At first he didn't know what Kate's lover looked like.
But some unfamiliar woman kept showing up at all of his wife's gallery openings and group shows without ever speaking to or looking at either of them.
Finally he asked Spiros, Kate's art dealer, who that girl was and when Spiros answered, Peter was too surprised to be hurt.
One day Kate had told him that she had a lover, that it was a woman and the woman's name.
He had said "All right' I ' and had since tried to ignore it.
He had been busy with lots of projects and understood that Kate needed more attention.
Since it was with a woman he didn't really mind, because as soon as he had more free time again, he'd expected Kate to break it off.
Besides, there was something in the whole idea that was arousing.
However, he'd never expected to have to contend with her physically.
Certainly not with the fact that she was so awfully young.
As soon as the surprise faded it was replaced by a sense of competition.
He was jealous of Kate for having such a young lover.
The girl was listed in the phone book, listed very boldly with a full first name instead of that coy initial that most single women use to avoid obscene phone calls.
That was how he learned that she lived two blocks away.
If she and he were to stand on the roofs of their respective buildings, as he knew they had done on many sweltering summer nights, they could surely make out each other's silhouettes.
The next day Peter deliberately passed her place on the way to the gym and then stopped in front to look more closely.
He saw her name on the intercom.
It wasn't typed out neatly like the others, it was scrawled.
Two names next to hers had been subsequently scratched out by different pens at different times.
She probably goes through lovers quickly, he thought, and decided to turn away just as she came walking down the block carrying a bag of groceries.
He knew he shouldn't feel embarrassed.
It was perfectly natural to be curious.
Then he looked at her bags.
They were overflowing.
She shops, he thought, wanting to know everything about her.
When she saw Peter standing there waiting, her face went blank.
She kept walking but he knew she was pretending.
He knew she didn't want a confrontation.
She didn't want anything to do with him at all.
Later en he decided that he did not mind so much when Kate snuck home in the middle of the night as long as she was always there when he woke up.
That was the kind of unspoken courtesy that must exist between husband and wife.
Peter knew that he had been driven to view Kate critically before seeing which structures were firmly in place between them.
It was just as in nature, where one could more easily see what was brightly lit from a distance than when the viewer was illuminated on the spot.
This was a fact of the natural world that made him want to proclaim a metaphor for human relations.
Rain made the day feel like night, but warmer and without threat.
When Kate walked along in the dark afternoon she could see people sitting inside slightly illuminated restaurants.
The ones with the flattest colors reminded her of the old days when she was a student in that very same neighborhood.
Kate picked up a New York Times and walked into a relic on the corner that still had a lunch counter with a General Electric malted machine.
In the sixties that coffee shop had been considered overpriced, but now it seemed comfortingly plain and ethnic, given what other enterprises had erupted along the walkway.
She opened the paper, drank her coffee and then leaned back to stretch and look around because the news was always the same.
At a small table was a red-haired man with a black woman he really liked.
You don't see thczt so much anymore, Kate noted, remembering when interracial couples were a normal part of Greenwich Village life.
Nowadays there were a number of single older women, with gray frizzy hair and Jewish expressions, exhausted by their brown-skinned, up-to-date teenage children.
Very few of those couples had stayed together.
Of course, that could really be said about anyone who fell in love idealistically.
Love with political implications had always interested her from a distance, but there was this ever present threat of violence accompanying it that she had managed, until now, to avoid.
The red-haired man at the next table liked the black woman he was with.
He grinned when she talked to him and was pleased just to see her.
She had spaghetti dreadlocks and a strawberry malt.
Everyone in the place had different hair.
There were two bald guys in old orange sweaters talking slowly in the corner because they'd known each other for a long time and could relax.
There were a couple of aging punks drinking black coffee and some skinheads on skateboards buying ice cream.
It had been a hallucinatorily hot summer with AIDS wastes and other signs of the Apocalypse washing up on the beaches.
Kate had spent it working in her studio, only in the evening, hoping to find some relief there.
But she was still forced to cool off in the shower every hour and wear a T-shirt soaked in cold water before being able to concentrate on what she was making.
One night she had heard many loud voices, as though someone had been shot or the drug dealers were arguing again.
Then there was an incredible noise, a machine approaching like a war movie in Dolby sound.
In the midst of what had been a hot, still night, the mess in her studio began to blow around the room because a helicopter hovered outside almost level with her windowframe.
When it moved on, she stuck her head out all the way, leaned to the left and then saw crowds swarming.
There were a lot of skinheads but also many regular neighbors plus punks and aging hippies.
