My sort-of-aunt, Mara Borden, a red head and appealingly ugly, would never have an electric blanket. “A sign of defeat, no substitute for a warm male body.”
      Four times married, she cavorted from liberated youth to mature folly. She found a large apartment on West Tenth Street, with good north light for her current lover, an artist. She was absurdly lavish, when all Eric wanted was food when he was hungry, and stress-free time to paint. Mara was on a high financial roll in advertising and the market. 1954 was her vintage year. I look back from this distance, and marvel.
     Mara could be great company. She challenged you to think, to explain yourself fully. At her worst she was bootless, an empty husk demanding that we slake her wide screen boredom. She was deadly when crossed. It was clear to me from the day I came to New York that the difference between us was passion, hers, whereas I, at twenty-two, still walked about in post-adolescence. I admired her because under the witty veneer there was steel, but she made me feel drab, which is odd if you think it over, for I am not plain and I do not dress in burlap.
     Her Eric was an excellent artist, absorbed in his painting. His reputation was growing. Lucky for Mara he was good because she could not tell the difference. She listened to the critics, picked up a few knowing phrases, and ran with them. Each canvas was one brilliant color, usually green or blue, with strong black, white-edged lines that curled and twisted to draw you into a vortex. I didn’t know what to make of them. People said he had a phenomenal technique; I could not prove it, but I could feel the energy.
     “What do you call your style?” a friend of Mara’s asked. “Abstract? Nonobjective?” I would not have dared.
     “Don’t call my paintings anything,” Eric said. “Just look at them.”
      He smelled sexily of soap and turpentine, and in spite of his resolve, tobacco. He worked all day, bare foot, only half dressed so he would not be tempted to go out, his jeans held up with a piece of rope. He muttered to himself while he squinted at the canvas on the easel.
     Eric had no small talk. Either he barged right into a topic and wrestled his adversary to the rug, or he ground the company to a halt with his silences. I watched him do it many times. It turned otherwise sensible people frantic, jabbering and making inane remarks. Everything about him caused a flak with Mara’s friends, and especially her brother, because Eric was, give or take a few years, half her age.
     Mara paid no mind. The boy was a “marvelous lover, a marvelous cook, a marvelous painter,” and the rest of the world could go “marvelously to hell, thank you,” as long as she retained exclusive rights to her marvelous Eric.
     He allowed himself to be pulled into Mara’s orbit. He wanted to paint, she wanted him to paint in her house. They suited each other’s needs—for the moment, I believe Eric would have told you—never looking beyond the day. Affable yet preoccupied, he was everybody’s friend because he was nobody’s friend and he had a single track, turned-in mind.
     Mara enclosed him by gathering his cronies and soon organized them for her needs. “I want to help, lover,” she said. “They need my money and I like having them around. They’ll pay me back when they’re famous.” She hired Vera Therkov, a gifted cellist with a halo of short black curls, and Kelly Dean, a young poet, a red head who looked like Mary, Queen of Scots, to arrange Sunday music afternoons and poetry readings, and, to do Mara’s shopping and cleaning. It was outrageous, but Vera and Kelly were broke, happy to be eating regularly, thrilled to have a work space.
     “That’s the witchery of her,” Kelly said, “knowing how to pinion us.”
      Mara collected other young musicians and actors, too, who washed widows and waxed the floors in return for cash and compulsory attendance at her parties. They were floaters who left Mara when they’d made enough money to move on, but there was always a new boy waiting in the wings.
     “Isn’t she a hoot!” one of them said to me. “The word is out you  do time at Borden’s, you’re bound to succeed. Face it, her dialogue is bizarre and she’s a real quirk, but you have to give it to her for spunk. I hope I’m as frisky when I’m her age.”
     “I am absolutely going to pretend I never heard you mention age,” I told him.
     Into this zoo came I, Gwen Olson, the anomalous niece from St. Paul, whose mother wanted her to have a supervising relative in the big city. She wrote to Mara, who was for a short time my uncle’s wife. Without giving it a thought, Mara took me in.
     “You are all grown up, are you, Gwendolyn?” She added me to her staff.
     My house chore was to phone or write party invitations to VIPs at MOMA, the Whitney, the Met, the Guggenheim, or to a big wheel at some place like David Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan; she never stopped promoting her boy.
