I learned, though, that despite her formalism, Gwenny would acknowledge talent even when it came in late-romantic terms. I did the required abstract pictures and got a fair amount of praise for them. But a year later, without prelude, I turned to a figurative subject: my own, I thought. But the technique was pure Nagy, supplemented by what I’d learned of color modeling from a thick book that sat on my cousin Boyd’s desk in his refinished attic bedroom out in New Jersey. Illustration, by Andrew Loomis, was full of color charts and composition diagrams. It was called Illustration, but what Loomis really wanted to teach his readers was how to paint pin-up girls and athletes, neither of which, as picture topics, particularly excited me. Still, it was only a step away from the comic book art of Frazetta, Williamson, Krenkel, and Wood that was my first, visual love. So, in one corner of the busy art room, with just a little sketching that only one student noticed, I began a picture of a mighty-muscled potentate, seated on his throne, turned three-quarters face — which Loomis had explained was far more dramatic than a full front or full profile — chin on his fist and looking stern. His robes trailed the throne steps. Rising columns and smoking braziers loomed in the foreground.

“What are you drawing it first for?”

“Nothing.” But I was sketching it first because that’s what Loomis said you should do (emphasizing that you not put in much detail, but only basic forms), though I was sure Gwenny, who by now had also told us about “love of the materials,” wouldn’t have countenanced it.

The setting had come from one of Mr. Loomis’s harem scenes, odalisques banished and replaced by a hulking body builder I’d glimpsed inside a newsstand muscle magazine, where, somehow, the focus on the gleaming shoulders and shadowed belly had been sharp enough for me to notice on the great blocky fist that the lowering Hercules bit his nails. From my terror of homoerotic sexual discovery, in this school version I’d clothed him a bit better. But the background was Loomis’s arches, windows, and steps, only with his bevy of busty, gauzily-veiled maidens removed. The foreground columns and braziers were Loomis’s as well. (Probably he’d swiped both from Parish or Alma Tedema.) Emptied of Loomis’s sexual symbols (and replaced, yes, with my own), the picture was one I’d tried in my sketchbook half a dozen times over spring vacation back in Jersey. But now, in the sixth-floor art room, as I painted at my wholly borrowed amalgam of visual clichés, not only did the students crowd around, but finally Gwenny pushed up to see what I was doing and pronounced with some surprise: “That’s really very beautiful!”

From then on I was treated as someone talented at art. But I had been as prepared for her to be as dismissive of the whole counterfeit pastiche as she had once been of the horizon lines, the vanishing points, and the basic forms that, now hidden behind layers of gouache, had made that pastiche draftable.

Our science teacher was also an artist. Some years before, he’d married the woman who had been my teacher in the five-year-olds, magically changing her name (I never quite understood how) from Rubins to Robus.

If both last names had not been initial-R trochees, I probably would have understood the process. But for me, it was a transformation, rather than a replacement, and thus remained mysterious.

Hugo, as we called Mr. Robus, had a sculpture — Woman Washing Her Hair — in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. I had pleaded to have him as my homeroom teacher (“to be put into his House,” in the school’s idiosyncratic jargon), and, with my friend Robert, I had been. In a way, Gwenny was too much a total surround for me to think of her as a favorite teacher — though she was certainly my most influential. But the title of favorite went to Hugo. He didn’t look in the least like John Nagy. He was clean shaven. When he taught, he always wore a white shirt and, usually, a tie. If the lab, with its wooden tables, glass-cased cupboards, and chrome gas jets, was warm, sometimes he left his sports jacket off. Whenever I came physically near him, I always thought of (but never once mentioned) Woman Washing Her Hair. Yet the little electric lights, the single-pole/double-throw switches, and the voltmeters and ampmeters Hugo taught us to wire up, the Lyden jars and Bunsen burners he taught us to operate, the test tubes, retorts, and pipettes he showed us how to fill and empty to precise measure, were all he ever spoke of. For me he was a scientist, and when I was around him, that’s what I wanted to be, too.

Oh, maybe, like Hugo, I’d have something in a museum somewhere, or a novel that you could buy in a bookstore, or a concerto that, while I was working with a hydrogen bubble chamber in an atomic lab someplace, was, even that same evening, being performed by a major symphony orchestra.

But science was my center.

Robert was among my best school friends — often my very best. Blond and round faced (yes, the strawberry custard confection), he was an inveterate nail biter and a general oddball. He tended to become splutteringly overexcited about things, and in many ways he was an immature and, often, an awkward boy. An early motor difficulty, which had caused him to clutch his pencil or pen in both hands when he wrote or to steady one hand with the other when he pointed at something, had settled into a slight clumsiness, most of the time unnoticeable. And he was as goodhearted a friend as you could want. Freddy the Pig books had been our early shared enthusiasm. Now it was Heinlein’s science fiction juveniles and amateur electronics. Our friendship dated from our first weeks together in the five-year-olds, when, on the first day of school, Robert had been the object of some truly vicious teasing. Sometimes I would pull away from him, but when I had been betrayed by Jeff or bullied by Jonathan (and Robert’s and my friendship had survived its own betrayals), Robert was whom I came back to.

In Robert’s penthouse apartment, just a block down from the school, a year before we got our own, I saw my first television set. The show we watched that evening was Burr Tillstrom’s Kukla, Fran and Ollie.

Then, a few months later, we were on television — together!

It was a cowboy show, where three or four children sat around on a corral fence, while, for five minutes at the beginning and five minutes at the end of the program, the chapped and Stetsoned star talked about the ancient Republic Pictures serial that filled the bulk of the airtime. Robert’s mother had arranged it and was to take the two of us to the studio. Robert wore jeans and sneakers, as we always did at school. But in light of my public appearance, Mom had sent me in that day in a suit and tie. As we didn’t have a TV yet, she didn’t know what the other kids on the show usually wore — and certainly wasn’t about to let me tell her: “But Mom, it’s a cowboy show — ”

“Just because it’s a cowboy show doesn’t mean you can’t look nice. You put on your tie, now!”

At the studio, the director’s assistant, a young woman in a purple blouse, slacks (not that common on women in the ’50s), and glasses, frowned at me, then told me to take off my suit jacket, in order to “dress me down.” Then someone said I’d have to put it back on, since my white shirt, even with the jacket covering most of it, would glare. (More than anything else, TV was responsible, during the ’50s, for the ascendancy of the Oxford blue shirt.) They asked me to take my tie off. I did; and decided they were really nice people. Then they opened my shirt collar as wide as they could under my tightly buttoned-up suit coat — and gave me a ten-gallon hat to make me look “more informal.”

Several times my mother had taken me to see radio programs. Although I’d been disappointed that the shows were not really acted, but simply read out from sheaves of flimsy paper by ordinary men and women standing around on an empty stage, one had been in a full-sized theater with balconies and the other in a hangar-like space that had seated at least three hundred. But this was a one-camera show, done live, in a studio only a hair’s breadth bigger than our bathroom at home. In his soiled white shirt, the cameraman chain smoked (like my father), and when I asked, “Won’t his cigarette smoke get in front of the lens and make it cloudy?” the assistant laughed and said, “If his cigarette bothers you, I’ll ask him to put it out. He’s not supposed to be smoking in here, anyway.”

