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This Game was easier before I was famous, or infamous, and before the damned process was so efficient. When I could still pretend it was my own art, or at least about my art. Nowadays, once you're doped up and squeezed into the skinsuit, it's hard to tell whose eye is measuring the model. Whose hand is holding the brush.

I'll work in any painting or drawing medium the customer wants, within reason. Through most of my career people naturally chose my own specialty, transparent watercolor, but since I became famous with the Manhattan Monster thing, a lot of them want me to trowel on thick acrylics in primary colors. Boring. But they take the painting home and hang it up and ask their friends, Isn't that just as scary as shit? That's the stylistic association with the Monster, usually, not the subject matter. Most people's nightmares stay safely hidden when they pick up a brush. Good thing, too. If the customer is a nut case, the collaboration can be truly disturbing--and perhaps revealing. A lot of us find employment in mental institutions. Some of us find residence in them. Occupational hazard.

At least I make enough per assignment now, thanks to the notoriety of the Monster case, so that I can take off half the year to travel and paint for myself. This year, I was leaving the first of February to start off the vacation sailing in the Caribbean. With one week to go, I could already feel the sun, taste the rum. I'd sublet the apartment and studio and already had all my clothes and gear packed into two small bags. Watercolors don't take up much space, and you don't need a lot of clothes where I was headed.

I was even tempted to forsake my schedule and go to the islands early. It would have cost extra and confused my friends, who know me to be methodical and punctual. But I should have done it. God, I should have done it.

•

We had one of those fast, hard snows that make Manhattan beautiful for a while. I walked to and from lunch the long way, through Central Park, willing to trade the slight extra danger for the beauty. Besides, my walking stick supposedly holds an electric charge strong enough to stun a horse.

The man waiting for me in the lobby didn't look like trouble, though you never know. Short, balding, old-fashioned John Lennon-style spectacles.

He introduced himself while I fumbled with overcoat and boots. Juan Carlos Segura, investment counselor.

"Have you ever painted before?" I asked him. "Drawn or sculpted or anything?" Some of the most interesting work I produce in collaboration comes from the inexperienced, their unfamiliarity with the tools and techniques resulting in happy accidents, spontaneity.

"No. My talents lie elsewhere." I think I was supposed to be able to tell how wealthy he was by upper-class lodge signals--the cut of his conservative blue pinstripe, the gold mechanical watch--but my talents lie elsewhere. So I asked him directly, "You understand how expensive my services are?"

"Exactly. One hundred thousand dollars a day."

"And you know you must accept the work as produced? No money-back guarantee."

"I understand."

"We're in business, then." I buzzed my assistant, Allison, to start tea while we waited for the ancient elevator.

People who aren't impressed by my studio, with its original Picasso, Monet, Dali and Turner, are often fascinated by Allison. She is beautiful but very large, 6'3" but perfectly proportioned, as if some magic device had enlarged her by 20 percent. Segura didn't notice the paintings on the walls and didn't blink at her, either. Maybe that should have told me something. He accepted his tea and thanked her politely.

I blew on my tea and studied him over the cup. He looked serious, studious, calm. So had the Manhattan Monster.

"There's half a page of facilitators in the phone book," I said. "Every single one of them charges less than I do." I believe in the direct approach. It sometimes costs me a commission.

He nodded, studying me back.

"Some people want me just because I am the most expensive. A few want me because they know my work, my own work, and it's very good. Most want a painting by the man who released the Monster from Claude Avery."

"Is it important for you to know why I chose you?"

"The more I know about you, the better picture you'll get."

He nodded and paused. "Then accept this. Maybe fifty percent of my motivation is because you are the most costly. That is sometimes an index of value. Of your artistic abilities, or anybody else's, I am totally ignorant."

"So fifty percent is the Monster?"

"Not exactly. In the first place, I don't care to pay that much for something that so many other people have. And I don't like the style. Two of my acquaintances own paintings they did with you in that disturbing mode. But, looking at their paintings, it occurred to me that something more subtle was possible. You. Your anger at being used in this way."

"I have expressed that in my own paintings."

"I am sure that you have. What I want, I suppose, is to express my own anger. At my customers."

That was a new wrinkle. "You're angry at your customers?"

"Not all of them. Most. People give me large amounts of money to invest for them. Once each quarter, I extract a percentage of the profit." He set down the cup and put his hands on his knees. "But most of them want some input. It is their money, after all."

"And you would prefer to follow a single strategy," I said, "to use all their money the same way. The more capital you have behind your investment pattern, the less actual risk--since I assume that you don't have to pay back a percentage--if an investment fails."

"For an artist, you know a lot about money."

I smiled. "I'm a rich artist."

"People are emotionally connected to their money, and they want to do things with it, other than make more money. They want to change the world."

"Interesting. I see the connection with my work. My clients."

"I saw it when I read the profile in Forbes a couple years ago."

"And you waited for my price to come down?"

"Your price actually has come down nine percent, because of inflation, since the article. You'll be raising it soon."

"Good timing. I like round numbers, so I'm going up to one-twenty when I return from vacation in August." I picked up a stylus and touchpad and began drawing close parallel lines. It helps me think. "The connection, the analogy, is good. I know that many of my clients must be dissatisfied with abstract smearings that cost them six figures. But they get exactly what they pay for. I explain it to them beforehand, and if they choose not to hear me, that's their problem."

