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very proud of him, this very handsome young boy. Degas was an interesting figure and must have been at the height of his painting career then. I was just stupid enough to be really only interested in music. Well, it's hard to follow in detail. There's so much detail."

    T he last days of March, all crazy with cold weather, swooped and shifted around me like the torn, blown pages of an old book. My forced holiday had brought new pleasures, but it had also robbed me of any enduring structure. I woke most mornings to nothing. For six years there had been some necessity to getting up. The stack of marked exams, toast in a paper napkin, plus my leather satchel stuffed with books and what-have-you (torn from their nooks as I rushed to the door), and my head full of plans and anticipation for the children and the day, I had to catch one of those monstrous buses that filled our streets by seven just to make it to school before the concierge, with his paw full of keys, locked the great iron door shut for the morning. Those were sweet, rapid mornings, full of flight and arrival. They loomed behind me like the shimmering, silvery peaks that frame our city's portrait, east and west: a magical, distant place—entirely unreachable. Now I was idle. I saw Dogan when he could arrange it. We had sex in the laundry room of his apartment building a few times. Twice we saw movies. I barely noticed the films, pinioned as I was to the minutest changes in his posture. I could never phone him. Lurking near the soccer field was out of the question, so I saw him less and less. The weather was terrible for a few weeks, and I stayed home and read. Herbert kept me supplied with books. It was an awful time, more destabilizing than I had then realized, and Herbert was my only reliable anchor.
    On the last Friday of that disappointing March, Herbert called from work to invite me for dinner at the Hotel Grand. He'd made some great discovery about the Steins and wanted to share it over a meal with me and our friend Henry Richard. Henry always stayed at the Grand (a squat brick and glass monstrosity that rose from the edge of our "historic district" like a staging area for some kind of theme-park ride). Henry was in town just now, buying art.
    Herbert, who really is extremely good at what he does, had discovered three "missing" drawings by Picasso—studies, he believed, for the 1906 painting called Boy Leading a Horse . (An utterly enchanting boy, standing nude beside a horse, which he seems to command without reins; the earth is tawny and burnished like the boy, while the sky is a festering storm of silver and gray, like the horse.) Herbert believed this boy might be Allan Stein. He'd uncovered a bill of lading sent by Allan to Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore in 1951, listing a portrait Picasso had painted of Allan, age eleven, during the same months that he painted Boy Leading a Horse —included with it were "three preliminary drawings." The portrait arrived in America, but the drawings did not. Herbert thought these drawings might have been for Boy Leading a Horse . If Allan had posed one afternoon, during his sittings at Picasso's studio, standing nude in the posture of the boy, he might, in some small way, be the Boy Leading a Horse. Finding the drawings could provide the link.
    "Obviously nothing can be proven per se." Herbert rambled on as we sat waiting for Henry at the Grand. "Given Picasso's use of—well, virtually anything he could get his hands on to make his paintings, no one could prove Allan was the model in any conventional sense. But it's just so tantalizing to think of finding 'the boy,' I mean, a real boy stuck somewhere in that painting. It's a monumental piece." Herbert showed me a once-tipped-in color plate he'd cut from a book at the museum. The painting was very erotic. The contours of the boy's belly and chest were supple and inviting. "Any evidence linking it to Allan Stein would be, you know, more than delightful. No one ever mentions