“No!” I said, abashed at not being taken seriously. “It doesn’t bother me! I was just wondering about the camera, that’s all!”

But my greatest, silent astonishment there was that the desert background which, on Robert’s television only the night before, had stretched infinitely far behind the length of corral fence, with a couple of cactuses standing among distant dunes and sagebrush, was only painted cloth, a foot higher than the star’s head, and with a sag along the top! The whole desert (not to mention the prop fence before it) was not as wide as Robert and I laid together, toe to head!

But the very bright lights were already on.

Already we were more or less positioned.

My next surprise was one that has surprised me all over, every time I’ve been on a talk show or guest interview since: the unruptured continuity from non-air time to air time.

We four kids had been on monitor for fifteen minutes now and had gotten used to it. (Or would never get used to it: the other boy, who’d come with his father, kept staring back and forth from the TV screen in the studio corner to the camera in the middle of the room, unable to understand why, when he turned to look at himself, his image on the screen looked away, so that he could never get his screen self to look directly at his own face.) Standing beside the camera, wearing earphones and a green, open-necked shirt, dark as the sea, the director gave all his attention to his clipboard.

Only the red light coming on above the camera lens told us that the studio had changed from a cramped cell with flaking gray paint on the walls and a very shiny clock with a red second-hand jerking about it above the door, to a dream presentation vaster than Arizona and replicated unto gray thousands. It was a transition wholly without emotional weight, thoroughly technological, hidden within some nacelle of wires and timed to a clock in another room we couldn’t see.

In the same voice with which he’d been asking us if we were comfortable, was I secure on the rail there, if the party dress of the girl who sat beside me was caught under her leg (“No sir! It’s fine!”), the star in his chaps and cowboy hat said, as though he were continuing to talk to us or to people like us who, for some reason, weren’t quite there: “Well, boys and girls, it’s good to see you all back again. This evening, as our guests, we have Billy and Suzy and Bobby and Sammy…”

I’d never heard anyone call Robert “Bobby” before. And I loathed the name “Sammy.” Yet, before the metallic lights like white-hot holes in the walls, in almost no time he was saying (in the same voice in which he’d been addressing uncountable ghost children), “All right, that’s all there is to it. For now, anyway. Or at least for the next fifteen minutes.”

The red light was off.

The dream was on hold — or had switched beyond us to another of its infinitely malleable, endlessly linkable segments.

“You can get down. Just don’t go too far, so we can all get back together for the closing part of the show.”

Suzy (if she was any more “Suzy” than I was “Sammy” or Robert was “Bobby”) climbed down from the fence. I got down too. Billy was still staring from camera to monitor. Robert just jumped. “Can we go watch the movie now?”

“Aw…!” The star leaned back and folded his large, clean hands before his silver buckle, as though this were the single sadness in his generally joyful job. “I’m sorry! But that’s done from an entirely different building, way over on the other side of town. And we aren’t hooked up to that cable. But we’ll be back on the air in just a while…”

I took off my ten gallon hat and looked for the director’s assistant to give it to. She was at my elbow a moment later. “Don’t you want to keep that,” she said as I turned to her, “till the show’s over?”

Though my family did not yet have a TV, the Hunts, who lived in a cramped apartment on the second floor in the building next door to our private house, did. (Their daughter, Laura, a girl six months older than I, was supposed to be “engaged” to me, so ran the joke among the other black children along the Harlem block.) Dad and Mom and my sister were all going over there to watch.

Robert’s mother stopped in with us at a coffee shop after the show and we got hamburgers. So we didn’t get back to my house till about seven.

“What in the world happened to your tie?” Mom demanded when I walked in.

“I’ve got it on…?” I looked down at myself in conscientious bewilderment. (How carefully I’d knotted it again before the mirror above the sink in the studio’s blue phonebooth of a bathroom.)

“But you didn’t have it on the show!”

And I was surprised all over: I actually had been on television! Thousands of people really had seen me!

“They made me take it off,” I said, wondering now if it wasn’t really me who’d made the suggestion. What was it they’d said about the glare from my shirt? Maybe I’d just looked silly in a suit and an open collar… But Mom seemed to think it was more funny than not. And when Dad came upstairs from the ground-floor funeral parlor, he didn’t say anything — maybe he hadn’t actually gone over to the Hunts’ and seen me…?

A year or so later Robert provided me with the most sexually exciting few hours of my childhood.

I had met Robert’s father a few times. A physically vast, gray-haired man, the elderly and successful Scotsman was notably senior to his German-American wife. Then, one year, just before school started, my mother put down the phone to tell me: “Aunt Kay just told me that Robert’s father died this summer! That’s so sad for his mother. And the boy, too. He’s had such a rough time.” She meant Robert’s motor problems that had, by now, all but vanished and whose faintest lingerings I never noticed anymore.

When I saw Robert again in school, I was a little scared for the first minutes, wondering if his having a dead father would make him any different. But he looked just the same as before. And soon — almost — I’d forgotten it.

That spring vacation, for the first time, Robert invited me to come up to his summer house. (April’s cruelties, as Chaucer knew, have a certain thread of generosity woven through them.) His family had a farm outside New Paltz, and his mother — who’d gone back to work as a nurse in a hospital — would drive us up there.

Our own family’s summer place in Hopewell Junction was a small affair. But it was sort of a farm — at least for several years my father had grown a field of corn behind it. We had a dozen acres of woods. And one summer Dad had raised a matte-black coop of chickens and, another, stilted up five feet from the guano-splatted ground and walled with octagonal wire, a house full of turkeys.

But what Robert’s mother (us in the back seat of the station wagon) finally pulled up to was, after our two-hour drive, a sprawling three-story farmhouse, with an even more sizable barn set off from it. There were several fields, a forest, a sloping lawn, and even a pond on the property. There were a number of cows, some ducks, and a rambunctious dog, who lolloped out of the barn to leap on and lick all over us as we got out of the car. His name was King, after the dog on the Sargeant Preston of the Yukon radio show, Robert explained. Robert and I both listened to it each week at home (a booming, slightly anglicized baritone, which meant Canada in the 1950s: “On, King! On, you huskies…!”), along with Superman, The Green Hornet, and The Lone Ranger — television was still, at that time, an expensive novelty more than anything else.

How the farm was managed when Robert and his mother weren’t there, I don’t recall. But the system of live-in hands and visiting caretakers was explained to me satisfactorily enough at the time.

That first afternoon, Robert’s mother had to drive into town. A little later, the hand who was about had to go off in his own car. Being left alone fit in perfectly with a plan I’d had in mind for some time now.