"You said as much in the article. But I don't want abstract smearings. I want your customary medium, when you are working seriously. The old-fashioned hyperrealism."

"Do you want a Boston School watercolor?"

"Exactly. I know the subject, the setting----"

"That's three weeks' work, minimum. More than two million dollars."

"I can afford it."

"Can you afford to leave your own work for three weeks?" I was drawing lines very fast. This would really screw up my vacation schedule. But it would be half a year's income in three weeks.

"I'm not only going to leave for three weeks, I'm going exactly where you are. The Cayman Islands. George Town."

I just looked at him.

"They say the beach is wonderful."

I never asked him how he'd found out about my vacation plans. Through my credit-card company, I supposed. That he would take the trouble before our initial interview was revealing. He was a man who left nothing to chance.

•

He wanted a photo-realist painting of a nude woman sitting in a conference room, alone, studying papers. Horn-rimmed glasses. The conference room elegant.

The room would be no problem, given money, since George Town has as many banks and insurance buildings as bikinis. The model was another matter. Most of the models in George Town would be black, which would complicate the text of the painting, or would be gorgeous beach bums with tan lines and silicone breasts. I told him that I thought we wanted an ordinary woman, trim but severe-looking, someone whose posture would radiate dignity without clothing. (I showed him Olympia and Maja Desnuda and some Delacroix, and a few of Wyeth's Helgas that had that quality.) She also would have to be a damned good model to do three weeks of sittings in the same position. I suggested we hire someone in (continued on page 118) Feed Back(continued from page 68) New York and fly her down with us. He agreed.

Allison had been watching through the ceiling bug, part of her job. She came in when he left and poured herself a cup of tea. "Nut case," she said.

"Interesting nut case, though. Rich."

"If you ever took on a charity nut case, I wasn't watching." She stirred a spoonful of marmalade into her tea. Russian style. She does that only to watch me cringe. "So I should get tickets to the Caymans for me and M&M?"

"Yeah, Friday."

"First class?"

"What's it worth to you?"

"I don't know. You want a cup of tea in your lap?"

"First class."

•

Finding the right model was difficult. I knew two or three women who would fill the bill in terms of physical appearance and sitting ability, but they were friends. That would interfere with the client's wishes, since he obviously wanted a cold, clinical approach. Allison and I spent an afternoon going through agency files, and another afternoon interviewing people, until we found the right one. Rhonda Speck, 30, slender enough to show ribs. I disliked her on sight, and liked her even less when she took off her clothes, for the way she looked at me--her expression a prim gash of disapproval. Even if I were heterosexual, I wouldn't be ogling her unprofessionally. That edge of resentment might help the painting, I thought. I didn't know the half of it.

I told Rhonda the job involved a free trip to the Cayman Islands and she showed as much enthusiasm as if I had said Long Island. She did brighten a little when I described the setting. She was working on her law degree and could study while she sat. That also helped to distance me from her, since I am not a great admirer of the profession.

I called my banker in George Town and described the office that I needed. She knew of a small law firm that was closing for a February vacation, and would inquire.

It had been a few years since I'd painted nudes, and I'd done only two photo-realist studies ever. I didn't want to work with Rhonda any more than I had to, or pay her any more than I had to, so I had a friend with a figure similar to Rhonda's come over and sit. For two days I did sketches and photographs, experimenting with postures and lightings. I took them to Segura and we agreed on the pose--the woman looking up coldly from her papers, as if interrupted, strong light from the desk lamp putting half of her face in shadow. Making the desk lamp the only source of light also isolated the figure from the details of the office, which would be rendered in photo-realist detail, but darkly, making for a sinister background.

Then I spent three days doing a careful portrait of the model, head and upper body, solving some technical problems about rendering the glossy hair and the small breasts. I wanted them to look hard, unfeminine, yet realistic.

I took the portrait up to Segura's office and he approved. His only reservations were about himself. "You're sure I'll be able to produce something with this kind of control? I literally can't draw a face that looks like a face."

"No problem. Your hands will be stiff from using undeveloped muscles, but while you're in the skinsuit your movements will be precisely the same as mine. Have I told you about the time I hired a facilitator myself?" He shook his head. "I was curious about how it felt on the other end. I hired a guitarist-composer, and we spent two days writing a short fugue in the style of Bach. We started with the four letters of my last name--which, coincidentally, form an A-minor-seventh chord--and made up a marvelously complicated little piece that was unequivocally mine. Even though I can't play it."

"You could play it in the skinsuit, though."

"Beautifully. I have a tape of it, the facilitator sitting beside me playing a silent solid-body guitar while I roam around the frets with brilliant sensitivity." I laughed. "At the end of each day my hands were so weak I couldn't pick up a fork, let alone a brush. My fingers were stiff for a week." I wriggled them. "Your experience will be less extreme. Using a brush doesn't involve the unnatural stretching that playing a guitar does."

Segura was willing to part with an extra hundred grand for a one-day demonstration. A predictable course, given hindsight, knowing him to be a man boxed in by distrust and driven, or at least directed, by what I would call paranoia.

He suggested a self-portrait. I told him it would have to be done from photographs, since the skinsuit distorts your face almost as much as a bank-robber's pantyhose disguise. That interested him. He was going to spend three weeks in the skinsuit; why not have a record of what it was like? I pretended that nobody had come up with the idea before and said sure, sounds interesting.

