The Blue Paint

I want to tell you about the night I stood in a crowded gallery on West 27th Street and let a thirty-one-year-old woman take me apart in front of two hundred people.

My name is Victoria Ellison, but everyone in the New York art world has called me Tori for thirty years.

I am fifty-four.

I teach painting three days a week at a community studio in Queens, and for the last twenty of those years I have been quietly building a body of work nobody outside a small circle has ever seen.

That Tuesday, the gallery belonged to Camille Voss.

She had been my student once, back when she was nineteen and couldn’t mix a believable shadow without turning it to mud.

I taught her how to see.

That was the thing I kept telling myself as I stood at the edge of the room with a glass of warm white wine in my hand, watching her hold court under the lights.

She had on a cream suit and gold earrings, and she laughed the way people laugh when they know every head in the room is turned toward them.

I had come because Daniel Roth, the gallery director, had sent me a paper invitation in the mail, the old-fashioned kind, with my name written in ink.

I thought it meant my show was still on.

I thought a lot of things that night.

Camille spotted me from across the room and something changed in her face — not surprise, exactly, more like pleasure, the way a cat looks at a bird that has wandered indoors.

She walked toward me slowly, still smiling, still talking to the man beside her, and when she reached me she stopped and tilted her head.

“Tori,” she said.

“Camille,” I said.

That was as far as I got.

“You know,” she said, loud enough that the woman next to me turned around, “I still have the little painting you gave me at the end of that first semester.”

I nodded.

I remembered it.

It was a study of my own hands, and I had been proud of it, and I had handed it to her because she had no money for supplies and I thought she had talent.

“I use it now,” Camille said, “as an example of what not to do.”

The woman beside me laughed.

So did two men behind her.

I stood there with my wine and my paper invitation and I felt my face go hot, and then I felt it go cold, and then I started to cry.

I didn’t sob.

I just stood there, and the tears came down, and I could not make them stop.

I have painted through two miscarriages, one divorce, and the funeral of the man I loved more than anyone on this earth, and I have never once cried in public.

That night I did.

Camille watched me do it, and she did not blink.

“Oh, Tori,” she said, softly, so only I could hear, “you always did confuse sentiment with skill.”

Then she leaned in close, close enough that I could smell her perfume, and she said the thing I have not been able to forget.

“He used to say that about you too.”

I knew exactly who she meant.

My husband, Paul, has been dead for four years.

He said that phrase once, in our studio, on a Sunday morning in October, and there was only one other person in the room when he said it.

That person was not Camille Voss.

I stood frozen while she straightened up, smoothed her jacket, and turned away from me like I was a coat she had decided not to buy.

And then, as if nothing at all had happened, she walked straight to the back of the gallery, where a man in a dark suit was standing with his hands folded, watching the whole thing.

Daniel Roth looked at me across the room.

I could not read his face.