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“An Extraordinary Life”, an excerpt from Brightening Glance by Pat Lipsky
A lot of life is random. But you can tilt the odds by placing yourself in those situations where good random things are known to occur. Of course randomness works the other way too. The first day of graduate school our painting professor was Tony Smith.
A tall bearded man my father’s age, stepping into the studio to confront the cautious, nervous ambitions and brazen insecurities of twelve graduate students. He was wooly-headed and brilliant.
I was twenty-seven, and brilliance seemed to me a manageable phenomenon—like hurricanes or measles, events that could also be handled with sensible precautions. The key attribute was staying power. Get inside the brilliant person’s zone of influence, then keep the transmission lines open.
Brilliant people I’d met often seemed focused on interesting things not quite in the room. Then you could see them too. But only after the brilliant people had pointed them out and spoken about them.
This was what brilliant people were for. The risk you didn’t take into account was the person at the other end of the transmission, with ambitions and insecurities of their own.
And, of course, Tony was brilliant whether any of us were in the room or not.
So as the semester progressed, what Tony wanted from me became one of those questions that illuminates everything but can’t really be faced, like the sun. My own husband was spoiled in the way of attractive people. Half the time he seemed present, solidly there. And then he’d look up at me only as a surprising interruption, a mechanism that either was or wasn’t functioning. But even when I was painting in class I could feel the weight of Tony Smith’s attention between my neck and shoulders. When he turned away, I’d raise my hand with a question and could feel the extra second he spent disentangling his gaze.
My best friend was a willowy and unwholesomely rich Harvard graduate named Aurelia Kleinman. “What’s his age again?” she asked. Her accent—lightly imperious—made you think of the Fitzgerald line about the voice being full of money. We were picking up our children from nursery school. I told her what a sharp dresser Tony was—always in a business suit, when other people weren’t arriving in suits that much to Hunter College. “What’s his body like?” Orrie asked with a small giggle.
She sipped coffee as we braced ourselves for the door. That interesting moment, all the children pouring through, when we’d instantly stop being adult friends and become all mother. Orrie and I were the only parents wearing sunglasses.
She said quickly, as the knob began to turn, “Fifty-one is a dangerous age, for a man. They get paranoid that you’re the last beautiful girl they’re ever going to interest. Dangerous for my father. And so, of course, very dangerous for my mother.” (What Orrie actually said was mummy, but I can’t bear to write it.) Then Orrie was dropping to one knee for her sons. “Oh, hello to you, hello to you!” I found the alert, worried faces of my own two boys inside the pack. It was heartbreaking the way their faces looked when they didn’t spot you immediately. Orrie was staring at me over her sunglasses. “So tread lightly,” she said meaningfully. “I’m just giving Pat hiking advice,” she explained to her boys.
When I was painting in class I could feel the weight of Tony Smith’s attention.
Her family was from North Carolina—they’d been rich through all but the first six presidencies. When she talked, you pictured estate forests, private runways, gold keys turning safe-deposit boxes, and politely abandoned plans in astonishing settings. But you could never ask Orrie directly about any of this. It would be rude: you could let her say it, but the data had to come from her, or the implication was that you were making her feel freaky. But every so often she’d lift those light imperious eyebrows and say, “Family event.” Then she’d disappear for a few days and come back another person, either reckless-tongued or very good-daughterish in a way that must have reflected the tensions of her growing-up self.
With Orrie, art felt like my private, mysterious thing. A special world to which my own background, plus talent and experience, entitled me. It was my estate. Art can do this, put you on an equal footing.
Life outside Hunter was solid, a sort of square. At breakfast and dinner I was one of four around a table: my husband, me, two children. But during the day there were the twelve of us in that studio, with its smell of paint and colors on canvas and old hissing radiators, being trained for our insane gamble. To become, if we could be, artists. And there was Tony, lordly and slightly ominous, his eyes pinned on me, which seemed an advantage.
Even if you don’t recognize the name—a hard, direct name that’s so much like him—you know his work. Tony Smith made the big black tetrahedron snake sculptures you often find on college campuses or see business people eating in the shade of, ties and scarves whipped by the breeze. A great one prowls the grounds around the National Gallery.
He wasn’t famous that way yet. It was all of our luck, Tony being at Hunter Graduate School. And it was my luck—good or bad—that he took this particular interest in me.
