After a party, he’d take the chair apart and start counting the receipts, like a store owner hitting the cash register the evening after a fire sale.

The only trouble was, to sit in the wooden chair, you had to concentrate, since it teetered.

Morniel couldn’t lose—he always sat on the bed.

“I can’t wait for the day,” he was saying, “when some dealer, some critic, with an ounce of brain in his head sees my work. I can’t miss, Dave, I know I can’t miss; I’m just too good. Sometimes I get frightened at how good I am—it’s almost too much talent for one man.”

“Well,” I said, “there’s always the—”

“Not that it’s too much talent for me,” he went on, fearful that I might have misunderstood him. “I’m big enough to carry it, fortunately; I’m large enough of soul. But another, lesser guy would be destroyed by this much totality of perception, this comprehension of the spiritual gestalt as I like to put it. His mind would just crack wide open under the load. Not me, though, Dave, not me.”

“Good,” I said. “Glad to hear it. Now if you don’t m—”

“Do you know what I was thinking about this morning?”

“No,” I said. “But, to tell you the truth, I don’t really—”

“I was thinking about Picasso, Dave. Picasso and Roualt. I’d just gone for a walk through the pushcart area to have my breakfast—you know, the old the-hand-is-quicker-than-the-eye Morniel—and I started to think about the state of modern painting. I think about that a lot, Dave. It troubles me.”

“You do?” I said. “Well, I tend to—”

“I walked down Bleecker Street, then I swung into Washington Square Park, and while I walked, I was thinking: Who is doing really important work in painting today who is really and unquestionably great? I could think of only three names: Picasso, Roualt—and me. There’s nobody else doing anything worthwhile and original nowadays. Just three names out of the whole host of people painting all over the world at this moment: just three names, no more. It made me feel very lonely, Dave.”