Excerpt of THE ART OF PRETEND   It was in the kitchen area that I noticed Archer, approximately twenty minutes after I lost Etta, not that I was keeping track. Archer was Etta’s older brother and a semi-established artist for someone who just barely scratched the surface of his thirties. There were his shows here in the city, plus Miami and Los Angeles and abroad. At one point it felt as if everywhere you turned, there was his photograph, or some article either praising or eviscerating his work, and then, nothing. Two years passed. He’d supposedly been living out in the country, followed by a friend’s houseboat. Etta said he was “burnt-out,” that it happened all the time with artists, this endless cycle of creation and expectation, feeding the public’s appetite for something new, something exciting, something that had never been done before. But it had all been done before, that was the problem. “Sounds intense,” I had said, but she did not comment further. Archer was still tall and thin, like Etta, with an angular face and pale green eyes that matched his sister’s. The last time I’d seen him, his hair was long and he could tuck it…