David Edelstein

That's not how I remember it.

Many of our charades had this power differential; he was always the one for whom its gradient was in favor, and neither of us ever questioned this. We'd meet up somewhere we'd never patronize—a restaurant on the Upper West Side; a hotel bar in Times Square—and start the evening in character. I liked seeing him through someone else's eyes, but as the night went on, our true selves, or what we thought were our true selves, would come out and we'd end up poking fun at the people we were pretending to be. We'd become united in our mutual superiority, and the whole affair would start to feel greasy and indulgent.

Oh, fuck, I said. I'm such a klutz.

You're not, he said.

I dabbed ineffectually at my skirt, which had been dove gray but was now runneled with dark streaks.

It'll dry, he said, and briefly, I hated him.

It's fine. I folded the damp napkin and set it back on the table. I think talking about my family made me nervous, I said.

During my first week in the program, I did nothing but pace over my empty canvases, gessoing and re-gessoing their surfaces until they were as smooth and blank as ice. All my usual subjects were gone—my friends, my familiar interiors—and with no one else to pain, the professor encouraged me to focus on self-portraiture. I did as he instructed, making paintings of my body and my face. At first he praised me for it, and in time, I learned the reason he had instructed me to apply, which was that he wanted me in a different place, close to him, where he could proceed to isolate me.

That wasn't how it felt then; maybe that's only how I was able to phrase it years later, with the distance of time and the ability to narrativize both myself and the event. How it felt then was that I had been discovered as an artist, and that my particular way of seeing was luminous, valuable, perhaps even genius. How it felt at the time was that he invited me to dinner at the house he was allotted from the college, a stately Victorian with a warm yellow light in every room. How it felt was that I had no one in my life to tell, not anymore: Many of my classmates had moved to other parts of the country, and I had fallen out with my closest friend from college.

Without my realizing it, my life had become small; he was the one thing that promised to make it larger.

I would do this, and I would do that, and I thought I wouldn't do that, though I did.