During the drive to New York this artist and I got to talking, which we hadn’t done all summer because of a lot of different circumstances. I will enumerate them:

1. He was dating another girl at the school.

A brief description of this other girl follows:

She lived in New York and was the daughter of a famous actor who had gotten himself killed in a car accident with his mistress. This girl’s mother had remarried a dentist or something. Anyway he gave her a more-than-comfortable life on Central Park West in one of those big old apartments that today cost about $20 million and he became a stepfather to this girl, who wanted to break into the movies but was at this art school because she also thought she wanted to be an artist. She was slightly plump but otherwise pretty. Isn’t it amazing that after all these years my claws are still visible?

2. I was in the “other” room.

A not so brief description of this “other” room follows:

There were two rooms at Camp Painterly. The rooms were identical in all aspects – size, number of windows, number of easels, distribution of work space – except for one thing. A very important thing. One room housed all the scholarship students – the serious artists who couldn’t afford summer camp but who had undeniable talent and had to pass a rigorous portfolio critique not only to get into camp but to get the all-important tuition from the school. These were the future of art, as the officials who ran the school saw it. They were all from eighteen to twenty-six or so. Once you hit thirty and you hadn’t been singled out for your potential in ART, you could pretty much pack it up. Or get a job in advertising.

Now, I had gone through this portfolio review, been accepted and been offered a precious scholarship to cover the tuition. I had done all this on my own during spring break of my senior year of high school. In my ignorance, however, I thought this was an insult and had told them I did not need their charity and could pay my own way, thank you very much.

On the first day of camp, when they put me in Room One, and I looked around at all the gray-haired ladies carefully brush stroking small canvases with scenes of gulls nesting in marsh grass and red barns against green hills, I realized my mistake. But it was too late. I was sandwiched between two sixty-somethings who spent the rest of the summer clucking over my wild abstract splatterings and trying to stay out of my line of fire.

My companion on that trip back to New York City had spent the summer with all the other radicals in Room Two, getting ready to take the art world by its ear and, by the way, preparing twelve-foot canvases for his Fullbright to Brussels.

Once in New York, he and I spent a harried week frenetically – but unsuccessfully – trying to carve out a few moments alone with each other while he made abortive attempts to extricate himself from his involvement with the actress/artist/famous actor’s daughter who did get offered a one line part in a movie later that year. I believe her stepfather put some money into the production but don’t quote me on that. At the end of the week I went to the dock to see Mr. Lovegod off, me bravely waving as the ship pulled away with my love standing woefully at the rail waving back and promising to write. Eighteen is such a lonely age.

Well, I was eighteen. He was twenty-seven and he should have known better by then.