In fact, I'd done it twice, but both times the collaborators produced impasto abstractions that didn't resemble anything. Segura would be different.

By law, a doctor has to be present when you begin the facilitation. After it gets under way, any kind of nurse or medic is adequate for standing guard. A few collaborators have had blood-pressure spikes or panic attacks. The nurse can terminate the process instantly if the biosensors show something happening. He pushes a button that releases a trank into my bloodstream, which breaks the connection. It also puts me into a Valium haze the rest of the day. A good reason to have people pay in advance.

There's a doctor in my building who's always willing to pop up and earn a hundred dollars for five minutes' work. I always use the same nurse, too, a careful and alert man with the unlikely name of Marion Marion. He calls himself M&M, since he's brown and round.

I soaked and taped down four half-sheets of heavy D'Arches cold-press, allowing for three disasters, and prepared my standard portrait palette. I set up the session to begin at 9:30 sharp. M&M came over early, as usual, to have tea and joke around with Allison and me. He's a natural comic and I think also a natural psychologist. Whatever, he puts me at ease before facing what can be a rather trying experience.

(I should point out here that it's not always bad. If the collaborator has talent and training and a pleasant disposition, it can be as refreshing as dancing with a skilled partner.)

The others showed up on time and we got down to business. An anteroom off my studio has two parallel examining tables. Segura and I stripped and lay down and were injected with six hours' worth of buffer. M&M glued the induction electrodes to the proper places on our shaven heads. The doctor looked at them, signed a piece of paper and left. Then M&M, with Allison's assistance, rolled the loose skin-suits over us, sealed them and pumped the air out.

Segura and I woke up at the same instant M&M turned on the microcurrent that initiated the process. It's like being puppet and puppeteer simultaneously. I saw through Segura's eyes. His body sat me up, slid me to the floor and walked me into the studio. He perched me on a stool in front of the nearly horizontal easel and the mirror. Then I took over.

If you were watching us work, you would see two men sitting side by side, engaged in what looks like a painstakingly overpracticed mime routine. If one of us scratches his ear, the other one does. But from the inside it is more complicated: We exchange control second by second. This is why not every good artist can be a good facilitator. You have to have an instinct for when to assert your judgment, your skills, and let the client be in control otherwise. It is literally a thousand decisions per hour for six hours. It's exhausting. I earn my fee.

My initial idea was, in compositional terms, similar to what our nude would be--a realistic face in harsh light glowing in front of an indistinct background. There wouldn't be time to paint in background details, of course.

I made a light drawing of the head and shoulders, taking most of an hour. Then I took a chisel brush and carefully painted in the outlines of the drawing with frisket, a compound like rubber cement. You can paint over it and, when the paint dries, rub it off with an eraser or your fingertip, exposing the paper and the drawing underneath.

When the frisket was dry, I mopped the entire painting with clear water and then made an inky wash out of burnt umber and French ultramarine. I worked the wash over the whole painting and, while it was still damp, floated in diffuse shapes of umber and ultramarine that would hint at shadowy background. Then I buzzed Allison in to dry it while I/we walked around, loosening up. She came in with a hair drier and worked over the wet paper carefully, uniformly, while I didn't watch. Sometimes a dramatic background wash just doesn't work when it dries--looks obvious or cheesy or dull--and there is never any way to fix it. (Maybe you could soak the paper overnight, removing most of the pigment. Better to just start over, though.)

I walked Segura across to the bay window and looked out over the city. The snow that remained on the shaded part of rooftops was gray or black. Traffic crawled in the thin bright light. Pedestrians hurried through the wind and slush.

Segura's body wanted a cigarette and I allowed him to walk me over to his clothes and light one up. The narcotic rush was disorienting. I had to lean us against a wall to keep from staggering. It was not unpleasant, though, once I surrendered control to him. No need for me to dominate motor responses until we had brush in hand.

Allison said the wash was ready and looked good. It did--vague, gloomy shapes suggesting a prison or asylum cell. I rolled up a kneaded eraser and carefully rubbed away the frisket. The light pencil drawing floated over the darkness like a disembodied thought.

I had to apply frisket again, this time in a halo around the drawing, and there was a minor setback: I'd neglected to put the frisket brush into solvent, and the bristles had dried into a solid, useless block. I surprised myself by throwing it across the room. That was Segura acting.

I found another square brush and carefully worked a thin frisket mask around the head and shoulders, to keep the dark background from bleeding in, but had to stop several times and lift up the brush because my hand was trembling with Segura's suppressed anger at the mistake. Relax, it was a cheap brush. You must be hell on wheels to work for.

First a dilute yellow wash, new gamboge, over the entire face. I picked up the hair drier and used it for six or seven minutes, making sure the wash was bone-dry, meanwhile planning the next couple of stages.

This technique--glazing--consists of building up a picture with layer upon layer of dilute paint. It takes patience and precision and judgment: Sometimes you want the previous layer to be completely dry, and sometimes you want it damp, to diffuse the lines between the two colors. If it's too damp, you risk muddying the colors, which can be irreversible and fatal. But that's one thing that attracts me to the technique--the challenge of gambling everything on the timing of one stroke of the brush.

Segura obviously felt otherwise. Odd for a man who essentially gambled for a living, albeit with other people's money. He wanted each layer safely dry before proceeding with the next, once he understood what I was doing. That's a technique, but it's not my technique, which is what he was paying for. It would also turn this portrait, distorted as it was, into a clown's mask.