Though Robert was my friend, he was not a part of the pre-adolescent afternoon sexual carryings-on I engaged in in the showers of our school basement after swimming. That circle of initiates included Raymond, Wally, Vladdy, and — sometimes — Jonathan. There was another tall boy in our class, Arthur, another bully, who knew something was happening and, when Jonathan wasn’t there to tell him to get lost, would occasionally barge naked into our gray marble changing booth and threaten to tell: the menace from Arthur far outweighed any threat from the Phys. Ed. teacher or his assistant — who simply wanted to stay as far as possible from the wet, naked, screaming, towel-snapping Sixth and Seventh Graders.

But I couldn’t see why Robert wouldn’t like it as much as the rest of us. Awkward as he was, though, I decided it would probably be better if I broke him in myself before I brought him to the others. These sexual explorations were carried on almost wholly without words — only partially because of Arthur. So you had to know what to do, or at least be able to figure it out without making noise.

When, once, Arthur finally did confront our regular Phys. Ed. teacher with an accusation, the t-shirted man put his hands on his hips, looked at the tall, belligerent boy, and, with a contemptuous jerk of his head, asked, “How come you’re so interested in stuff like that? Nobody likes squealers — about anything. But you keep on talking about this kind of stuff, somebody’s going to start wondering why you’re so curious and concerned about it all…” which left the boy surprised, silent, and probably confused.

But the rest of us were miraculously off the hook.

Today I suspect this was just our gym teacher’s (wholly homophobic) way of dealing with a situation he’d probably encountered many times in ten or fifteen years of teaching athletics.

But more recently, a male history teacher had been temporarily assigned to supervise the afternoon swim activities, and, wandering through the labyrinth of marble-walled shower and changing stalls, he must have overheard something, so waited outside ours for a good five or ten minutes, listening. Finally, still in his bathing suit, he stepped around, where three of the five of us had completely abandoned ours, and announced nervously: “What you’re doing is sick!” He was a tall, sunken-chested man, who never looked very happy. “You know, that’s very sick, now. I should report this. You just don’t understand how dangerous what you’re doing is. This is much more serious than you think — you don’t understand it. What you’re doing is very sick…!”

We froze in naked guilt. Then Wally, the most aggressive of us, suddenly declared, mockingly: “Well, I think you’re sick!” Then he let an ululating hoot, that ended in a kind of grunting, idiot laugh. Was he returning the intimidation to the teacher the way our gym coach had done with Arthur? Wally was the class clown anyway and, probably from nervousness, had simply blurted the most outrageous thing he could think of. Still, maybe he had some notion that moving our actions from the simply sinful into the truly insane — certainly the effect his words, wail and cackle had on me — might, somehow, save us. The history teacher blinked, said nothing, then — suddenly — walked away. And for the next anxious week, I wondered if we were to be punished. But in the end there was no more fall-out from his discovery than from Arthur’s. And so, after a hiatus of three or four days, we resumed.

But this was why you had to be on your toes to join in. And had to be quiet. On your toes was not the place Robert ordinarily stood — unless he had some coaching. But he was a smart kid and learned quickly. This country visit, now we were alone on the farm, seemed as good a time as any for me to start him out.

Our shoes and socks off, we were wandering around the grass. We’d been told we weren’t supposed to go into the livestock part of the barn barefoot. So we didn’t. But I started horsing around with Robert. Wrestling together on the hem of a haystack, I made a couple of grabs for his crotch. Once I got my hand down his baggy corduroys and made tickling motions between his legs.

“Don’t do that!” Robert protested.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” I said. “That doesn’t feel good?” I grinned.

He frowned. “It doesn’t feel anything,” he said. “It’s just silly.”

So much for my attempt, positioned (as are pretty much all early acts of desire, however clumsy) so ambiguously between the selfish and the compassionate, to introduce Robert to our puerile pleasures. But he was not very physically developed anyway. That seemed to be the end of it. So I didn’t try again.

Now we threw sticks for lolloping, golden King. And got tired of it.

Then Robert brought me over to show me his ducks. With King nosing up at his elbow, Robert leaned over the half door in the barn’s side, pointing around in the indoor duck pen. He told me that the fat, white, waddling birds had been given him that summer. During their stays on the farm, they were his responsibility. When they were sold, in a few months, Robert was going to get a third of the money. They had to be kept very calm and quiet, he explained, or they’d get all tough, and you wouldn’t be able to eat them.

At some point, we decided to let the ducks go for a (calm and quiet) swim in the pond down the slope. But to do it, we’d have to tie up inquisitive King — otherwise, Robert explained, he’d kill them.

Between us, we decided to hold the dog, let out the ducks, then put King in the duck pen and leave him there while the ducks enjoyed the water. I held onto King’s collar, while Robert opened the lower half of the door — King nearly yanked me over.

Ducks flapped, fled, and quacked.

“They’re not supposed to do that!” Robert cried. But once they’d scurried off a few feet, the birds turned placidly toward the pond and started over the grass, while Robert and I got King into the pen and closed the bottom half of the door.

The ducks seemed to know exactly where the pond was, and went ambling, amiably and loudly, toward it.

Robert had locked the bottom half of the Dutch door; but he’d only pulled the top half closed. It must have swung in a crack. King nosed it open — at a bark I turned to see brown and gold rise up, arch over, and out! With another bark, there were dog and ducks all over the grass.

Robert cried, “Oh, Jesus Christ — !”

We ran after them. I wasn’t too sure how you were supposed to pick up a terrified duck, and didn’t want to learn by trial and error. I hadn’t had much experience with barefoot running, and did it gingerly in the cool grass. Friendly enough before, King was practically as big as we were and didn’t want to be stopped!

Nearly in hysterics, skidding after one of his frightened charges, Robert slipped in the grass, then clambered to his feet, yelling, “No…! No…!” He tried to chase the dog away from the honking ducks, grabbing one of the earthbound birds. “No…! They’re not supposed to run…! They’ll be all ruined…! No…!”

I ran around as much as I could, wishing that Robert wasn’t so upset and that we could treat it more like a game. Once, when he finally got hold of one, I ran over to see. The yellow web raked repeatedly at Robert’s belly (duck’s feet have claws, too), where his blue t-shirt had ridden up from his pants. Once, behind its beak, a dark red eye turned to sweep mine, not seeing me or Robert (my sudden panic insight) as any less menacing than King — who leapt and leapt, trying to bite the bird, while Robert turned away to protect it with his body from King’s eager jaws. Near them, for one moment I saw, among the snowy feathers, cushioned around Robert’s scratched-up hands, a single and, in the midst of the hysteria, scary smear of duck blood.

“Get him away…! Get him away! Bad King! Bad dog! Get him away…!”

So I chased King back —

— who careered off, down to the pond, where two ducks had already reached the water. King went splashing right in, throwing up a steel-bright sheet that angled above the grass and fell as spray.

Running down, I stopped at the lake’s edge. Robert went splatting in, fell, coughing and crying, got to his feet, and leapt on King, while pushing a flapping white bird away over the water.

