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her too, or rather, things about her—that she would prefer no one knew at all.

THREE
    A day off had done her good. Now Kate was anxious to get to Boyd Werther’s studio and complete the taped interview for the upcoming installment of Artists’ Lives. They would have to finish on time if she was to keep her appointment with Floyd Brown. Despite Clare Tapell’s assurance that all they wanted from her was an opinion on a couple of paintings, Kate was dreading it. Paintings in a gallery or museum were one thing, in a police station something else entirely.
    Kate pushed the thought from her mind and quickened her step.

    Mulberry Street felt like a small village waking up just a bit later than the rest of Manhattan: a few trucks and vans delivering wares; shopkeepers pulling open metal grates; window washers sloshing soapy water across glass storefronts; the mostly young, definitely hip residents—women with a strip of exposed gym-toned belly, guys sporting that just-out-of-bed tousled hair that needed an hour of gelling into shape—ambling into one or another of the cool new cafés that dotted the street, cigarettes dangling from the corners of their still young, but otherwise wise mouths. Kate wondered how they could afford the time. Were they artists, musicians, or out-of-work stockbrokers who’d opted for the boho life after the nineties market tumbled? Whatever. Good for them, thought Kate, always amazed when she came down to NoLIta, the area north of Little Italy, at how the city was such a canny chameleon, able to transform neighborhoods seemingly overnight.

    Kate’s small PBS film crew was completely set up and ready to roll by the time she stepped out of the industrial elevator into Boyd Werther’s football field of a studio. With its twelve-foot pressed-tin ceilings, wide-plank floors, and glorious city views, Kate had kidded Boyd that he must have killed someone to have such a grand studio, but she knew better.

    Boyd Werther was that rare art world phenomenon, an artist who had been successful throughout his career. First as a cool minimal painter in the seventies, and then, when he’d expanded his artwork and taken up where the abstract expressionist painters of the 1950s had left off, combining the energy and grace of de Kooning’s gesture with Mark Rothko’s gorgeous color, he had been canonized a “modern master”—his canvases of looping, intertwining color bands compared to such grand and disparate influences as Jackson Pollock’s “drip” paintings, the calligraphy of ancient Japanese scrolls, and the Paleolithic cave paintings at Lascaux.

    Lately, Kate kept hearing him referred to as the “great white hope.” She wasn’t sure if people meant Boyd was the keeper of the traditional flame or if it was some sort of put-down, but knowing the art world, Kate assumed the latter. No artist could be successful for forty years and not have people despise him.

    Kate hoped Boyd Werther’s career was indeed as successful and lucrative as it appeared, since the artist had confided to her that he was currently paying alimony and child support to three—or was it four? Kate could not remember—ex-wives, who had provided him with six or seven offspring, including a toddler in a fancy private preschool—the product of his most recent divorce from a Brazilian beauty.

    Kate stepped gingerly between strobe lights and wires to give each of her crew a quick hug.

    “Where’s Boyd?” she asked.

    “Moussing his hair,” said Cindy, rolling her eyes.

    Kate unfolded her list of final questions for Boyd, whom she’d been interviewing for several weeks. This was the last day of filming and she wanted to make sure she had everything she needed for her show.

    This season, Kate’s series was simple: Each week a different artist was interviewed about the importance of color. Though the interviews came across as live, they were taped so that Kate could not only edit out the mistakes, but add relevant historical