So I pushed back a little, establishing my authority, so to speak. I didn't want this to become a contest of wills. I just wanted control over the hair drier, actually, not over Juan Carlos Segura.

There was a slight battle, lasting only seconds. It's hard to describe the sensation to someone who hasn't used a facilitator. It's something like being annoyed at yourself for not being able to make up your mind, but rather intensified--"being of two minds," literally.

Of course, I won the contest, having about ten thousand times more experience at it than Segura. I set down the hair drier, and the next layer, defining the hollows of the face visible through the skinsuit, went on with soft edges. I checked the mirror and automatically noted the places I would come back to later when the paper was dry, to make actual lines, defining the bottom of the goggle ridges, the top of the lip, the forward part of the ear mass.

•

The portrait was finished in two hours, but the background still needed something. Pursuing a vague memory from a week before, I flipped through a book of Matthew Brady photographs, visions of the Civil War's hell. Our face in the skinsuit resembled those of some corpses, open-mouthed, staring. I found the background I wanted, a ruined tumble of brick wall, and took the book back to the easel. I worked an intimation of the wall into the background, dry-brushing umber and ultramarine with speckles and threads of clotted blood color, alizarin muted with raw umber. Then I dropped the brushes into water and looked away, buzzing M&M. I didn't want to see the painting again until I saw it with my own eyes.

Coming out of the facilitation state takes longer than going in, especially if you don't go the full six hours. The remaining buffer has to be neutralized with a series of timed shots. Otherwise, Segura and I would hardly have been able to walk, expecting the collaboration of another brain that was no longer there.

I was up and around a few minutes before Segura. Allison had set out some cheese and fruit and an ice bucket with a bottle of white burgundy. I was hungry, as always, but only nibbled a bit, waiting for lunch.

Segura attacked the food like a starved animal. "What do you think?" he said between bites. "Is it any good?"

"Always hard to tell while you're working. Let's take a look." I buzzed Allison and she brought the painting in. She'd done a good job, as usual, the painting set off in a double mat of brick red and forest green inside a black metal frame.

"It does look good," he said, as if surprised.

I nodded and sipped wine, studying it. The painting was technically good, but it would probably hang in a gallery for years, gathering nervous (continued on page 150) Feed Back(continued from page 120) compliments, before anybody bought it. It was profoundly ugly, a portrait of brutality. The skinsuit seemed to be straining to contain a mask of rage. Something truly sick burned behind the eyes.

He propped it up on the couch and walked back and forth, admiring it from various angles. For a moment I hoped he would say, "This will do fine; forget about the nude." I didn't look forward to three weeks of his intimate company.

"It captures something," he said, grinning. "I could use it to intimidate clients."

"The style suits you?"

"Yes. Yes, indeed." He looked at me with a sort of squint. "I vaguely remember fighting over some aspect of it."

"Technical matter. I prevailed, of course--that's what you pay me for."

He nodded slowly. "Well. I'll see you in George Town, then." He offered his hand, dry and hot.

"Friday morning. I'll be at the Hilton." Allison put the painting into a leather portfolio and ushered him out.

She came back in with a color photocopy of it. "Sick puppy."

I examined the picture, nodding. "There's some talent here, though. A lot of artists are sick puppies."

"Present company excluded. Lunch?"

"Not today. Got a date."

"Harry?"

"He's out of town. Guy I met at the gym."

She arched an eyebrow at me. "Young and cute."

"Younger than you," I said. "Big nose, though."

"Yeah, nose." She poured herself a glass and refilled mine. "So you won't be back after lunch?"

"Depends."

"Well, I'll be back around two, if you need anything." She headed for her office. "Happy hose."

"Nose, damn it!" She laughed and whispered the door shut behind her.

I carried my wine over to the window. The icy wind was audible through the double-pane glass. The people on the sidewalk hurried, hunched over against the gale. Tomorrow I'd be lying on snow-white sand, swimming in blood-warm water. A few days of sunshine before Segura showed up. I drank the wine and shivered.

•

In the 18th century, George III was sailing in the Caribbean when a sudden storm, probably a hurricane, smashed his ship to pieces. Fishermen from one of the Caymans braved the storm to go out and pick up survivors. Saved from what he'd thought would be certain death, King George expressed his royal gratitude by declaring that no resident of the islands would ever have to pay taxes to the British crown for the rest of eternity.

So where other Caribbean islands have craft shops and laid-back bars, George Town has high-rise banks and insurance buildings. A lot of expatriate Brits and Americans live and work there, doing business by satellite bounce.

I have a bank account in George Town myself, and may retire there someday. For this time of my life, it's too peaceful, except for the odd hurricane. I need Manhattan's garish excitement, the constant input, the dangerous edge.

But it's good to get away. The beach is an ideal place for quick figure sketches, so I loosened up for the commission by filling a notebook with pictures of women as they walked by or played in the sand and water. Drawing forces you to see, so for the first time I was aware that the beauty of the native black women was fundamentally different from that of the tourists, white or black. It was mainly a matter of posture and expression, dignified and detached. The tourist women were always to some extent posing, even at their most casual. Which I think was the nature of the place, rather than some characteristic female vanity. I normally pay much closer attention to men, and believe me, we corner the market on that small vice.

My staff came down on Thursday. M&M tore off into town to find out whether either of his girlfriends had learned about the other. Allison joined me on the beach.

