I’m hard, congealed anxiety, poised on the edge of a chair. My hands are shaking, feeling so barely assembled, I half-expect my fingers and thumbs to start dropping off. I’m so nervous I can’t remember which foot to put on the stool; so, after an eternity of indecision, I make a desperate gamble on the left. Next time, if there is one, I think, I’ll mark a big X beforehand on the correct sneaker.

Teddy’s voice is a deep, lazy rumble. I want to close my eyes to listen, but lower them instead, pretending to look at my guitar—and feel myself casting off, set adrift on his voice, carried beyond my fear.

                                                                                 …

Teddy stands behind the counter at Paragon Music before my lesson. He’s wearing his perennial turtleneck sweater underneath his shirt, though it’s a hot summer day. I fancy him tucking it into his bathing trunks when he goes swimming or rolling deodorant under each sleeve in the morning after he takes off his pajamas. He looks frail, even with all that padding. Once he climbed out of his sickbed to give me my lesson, wearing a rakish cap. I, who was teetering on the edge of infatuation, fell back, thinking, What an impossibly odd man!

At one of the guest lectures I attended, painter Nathan Oliveira described an evening when he’d presented a slide show of his work to a number of artist friends. “Why, you’ve got a whole exhibition’s worth here!” they’d enthused. “But they’re all the same painting!” he’d confessed. He then explained that he could never tell when a painting was done, a problem I identified with. (Earl says when Renoir was asked how he knew a painting was finished, he answered, “When I feel like pinching the model instead of painting.”) Olivera solved the problem by adopting a new medium—monotype—which allowed him to take glass “impressions” of a piece throughout its evolution. I thought to myself, “Of course! As an artist, it’s your job to find creative ways of dealing with your limitations.”

At another lecture, Painter Jay Defeo recounted how she spent eight years painting “The Rose,” which went through an Oliveira-like evolution I noted as she presented her slides, weighing almost a ton when she finally finished it. The outer wall of her apartment had to be knocked out, she told us, so the painting could be removed with a crane. Studying her more recent work, I thought “Those look suspiciously like molars.” She’d become obsessed with teeth, she went on to explain. The alcove she painted “The Rose” in hadn’t had enough ventilation, and the lead in her oils had caused all of hers to fall out.

PERFECTLY AT HOME

Seely had come to feel perfectly at home here. She could even have been seen dancing in the front of the lavatory mirror, drying her hair at her desk with a hair dryer she’d brought from home, and boiling Tupperware containers of soup in a pot over a hotplate for lunch—if there had been anyone around to see her. But she was always the first one in in the morning, mostly the only one about during morning classes, and the only soul who worked through the lunch hour.

That fall was the beginning of a second Renaissance in my life. In the first place, Ella moved to Berkeley; instead of rare long-distance telephone conversations that I could ill-afford, at long last I had my best friend close at hand.

In the second, I’d always wished I’d been able to go to a small college—some place that wasn’t as impersonal as Cal. Now, a dozen years later, however improbably, I was being handed a second chance—an opportunity I was finally ready to embrace. As an employee, I could take classes for free. With a decent salary and no rent to pay, I could also afford the private lessons I’d hankered for. And working part-time, I had the time to pursue…well, classical guitar, jazz dance, photography; I even joined the Berkeley Women’s Writers Group, despite my abiding conviction that I couldn’t write fiction—and wound up penning my first short story, “In Her Own Time.”

It seemed like there was always a three-ring circus of cultural events going on at the college, so I went to guest lectures, art shows, music and dance concerts—the latter with Nan, a ballerina and the slide librarian of the Art Department, who became a friend. I felt exhilarated in a way I hadn’t in all the years since I lived in Spain. I took American art history from a visiting professor, Roberta, who was one of the most exciting lecturers I’d heard—and even began singing lessons again with one of the college voice teachers. I could tell she wasn’t doing my voice much good, but her approach was gentle enough that she didn’t seem to be doing it much harm either, and I continued to hold out hope that one day my body would wake up, like a dreamer from a long sleep, and remember how singing was done.

Back in California before the semester started at Tiburon College, I missed being out in the wild hills around Cadaques so much that I started driving mornings to the wilderness parkland that extends for thirty-two miles along the East Bay hills from Richmond to Castro Valley—to hike alone. (I’d stopped trespassing around the reservoirs.) But one day, a stranger appeared in the distance and seemed to be following me. After what I’d gone through hitchhiking, I was frightened enough by this latest experience that I met with the wife of an acquaintance who was a reservist in the police force—to discuss getting a gun to protect myself.

After the truckdriver’s attack in Spain, I was left with a sense of outrage that anyone could imagine they had a right to violate my personal space—to reach in and grab me and try to overpower me. (And yet, it occurs to me now, this is exactly what men are taught they have the right to do—to reach in and grab and try to overpower someone else—that is, to fight—if they are given a reason to or have their own reason to. So, of course, why would it be a stretch, I realized, for a man to do the same thing to a woman?) Nevertheless, understanding after my conversation with the reservist that target practice would have to become a part of my life, I abandoned the idea of carrying a gun. Instead, regretfully, I stopped hiking in the “wilderness” by myself as a way of communing with the natural world—for me, a profound loss.