There were officers on the edges grabbing others arbitrarily and kicking them or hitting them with police sticks.
It was more police in one place than Kate had seen since the sixties.
It was real violence in the midst of great confusion.
It was not a movie of the week.
It was hot.
It was stylized.
It was unbelievable when it happened so openly.
She stayed at the window watching and then made the decision not to enter into it.
She drank her second cup of coffee checking to be sure her purse was still tucked under the lunch counter.
Now that it was September, that hot night had become a screen, another newscast, a spectacular event.
It was the shred of an idea.
Now, the same skinheads were buying ice cream in their sweatshirts, red bandannas and baggy army pants.
Girls and boys with bleached blond military haircuts were hanging out again wearing T-shirts claiming I Survived the Tompkins Square Riot.
"Would you watch my raincoat while I go to the bathroom?"
asked an earnest young woman clutching a notebook.
"Sure."
She returned quickly, slightly apologetic.
"I bought a new raincoat," she said, brushing it off with her fingers.
"It's a nice one," Kate said.
"It's crisp," the woman answered caressing the sleeves.
"It's the first new coat that I've had in ten years.
It fits.
It's light for the summer and later, if it gets cold, I have a lining I can put in.
The pockets won't have to be restitched every season.
It zips."
She folded it carefully over the back of a chair.
"You know what scares me?"
the woman said quietly like she was talking about the dead.
"You look all around and know that it is the end of the empire.
Then I look at myself and I have a new coat."
She was mousy, this woman, and a little bent over from too much scribbling in too many notebooks.
Too much reading and not enough time in bed.
"When you get something new," she said conspiratorially, "you have to watch out that it doesn't get stolen.
You have to avoid people who need money and people who need raincoats and keep them away from yours.
But I feel bad being dry on the street when my brothers and sisters have nowhere to sleep.
"And contradictions are what let us know that we are fully human," Kate said.
ù "But?"
the woman answered, waiting.
"But?"
"But," she said running old-looking hands over a younglooking face.
"But then what?"
There were three or four things that terrified Kate and they came to her in moments, like the first sight of flamingo faces on the subway.
Or, that pause after the nebulous closeness of lovemaking when the person's voice suddenly rang louder than all others.
Kate feared the consequences of chaos but was comfortable with fragments, when they were freely chosen.
In fact, she had lately been more excited by shreds of ideas and the partial phrases that paraded before her than in anything actually completed in her studio.
But that did not worry her, because Kate had been making artwork long enough to recognize the patterns of frustration and breakthrough, denial and breakthrough, passion and frustration and breakthrough and change.
Something was changing in the way she was seeing and it had started to affect her drawing.
Kate's last major stylistic shift had come four years earlier, when Spiros had put her on retainer and mounted her first successful solo show.
She took in more money that season than Peter had in years of steady employment.
"You're using my ideas," he had complained.
"You know there's no market for my work.
No one can hang my work over a fireplace.
Pure design challenges capitalism's view of the object.
People always get rewarded for creating commodity products."
As he was speaking, Kate was looking sympathetically at his face.
His lips were swollen and purple with wine as though they had been bruised.
His face was covered by a thin slick of oily sweat.
After years of being who he was and doing what he did, Peter's gestures had become a list of habitually repeated actions.
Had her own as well?
Years of the same expressions had turned his body into a collection of these shapes.
But there was at the his commitment to his art.
She saw that he could be a fool or a hero, depending on how he was viewed.
It was that quiet observation that had provoked Kate's switch to portraits.
She went straight from the coffee shop to her studio, letting the rain drip down her forehead and along the end of her nose.
Without even taking off her coat, she went to a stack of old paintings and flipped through them impatiently.
She wanted to smash them.
She was tired of standing too far away from a person's face.
She wanted to show what she saw making love or in a fight.
It was a flash of lip, a pimpled cheek, sweat between the breasts, an unidentified slope or shadow that seemed suddenly more important.
Sex and violence were sensual experiences, not visual ones, although they did have a visual component.
In order to bring out the touch in the visual she had to get closer, as though her eye was on his chest looking up the side of his neck.
That was where she wanted the image to be.
She opened her window wide and leaned out over the ledge, one hand grabbing the molding.
The park had been quiet since the summer and was still green.
There were thirty or forty makeshift shacks, tents, lean-tos serving as temporary shelter for at least 150 people.
But no riots and very little noise from the police.
Some stragglers had wrapped themselves in empty garbage bags while others just sat stoned and got soaked.
The public bathroom was so overflowing with homeless people trying to stay dry that the crack smokers had to step over them to get inside.