Free Old Neighborhood by Avery Corman

able to do here,” I heard her telling a class. “They were made by a very nice man named Mr. Matisse.” The atmosphere was kind, loving but never condescending. The children loved her, she was gentle and patient, and the parents respected her. To the upper middle class of Long Island, here was day care without guilt. The children of suburbia were occupied with Culture.
    She called her school “The Nassau Institute of Children’s Art.” We worked together in the beginning, I helped write copy for mailing pieces and for ads that appeared in local newspapers. We placed posters on community bulletin boards, on lampposts in shopping malls, in merchants’ store windows. Along with the encouragement I offered, that was the extent of my contribution. The school became successful because of Beverly’s ingenuity and personality.
    She went out at night to people’s homes, talking to them about her program. She permitted children to visit the school for trial classes, and they usually chose to return. She tried to find new ways to expand upon her premise, to make the school a center for children’s art education. She made contacts with local artists and invited them to speak at the Institute, and the children visited the artists’ studios. She arranged Saturday bus trips to New York City and took the children on museum and gallery tours. She organized one-man shows with the children as the artists: “April 9–15, Jennifer Rodnick, Age 10, Watercolors.” Beverly expanded into other areas, devising an art therapy program for exceptional children and art classes for senior citizens. Then she arranged to receive state subsidies for these programs.
    Beverly had begun with rented space in a store, and by working long hours, nights, weekends, and by being resourceful, she had developed the Institute into an enterprise that now required a two-story building, which she leased—and she employed a staff of four full-time teachers, a bookkeeper and a secretary.
    In my career, the agency had grown from a “creative boutique,” as people in large agencies were fond of calling upstarts, to a small-to-medium-sized agency in 1977 with a good reputation in the field. I was still primarily involved in the creative side of the agency, but I was obliged to spend much of my day in meetings. Under pressure as the president of the agency, I was drinking more than I should have. I had a system with a waiter at my regular restaurant. He was under instructions to keep my glass filled with white-wine spritzers. I never had to ask for a drink, so it would not seem as though I was drinking to excess. I also had the rationale that the wine was diluted with club soda, but after a two-hour lunch, I might have had the equivalent of a bottle of wine for myself. At night, if I worked late, I opened a cabinet bar in my office and moved on to hard liquor. I gained weight, I seldom did any exercise on weekends, occasional yard work, my bicycle had long since rusted. At forty-three I had the beginnings, or a stage beyond that, of middle-aged paunch.
    Tolchin kept himself in far better condition than I by swimming at a health club and by having continuous liaisons with young women, who seemed to decrease in age as we got older. He advised me to have an affair.
    “Keeps you in shape,” he said.
    “Why would a man with a wife who looks like Bevvy have an affair?”
    “I’ve got a few answers for that.”
    “I don’t think I want to hear them.”
    “Well, I guess you’re lucky, having Bevvy. But you’re also getting fat.”
    Why would a man with a wife who looks like Bevvy … but our sex life was not out of a gothic romance. We made love usually on Saturday nights, sometimes on a Friday. In a typical week, Beverly was exhausted and ready for sleep at ten-thirty, the bed cluttered with last-minute notes and papers, while I was making a final check of the work I had brought home. We were very busy people. My forty-third birthday was celebrated four days