Once I saw it wasn’t deep, I waded in after them and helped Robert haul King back to the grass.

The ducks clustered, honking, at the pond’s far side.

Holding onto the wet dog collar with Robert, while sopping King pulled against us, I realized — as I tugged, shoulder to shoulder with him — how upset Robert was. “Bad King…!” He hiccuped and cried, even as we got the dog up on the bank. We had to haul King back to the barn. “You damned dog — !” Once Robert kicked at the beast with his naked foot. King tried to dash away again.

“Come on, Robert — ”

Then King decided to shake himself.

Robert let go and started crying again.

Under the splatter I pursed my lips, turned away my face, tightened my hold and, knuckles deep in wet fur, with the smell of dripping dog all around me, pulled King forward.

As he clipped the dog onto the leash that he’d tied to one of the barn posts, Robert started crying once more. (We were still barefoot and were in the barn against orders, but there hadn’t been anything else to do.) “They’re all ruined and tough, now! Nobody’ll eat them…!”

“I think we better get them back into the pen anyway, huh?”

King barked a few times as we walked away. We stepped off the straw- and pebble-strewn planks and onto soil, patterned with tire tracks and packed down, now, with our footprints, then onto the grass.

With King out of the way, we herded the ducks out of the pond, up the slope, and back to their pen. The duck that had been bleeding seemed to have gotten washed off by her swim and was okay now. None of them looked too much the worse. I thought that would be the end of it.

But Robert was desolate.

“Look — ” I tried to be practical — “nobody was around and saw us. You don’t have to tell anybody it happened, do you?” We were standing under a tree. The sky was overcast, and I thought we should go inside. “You could always pretend that it didn’t — ”

“That isn’t the point!” Robert’s face was dirty. His hair was wet. Tears still streaked his cheeks. “They were my responsibility! And now nobody’ll be able to eat them!”

“Well, maybe,” I said, “since they were only running around five or six minutes — ” It had seemed to take hours while it had been happening; but it hadn’t, I realized now, been all that long — “it won’t make them that tough.”

This seemed to be an argument that he could partially accept. He wiped his nose.

Then he turned and shouted: “That god-damned dog!” The profanity fit in Robert’s mouth as awkwardly as it would have in mine.

I said: “Let’s go inside until your mom gets back.”

As we walked across the grass toward the farmhouse’s white steps that went up to the kitchen porch, occasionally Robert would sort of quiver — and now and then sniffle as though he were going to start crying again. Through the whole thing, I hadn’t really been upset. But, once more, lost between compassion for my friend and a selfish worry that his state would ruin the rest of my visit, I decided I had to say something that would change things.

“Robert,” I said. “Your father’s dead.”

He turned to me and blinked — either because what I’d said was true, or because I’d voiced the fact that, certainly, no one else among our classmates had yet dared speak to him of.

“You probably feel like you’re responsible for everything.”

He stopped.

We looked at each other.

We were both wet. Our shirts were out of our pants. Buttons were missing. Our clothes and faces and arms were stuck all over with grass blades, duck down, and leaf bits. Robert had more cuts and scratches than I did. But I had a bruised knee, and there was a tear in my shirtsleeve where King’s tooth had torn it, raking down my forearm to leave the smallest trickle of blood — which I’d decided not to mention to anyone, since back at school Hugo had told us about rabies injections directly into the stomach wall and how much they hurt. It just didn’t seem necessary.

“You didn’t do it on purpose, Robert,” I went on. “It wasn’t your fault. And it’s probably not going to be as bad as you think, anyway.”

Robert blinked, sniffed, then shook his head, with small quick motions, as if to say I just didn’t understand at all.

“A duck gets tough from running around and exercising and things the same way a… a body builder’s muscles get big and tough.” I had no idea what made a duck tough — or tender. But it sounded good, even scientific.

“I know,” Robert said. “I’ve got a lot of responsibility, now. My mom says so.” There were still tears in his voice, but they were not the tense, terrified tears of someone fighting the descent into deeper and deeper misery but the easier tears of someone rising at last toward reason — a distinction children can all make, though sometimes adults forget it.

“Robert, a duck would have to run around a lot more than five minutes to grow that kind of muscle!”

He actually smiled a little. The notion of those quacking pillows with muscles like the pictures in the Charles Atlas advertisements on the back of the comics we traded was funny.

Inside we got washed up. Looking in the medicine cabinet, I volunteered to put mercurochrome on his scratches, but Robert decided against it.

“It’s iodine that stings — ”

“I know. I still don’t want it. I’ll be all red and look funny.”

That evening, after his mother got back, and we were at the kitchen table eating hot dogs and baked beans (both of us still barefoot, but cleaner and drier), Robert, with a mouthful of frank, told her:

“The ducks got out this afternoon. King almost caught them. But we got them back in.”

“That’s good,” his mother said. “You know, Bill told you, when he said you could take care of them, they’re not supposed to run around too much — or they won’t be fit to eat!”

That was all there was to it.

I could hear, neither in his words nor hers, no trace of the physical exertion or moral despair the adventure had put Robert — and me — through.

That evening Robert’s mother told us she had arranged a trip for us the next morning. The farm’s cows generally produced two full milk cans a day. When the milk driver came to pick up the farm’s milk, we would join him and ride the rest of his run to the dairy. We were to be up and ready by five.

Robert told me he had been on the trip before and that the milk truck driver, Eric, was a great guy. Robert’s mother added that Eric had worked on the farm back when he was a teenager. Her husband had always liked him. Then Eric had gone away for a year — into the armed forces. But he’d been back awhile now, and for the last two months he’d been just as nice and as helpful — well, she didn’t know what she’d have done without him! So that night, I went to sleep in a small room with a sloping ceiling, and Robert went to bed in his own room — “Because you two can’t talk all night if you have to get up at four-thirty in the morning,” Robert’s mother told me, turning out my light.

I’d wondered if I should make another stab at introducing Robert to sex once we were in bed — Robert could be slow about things. But since we weren’t in the same room, I decided — again — to forget it. I turned over under the country comforter, and went to sleep.

Getting up in the middle of the night was kind of interesting.

“Oh, don’t worry,” Robert’s mother said. “It won’t be dark for long.”

Down in the kitchen, by the time we finished our cornflakes, the windows had lightened to an indigo as deep as evening’s.

Robert got in an argument with his mother about whether we could go on the ride barefoot.

“Running around the farm is one thing,” she told us. “But you don’t know where you’re going. So I want you both to put some shoes on. Now!”

“But I know where I’m going!” Robert insisted. “I’ve been there before!”

“And I don’t want to argue anymore! Put your shoes on, or I will phone Eric right this minute and tell him that you’re not coming!” She stepped toward the phone — which got a capitulatory squeal from Robert.

She was angry, too.

Robert’s mother actually had a pretty short temper — shorter than my mom’s, anyway. I wondered if that came from having her husband die.

