When I first met the painter of this picture I'd just lost my job and, if I remember correctly, I was reading the poems of the Japanese writer, Shiraishi. I got the book cheaply in a used bookstore and so felt a certain responsibility to it, but the more I read the more I liked it, and sometimes I even went around reciting bits of the poems in my head. Things weren't going well. I was sleeping on the floor of a friend's apartment, a photographer from Berlin who used to take pictures of the plants on his windowsill, a few potted greens that seemed to share a certain wistfulness, as if they had once lived in the great glass and cast-iron hothouses of Europe and didn't know how they'd got to that homely window ledge. They were nothing special, those plants, but I didn't say anything because after all the photographer was letting me sleep on his floor and use the soap in his shower. At that point I didn't know he was also the one who would introduce me to my painter, but if I had it would have been yet another reason to have practised silence as a form of gratitude.

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'My Painter' will be printed in full in Granta 97: Best of Young American Novelists 2. To subscribe to Granta and receive the entire issue free, or to buy a copy of Granta 97, click here.