Activity

“I’m the same age Goya was when he painted The Drowning Dog,” Arnold said the midnight he turned seventy-three. We were seated on a park bench in Tompkins Square. It was full summer and too hot to stay in our apartment. “He was living at the farmhouse he had bought miles from Madrid. He had been go…

The first night of Arnold’s convalescence I slept on the sofa. Around midnight, I startled myself awake and went to check on him. I had forgotten to shut the bedroom light. Snoring loudly from the anesthesia, his bandaged eyes wrapped in thick gauze, he lay supine, unaware of my presence. I crossed…

My novel was stuck one hundred pages in. I had not been able to commit a word to paper since we had moved to New York six months before. Sometimes a writer gets stuck because she is at a loss as to what comes next. Sometimes a writer knows too much about what comes next and is paralyzed by her own …

I need to emphasize here that not only was Arnold drawn to youth, but that youth was drawn to Arnold. Within minutes, he vanquished their bemused expressions with the intensity of his concentration: He did not so much look at art as dissect it. He walked from portrait to portrait, cocked his head t…

We were both in a fervent state of uncharted creativity—me for the first time, him for the second. We pulled all-nighters and still managed to make love afterward. We critiqued each other’s work—brutally, lavishly, meticulously—not as teacher and pupil, but as collaborators. If I saw something lack…