We sat at the table, bending down, Robert to tie his sneakers, me to lace my shoes.

Then, outside, we heard a truck.

“That’s Eric!” Robert cried. We were both up and out the door, with Robert’s mom behind us.

The milk truck was just a little bigger than a pickup. The back was open, and a dozen upright milk cans stood in it from previous farm stops. A lanky guy with bronze hair under a red cap was already hoisting up our two (filled by the electric milking machine Bill in the barn had shown us working the evening before).

“Mornin’, ma’am. Hey, Robert — this your little friend from New York City? Howdy, there!” Squatting on the open tailgate, Eric grinned. “You two fellas ain’t gonna give me no trouble now, are ya’?” He pushed up his cap visor and reached over to shake my hand.

Robert’s mother said: “I’ve told them they have to do everything you say.”

As I took Eric’s hand to shake, I saw that for all his hard, country-soiled calluses, he was as bad a nail-biter as Robert. It gave me a kind of start.

Twenty-three or twenty-four, with a pleasant smile but not a whole lot of chin, Eric was a gangling, good-natured, upstate farmboy. His jeans were frayed at knee and cuff. His high-laced workshoes were big, scuffed, and muddy. His plaid shirt was rolled up from forearms showing an anchor and an eagle from his Navy stint. “Don’t worry, ma’am,” he said to Robert’s mother, standing now and pulling his cap visor back down. He jumped to the ground. “I’ll have these little guys back here by eight-thirty, nine o’clock in the morning — at the latest.” He pushed up the tailgate, clanked it to, and stuck in the iron bolt on its jingling chain that held it closed, hammered on it once with his big hand’s hard heel, then walked us around to the cab, where the door — the truck sat on a slope — hung open. “Come on, now, you two. Get on up in there. Bye, now, ma’am.”

“Bye, Eric. You two be good, now, and do what Eric tells you!”

That milk run through the paling New Paltz dawn was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me.

As Eric grasped the wheel (the top arc covered with oil-blackened carpet, fixed at the ends with electrician’s tape), to haul us round onto the road, one wheel chunked down and up, into and out of, a pothole. “God-damn, if that ain’t some shit!” Eric broke out, then glanced over. “Now you ain’t gonna tell on me, huh? You let your mom know I’m cussin’ around you little fuckers like this, an’ you’ll never see my ass again! You two remember that, you hear me?”

Yeah, sure. We nodded vigorously. Oh, his friend would never say anything about something like that, Robert spoke for me — as if his own assurance had been given long ago.

Over the next thirty yards of bumpy road, however (we were still not off Robert’s property), by the time we reached the highway, I’d realized that, while — if he had to — Eric could maintain country decorum with farmers’ wives and mothers, turned loose in a truck with a pair of boys he became the most foul-mouthed man I’d ever met!

Of course I’d heard “bad words” shouted in anger on Harlem streets. But this open joviality was as heavily weighted with profanity and scatology as speech could bear. Nor was it bawled in the anonymous urban distances. It was directed, without an ounce of ire, straight at Robert and me — “How you little shit-asses doin’ in that fuckin’ school you fuckin’ go to down in that ol’ shit-ass city?… You messin’ ’round with that science-crap, huh? I never knowed shit about no fuckin’ science. Or pretty much about no school-shit either. But you bastards are probably pretty smart little sons of bitches about all that fuckin’ shit now, ain’t ya’?” Then, when he would gun the truck to pass a rare car out on the early road, he’d grunt toward the window, “Suck my fuckin’ asshole, cocksucker!” Then, back to us with mock frustration: “What do these early mornin’ fuckheads think they’re goddamn doin’ anyway, this fuckin’ early, on the fuckin’ highway, gettin’ in shit and everybody’s fuckin’ way besides? Trippin’ over their goddamn dicks like they left their fuckin’ flies open!”

I and I guess Robert, too, were in ecstasy!

We had to stop at one more farm to pick up a last milk can before going on to the dairy. “A fuckin’ little one-can shit hole — and that can ain’t never fuckin’ full. I’m not supposed to take the fucker if it ain’t fuckin’ full. But I’m a soft-hearted son-of-a-bitch; so I do it. Now your daddy — ” this to Robert — “he always kept a hell of a good-lookin’ farm. And your mom’s done pretty well by it since. But this ol’ shit hole we’re goin’ to now ain’t worth a damned dog turd!” The farmhouse we came up to, though, looked as neat as it could — if a lot smaller than Robert’s. Unshaven, with bib-overalls and long johns beneath them, a heavyset, elderly man came out; and without noticeable transition Eric managed once more to put his profanations aside. “Hello, sir. How you doin’ this mornin’, sir?”

“Hi, there, Eric. You want me to give you a hand up with that can — ?”

“No, sir!” Opening the door, Eric leapt from the cab. “No, sir — you don’t have to do nothin’ with it, sir. I’ll get it — that’s what they pay me for. So you just relax.”

From our seat in the cab, we heard Eric in the back, the can first rolling across gravel, then rasping on the truck bed.

From inside, we heard Eric call down from the truck, “How’s Bubba doin’?”

And from the ground the farmer answered, “Why, he’s doin’ just fine.”

“You tell ’im,” Eric said, “not to get in no trouble with that motorcycle.”

“Now, I’ll tell ’im just that.”

This apparently was some joke that set the two of them off laughing.

“You tell ’im,” Eric declared. “You tell Bubba that Eric said you was to tell him that!” (Eric pronounced his own name as one diphthongized, down-swung syllable that, for all the slurring of the Negro speech around me in Harlem I could sometimes assume, would have been beyond me.) “You tell ’im, I say!” They were still laughing. “Tell ’im! Don’t you forget it, now, neither!”

“Oh, I’ll teil ’im!”

Eric’s boots scudded on gravel. (In my mind I saw him vault.) A moment on, cap in hand, he swung up into the cab and slammed the door. “Bye, now, sir!” With one hand back and the other front, he tugged it over spiky hair the color of light coffee. “Bye, now — so long, sir!”

“Bye, Eric!”

Eric grabbed wheel and gearshift.

The motor revved beneath.

We started again.

“Now we’re fuckin’ outta here, boy — like pig-balls on butter! Let’s get the fuck on the road!”

We jogged along awhile. Eric kept up his banter. I remembered Robert’s awkward curses yesterday. By now Eric’s sentences seemed just as awkward when curses were missing. For, during this stop, I’d heard, as I hadn’t at Robert’s farm, the faint halts and false starts you couldn’t really write without burlesquing, that nevertheless told where a fuckin’ or a shit dearly yearned to fall.

