Dominick Corvaisis and Parker Faine's friendship

Dominick Corvaisis and Parker Faine’s friendship joins two conspicuously different men through shared artistic commitment and a deep investment in friendship itself. Parker is not merely the confidant to whom Dominick recounts his worsening sleepwalking: when Dominick calls for help in his sleep, Parker recognizes what may be happening, comes to him, and avoids exposing him to strangers or police. Their bond makes practical care possible where embarrassment might otherwise have kept Dominick silent.

An unlikely friendship

At fifty, Parker is fifteen years older than Dominick and has been rich and famous for nearly a quarter-century. He is physically imposing, with shaggy hair and beard, while Dominick is slender and lean-muscled, clean-shaven, and notably solitary. Their habits and public lives diverge as sharply as their appearances: Dominick drinks little and is easily intoxicated; Parker’s thirst and capacity for alcohol are legendary. Parker is at ease with wealth and fame, whereas Dominick is uneasy about the money and notoriety beginning to come his way through his novel, Twilight in Babylon.

The contrast is rendered in the clothes they wear to lunch at Las Brisas: Dominick arrives in loafers, brown slacks, and a button-down shirt; Parker wears blue tennis shoes, crinkled white cotton pants, and a flowered shirt outside his belt. They seem dressed for separate engagements, almost as if their meeting were accidental. Yet the mismatch is surface evidence of difference, not distance. Despite being slow to make friends, Dominick has made Parker his best friend, perhaps the only person with whom he can speak openly about what is frightening him.

Shared artistic seriousness

The two men met six years earlier, when Parker moved to Oregon for eighteen months to find new subject matter for a landscape series. He had agreed to give one lecture each month at the University of Portland, where Dominick worked in the English Department. Parker’s painting combined suprarealism with a surreal imagination; Dominick’s art was writing. The forms differed, but both men approached their work with high standards, commitment, and craftsmanship.

Their likeness, then, is not a matter of temperament or style. The account describes each as an artist by compulsion rather than by choice or inclination, and both place enormous value on friendship and actively nurture it. That shared seriousness helps explain why a friendship between such mismatched personalities became close: neither has to resemble the other to recognize the demands of the other’s work, or the importance of showing up for someone valued.

Confiding the sleepwalking

On the first Sunday in December, Dominick tells Parker the embarrassing and distressing details of his escalating somnambulism over lunch on the terrace at Las Brisas. The setting is bright and sociable, with a view of the sunlit sea, gulls, and nearby star jasmine, but Dominick’s account is anything but easy. That morning he had awakened behind the garage furnace for the fourth time, terrified. His inability to control these nocturnal episodes has left him dispirited and without an appetite; while Parker eats nachos and drinks margaritas, Dominick manages only half a beer.

Parker is already on his fourth margarita, with another ordered, but his attention remains sharp. He asks why Dominick did not tell him sooner, and rejects Dominick’s feeling that he was foolish to bring it up. His concern is immediate rather than abstract: he remembers how Dominick was when they met in Portland and connects the present problem with changes Dominick underwent two summers earlier. Dominick does not understand what Parker means by those changes. The exchange shows both the intimacy of their conversation and a limit to it: Parker has been observing a change in his friend, but Dominick cannot yet supply the same account of himself.

Help without exposure

The friendship’s protective quality becomes concrete when Parker appears after Dominick has called him while asleep. Dominick, still on the floor and too exhausted and weak-kneed to rise, asks what Parker is doing there. Parker explains that Dominick phoned less than ten minutes earlier, shouting that someone was there and was going to get him, before hanging up. Dominick feels humiliation settle over him; Parker instead identifies the call as another likely consequence of the sleepwalking.

Parker admits that he might have called the police, but suspected the sleepwalking and knew Dominick would not want the matter brought before strangers. His judgment does not erase Dominick’s shame, yet it respects the privacy behind it: Parker comes because his friend called for help, and chooses not to turn the crisis into a public incident. Across the lunch confession and the nocturnal call, their friendship moves from candid listening to direct intervention. Its defining loyalty is not that Parker can cure Dominick’s condition, but that Dominick can entrust him with its most frightening and humiliating evidence.