Impressive as she is in office clothes, Allison is spectacular out of them. She has never tanned; her skin is like ivory. Thousands of hours in the gym have given her the sharply defined musculature of a classical statue. She wore a black leather string bikini that revealed everything not absolutely necessary for reproduction or lactation. But I don't think most straight men would characterize her as sexy. She was too formidable. That was all right with Allison, since she almost never was physically attracted to any man shorter or less well built than she. That dismissed all but a tenth of one percent of the male race. She had yet to find an Einstein, or even a Schwarzenegger, among the qualifiers. They usually turned out to be gentle but self-absorbed, predictably, and sometimes more interested in me than her. The message light was on when we got back to the hotel; both Rhonda Speck and Segura had arrived. It wasn't quite ten, but we agreed it was too late to return their calls, and retired.

•

I set up the pose and lighting before we went under, explaining to Rhonda exactly what we were after. Segura was silent, watching. I took longer than necessary, messing with the blinds and the rheostats I'd put on the two light sources. I wanted Segura to get used to Rhonda's nudity. He was obviously as straight as a plank, and we didn't want the painting to reveal any sexual curiosity or desire. Rhonda was only slightly more sexy than a mackerel, but you could never tell.

For the same reason, I didn't want to start the actual painting the first day. We'd start with a series of charcoal roughs. I explained to Segura about negative spaces and how important it was to establish balance between the light and dark. That was something I'd already worked out, of course. I just wanted him to stare at Rhonda long enough to become bored with the idea.

It didn't quite work out that way.

We didn't need a doctor's certification in George Town, so the setting up took a little less time. Artist and client lock-stepped into the office where Rhonda waited, studying the pages of notes stacked neatly on her desk.

There were two piano stools with identical newsprint pads and boxes of charcoal sticks. The idea was to sketch her from eight or ten slightly different angles, Segura moving around her in a small arc while I worked just behind him, looking over his shoulder. Theoretically, I could be anywhere, even in another room, since I was seeing her through his eyes. But it seems to work better this way, especially with a model.

The sketches had a lot of energy--so much energy that Segura actually tore through the paper a few times, blocking out the darkness around the seated figure. I got excited myself, and not just by feedback from Segura. The negative-space exercise is just that, an art school formalism, but Segura didn't know that. The result came close to being actual art.

I showed him that after we came out of the buffer. The sketches were good, strong abstractions. You could turn them upside down or sideways, retaining symmetry while obliterating text, and they still worked well.

I had a nascent artist on my hands. Segura had real native talent. That didn't often come my way. The combination could produce a painting of some value, one that I wouldn't have been able to do by myself. If things worked out.

Allison and I took the boat out after lunch--or rather, Allison took the boat out with me as ballast, baking inertly under a heavy coat of total sun block. (She and I are almost equally pale, and that's not all we have in common; I'm also nearly as well-muscled. We met at the weight machines in a Broadway gym.) She sailed and I watched billowing clouds form abstract patterns in the impossible cobalt sky. The soothing sounds of the boat lulled me to sleep--the keel slipping through warm water, the lines creaking, the ruffle of the sails.

She woke me to help her bring it back in. There was a cool mist of rain that became intermittently heavy. A couple of miles from shore we started to see lightning, so we struck sail and revved up the little motor and drove straight in, prudence conquering seamanship.

We dried off at the marina bar and drank hot chocolate laced with rum, watching a squall line roll across land and water, feeling lucky to be inside.

"Photography tomorrow?" she asked.

"Yeah. And then drawing, drawing, drawing."

"The part you like best."

"Oh, yes." Actually, I halfway do like it, the way an athlete can enjoy warming up, in expectation of the actual event.

•

The next morning I set up the cameras before we went into the skinsuits. The main one was a fairly complex and delicate piece of equipment, an antique 8x10 view camera that took hairline-accurate black-and-white negatives. I could have accomplished the same thing with a modern large-format camera, but I liked the smooth working of the gears, the smell of the oak and leather, the sense of contact with an earlier, less hurried age. The paradox of combining the technology of that age with ours.

The other camera was a medium-format Polaroid. Buffered and suited, I led Segura through the arcane art and science of tweaking lights, model, f-stop and exposure to produce a subtle spectrum of prints: a sequence of 98 slightly different, and profoundly different, pictures of one woman. We studied the pictures and her and finally decided on the right combination. I set up the antique 8x10 and reproduced the lighting. We focused it with his somewhat younger eyes and took three slightly different exposures.

Then we took the film into the darkroom that M&M had improvised in the firm's executive washroom. We developed each sheet in Rodinal, fixed and washed them and hung them up weighted to dry.

We left the darkroom and spent a few minutes smoking, studying Rhonda as she studied her law. I told her she was free for three days and that she should show up Thursday morning. She nodded curtly and left, resentful.

Her annoyance was understandable. She'd been sitting there naked for all that time we were playing in the darkroom. I should have dismissed her when we finished shooting.

We lit up another cigarette and I realized that it wasn't I who had kept her waiting. It was Segura. I'd started to tell her to go and then he manufactured a little crisis that led straight to the darkroom. From then on I hadn't thought of the woman except as a reversed ghost appearing in the developer tray.

Under the circumstances, it wasn't a bad thing to have her hostile toward us, if we could capture the hostility on paper. But it goes against my grain to mistreat an employee, even a temporary one.