People shared rumors. Tony and female grad students; Tony not treating his marriage as any sort of map or limit to behavior. (The fact of Tony’s wife didn’t mean very much. One item of creepy gossip was about Mrs. Smith driving him to assignations. You could imagine her soft profile at the wheel, waiting outside a dark one-story house.) You’d forget this when you looked at him in class. And then remember after, when he found you with his large, hard blue eyes.
I had been in my own marriage six years, and come to understand the relationship as a kind of giant machine you rode in and somehow thoughtlessly fed your days to. You hardly even knew you were riding in it, as it chewed up days and months. Except for the moments when the machine suddenly broke. Even if it was just the smallest bump. And then you were aware of its thoughtless, gigantic power to ruin.
Even if I hadn’t been married, I would have been weirded out. Start an affair with a brilliant person, I thought, and this would light a fuse. The situation could explode in either of two directions. Either the affair would stop—and then no more brilliance, just avoidance and bad feelings. Or, and this was unlikely, if it progressed to marriage you’d end up being, simply, another version of the wife. You’d never really have been a fellow artist at all. In both cases, the brilliance you were there for would stop.
So if you really wanted to paint, the possibility of an affair was like a candle you had to keep lit but with only the tiniest possible flame, one that wouldn’t really melt any of the wax.
My friend Orrie had warned me about this. “Men are very, very sensitive mammals. They can be startled and wounded and frightened away by the tiniest movements.”
I always asked Tony questions—planned all week—when the class met on Wednesdays. Then he suggested we meet once a week after class, for private discussions, artist to protégé. These were thrilling. We talked as we broke down our painting stations, running hot water through our brushes—the paint giving in sudden delicious, sludgy clumps—and stowed away my canvases. And when we walked outside along the sidewalk crowds and rush hour car horns and smells, through the slanting light and shadows of Lexington Avenue, feeling the city cool into winter along our arms and on our faces and hands, Tony raised his voice to be heard above the soliloquy of traffic.
Another thing about brilliant people: they make the rare and elevated feel casual, near. Tony had studied at the Bauhaus—the famous German school so committed to the avant-garde that its faculty had to run from the Nazis. (They reconstituted in Chicago, where Tony met them.) Then he’d spent years as Frank Lloyd Wright’s apprentice. Often Tony talked about Jackson Pollock as if he’d just stepped out of the room. Tony had been there at the beginning and end. He’d walked into the Art Students League and met Pollock, then helped lift the coffin as a pallbearer at Pollock’s funeral. It put you, mentally, on a first-name basis with art and history. Because you knew someone who had walked through those rooms—Pollock’s studio in East Hampton, the Chicago Bauhaus—it felt, by extension, that you’d been there too. That some of that dust had landed on your own shoulders.
When you start, art is limited to the narrowness of what you’ve been and things you’ve managed to see. There was a young person’s limit to what I’d experienced myself. I was painting what seemed meaningful to me: my two children, in their beds or under the tree shadows in Central Park. At Tony’s request, I brought these to class.
It was thrilling to have Tony look at your work: the very active, restless way brilliant people have of taking in material, galloping ahead, and enthusing about it. You can never quite be sure anything you’ve done really merits such attention. Tony asked, “Can I take some of these home to New Jersey with me? I want to look more.” No other painting teacher of mine had ever asked that.
Start an affair with a brilliant person, I thought, and this would light a fuse. The situation could explode in either of two directions.
He supplied the best definition of nonrepresentational art I’d ever heard. He demystified it. Tony was very close with the painter Mark Rothko. Rothko’s studio was just across the street, the fourth floor of East Sixty-Ninth Street; Tony often came to our class straight from having a look at Mark’s work. This often snowed us. To be a block away from all that. He told me, with a frown, that painting true objects from real life was fine. It was all well and good. Painting my feelings for my children was fine. “But the only way to really express true feeling is through abstraction.”
It took me a second: the words “express” and “feeling” came from that nervous world of concepts I wanted to exclude when talking with Tony. It took a second for me to make sure he didn’t mean them the way I didn’t want him to.
“What you’re giving me here,” he continued, “is an illustration of feeling. But not the feelings themselves.” He nodded as if he’d just overheard and liked the way he’d framed the idea. He nodded again. “Only abstraction can give you direct experience of actual emotion, which is what Mark’s paintings show us.”
