"I'm not into that," he said. "You had no right."

I crawled off to the coffee table, decided then and there I had no fondness for Greenpoint.

So, things hadn't always been perfect, or even hygienic, but Maura was my love. I wanted to ravish almost every woman I saw on the street, regardless of age or body type, but if I ever did picture myself not married to Maura, never did another woman hove into view, just a taxing still-life: a handle of chilled domestic vodka and sick-making amounts of Korean barbecue.

But now I kept thinking of Constance and Lena, those early confusions. I got up and made my tipsy way to Maura's desktop. I'd kept tabs on Lena before. She taught painting at a state school in Connecticut now, must have been near retirement. I hadn't run a search on Constance lately. Soon I had a photograph of her up on my screen. I'd entered-the invasive quality of the word was not lost on me-the website of an elite girl's academy in New England where Constance served as headmaster.

She looked older, of course, glancing up from her tidy and morally instructive escritoire, her pigtails gone, her still-black hair shorn with sour elegance. It was hard to detect the plump, glowing, self-righteous coed in this dour professional. I had no doubt she was still a feminist. Marxist was debatable. But maybe she was waking up the rich girls to the crimes of their kin. Wasn't there a tradition of that in such places? She did look wiser, happier. But I grieved for her lost radiance, which is just to say I was weeping for myself again.

Lena was another story. Lena shook me with old shame. Lena was another name for my failure to become what I'd once believed I already was. But tonight, strangely, when I thought of her, a different face floated past, a background ghost.

It was one of the last times Lena had visited my campus studio, a corrugated shed near the biology labs. The room got good light, but whenever I opened a window the stench of burnt rats wafted in. Often I'd light a cigarette, let it smolder for the stink, but this day Lena stood there smoking, studied my canvases.

I'd gone in a new direction. It hadn't turned out well, but I thought there was an idea there, a gesture, I could salvage. I'd be graduated in a month, was headed into the savage, supercilious world. This was my last shot at an uncompromised critique. Though of course it would be compromised. But only by lust.

Still, who knew? It was easy to forget Lena was also an artist, that she hadn't been put on earth just to mentor me. She made it easy to forget. She didn't linger in her past, and her triumphs were in her past.

"Thoughts?" I said. "Feelings? Pangs?"

Lena stood with her hand on her head, cigarette between her fingers. She singed her hair often this way.

"I think you've lost your mind, Milo."

"Shit, really?"

"No, not really. Finally. You were close, but now you've gone crazy. Controlled crazy. They're funny and sly, like always, but they've got this turmoil now, too. A newfound urgency. God, listen to me. That stuff in the corner, is it wax?"

"Rubber cement. Treated. I treated it."

"Treated it with what?"

"Trade secret."

"For what will you trade the secret?" said Lena, put her cigarette in my ceramic frog ashtray, and slid her hand into my shirt.

"I thought we weren't going to do this anymore."

"Do what?"

"We weren't going to… Oh, fuck you."

"We weren't going to fuck me?"

While we made love on the paint-caked workbench, I watched the cigarette burn in the clay lip of the frog. Why couldn't she just crush the damn thing out? The smoke curled up to the cement ceiling and Lena had an orgasm, or some approximation thereof, and I pulled out, spilled myself on her belly and the tails of her striped button-down shirt, a man's shirt, maybe her husband's. It felt good to do that, like that eureka moment when a child discovers just how, precisely, to be a shit. Lena's face flushed and she blew at her bangs. There was something sulky, unlikable, about that upgust of breath, but I couldn't pin it down. I had the sense I couldn't pin it down because I was too young, and suddenly felt my youth as a form of impotence. I snatched Lena's wrist, turned her toward my paintings.

"Now," I said. "Tell me true."

"I already told you, Milo. I don't lie about this stuff. I'm not that desperate."

"I think you are."

"You little bastard."

"Please, Lena. Who's going to tell me?"

I could see her soften. I was just a dumb, scared boy. I was also a demon, junior precious division. Lena lit another cigarette, sank into a squat.

"I don't know, Milo," she said. "You have talent. It doesn't seem to be outrageous talent, but who knows about these things."

"Compare me to Billy Raskov."

"I don't do that."

"Sure you do."

"Okay, fine. I know you think you're a better artist than Billy Raskov, but you're just a better draftsman. That's something. But there are mentally handicapped people who draw and paint with far more technical skill than either of you. So, like I always say, it all comes down to how much you need to inflict yourself on the world. You're good enough. If you kiss the right ass, you could certainly make a career. Get some shows. Teach. Like me, for instance. I'm not a failure. I'm in a very envied position. You have some big-dick fairy-tale idea of the art world, so you don't understand this yet, but hanging in, surviving, so you can keep working, that's all there is. Sure, there are stars, most of them hacks, who make silly amounts of money, but for the rest of us, it's just endurance, perdurance. Do you have the guts to perdure? To be dismissed by some pissant and keep coming? To be dumped by your gallerist? To scramble for teaching gigs? It's not very glamorous. Is this what you want? You're good enough for it. You're not the new sensation, but you're good enough to get by. But you have to be strong. And petty. That's really the main thing. Are you petty enough? Are you game? Are you ready to screw me again? You must be."

Lena reached for my crotch. I swatted her hand away, stumbled out of the smoky shed. The sun was high and warm, the grass lush, spongy. Some students talked beneath the portico of the biology building. There was a humming sound, which I tracked to a vent in the bricks. The stench of the experimental dead blew out of it. I thought of the rats and guinea pigs and gerbils in their cages, studied my hands.

Soon I would not remember what Lena had said. Already it seemed kind of jumbled. Lena just really made no sense. Past the biology building, on a bench beneath some poplars, I could swear I saw Purdy. Was that Purdy? Yes, absolutely, it was Purdy, on a stone bench with a woman I did not know. She was pretty and sat straight with her hands on her stomach, as though protecting it, and she looked up at Purdy, who seemed to be laughing, laughing incredibly hard, so hard that even from this distance I could see a vein rise in his neck. Though maybe Purdy wasn't laughing. Maybe he was shouting. I had never seen Purdy shout.

What the hell had Lena been talking about back there? Loopy slut. But she had a good eye for my work. Couldn't deny that. Funny and sly, she'd said. With a newfound urgency. Wasn't that the gist of it? It was Art. I was an Artist.