“You know — ” We went round another curve, with Eric’s near elbow getting my ribs and me pushing Robert against the door (tools rattled in metal below the seat) — “when I throwed up the goddamn Navy an’ come the fuck home (Oh, they fuckin’ wanted me to stay but I told ’em to get fucked, I knew where I fuckin’ lived!), I shoulda gone the hell to Texas and been a goddamn cowboy, herdin’ fuckin steers and ropin’ fuckin’ calves — then I bet you little scumbags would really like shittin’ around with a wild-ass bastard like me!” He put his head back and sang out: “Whoopie-Fuckin’-Tye-Yi-Yippy-Shit-Ass-Yay! Well, now, hey — ” His gold-stubbled cheeks filled with air as he whistled, then his chin came down as we bounced over another stretch of broke-up macadam — “I bet I’d be a fuckin’ movie star by now, with fuckin’ fine music every time I turned the knob — that would be a goddamn sight better than rustlin’ fuckin’ milkcans for a bunch of shit-machine cows, you better believe your fuckin’ balls when they spit on ya’!” We bounced down the straightaway. “But it ain’t that fuckin’ bad around here, now, is it? You an’ your ma keep comin’ the fuck back.”

A few minutes later Eric pulled over again.

“Now don’t you two little peter-heads get all excited — we ain’t got there yet. I’m just takin’ a fuckin’ break to do somethin’ you can’t do for me.” He opened the cab door, dropped down to the shoulder, strode a few feet into the undergrowth, half squatted, then stood again. Rasping down his zipper, he hauled himself out, testicles and all, and began to spray grandly, goldenly, over leaves and logs and paired birch saplings. “Pick up the fuckin’ milk, then have to jump out an’ take me a fuckin’ leak — I do it ever’ mornin’, and ever’ mornin’ I’m goddamned for a sinner if I don’t fuckin’ forget.” Swinging his stream around, he turned to us, grinning.

The amber arc glittered through coppery leaf-dapple.

“You two assholes wanna come down here and have us a pee fight? I’ll drown the both of ya’, one ball tied behind my fuckin’ back!”

“No!” declared Robert, happy as I was. “You’d win!”

“I fuckin’ wouldn’t!” Eric protested as his stream lost its arch. Like Vladdy back in school, Eric was uncircumcised. Unlike Vladdy’s though, Eric’s cuff hung loose down over his knuckles, so that as it slid forward, the top interfering with his water, he splattered like a bright umbrella. Then the umbrella closed. Urine dribbled from his fist, wet his grimed fingers, dripped to the dried mud on his boot toe. “’Cause I just ran out of fuckin’ piss, an’ I don’t got me no more!” Shaking himself, he stuffed himself back in his pants. “Come on now, the two of you little bastards. Get on down here and irrigate some trees. I don’t want you sons-o’-bitches havin’ to go when there ain’t no fuckin’ place to do it at.”

So we got down and left our puddles in the ditch beyond the shoulder, then returned to the cab, where Eric sat, elbows on the wheel, sucking at his knuckles, biting at his cuticles. He glanced down at us from under his red visor.

“Get the fuck back on up here, now, ’fore I wail the piss out of you little shit-asses!” His grin held not a jot of aggression.

We climbed back into the cab, and Eric drove again. He talked about “… Jew-bastards. I guess some of them is as bad as ever’body says. But I knowed some that weren’t a hell of a lot worse than anybody else — though if I said that in the fuckin’ bar, some guy’d wanna pull me apart and shit on the pieces.” He talked about “wops.” There were, I guess, a lot of them in the Navy with him. “I just never understood the fuckers, is all. They all them Catholics an’ stuff,” and he shook his head. He talked about “niggers — Ooops!… Oh, shit! I done forgot. His momma told me, yesterday on the phone — you a nigger too, now, ain’t you? — to get me all prepared, so I wouldn’t start talkin’ no nigger shit: like this. Well, you sure as hell don’t look it — you could be a little wop kid, though. Or one of them Puerto Ricans. Well, now, it’s gonna always be like that with me: I open my fuckin’ mouth an’ I’m gonna stick my big toe — cowshit an’ all — right in it, till that ol’ fucker come out my fuckin’ ear like ya’ goddamn dick left hangin’ out ya’ pants and you don’t even know it!” He hauled on the wheel, went round a leafy curve, and leaned over to show us the side of his head. “See it there, that fucker wigglin’ out my ear? You look, you can see it. There it fuckin’ goes! Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle!” But, whether it was a penis or a toe, Robert and I were beyond offense and simply howled.

I wonder if the man thought it was his inane jokes that kept us in hysterics, or if he realized it was his scabrous vocabulary tickling us to our boyish cores. Could, indeed, we have made the distinction? Eric cussed out more potholes, more drivers, and speculated at length on the sexual habits of the waitress at the diner who’d served him breakfast that morning. (“Shit on a fuckin’ shingle, that’s what she gave me, I swear. Goddamn, it’s a fuckin’ miracle I’m still fuckin’ alive!”) His invective involved her with toothless octogenarians and several large barnyard animals, at a specificity quite beyond our nine-year-old minds to follow: “I’m sittin’ at the goddamn counter, being fuckin’ polite and thinkin’ ’bout my face full of pussy…” evoked a picture of Eric on a counter stool with a kitten trying to climb down from his head — while his speculations on whether the waitress was or wasn’t the sort who’d “give a fuckin’ donkey head with rusted-out braces an’ rotten teeth till the hairy bastard hee-hawed for mercy…” sailed by in an image worthy of Un Chien andalou, but devoid of information for Robert or me — though enough big monster-mule and little wormy pig dicks got sucked off, cut off, and rammed down this or that cocksucker’s throat, Lord knows, to make up for it. We couldn’t stop laughing anyway, as it all swirled around us in phallic confusion, a surreally mis-imagined haze.

Nor was it entirely monologue. Eric asked us more questions about life in the fuckin’ city, professing to each answer we gave his own smilingly indulgent terror of that fuckin’ place:

“When I was in that goddamn Navy they wanted to put me on a fuckin’ plane. I told them right the hell out, there was no fuckin’ way they was gonna get me up in one of them fuckin’ things! Well, I feel the same way about fuckin’ subways. I want the wheels on the fuckin’ road. Not twenty feet under it, or half a mile above it. On it. An’ that’s fuckin’ it!”

When the truck crunched onto the gravel beside the dairy, a guy in a blue uniform with white piping across the pockets and down the sides came out and, as Eric opened the cab door, called:

“Well how the hell are you?”

For a moment, as Eric climbed out, I thought we were entering some unimaginable world where all males talked like this. (“Got some kids with ya’,” the uniformed guy observed. “Yeah, I remember Robert, from last time.” And, to both of us, as we dropped down: “Hi, there.”) But the occasional hell, dang, damn, and goddamn we heard from the rest of the dairy workers as the morning rolled on were no more than ordinary, civilized slips, that vanished against the profane transgressions of Eric’s dithyrambic scatology.

Standing in the sun, I looked down at the gray stones graveling away before the building, thankful for my shoes as only a city child can be.

