Why not just wait until then to clear this up? Was he afraid this person had been marshaling forces against him over there? “No. He would soon be on the other side himself, you see. Sometimes we’d talk of my “task.” He was going to see a medium to contact one of his dead, chat a little, and deliver a formal apology. “Well, then, you wouldn’t know much about it, would you?” His mind was like a vintage magic eight ball: ask a question, shake it up, and a vaguely relevant answer would emerge. Of me, he asked, “Do you have a brother?” I said no. An alarming account of a sexual encounter with his twin brother, who’d died at 17. Many pistols, people waving them around or threatening to shoot themselves. Tennessee Williams had written about him-unfavorably. He’d drank in cafes with Picasso and Dora Maar and the “fish-eyed” Brassaï and women in green turbans. A muddy stream of talk in which some coin-like pieces glittered. On his wrist a silver band into which pigs’ teeth were imbedded-it was occasionally referred to in the course of our conversations, along with numerous other things.

That’s when he liked to drink port and free-associate. David” as he wanted me to call him, stopped painting in the late afternoons. At my feet, my portfolio, new sketches, a case with my brushes, since I’d anticipated he’d ask me to demonstrate my work. The entire matter requires strict confidentiality.” I’d been hired on the strength of my thigh-face-it inspired this confidence. He’s lost his permit already.” Maybe he wasn’t ten, then, just small. “I thought at first Billy could do it, but he’s very reckless. I was to retrieve his car from a garage on the Lower East Side, drive it crosstown, pick him up, drive back across to the East Village, where he had an appointment, wait, drive him back to the studio. This was the topic he referred to as “the great extinguishing.”Īs far as I could tell, the job was to drive him around. I would accompany him on a vital piece of business he needed to finish before…. According to Carpenter, my job was far more important. I remained in the living quarters, on the sofa. I watched as they streamed past me into his studio.

No, no, he had plenty of painting assistants. To see their influence reflected in the next generation. I’d likely be working on the new paintings. The year before Carpenter had had a major retrospective at MoMA. “I’ll probably just be stretching canvas,” I said. I lived on the Chinatown side, in a 5th floor walkup with five other dudes, most of them art students. I’d heard he needed someone down at the corner store we both went to. This was Billy, the “errand boy.” I appeared to be a “cautious, trusty fellow.” “Did I have a vehicular license?” I was wearing the tie I’d bought for graduation, clutching my Pratt portfolio, and mentally calculating my competition. Behind him, a ten-year old in a newsboy cap sat in the window smoking a cigarette and looking pensive. We were in his cavernous Tribeca loft studio-he had on some sort of bordello-style silk nightdress from which his arms protruded, welcomingly, pterodactyl-like. The first time I met the great Abstract Expressionist painter David Carpenter he told me, “You have a rubbery face, similar to a thigh,” and then, probably because I seemed offended, “A young woman’s thigh, not one of my own.” He’d just turned ninety the week before.

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