To know he’d come from looking at Rothko’s paintings to looking at yours: that was the power of a person like Tony. You know they’ve stood in extraordinary rooms. And if they can like and accept you, somehow it seems as if your work can withstand those rooms as well. You’ve survived the toughest eyes. Tony explained that the reverse was true. “At my New Jersey place,” he said, “we have all kinds of old farm utensils. Tools, supplies, knickknacks, and what have you in the garage. Some of those, you know—you strip off the context, and they could be seen as abstract, beautiful.” He looked at me. And here I knew. He was talking about his house with me as a kind of flirt. Because it powerfully excited him—to have the concepts of me and the house joined in his mouth like that.
Sometimes his speech could be a blizzard of first names. Mark. Also Barney—for Barnett Newman, a famous painter, maybe even more famous as a theorist. Jackson was Pollock, who had started everything. Even “Tennessee.” For another friend of his, Tennessee Williams. He must have known how these constellations in his daily talk could snow any person in her twenties.
He was a wild anthology of Pollock stories. There he was, talking about the person who had made American art something big and major: glamour is a part of brilliance too. Can you be attracted to somebody you don’t find, somehow, glamorous? And for the person on the other end, can you hold the attention of someone whose tastes have been no doubt elevated by constant exposure to the best? Tony was friends with the man who had made American painting, finally, international. He told me, with excitement and regret, about the church he and Jackson once designed together, which somehow never got built. Jackson had refused the commission unless Tony’s work was also included. His best story was about that Pollock canvas called Blue Poles. The painting became very important, and a point of contention. Tony, Barney Newman, and Pollock were in Jackson’s studio: this was the barn in Springs, East Hampton, down a winding road with a view of the marshes. Jackson was in a low mood. They’d all been drinking, the painting Jackson had on the floor was refusing to come out. As they drank, the three men started putting stuff on it. Then they were all painting on it. First with brushes and sticks, then pressing their fingers and palms into the surface. It became a bacchanal. There was some bleeding; they took off shoes and started walking on it. (The blood was from Newman’s foot; he’d nicked his sole on a Coke bottle.) Then Barney got an idea—drawing eight long blue lines, to pull the picture together, and he painted them on. Blue Poles eventually sold to the National Gallery of Australia. The highest price then paid for a twentieth-century American canvas.
Lee Krasner, Jackson’s widow, disputed the story. This made a rupture between Tony and Lee. So later Tony retracted the whole story. In the cleaned-up version, Jackson had simply been “in a bad way.” That was all. When everybody was older, Tony’s wife attended the Lee Krasner retrospective at the Whitney. Tony sent her in alone; he didn’t want to face Lee. (This time, it was Tony waiting out in the car.) When Lee saw her, she reached out—and then, maybe remembering the Blue Poles story, Lee retracted her welcoming arms.
But what you also took away from these stories was daily and nourishing. That it was real people with real and messy lives that art came from. People who made egotistical arguments and had bad habits and spouses and children, all of which I had too.
Orrie was always asking. Until my stories about Tony became like his about Jackson Pollock. Lots of “Tony said,” “Tony did.” And Orrie seemed to enjoy putting me in this position: revealing to me all the pleasures I already took from the relationship. There’s a sadism in certain kinds of friendships. A forceful showing to you of yourself, or the friend somehow enlisting you in a private argument about their own past, that all people everywhere are disappointing in the same limited number of ways. Orrie advised me to tell my husband about Tony—a connection this big was bound to come out anyway, and I couldn’t afford my husband becoming jealous of my work in any way. Trust her. It would become after that a choice of work or family; nobody wants that. “Because either choice is a money-loser,” she said in her light voice. “A write-off.”
I thought for a moment about Orrie saying “can’t afford”—what could that phrase possibly mean to her?
Then Orrie was called away on one of her family functions. This one lasted a week, a great convocation of Gwinnetts, for a discussion of the museums and foundations that the family oversaw, plus the disposition of various mammoth properties. She came back in a vivid, dangerous mood.
I told her the advice about talking Tony over with my husband had been smart. It had woken him up a tiny bit. Also removed some of my guilt: if anything, by making him manageable for my husband too, it had diminished Tony.
She kind of shrugged angrily. We were walking down Sixty-Fifth Street to the nursery school.