     Kelly and I turned the spare bedroom into an office and shared the space when I walked down from my midtown apartment three times a week. It ticked Mara that I wasn’t there every day, so she piled extra social duties on me. Still, I held firmly to my research schedule.
     I am a botanist. I had a grant to work on my thesis at Brooklyn Botanical, on “escapee” plants from colonial herb gardens, which wind, birds and cattle spread country wide; later many were reclaimed and brought back under cultivation. The topic bored Mara as much as it fascinated me and she plowed me under whenever it came up.
     “God, when I was your age, the only weeds I gathered were on my plane’s nose when I had to set down in a hurry—in Australia, once—I  told you, Eric.”
      Nobody could surpass Eric at looking indifferent. “Many times, old girl,” he said.
     Mara flushed. The boy was going to pay for that ‘old.’
      The minister’s sixth child, little Mara had hated growing up poor and somehow found her a rich Texan to marry, first. “The parties—the parties we gave. Live swans in the punch—ropes of pearls to the navel, real pearls, sweets…”
     “Real naval, Mara?”
     “You should know, dear Eric.”
     “I’ll give you the pearls,” he said, “but when you go on about the old days, delete the live swans shitting in the drink. Not tidy. Not tidy at all. And as for Australia, you learned about the Outback from paper-backs at Borders.”
      It was not the first nor last time I slipped away before the row escalated. I never could find out how Mara met my handsome uncle and lived with him in Minneapolis for a while. The cold exhilarated Mara, and according to my mom she made a real life there, but Uncle Edgar could not hold her. “He was a hopeless academic,” Mara said. “With all his opportunities he wouldn’t make anything of himself.” My father said, “She thought anybody who went to college should become president.”
      She threw them all over; Dudley and Alan and Edgar and Bruce, “I paid my dues, as wife and citizen,” she told me. “What the hell have you done that’s useful? Yes, Lord, I’ve seen most of it, known everybody…”
     “And slept with half of everybody,” Eric said, after one of the retold tales. Mara was delighted.
     “Darling! I wasn’t that much of a bawd.”
      Sometimes, to make her steam, Eric would pretend interest in my work; it rattled me to see Mara’s mouth tighten to discover I was a pawn in their game.
     Mara made it clear that “the help,” Gwen, Kelly and Vera, were not invited to the Class A soirees we arranged for her. Young lover, and coterie of boys were always there. Young women weren’t. We pretended not to care, but it burned.
     In turn, she took aim at our weaknesses, to break our confidence and feed her ego. She jeered at Vera’s “costume outrages,” which were smashing, as “lurid attention getters.”
     “Have you looked at yourself sideways, honey bun?” Mara said. “That skirt is working overtime to contain you.”
     “I like it,” Vera said. “It’s a break from those flowing robes surrounding me and my cello. And I have a good behind.”
     “It’s lively,” Kelly said, and Mara looked worried.
     “Good you didn’t say ‘ass,’” Kelly said, when Mara left. “You know how Sweets loathes 'vul-gar-ity.”’
     “Are you my friend, Kelly Dean?” Vera wailed.
     “What going on?” I heard Mara ask Eric. “If she’s wiggling that lively rear at you, Sweets, she’ll die in a slow and painful way. So, in time, might you.”
      Mara waited, but Eric did not answer. She looked very low, I had to feel sorry for her. It was all catching up, the games, dissipation, the sudden unbridled jealousy. Under the nonsense, she really loved him.
     “At least,” Mara said, “I’m grateful Kelly is involved with that hangdog wisp who is rumored to beat her…”
      Eric said nothing. It was my turn.
     “Little colorless pretty Gwen. Where is that vapid girl?”
      Foolishly, we rattled her. We called ourselves the “Brio Trio—Plenty of Sass and Flash!” and sometimes, “Eric Linden’s Girls—Redhead, Black and Blonde, Poses on Demand.” Out of Mara’s hearing, but counting on it getting back to her.
     When we were cut out of Mara’s parties, the Brios prowled Greenwich Village and emerging Soho. We would turn up next day like bedraggled cats. Eric grilled us on where we had been and with whom; he looked so superior as well as wistful that we lied outrageously, rubbing it in.
     “You should have been with us, Sweets,” we preened, “the Blue Grotto was a kick—the food at Toucan’s is fantastic—have you been to the New Deal in Soho,” knowing he had not, “you’re packed in there from midnight to morning like fat sardines in a small can…”
     “Like Vera’s skirt,” said Kelly, and we cracked up. Eric sniffed, putting us down.
