James’s landlady had not wanted to rent it to another artist, but he had persuaded her, promising that there would be no paint, and no smell of turpentine, and no smell of hash, either, and no loud music. “My God, James, you’ve signed up to a very boring existence,” Aidan said, laughing. James had invited a few people around for a housewarming dinner; Amy and Lorraine and Cillian were there, and Zoe, and Lisa, the girl Catherine had met in the PhotoSoc office, and Aidan’s friend Liam was due to call in on his way home from work in the Buttery. James had cooked a huge Bolognese, and they had eaten it sitting around the room, James and Aidan and Cillian on the floor, the girls on the kitchen chairs and the couch. It was James’s second week in the flat now, and he had made it his own; his books were on a low shelf in the corner, and on the walls he had tacked up dozens of postcards and magazine images of artworks he loved. Warhol’s blue-toned Jackie O was up there, and a shot of Vito Acconci panned out under the platform in Seedbed, and one of Walker Evans’s pinched-faced sharecroppers, though James had explained to Catherine that that image was not actually Evans, that it was a piece that another artist, an American artist, had made by taking a photograph of the Evans.