“What does it matter what your husband thinks?” she asked furiously.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
I wasn’t going to stay with him: Didn’t I see that yet? I told her about his good qualities. How good he was with our boys. How he never got in the way of my painting. How I liked his body, his hair. I wondered why she’d suddenly gone ballistic about my husband and our marriage. Maybe her family visit had put Orrie in a bad mood?
“He’s an airport,” Orrie said. “Who looks at an airport?” she asked. “Who bothers to really notice an airport,” she went on. “An airport is just the place that you leave.”
I got what she was saying but was surprised by her angry delivery, which put me off. We rounded a corner into a slash of February lemon sunlight. I thought you could possibly get this by mixing some of the color Aurelian with a touch of Payne’s Grey. Orrie pushed up her dark glasses. “You know why I’ve never done anything? Anything real? I’m talented too.” She waved her hand across her torso. “Anything like what you are doing?” And looked down. “No one in my family is allowed to fail. To try their hand and not succeed. Failure is so embarrassing and ordinary.” Now she was even walking angrily. Little jabs of her feet, which on a body like hers was a bit ridiculous. There’d been an English professor at school: slightly older and very attractive. He’d thought she had real talent, writing talent. He’d given her reading lists, talked about the famous writers he either knew or exaggerated knowing. They’d become involved. He’d proposed—and here, her family had stepped in. All those Gwinnetts with their heavy foundations and worldliness, who made the alliance impossible. “It’s up to you,” they told her only when they were certain what her selection would be. Orrie stood firm, then relented. And she told me what the professor said, in his sad university office, when she told him no: “We could have had an extraordinary life.” Tony’s life was turning extraordinary. Right around the time I graduated from Hunter he suddenly became famous.
There Tony was, on the cover of Time magazine, being called one of America’s most talented new sculptors—his was the fastest rise in the New York art world of the late sixties—that demanding, bearded face. He now belonged to the art world, as I read Time over breakfast. “The darling of the critics, the envy of every museum collector.” Us students had been right, and we’d lost him.
Tony didn’t make a big deal about it—but what could it have been for him to walk by a newsstand on the way to our class and see his picture on a row of covers? Like a mirror reflection in the window. It was only for seven days, till the next cover of the magazine: but for those seven days he must have felt more alive.
And at the end of that week’s session, when we were cleaning our brushes, I stayed a little later. Tony turned the water off. It made a kind of extra squirting sound as the flow ended. “There’s something I need to say.” Some of the water had fanned across his cuffs, which took my eye for a second: that blue suit with water darkening the edge.
He must have been waiting—and with the positive change in one area of his life he wanted to now approach the other. “I’ve loved you since I first saw you,” Tony said. He looked relieved. Then he said an odd thing, for all the declarations of love I’ve had, seen, and read about. It showed how cool he was in a way to add this—simply because it was, for him, true. “You remind me of my mother.”
He waited for me—and when I didn’t speak for a while, he waved his hand in the air. “You don’t have to say anything now,” he said. “I said what I needed to.”
And a few weeks later, I had Tony to dinner. This was his idea. He said he couldn’t get me out of his head. I’d avoided Orrie since she’d compared my husband to a departure gate. But I still had to go to school for my children. And the day Tony was to visit, I saw her head with its stylish short haircut at the beginning of the line of mothers. She kept turning over her shoulder—then came and found me.
This was the good daughter version of her: She was now nearly furious with concern. “You have to be ruthless to be happy,” she said. “You can be nice and well-meaning and you end up just in the middle. Medium happy, okay happy.” She waved her hand around us: at the parents, the school. All consigned by Orrie to okay-ness. Her own husband, Henry Kleinman, was just another Harvard banker. His being Jewish had been an indulgence and was as far down the scale as her family went. Hard negotiators, they had probably seen it as an acceptable compromise.
“What makes you think you can expect something extraordinary,” she said, “ if you’re only ever willing to act like everybody else?”
Tony came to our apartment with a large wrapped present, set it by the closet door, solemnly shook hands with my husband, rested his hand on his kneecaps as he bent to say hello to my children. He had only ever seen them in paintings. He made the house feel suddenly small—filled it in a way we didn’t seem to. We all were attendant on him. And I didn’t know why he had wanted to come and the whole thing appeared somehow terribly dangerous: to compare himself with my husband, to claim me, take me from him? Or maybe, just to become more intimate?
I felt the strangeness. Having brought him, with my own young powers, to my house, from his world into mine. And knowing—he and I the only people in the room knowing this—that I could have him at the center of my life if I wanted. That everyone in the room was hanging on his offer. Maybe his bringing himself here was his way of making an offer.
