ELEANOR Ostenbach and I shared an apartment in New York City years ago. We were both studying painting, attending classes in beginning design and drawing at the New School on West 12th Street. We lived on York Avenue near 65th in a two—bedroom flat for which we paid what now seems like a reasonable sum. Of course we considered ourselves poor then—at least poor enough that our spirits fluctuated with the price of ground beef at the local market.

In a very loose manner of speaking, Eleanor's work was representational and mine was abstract—but we agreed about the most important thing: the work itself. With unspoken accord we had arranged our quarters such that each of us had a bedroom for a studio. We crammed our beds and our bureaus into the narrow kitchen-living room. We ate, sitting on our beds, off a table that doubled as a nightstand and breadboard. It was not unusual for me to discover a carrot peeling or a sprinkling of crumbs or a translucent moonslice of onion in my bedsheets. Our laundry hung to dry over the backs of chairs. Bohemian it was. Something our mothers would never have liked or tolerated for themselves; something our fathers did not quite realize they paid for.