Edie had often joked when they were together that she was getting a PhD in Him—that he’d told her what to think, what to read, what and whom to give her attention, the qualities that made art worthwhile, the qualities that made life worthwhile. And she had, she knew, benefited from his education. She had been improved. Yet he’d also built up in her an indestructible confidence similar to his own, had taught her to respect herself and her ideas so much so that she, years later and slowly, began to see, through a lens he’d given her, his total disrespect of her, despite his love, the way he saw her as a project of his, a savage mind he was civilizing.