And from the ricketiness of that perch we all sat down. I couldn’t hear anything that was said, though I know I nodded and smiled, some social part of me continuing to conduct necessary business as I saw the two men in their places at the table: the square was just the three of us now. And at that moment, I didn’t know what I’d do. Tony had told us how important hanging a show was: a painting could look great by itself but then not as good when you hung it next to the wrong canvas for an exhibition. Everything was context. When I started my own showing, and I still remembered many things Tony had said, I understood how right he was, and how generous it had been, at this pitched moment, for him to think to share it. And Tony for a moment did look every year of his age, across from my young, handsome husband. My husband looked smooth. Then my eyes adjusted, and I could see again how extraordinary he was. Tony asked if we had anything to drink, preferably scotch. My feelings were shifting by the second.
To know he’d come from looking at Rothko’s paintings to looking at yours: that was the power of a person like Tony.
And from that situation—one of those moments when anything might happen—Tony proceeded to get unbelievably, impossibly drunk. He became as drunk as I’d ever seen anybody drunk. Drunk in the way of the past’s drunks. Of the people for whom drunkenness was a truer state, interrupted by wasteful periods of sobriety.
And then drunk in a strangely unappealing way: as time passed all the alcohol seemed to consolidate in his nose. After about an hour, the bridge of his nose would wriggle and squinch up and down like a rabbit’s. He drank for two solid hours: he sang a song about being Irish, and then one about a grasshopper but most of the second verse was mushed. Eventually, my husband lifted his eyebrows at me and relaxed into nonobservance: it was as if, earlier, some essential part of him had sensed a danger to himself, a threat to his settled life, and now that objective cold self sensed that the danger had passed. He nodded at me. One more bit of irony: marriage had allowed my husband to join a long line, to partake in a great cultural observance. We’d both joined a line that extended to Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock and perhaps even Frank Lloyd Wright and many others: people who had gotten to see Tony Smith drunk. I’d heard about but never experienced his drunkenness—for me it was the cutoff point.
My husband excused himself, rose from the table at ten o’clock to check on the boys. I whispered to Tony, asking if he was all right. We were alone at the table, and I wanted to see what he would say. My moment of decision had passed. This was a life I did not want. His nose went through another unbelievable series of twitches. “Sure,” he said. Then he rested his cheek on his dessert plate as if it were a pillow. When I asked how he was getting back to New Jersey, he said he’d need a cab. I couldn’t imagine how he could hail one. I pictured the many hurdles between our table and the passenger seat. He’d have to first navigate the hallway. Then pilot the many-buttoned, suddenly elaborate cockpit of the elevator. Cross the desert of our lobby. And then face the unpredictable freelance personnel of the street. There was quite an adventure in front of him. I understood I was responsible for getting him home. As we went through the door, he grabbed the gift he’d brought. He lurched upright.
In the lobby Tony said, “It’s all okay, all okay.” I agreed. It was okay. Then at the door he gave me his gift again, the brown paper–wrapped square. “For you,” he said. “Real things, they can be abstract too,” he said.
Outside on the street I hailed and seated him in the cab. And felt relieved he was leaving.
As my husband watched TV in the bedroom, I removed the brown twine and paper from around Tony’s gift. It was, as he’d told me, the industrial farm stuff from his home in the country. A burlap sack, with framing nails tacking it against a light wood stretcher bar. Purina Hen Chow, it said. It was beautiful. From the industrial stuff, the barn stuff from his home in the country. And how brilliant of Tony to see the art there.
He’d connected the concept of his house and me again, in this visceral way.
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My children especially loved it: and their loving it was always a kind of secret between who I now was and who I’d been then, the circumstances of the gift. When I had my first show a year later, becoming successful so fast that Tony’s face and my face were advertised together in Art Forum, on separate pages, so if you closed them the faces were together. And when I opened it again, he looked as remote and glowering as he had that first day of class. As if he’d never been somebody who had given me anything personal. This was the treasure I held off selling until the bitter end, when everything had changed again. And when I brought it to Sotheby’s, since Tony had never signed it, I was told the piece was simply without value. There was no way to prove the brilliance was his or if it was mine.
From Brightening Glance by Pat Lipsky, published by the University of Iowa Press. Copyright © 2025 by Pat Lipsky.
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