Grinning, Eric motioned to me. “Get over here, ya’ little shit-ass bastard.” Beside me, he bent and put one hand on my shoulder. “You stay the hell back, now, while me and a couple of these other cocksuckers unload them shit-ass milk cans down onto that fuckin’ chain-linked conveyer, right there — see?” He pointed with the other. “They carry the shit — ” clinking and wobbling, half a dozen, already on it, moved by the red brick wall — “till they go right through that fuckin’ archway, over there — you see it, now?” He smelled of earth and machine oil. “So you stay the fuck outta the way.” Then he dropped his hand, stood up, and went around to the truck back. “God-damn, get that big ol’ shit-ass fucker!” he’d shout, standing in the truck bed, leaning a can out to one of the men below — till finally one of the loaders objected:

“Come on, now! You better quit talkin’ like that, Garbage Mouth. You got kids around here! And they ain’t even yours. Maybe they haven’t been brought up to hear that kind of thing!”

From the truck, Eric grinned over at us: “Sorry, there.” He went back for another can. “Whyn’t you two go look around. We don’t want your goddamned little ears to wither up and fall off from the fuckin’ heat, listenin’ to our shit.”

“Your shit!” the other loader said sullenly, standing below. “Come on, now!”

So Robert and I went off to explore inside the building.

Robert had been here before and explained to me how everything had to be kept real clean — then let me wander off to see something on my own that didn’t much interest him. I strolled past tall aluminum equipment, slanted with salmon sun through high levered-out windows, to amble over the red, tessellated flooring slurred with milky spills — wondering what it would be like to walk through the white puddles barefoot. I probably looked like any ordinary kid, loafing around, gazing at the pasteurizing tanks, the homogenizing tubs, the cooling vats, the angled pipes and arching hoses that ran between gauges like clusters of clocks. I was still in a kind of profane trance, separated from the overtly sexual, at least in me, by a barrier no more substantial than a misty breath breathed out on a chill April dawn.

Once, in an empty corner (other than a few loaders and a foreman or two, all outside now, the workers didn’t come in till eight-thirty: so the dairy proper was deserted), I stopped by bare brick. Asbestos-covered pipes ran up to the high roof. Then I felt down inside my pants. What, before, I’d suspected, now I confirmed: back in the truck, about when Eric had scorched the Texas plains, I’d wet my underpants with that mysterious discharge that came more and more frequently these days — and which sometimes I could even make happen by various pleasurable frictions.

Immune in his youth to genital joy, could Robert have undergone a less sloppy, if similar, reaction?

Eric did not have an iota of the child molester in him. (I’ve known a number of Erics since: all heart and mouth.) He would have been outraged by any such idea. In a sense, the man who kept his cussedness under control with respectable women and men probably gives a better picture of him than his verbal excesses of the road. But if he had been so inclined, the sad and simple truth (at least I thought so then) is that I would have been the happiest, most willing, most gratefully molested child one might have asked for.

There was simply no sexual act, whether or not I’d tried it already with the guys after swimming, I wouldn’t have happily performed with him.

Soon I was in the truck again, between Eric and Robert.

The ride home was equally glorious, obscene, and innocent. Back at the farm we got down from the cab, said hello to Robert’s mother, who came down the kitchen steps drying her hands on a dish towel, while Eric swung the empty milk cans from the truck bed. We called our thoroughly inadequate goodbyes to the amazing man whose cussing caused such marvels.

He called back: “Bye, Robert. So long, little guy.” (I realized he’d lost my name on our trip.) “We had fun, didn’t we?” Then he slammed the cab door after himself. “Hope you come up and we do it again. They were real good, ma’am. Both of ’em, real good. Bye, now, ma’am. Weren’t no trouble at all!” Then he pulled his head back inside the window and the truck rolled off.

But I was still in a transgressive haze — that, frankly, if it had come down to it, I’d have traded my after-swim pleasures for any day.

“I told you Eric was a great guy,” Robert said, while his mother waved after the rattling tailgate.

All I could do was nod, and remember Eric’s big hands, his dirty boots, his cap — and his wondrous cussedness.

I never saw him again.

A few days later, I was back in the city.

And at school.

Robert wanted to be a scientist.

I wanted to be a scientist.

In Hugo’s classes we worked wonderfully hard at it. Or at least Robert did. I wanted to work hard. But it was so easy, especially with Robert around, in the midst of some lab experiment to get into talking about some fancified possibility, some speculative what-if…

Hugo’s assessment of me, once our first year together was over? In one of his biannual reports to my parents, he wrote:

“Sam is bone lazy.”

He was right.

I still am.

That’s probably why I’ve never been able to work at more than one thing at a time. And while — sometimes — I worked at my science, in those years art was something I didn’t work at but merely imitated from other people, other books, other pictures — even if, because of an imitative knack, occasionally, in or out of Gwenny’s class, I got more than my share of praise for it.

A year or so after my father’s death, I, my wife, some cousins, and some friends all went for a last weekend to our own country house — just before Mom sold it. In the attic’s evening nostalgia, from a small green table set up against the chimney brick, I picked up some dusty sheet music: “September Song”—though when and why my father had brought it up here, I didn’t know. But this time, what I saw was not a contested progression of notes. As I turned back through the gritty pages to the opening, what I noticed now was that the French lyrics, running between the speckled staves in italic type, were by the poet Jacques Prévert, whose little volume Paroles had been published in part by the Pocket Poets series and, back during my high school years, had joined, along with Ginsberg’s Howl, Corso’s Gasoline, Ponsot’s True Minds, and Williams’ Kora in Hell, my most cherished volumes.

“Les feuilles mortes qui nous ressembles…” Prévert had written; just as surprising, the translator and crafter of the American lyrics had been (I read at the music’s top) the humorist poet Ogden Nash: “The autumn leaves drift by my window, the autumn leaves of red and gold…”

The piece of music beneath it on the table, that showed the yellowed right angle where, a bit askew (for how many years), “September Song” had lain, was as great a surprise: a frothy tune, wildly popular during some season of my childhood, it was, “If I Knew You Were Coming, I’d Have Baked a Cake!” The writer of this, I learned for the first time from the name at the top, was the playwright and popular essayist, William Saroyan.

Had my father been aware of any of this? And how, now, could I ever know?

But — as I said — that was later.

Gwen had been our art teacher for several years.

What goes into a picture?

Shape, Line, and Color…

How are they put together?

In relationship to the outside edge.

By the time I reached the Eighth Grade we’d repeated it so often it had almost no meaning. As happens with all dogmas, sometimes we’d laughed at it. Frequently we’d mocked and made fun of it. But, as dogmas will, sometimes it had astonished me with its explanatory force. There were even moments when it seemed to relate as much to music (Mrs. Wallace had only that week handed me the solo score to the Mendelssohn Concerto: “This is probably hopelessly outside the realistic frame of your abilities. But there’re parts in it I’d just like to hear what you did with…”) as to the most functional architecture, to theater, to dance (Wendy was already telling me all about Martha Graham, José Lamon, and that there was a wonderful choreographer at the City Center Ballet named Balanchine, some of whose works a few people liked to say they couldn’t understand, though they certainly made sense to me!) — as to sculpture (the easy transition) and to art.

