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He painted—not the hellscape that was outside his window, but the hellscape that was eternal, the same view that Goya had.

No matter the hour, whenever I stopped by his studio unannounced, I would find him working. We had his palette table put on casters to give him more mobility and freedom. Wh…

The studios had changed, but not the loneliness of struggling and arguing with himself unobserved. His dealer and the twenty-something East Village artists, the exuberant boys and girls who had visited his studio and danced with him at the Palladium, had perished of AIDS or overdoses or moved on to…

“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 …