     “What juvenile liars! There’s no Blue Grotto, nor Toucans, you think I don’t know it.”
     “We’re just trying not to make you feel bad about the real places, honey bun,” we teased.
     “E-nough! girl. We’ve carried it over the edge.”
      It was our fault and not nice. We were bugging Mara on her own turf, out for revenge, a turn the tables put-down, and, temporarily, she did not know how to handle us. In spite of the kidding we were still keeping her house running smoothly and her life exciting—too exciting?—and we had frayed her nerves.
     She began to invite just one of us to the parties. We made excuses. All three, or none. Truthfully, we were frightened. It was such a magical time for us in that antic house, while we were Mara’s Marionettes, where we were so delightfully subsidized and seriously busy at our own work, and Mara would say, “I’m off to the mines to bring back gold for my chicks.”
     “If only she would not try to be One-Of-Us,” Kelly said. “It’s the generational problem, the age thing. We’re doomed.”
      Inevitably, we ran aground. Gremlins of pique and paranoia were rampant. Our mutual well-being crumbled. Mara accused us of playing harder than she worked: “Try to tell me why I go on paying for a bunch of dead beats.” She was so gone on Eric, she thought every woman wanted him.
     “That same goddamn painting has been on the easel too long,” she raged. “I want an explanation from every lousy one of you.”
      She was right, but who would tell her when Eric decided to make the Brios sit for him. He made several drawings of us and tore them up, to our horror, until he was satisfied.
     “I’ve done all I can swallow of every orange, waste basket, ink well, and trash bucket around here,” he said. “When the weather breaks I’ll be out sketching all day. Right now, I need live models or I’ll suffocate, and you three are it.”
     “Do you call those black squiggles on the puce squares an orange or a bucket?” Vera teased him.
     “You missed the fern on top of the radiator when you were doing objects,” Kelly, the poet, said, “and the way the last afternoon light illuminates that corner. I wrote a poem about it.”
      Eric gave her his rare smile.
     “Right you are,” he said, “but be sure I’ll do it soon. For you.”
      There followed long afternoons of posing, intermixed with the sound of the cello, or Kelly reading some of her poems, or my tall tales of a Minnesota childhood, followed by high tea and low jokes; an atmosphere of such intimacy and affection that we became blood friends. The finished drawings were proof.
     The most successful was of Vera, bent over her cello, caught up in her music. “The artist’s residual tenderness,” Kelly told me later. “His farewell, like Brahms to Clara, now that Mara has him in tow.
     “You mean to say he gave up Vera for Mara?!” I was incredulous.
     “Grow up, Sweets.”
      Kelly’s likeness was wonderful, too. She was at the table, her hair a spiked halo, one foot underneath her on the chair. The picture would remind her forever that here was the space where her mind lived.
     I was the failure. I gazed at the veritable likeness of me, profoundly depressed, while Eric watched me.
     “The pretty vapid one really, aren’t I?”
     “No,” he said pensively. “You’re Sleeping Beauty, that’s all. I hope when you wake it will be without pain.”
      I put the drawing up on the bureau in Kelly’s and my room to study it.
     “Your death wish, right up front, stupid,” Kelly said when she saw it there. “for God’s sake, take it home.”
      Eric panicked when Mara faced us down. He was not ready to move on. We backed off while he paid Mara special attention. She calmed down noticeably. Naturally we thought it was because of Eric, but apparently, somewhere, she discovered how to renew her energy with one drink too many, and later, with a snort of the white stuff. She knew that being a shrew did not fit her preferred life style.
     “I’m feeling marvelous, love,” we heard her say, “my vitamin B shots are miraculous, no more nasty tantrums, do try them.”
      Although I swore the Brios were clean, someone close was turning Mara on. I began to think it was Vera; if so, she had her Pyrrhic victory.
     We disbanded for the Christmas holidays and returned to Tenth Street hesitantly. Vera told us she was going home to Syracuse in May to teach. She was depressed that her playing was not concert quality, an idea implanted by Mara, and nurtured by Vera’s insecurity. Kelly and I spent hours discussing this.
     “If Mara was able to discourage Vera so completely,” I said slowly not sure I believed it, “then I suppose she actually lacks the drive to make it?”