Then there were those odd moments down in the third floor library — which, with permission, the Eighth Graders were allowed to use. The world globe stood beside me in one corner and the scrolled dictionary stand sat across from me in the other. (The dictionary did not contain, I knew because I’d looked them up, a number of the words Eric had used three springs ago — though some surprising others it did.) I looked over the analytic geometry and calculus text I was pursuing on my own, and for seconds Gwen’s dictum seemed to explain the more amazing parts of mathematics and science as well… though that insight I could only hold in my mind for a heartbeat.

That must have been the year, when we were working in the art room one April afternoon, that Robert became wholly, intently, and surprisingly involved in one of his pictures. He painted with his brush held in both hands, the way he used to hold his pencil when he was six or seven, and he seemed to fight the paper — rather than paint it. Blues and reds and grays swirled around each other, the colors getting angrier and darker as he got closer to the center, where, in his energy, he’d already torn the paper — and was still painting at it.

We used the tops of the old paint cans for our colors. Robert’s brush swept down across the one, licking up red, the other, lapping up blue. Then brush hairs smashed again into the saturated paper.

Gwenny happened to walk by in her paint-speckled smock. She looked over Robert’s shoulder — and made a sound as though she’d been hit. Recovering herself, she let out a breath: “Pure sex!”

The six of us — Priscilla and Richard and Kathy and Nicky and Mary — watching or whispering from our own projects, went into mindless, paralyzed silence (except Robert, obliviously at work). If Eric had stepped from springtime, through the door, and into the art room to call out some innocent and astonishing excoriation, it couldn’t have been more shocking. Teachers didn’t say things like that in those years. After another moment, however, we laughed.

Because Gwenny had always been a very different teacher.

Robert looked around, gave a sheepish smile.

Gwenny blinked at him — at us. “Well, it is!” she exclaimed. “Pure sex — that’s just what it is! You may not see it now — but you will, eventually. It’s quite marvelous. Go on!”

When school let out that afternoon, I went back up to the art room, let myself in, and spent a couple of minutes looking at Robert’s painting, still drying on the wall. Robert — who, while the rest of us had gotten taller, leaner, and stronger, had just gotten bigger and pudgier, and was mad about science fiction and amateur radio, and was still, on any scale I could read, the least sexual of children — had painted a picture in which no single shape, line, or color had retained its identity over an entire brush stroke. Rather it was all process, energy, movement… Was that, I wondered, what “pure sex” was? I don’t know whether it was beautiful. If anything, it seemed just a breadth away from a truly troubling ugliness — a quality that no figurative painting could have manifested without having been deformed, distorted, grotesque. Nor was it particularly sexy — to me. But it was powerful. Was “pure sex,” I wondered, something that ought to inhabit a painting (though Gwenny clearly thought it should), since its purity seemed to subvert the very esthetic — of shape, of line, of color — that allowed it to manifest itself in the first place? And how did it relate to the outside edge? Robert’s paint over-spilled all four sides and corners. The edge contained his painting no more than a photograph’s edge contains the whole of the reality around the camera. Arbitrarily, it delimited only a fragment of that roiling energy. Pure sex? And how did the “pure” variety differ from the tentative, frightened, half-hidden (and presumably impure) sort I’d tried to sneak into paint years ago with my borrowed muscle-builder hulking on his borrowed throne in his borrowed, orientalized throne room? With a lot of questions in my mind, I went home.

I must say it here.

Something about this account bothers me, because its topic finally lists toward the estheticizing of everything — and that way, as Benjamin first suggested and Sontag more recently reminded us, lies fascism.

But that’s the way the feeling world was presented, unrectified, to me. For better or for worse, that’s how it became mine. And by now we knew that Gwen lived in Greenwich Village. We knew her acquaintances were de Kooning, Bourgeois, Pollock, Nevelson, Frankenthaler, and Francis…

We also knew she was a committed and serious artist — serious enough that, when the school’s three art teachers (omitting Hugo) had an exhibition in the school lobby, several of our other teachers let it be known they did not like her work.

For the week of the show, Gwen’s three two-foot-wide, seven-foot-high canvasses hung with the paintings of the others, on the wall behind the maroon rail where, each morning, we marched by the nurse, Miss Hedges, to show our tongues and make sure we were all without stain.

Diagonally across from where the teachers had put up their paintings, under several arches, were some old wall murals. In blue and pink pastels, their style suggested the WPA: in the foreground, wearing long dresses, with bare feet showing from under their hems, highly stylized women picked up sheaves of wheat, while, in the background, in overalls and workmen’s caps, equally stylized men held aloft wrenches and hammers against a configuration of gears, smokestacks, and clouds. A faded rainbow arched over it all. The murals were, indeed, all shape and line (and ideology; though I couldn’t have read that then). They weren’t much on color, though. And they were simply wiped from the eye by Gwenny’s dynamic fusionings across the lobby.

Impastoed with massive horizontal strokes (wide enough to make you see her six-inch housepainter’s brush), rectilinear umbers, ochres, greens, and browns overlapped like amazing stairs, up the long surfaces, leading, in layered steps, to some apotheosis very much beyond that sacrosanct, upper, outside edge. Among the ochres and earths, squares of metallic gold recalled the utility of apartment radiators daubed over in winter, but with, as well, a patina of spirituality, like icons — the only objects that might justify such gilding. At once immediate and holy, their compositions were as solid as stone forts, energetic, sensuous, joyful, and vigorous — like the abstract passages in the lower-left-hand corners of Vermeer, as austere as non-figurative Klimt, as rich as Titian or Tiepolo.

To one side of them hung some impressionistic flowers and a painting of children — was Miss Andrews still at the school that year…? On the other, the high school art teacher had put up his several pictures of geometrically precise and vaguely surreal picket fences.

“Now that,” said our new, young history teacher — who, as a stab toward tradition, insisted we call her “Mrs.”—“I can relate to, at least a little.” As I stood beside her in my snow suit, not quite ready to go outside, still wet from swimming downstairs, she went on: “I mean — ” she bent her head to the side — “that’s obviously taken some skill to paint.”

I liked their skill, too.

But for me, Gwen’s was the only art in the show. To see it, you merely had to stand before one of her scalar, desiring towers, letting it pulse and suck and glimmer at you, while its tans, mochas, golds, and strawberries lifted you through the awful ascent of its lapped verticalities. Its sensuous awe, along with the average, uninformed, and uncomprehending disdain that the other teachers used to fight off its troubling intensity (one, in her gray suit, with her handsome gray hair: “I’m afraid I just don’t see them. What in the world are they supposed to be pictures of?” And one other, in heady purple: “They just look dirty, to me. Like what you’d expect from a child playing in mud.” And, as I did and do so often, I remembered Eric, the spring dawn, and the marvel the muck of his language had loosed) — surely that was the most important of Gwen’s formal lessons.