One summer he decided to drop art, to just stop being on the edge of his next thing. No more galleries, no more networking. He broke into an easier lifestyle, the kind he wanted, but that also seemed adrift and skin-deep. You can paint yourself any color. There was nothing super reckless about slouching into the backyard of Brooklyn affluence. Business and art froze in the warm months, so would he. The nighttime tree-lined avenues beckoning him into a old darkness that might have been complacency or might have been perfect adult life: agony, mystery, defeat, isolation in the light-lattice dream-haunted outer neighborhoods. All the money left and the junior statesmen became a stuart of the July penthouse. On the rooftop, long after sunset with nothing but a bottle of Merlot. Here is the chair, the ashtray, the recessed stereo, and the view that men die for. Beyond that there is nothing to be had, and he had nothing.

Here was the pool of truth, heated by the sun, even at midnight. He stopped fighting currents, let New York push him into the culture of his age. The dinner became tolerable. He drank less and saw more of the sky. It was not wrong or better than the usual drunk heat. It was less complicated, at the same time, carrying a strange political weight - as if the next movement would be articulate, forceful. He didn’t feel the fall coming, but there was unused space for a kind of dramatic gesture, a work. Harsh yellow-orange slanting light would fall on something new, but not now. Never now.

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