We examined each of the negatives on a lightbox with a loupe, then took the best one back into the darkroom for printing. Plain contact prints on finest-grain paper. The third one was perfect: rich and stark, almost scary in its knife-edge sharpness. You could see one bleached hair standing out from her left nipple.

That was enough work for the day; in fact, we'd gone slightly over the six-hour limit, and both of us were starting to get headaches and cramps. Another half-hour and it would be double vision and tremors. More than that--though I'd never experienced it--you wind up mentally confused, the two minds still linked electrically but no longer cooperating. Some poor guinea pigs took it as far as convulsions or catatonia, back when the buffer drug was first being developed.

M&M eased us out of it and helped us down to a taxi. It was only five blocks to the hotel, but neither of us was feeling particularly athletic. For some reason the buffer hangover hits people like me, in very good shape, particularly hard. Segura was flabby, but he had less trouble getting out of the car.

Back in the room, I pulled the blackout blinds over the windows and collapsed, desperately hungry but too tired to do anything about it except dream of food.

•

Allison had set up the paper, one large sheet of handmade hot-pressed 400-pound rag, soaking it overnight and then taping it down, giving it plenty of time to dry completely. That sheet of paper, the one Segura would be drawing on, cost more than some gallery paintings. The sheet I'd be working on was just paper, with a similar tooth.

We had set up two drawing tables with their boards at identical angles, mine a little higher, since I have a larger frame. An opaque projector mounted above Segura shot a duplicate of yesterday's photo onto the expensive paper. Our job for the next three days was to execute an accurate but ghost-light tracing of the picture, which would be gently erased after the painting was done.

Some so-called photo-realists bypass this step with a combination of photography and xerography--make a high-contrast print and then impress a light photocopy of it onto watercolor paper. That makes their job a high-salaried kind of paint-by-numbers. Doing the actual underdrawing puts you well "into" the painting before the first brush is wet.

We both sat down and went to work, starting with the uniformly bound law books on the shelves behind Rhonda. It was an unchallenging, repetitive subject to occupy us while we got used to doing this kind of labor together.

For a few minutes we worked on a scrap piece of paper, until I was absolutely confident of his eye and hand. Then we started on the real thing.

After five grueling hours we had completed about a third of the background, an area half the size of a newspaper page. I was well pleased with that progress; working by myself I would have done little more.

Segura was not so happy. In the taxi, he cradled his right hand and stared at it, the wrist quivering, the thumb frankly twitching. "How can I possibly keep this up?" he said. "I won't even be able to pick up a pencil tomorrow."

I held out my own hand and wrist, steady, muscular. "But I will. That's all that counts."

"It could permanently damage my hand."

"Never happened." Of course, I'd never worked with anyone for three weeks. "Go to that masseur, the man whose card I gave you. He'll make your hand as good as new. Do you still have the card?"

"Oh, yeah." He shifted uncomfortably. "I don't mean to be personal, or offensive. But is this man gay? I would have trouble with that."

"I wouldn't know. We don't have little badges or a secret handshake." He didn't laugh, but he looked less grim. "My relationship with him is professional. I wouldn't know whether or not he is gay." Actually, since our professional relationship included orgasm, if he wasn't gay, he was quite a Method actor. But I assumed he would divine Segura's orientation as quickly as I had. A masseur ought to have a feel for his clients.

The next day went a lot better. Like myself, Segura was heartened by the sight of the previous day's careful work outline. We worked faster and with equal care, finishing all of the drawing except for the woman and the things on the desk in front of her.

It was on the third day that I had the first inkling of trouble. Working on the image of Rhonda, Segura wanted to bear down too hard. That could be disastrous; if the pencil point actually broke the fibers of paper along a line, it could never be completely erased. You can't have outlines in this kind of painting, just sharply defined masses perfectly joining other sharply defined masses. A pencil line might as well be an inkblot.

I thought the pressure was because of simple muscular fatigue. Segura was not in good physical shape. His normal workday comprised six hours in conference and six hours talking on the phone or dictating correspondence. He took a perverse pride in not even being able to keyboard. He never lifted anything heavier than a cigarette.

People who think art isn't physically demanding ought to try to sit in one position for six hours, brush or pencil in hand, staring at something or someone and trying to transfer its essence to a piece of paper or canvas. Even an athletic person leaves that arena with aches and twinges. A couch potato like Segura can't even walk away without help.

He never complained, though, other than expressing concern that his fatigue might interfere with the project. I reassured him. In fact, I had once completed a successful piece with a quadriplegic so frail he couldn't sign his name the same way twice. We taught ourselves how to hold the brush in our teeth.

It was a breathtaking moment when we turned off the overhead projector for the last time. The finished drawing floated on the paper, an exquisite ghost of what the painting would become. Through Segura's eyes I stared at it hungrily for 15 or 20 minutes, mapping out strategies of frisket and mask, in my mind's eye seeing the paper glow through layer after careful layer of glaze. It would be perfect.

•

Rhonda wasn't in a great mood, coming back to sit after three days on her own, but even she seemed to share our excitement when she saw the underdrawing. It made the project real.

The first step was to paint a careful frisket over her figure, as well as the chair, the lamp and the table with its clutter. That took an hour, since the figure was more than a foot high on the paper. I also masked out reflections on a vase and the glass front of a bookcase.

