Michael and Omar went to an Ethiopian restaurant called Injera Café for lunch. On taking a table by a bright window, the painter broached his subject circuitously. “Do you have a better opinion of Emma now you’ve talked to her?”

“I’m resigned to her,” the lawyer said with unanticipated forbearance. “It’s good to know when you die, there’ll be someone else to care about you beyond the neighbors complaining about the stench coming from your apartment.”

“Could that be construed as a blessing?”

“Blessing?” Omar grumbled. “I’ve already exhausted my charitableness on this topic.”

Michael eyed the platter of food with determination. “I’ll settle for approval, then,”

Omar started eating with vengeance. “I want you to seize this, Mike. I really do. I just want you walking into this with your eyes open. There’s a necessary amount of compromise in relationships. There will be consequences—especially for your art.”

The painter sobered. “Of course.”

The friend expanded in general terms. “It’s no mystery why most of the great philosophers were lifelong bachelors. Why Beethoven, Brahms, and Schubert never married. Genius is a hothouse flower, and domesticity is not a hothouse.”

“One might conclude we are deluded for counting ourselves in such company, Ommie.”

The lawyer shot back. “If you know your own worth, then the most anyone could accuse you of is lacking false modesty.”

Michael began to brood over his food. “The point is moot. It’s not like I’ve ever gotten anywhere with my art.”

The friend was suddenly conciliatory. “True. The odds were always stacked against you as an artist. Success in life is entirely a matter of meeting expectation, not exceeding it. Being different is never good, unless you’re different in the same way everyone else is. People only admire different-ness to the degree it anticipates the next well-beaten path.”

“You may be right.”

“I know I’m right.” The philosopher climbed back up to his soapbox. “The enemies list to every new idea is long in this world, my friend: There’s apathy, cliquishness, political and social agendas, people who say ‘think outside the box’ but only mean the wrapping paper, MBAs who want to focus-group every rare, excellent, and difficult idea out of existence, the graveyard of academia where dead ideas go to be canonized, and so on and so forth. The great conceit of culture is the presumption we know every worthy mind or talent that ever lived. But the truth is, if it wasn’t for a few people working on behave of others, what would be the legacy of Kafka, Van Gogh, or even Shakespeare? ‘Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air…’”

“The world is hardly bereft of talent.”

The friend was sardonic in his reply. “Prodigies are a dime a dozen these days. One can find a thousand preschoolers who can play Beethoven’s violin concerto without dropping a note. What we don’t have are more Beethovens.”

“But sitting around and commiserating about what misunderstood Beethovens we are is not likely to win us allies.”

“And if we have no allies in the world, who’s going to rally to our cause if not ourselves? We have nothing to gain by ‘hiding our light under a bushel.’ We beat legalized abortion by fifteen years and have been fighting to validate our unintended lives ever since!”

“Some might say we’ve never grown up, only bitter.”

“Either way, our childhoods are unfinished business. We’ve left open a window others have only been too happy to close on their way out.”

“Then what is to be our fate besides arrested adolescence?”

The lawyer rose with bravado. “I can only see Divinity’s hand in my life, and whether I am despised through instruments of envy, or merely dismissed as being indecorous in my arrogance, I will be the pearl in the shit pile to inconveniently remind others that not all in life is shit. As Nietzsche said: ‘There is more difference between man and man than there is between man and animal.’”

“And what’s to be my fate?”

Omar hesitated only briefly. “Yours, my friend, is to grow up.”

The painter reeled at the prospect. “Me? Grow up? That would be the ultimate irony.”

The friend was arid. “Irony, Mike, is the name observant people give to life.” He slapped a twenty-dollar tip down on the table.

On exiting the café, the two men strolled back out into the autumnal sunlight. It set them more quietly and reflectively on their way.