     “I don’t know, either,” Kelly said. “It takes a lot of courage to go the extra mile. When you’re most vulnerable a destructive remark by a Mara can knock you right out of the game, perhaps forever. Still, I’m not writing Vera off—five will get you ten she’ll play in the symphony and chamber concert, as well as teach. You’ll see, she’ll rise like soap.”
      It was hard to watch Vera moping, until she finally snapped out of it. “Syracuse, too, has balls,” she said.
     In April, Kelly, whose voice mesmerized us at poetry readings, had her first book accepted. She broke off with the man—“No, he never laid a finger on me”—let the crazy hair grow out, and accepted a teaching job upstate in the SUNY system. “It’s the only route poets can go without starving,” she said. “I’ll be near you, Sweets, by several hundred miles,” she told Vera, “we’ll mush back and forth.

     The sudden moments which mark our crises do not announce themselves. They advance, crab-like, scuttle up from behind or blow in with gale force. For Mara and me it came on my last Saturday night buffet there, a goodbye party for Kelly, who was heading for France until fall.
     Eric sat with Mara on the couch. Several of us were sitting on the floor near them. I heard every word they said, in spite of the music, clank of silverware, and loud gab around us.
     “I’m off soon to sketch,” Eric said. “Spring makes me itchy for outdoors.”
     “Fine,” Mara said. “We’ll set it up for my vacation.”
     “Mara, no, not where I’m going. Camping is not your thing.”
     “Then we’ll go and do my thing,” she said.
     “My sweetheart.”
      Never in this life do I want to hear such a contemptuous tone to me.
     Out of the warring silence, Eric said suddenly, “Mara, I should tell you. I’m in love with Gwen.”
      My immediate gut thought was, He’s paying her back for blocking his trip. Thanks a lot!
     “Hey, lady, what is it?” Vera said. “You’ve gone dead white. Did you eat the shrimp? Hell, are we going to have to pump your stomach all night?”
      I sensed Mara’s eyes on my back, felt the lanced edge of her hatred. Finally, very cool, she asked.
     “Have you told her, Eric?”
     “No.”
      Her relief was palpable, lapping over us at her feet. Time, she needed, time had been granted.
     “Don’t rush,” was what she said, and Eric, who never hurried anything, must have nodded.
     On Monday I went to Mara’s and packed my notebooks, a skirt and top, bits and pieces for my own outrageous pub crawling. I knew. My time was out. At ten-thirty, there was a frigid call from Mara’s office: “Mrs. Borden wants to be sure you leave the key.”
      I simply had to do something destructive, if only a childish get-even game called “Nearly Wrecking the Joint,” or “Give the Lady Something Real to Think About.”
      No one was ever allowed in Mara’s bedroom. She kept this private space scrupulously neat. I tiptoed in and locked the door. During the next few minutes I flopped down on the made bed, wriggled the spread untidily, sprayed Je Reviens from the atomizer in my purse on her pillows, messed up her dressing table with loose powder, unscrewed the top off of a jar of cream and opened a lipstick. I spilled bath salts into the tub, dampened a towel and threw it across the toilet seat.
     By now, ashamed of myself, I didn’t touch the closets. Still, I padded out to the kitchen, filled several opened bottles of gin and whiskey with water, poured salt in the ice trays before replacing them in the freezer, and called it a day. Fancy, that vapid girl.
     I went to find Eric.
     He was standing before the easel and did not look up when I came in. What do you say? Keep it short.
     “Ciao, friend. Please give auntie my key.”
      He put his brush down carefully, his eyes still thoughtful on the canvas.
     “Wait a minute.”
      I knew he was not surprised; he was wearing shoes.
     “I’ll get a cab.” He patted his empty pockets.
     “I have the fare,” I said.
     We hauled my stuff down and rode uptown, side by side, looking out of our windows.
     “Don’t give up those wild blues too soon, Eric. I love that picture.”
     “It’s yours when I finish. I’ve never given you an Eric Linden. Sorry, bad pun,” he said, and clammed up. As the taxi turned into my street, “Funny,” he said, “isn’t it? Nothing ever said, no word or touch between us, we just knew. We could have had a time, if we didn’t starve first. I hate New York. I wanted us to live away from here, by the sea. Know that, Gwen.”
      Before I could recover my wits he was laid-back-Eric again. He asked the driver to wait while he helped me up the three flights. I gave him the fare.
