LEONARD IS SITTING at his desk thinking about numbers. Household accounts. The cost of things. Money coming in, going out. This is all quite personal to start, as it must be. What they spend. What they can afford. Down to the shillings and pence. To him, this is not only responsible, but indicative. It tells the story of their life, any life, both as history and moment, however one may dream. After all, he reaffirms soberly, dreaming is the luxury of order. Art is the beneficiary of businesses well run. He can make such heretical pronouncements to himself here, straightedge in hand, drawing the table of the year’s earnings and expenditures. Yet he wonders how thoroughly it divides him from his peers, if at all, or if, to the properly initiated, this is just the rusty old paradox of political economy, known and politely overlooked, like the flaws in the people one loves. Well, not by all. Not overlooked by all, but by the shrewder ones, surely, the most learned progressives, like himself, for whom a premise is a premise like it or not, and its conclusion inexorable.