I realized it would be good to start the curtains with a thin wash of Payne's gray, which is not a color I normally keep on my palette, so I gave Rhonda a five-minute break while I rummaged for it. She put on a robe and walked over to the painting and gasped. We heard her across the room.

I looked over and saw what had distressed her. The beautifully detailed picture of her body had been blotted out with gray frisket, and it did look weird. She was a nonbeing, a featureless negative space hovering in the middle of an almost photographic depiction of a room. All three of us laughed at her reaction. I started to explain, but she knew about frisketing; it had just taken her by surprise.

Even the best facilitators have moments of confusion, when their client's emotional reaction to a situation is totally at odds with their own. This was one of those times: My reaction to Rhonda's startled response was a kind of ironic empathy, but Segura's reaction was malicious glee.

I could see that he disliked Rhonda at a very deep level. What I didn't see (although Allison had known from the first day) was that it wasn't just Rhonda. It was women in general.

I've always liked women myself, even though I've known since 13 or 14 that I would never desire them. It's pernicious to generalize, but I think that my friendships with women have usually been deeper and more honest than they would have been had I been straight. A straight man can simply like a woman and desire her friendship, but there's always a molecule or two of testosterone buzzing between them, if they are both of an age and social situation where sex might be a possibility, however remote. I have to handle that complication with some men whom I know or suspect are gay, even when I feel no particular attraction toward them.

The drawing had gone approximately from upper left to lower right, then back to the middle for the figure, but the painting would have to proceed in a less straightforward way. You work all over the painting at once: a layer of rose madder on the spines of one set of books and on the shady side of the vase and on two of the flowers. You need a complete mental picture of the finished painting so you can predict the sequence of glazes, sometimes covering up areas with frisket or, when there were straight lines, with drafting tape. The paper was dry, though, so it was usually just a matter of careful brushwork--pathologically careful: You can't erase paint.

Of course, Rhonda had to sit even though for the first week her image would be hidden behind frisket. Her skin tones affected the colors of everything else. Her emotional presence affected the background. And Segura's feeling toward her "colored" the painting, literally.

The work went smoothly. It was a good thing Segura had suggested the trial painting; we'd been able to talk over the necessity for occasional boldness and spontaneity, to keep the painting from becoming an exercise in careful draftsmanship. Especially with this dark, sinister background, we often had to work glazes wet-into-wet. Making details soft and diffuse at the periphery of a painting can render it more realistic rather than less. Our own eyes see the world with precision only in a surprisingly small area around the thing that has our attention. The rest is blur, more or less ignored. (The part of the mind that is not ignoring the background is the animal part that waits for a sudden movement or noise; a painting can derive tension from that.)

Segura and I worked so well together that it was going to cost me money; the painting would be complete in closer to two weeks than three. When I mentioned this he said not to worry; if the painting was good, he'd pay the second million regardless of the amount of time (he'd paid a million down before we left New York), and he was sure the painting would be good.

Of course, there was arithmetic involved there, as well as art. Fortune listed his income last year as $98 million. He probably wanted to get back to his quarter-million-a-day telephone.

So the total time from photography to finished background was only 11 days, and I was sure we could do the figure and face in a day. We still had a couple of hours' buffer left when we removed the frisket, but I decided to stop at that point. We studied her for an hour or so, sketching.

The sketches were accurate, but in a way they were almost caricatures, angular, hostile. As art, they were not bad, though like Segura's initial self-portrait, they were fundamentally, intentionally ugly. I could feel Manet's careful brush and sardonic eye here: How can a well-shaped breast or the lush curve of a hip be both beautiful and ugly? Cover the dark, dagger-staring face Olympia and drink in the lovely body. Then uncover the face.

That quality would be submerged in the final painting. It would be a beautiful picture, dramatic but exquisitely balanced. The hatred of women there but concealed, like an underpainting.

It was a great physical relief to be nearing the end. I'd never facilitated for more than five days in a row, and the skinsuit was becoming repulsive to me. I was earning my long vacation.

•

That night I watched bad movies and drank too much. The morning was brilliant, but I was not. M&M injected me with a cocktail of vitamins and speed that burned away the hangover. I knew I'd come down hard by nightfall, but the painting would be done long before then.

Segura was jittery, snappish, as we prepared for the last day. Maybe M&M gave him a little something along with the buffer, to calm him down. Maybe it wasn't a good idea.

Rhonda was weird that morning, too, with good reason. She was finally the focus of our attention and she played her part well. Her concentration on us was ferocious, her contempt palpable.

I dabbed frisket on a few highlights--collarbone, breast, eye and that glossy hair--and then put in a pale flesh-colored wash over everything, cadmium-yellow light with a speck of rose. While it dried, we smoked a cigarette and stared at her. Rhonda had made it clear that she didn't like smoke, and we normally went into another room or at least stood by an open window. Not today, though.

I had a little difficulty controlling Segura: He was mesmerized by her face and kept wanting to go back to it. But it doesn't work that way; the glazes go on in a particular order, one color at various places on the body all at once. If you finished the face and then worked your way down, the skin tones wouldn't quite match. And there was actual loathing behind his obsession with her face, something close to nausea.

That feeling fed his natural amateurish desire to speed up, just to find out what the picture was going to look like. In retrospect, I wonder whether there might have been something sinister about that, as well.

