On his way home, as he and a zombie driver rattled down Varick Street in a gypsy cab, toward the Brooklyn Bridge, he kept going over those few seconds of banal party chatter in his mind. “Not sure I get the art.” “There’s not much to get.” But Nick was so much smarter than Peter! He often saw more than Peter did in all kinds of art, from contemporary stuff to the masterpieces people knew since childhood. Peter always said so! Yet Nick’s background wasn’t intellectual. He hadn’t undergone the standard art historical indoctrination at home or in school, and never seemed to want to learn more about what he was seeing, as Peter always thought he should do. Peter expected that anyone would want to do that, because . . . Well, all that was ancient history now. The therapist had helped them see that they were two different people, two different stories. Peter shook his head. Two different stories. How to collate past and present, except to unclench and let them scrape against each other like colliding supertankers?