     “Thanks, gorgeous. I’ll get back in time to paint a bit of good.” I watched through the banister as he ran down the stairs. “Don’t forget, supper’s always at eight,” he called to me. “Every night. I’ll be looking out.”
     “Eric!” I could not let him go like that. “You are a love of a fellow. And you are in my heart.”
      Had I hit the right note?
     “Put it on ice, duck,” he shouted back, “It will last forever.”
      Sure, sure. I sat down and cried in rage and sadness: our whole blessed routine gone in one jealous swipe. Mara, you picked the wrong girl, Eric doesn’t love me. I am an abstract object of his affection, part of the life he shut down when he bound himself to you, and his chains are tighter now since he ducked, and made me take the fall. Believe it, the world thinks you roped him, but I have reason to know it is his choice.
     I was Linden’s fantasy, that’s all he could afford. I explained it to myself, carefully, yet I felt absurdly guilty that I was not rich enough to underwrite the dream. The thought of life without ever seeing him again was, suddenly, pain. Eric, locked away from us in the tower he thought he could break out of when he wished, who warmed you, just by being near, without, as he said, a word or touch.

     I lived in New York for three more years. I never called them, was never invited to dinner at eight, nor did I walk down Tenth Street, nor run into anyone I’d known there. Kelly sent two Christmas cards, Vera nothing. Sometimes I thought I imagined them. It was a clean amputation and a slow recovery.
     I took a part-time teaching job at Hunter College, until a geologist named Henry Manning fell in love with me, settled into my place and took charge. He delighted and soothed and excited me. He did not squint at an easel while he talked. Manning looked directly at me, and talked a lot. I was sure he could throw a Volkswagen bug over his shoulder, from all that climbing over and pounding rocks. I was hooked, and scared, certain I would disappoint him, and mounted a terrific campaign not to be hurt when he left me.
     “Listen, Manning,” I said one Sunday when we were lazing around, and he smiled at me and began to sing, “You must have been a beautiful baby.”
     “Please listen, I have to tell you, that’s just what I was, the card board dolly, a spectator kid never chosen for teams or student government or plays…”
      Manning just looked at me.
     “I never went down to Lindstrom’s drug store for ice cream with girl friends, they chattered off without me. Guess why.”
     “Why?”
     “Because, my dad said, ‘Honey, you look like Garbo. The girls are jealous and the boys are scared stiff. Give them time and I’ll be swatting them out of here like flies.’ So much for the lonely kid from St. Paul, who never learned how, as they say, to relate.”
     “Come here.” Manning pulled me down beside him. “Are you kidding? I’m for beauty. I don’t go for ugly, and I even know you’re smart. So, babe, spare me the analysis, and give in.”
      He convinced me, at last. Just as we were packed and heading for Manning’s new job in Arizona, Mara’s brother called from Ossining.
     “Gwen, please, go to Mara’s, it’s serious and we can’t get there until tomorrow. Why you? Don’t be bitchy. So it’s been a long time, she’s your aunt, remember?”
      Frying in the August heat, I walked slowly down Fifth Avenue, wondering how come I was euchred into this spot? Mara was the last person I wanted to see. Was the family coming by stage coach from far away Ossining, not more than two hours away? “We can’t get a sitter,” indeed. Where was Eric? Was that the trouble?
     As I walked, I ran my fingers along the black iron fence enclosing the yard at the Church of the Ascension. I could not read the words on the sign under Holy Communion, so knew I was crying, turned the corner and made my reluctant way down Tenth Street.
     “It’s you,” she said without surprise. “Enter my tomb.”
      The apartment was dark, littered with clothes, papers, and dirty dishes and bottles. The kitchen was full of roaches and the whole place stank of Mara and booze, and undoubtedly, drugs. The old joyful meeting place. Without us, was she so helpless, her heart so grieved? What was I supposed to do? I was in shock. She beamed in on me looking around: no paintings, no easel.
     “He’s in Sweden. He says he never wants to leave, and has found us a little house by the water.”
      I thought I would be sick.
     “Next week I’m going to the fat farm and dry out.” She looked at me, cockeyed and cunning. “My family sent up the alarm, and made you come here? Well, they needn’t have, I’m none of their goddamn business, nor yours, thank you—“ She watched me shrewdly as she delivered the punch line: “I’m joining my husband in Paris.”