It was obvious that the face and figure would take longer than I had planned, maybe half again as long, with so much of my attention going into hauling in on the reins. His impatience would cost us an extra day in the skinsuits, which annoyed me and further slowed us down.

Here I have to admit to a lack of empathy, which for a facilitator is tantamount to a truck driver admitting to falling asleep at the wheel. My own revulsion at having to spend another day confined in plastic masked what Segura was feeling about his own confinement. I was not alert. I had lost some of my professional control. I didn't see where his disgust was leading him, leading us.

This is hindsight again: One of the talents that Segura translated into millions of dollars was an ability to hide his emotions, to make people misread him. This was not something he had to project; he did it automatically, the way a pathological liar will lie even when there is nothing at stake. The misogyny that seemed to flood his attitude toward the painting--and Rhonda--was only a small fraction of what he must have actually felt, emotions amplified by the buffer drug and empath circuitry. Some woman must have hurt him profoundly, repeatedly, when he was a child. Maybe that's just amateur psychology. I don't think so. If it had a sexual component, it would have felt quite different, and I would have instantly picked up on it. His hate was more primitive, inchoate.

I knew already that Segura was the kind of person who tightens up during facilitation, which was a relief; they're easier to work with. Doubly a relief with Segura, since from the beginning I felt I didn't want to know him all that well.

I might have prevented it by quitting early. But I wanted to do all the light passages and then start the next day with a fresh palette, loaded with dark. Perhaps I also wanted to punish Segura, or push him.

The actions were simple, if the motivations were not. We had gone 20 minutes past the six-hour mark and had perhaps another half hour to go. I had an annoying headache, not bad enough to make me quit. I assumed Segura felt the same.

Every now and then we approached Rhonda to adjust her pose. Only a mannequin could retain exactly the same posture all day. Her chin had fallen slightly. Segura got up and walked toward her.

I don't remember feeling his hand slip out and pick up the large wash brush, one that we hadn't used since the first day. Its handle is a stick of hardwood that is almost an inch in diameter, ending in a sharp bevel. I never thought of it as a weapon.

He touched her chin with his left forefinger and she tilted her head up, closing her eyes. Then with all his strength he drove the sharp stick into her chest.

The blast of rage hit me without warning. I fell backward off the stool and struck my head. It didn't knock me out, but I was stunned, disoriented. I heard Rhonda's scream, which became a horrible series of liquid coughs, and heard the paper and desk accessories scattering as (we later reconstructed) she lurched forward and Segura pushed her face down onto the desk. Then there were three meaty sounds as he punched her repeatedly in the back with the handle of the brush.

About this time M&M and Allison came rushing through the door. I don't know what Allison did, other than not scream. M&M pulled Segura off Rhonda's body, a powerful forearm scissored across his throat, cutting off his wind.

I couldn't breathe either, of course. I started flopping around, gagging, and M&M yelled for Allison to unhook me. She turned me over and ripped off the top part of the skinsuit and jerked the electrodes free.

Then I could breathe, but little else. I heard the quiet struggle between M&M and Segura, the one-sided execution.

Allison carried me into the prep room and completed the procedure that M&M normally did, stripping off the skinsuit and giving me the shot. In about ten minutes I was able to dress myself and go back into the office.

M&M had laid out Rhonda's body on a printer's dropsheet, facedown in a shockingly large pool of blood. He had cleaned the blood off the desk and was waxing it. The lemon varnish smell didn't mask the smell of freshly butchered meat.

Segura lay where he had been dropped, his limbs at odd angles, his face bluish behind the skinsuit mask.

Allison sat on the couch, motionless, prim, impossibly pale. "What now?" she said softly. M&M looked up and raised his eyebrows.

I thought. "One thing we have to agree on before we leave this room," I said, "is whether we go to the police or ... take care of it ourselves."

"The publicity would be terrible," Allison said.

"They also might hang us," M&M said, "if they do that here."

"Let's not find out," I said, and outlined my plan to them.

It took a certain amount of money. It was a good thing I had the million in advance. We staged a tragic accident, transferring both of their bodies to a small boat whose inboard motor leaked gasoline. They were less than a mile from shore when thousands saw the huge blossom of flame light up the night, and before rescuers could reach the hulk, the fire had consumed it nearly to the water-line. Burned almost beyond recognition, the "artist" and his model lay in a final embrace.

I finished the face of the picture myself. A look of pleasant surprise, mischievousness. The posture that was to have communicated hardness was transformed into that of a woman galvanized by surprise, perhaps expectation.

We gave it to Segura's family, along with the story we'd given to the press: Crusty financier falls in love with young law student/model. It was an unlikely story to anyone who knew Segura well, but the people who knew him well were busy scrambling after his fortune. His sister put the picture up for auction in two weeks, and since its notoriety hadn't faded, it brought her $2.2 million.

There's nothing like a good love story that ends in tragedy.

Back in New York, I looked at my situation and decided I could afford to quit. I gave Allison and M&M generous severance pay, and what I got for the studio paid for even nicer places in Maine and Key West.

I sold the facilitating equipment and have since devoted myself to pure water-colors and photography. People understood. This latest tragedy on top of the grotesque experience with the Monster.

But I downplayed that angle. I wanted to do my own work. I was tired of collaboration, and especially tired of the skinsuit. The thousand decisions every hour, in and out of control.

You never know whose hand is picking up the brush.

"I disliked Rhonda on sight for the way she looked at me--her expression a prim gash of disapproval."