      Then she lumbered into a chair and wept. She was swollen with water, fat, bare foot, and wearing one of Eric’s shirts over a torn nightgown. Her hair was wild and knotted. I probably gasped. It was absolutely unbearable to see her looking so like a rotting pear.
     “Would you be such a fool as to fall in love with a man fifteen years younger than you? Tell me, Gwen.”
      Fifteen? No thank you, auntie, don’t pull me into that, I just want to get away. She was so evidently in despair. I thought it would help to tell her.
     “Mara,” I said, “I’m married, too.”
      She sat up.
     “The poor bastard. He has my condolences. You’re a bloody lump, you know? No size. No style. Didn’t even have the guts to fight me for the man. Just as well, stupid child, I had you outgunned. You’d have lost. In spades, you’d have…”
      She began to shriek at me and laugh and hiccup, so instead of making her coffee and trying to sober her up, I fled.

     Manning and I were living in Tucson when we heard of Eric’s death. He and Mara had become a notorious pair in the art world during the past ten years, what with Mara’s irrational behavior and the open secret of their ages; there were malicious rumors of suicide. Never. He was too full of life and he had whittled his needs to suit his confinement. His risks, his joys, were all in the legacy of fine paintings which Mara spent the rest of her frenetic life placing in museums and galleries.
     “Poor guy,” my husband said simply. “I don’t think he could handle art and fear and love at the same time. Not to mention guilt. I’m sure it consumed him, whether he took an overdose, or not. He knew he was weak and self-serving, but what a tough bargain he made to devote himself to his painting. Perhaps he was too nice a guy to be a heel.”
     “Two years after Eric, Mara died. Few of her friends thought she would last even that long without him, but I knew that his death had given her an awful kind of peace: no one else could ever take him away.
     A rolled canvas was sent to me with a letter from Mara’s brother. I knew it was the blue painting before I looked at it.
     “We found this canvas marked for you by Eric. It was shoved in the back of Mara’s closet—belated wedding present now you have a family and must be pushing forty? I thought Sis was just too drunk to get around to sending it but then I saw a jumble of letters to Eric from Kelly and Vera and some from him to you, including this one. Knowing my sister I bet he never saw any of them. Can you beat it?”
      I read the old note in Eric’s scrawl:
     “G—Here is the Linden bit of blue I promised. Still painting along. Happiness is over the 3rd hill, I’m mired before the 2nd. Where are you Gwen?"
     I ran out to bake away pain in the hot Arizona sun. This was love? How did Mara justify isolating Eric so fiercely, from his old friends when he needed them? In the end, was it really Mara on a roller coaster of self-inflicted wounds who kept her marvelous Eric’s fantasies alive and strong? Where was the famous humor and generosity?
     Did Eric ever ask if she had sent me the painting? I could imagine her saying, “Certainly, Sweets, you haven’t heard from her, though, have you?”
      Dead is forever, what do you know? Everything comes clear too late when ‘what-ifs’ are useless and, ‘I never knew,’ is a pallid excuse.
     When I finally slowed down, gulping for breath, on some street I did not recognize, I wanted to yell and smash things the same way I let go in Mara’s bedroom, long ago. Instead, I talked to the telephone poles as I turned back.
     “You two lousy ‘Sweets,’ I paid my dues to you for years, imagining a debt I never owed. The truth is, you needed the Brio Trio to keep your drama alive; with us in the audience you were stars. After you threw me out you could never let the scene go, could you? And what was Eric thinking, please tell me, Mara, while you reinvented me as Gwen-the-lump, whom you probably argued over and pummeled, even when you finally forgot who I was? You almost made me believe it: a ‘lump’ accepts the given, does not mess around and try to change life, it’s hard enough the way it rolls. Gwen, the symbol, the red ensign of your private wars. G. is for Gorgeous. Where is that vapid girl?
     On a road in the suburbs of Tucson that’s where she is, a grown woman going home to Manning, who said quietly after he read the note, “My dear, try not to let this tear old scars. Just know it would have ripped my guts out, too, to want that girl and lose her.”
      Mara and Eric, I will not mourn your last terrible years I thankfully never witnessed. Instead, I will remember how I first saw you, surrounded by music and poems and light on the fern by the window, and us, the Brios; Mara, seemingly so electrically charged, and happy; Eric’s smile when a painting came out “a bit of good.” I am glad, truly glad I was part of it.
     Put it on ice, duck. It will last forever.