The Blue Paint

I stayed at that gallery for another hour, mostly because leaving would have meant walking past Camille and letting her watch me go.

I found a corner near the coat-room door and I stood there with my back to the wall like a woman waiting for a train.

I listened to the room.

That is what I did that night.

I listened.

Two women near the bar were talking about the spring calendar, and one of them said, “Camille’s getting the big room in April, you know.”

The other one said, “I thought that was Tori Ellison’s slot.”

And the first one said, “It was.

Things change.”

I stood very still and I told myself I had misheard.

Then a young man in a black turtleneck walked past me and said into his phone, “Yeah, Roth moved it.

Signed it six weeks ago.

Camille’s lawyer handled the paperwork.”

Six weeks.

I had received my invitation four weeks before that night.

I did not have a lawyer.

I had an old address book and a flip phone I refused to replace.

Daniel Roth found me ten minutes later.

He came over with his hands still folded and he stood beside me the way you stand beside someone at a wake, close enough to be polite and far enough to keep options open.

“Tori,” he said.

“Are you all right?”

“No,” I said.

He nodded slowly.

“Camille can be sharp,” he said.

“She doesn’t always know how it lands.”

“She knows exactly how it lands,” I said.

Daniel looked toward the front of the room, where Camille was laughing with a collector in a gray fedora.

“The April show,” I said.

“Is it still mine?”

He was quiet for a moment longer than a man should be quiet.

“There have been changes,” he said.

“The schedule moved.

We can talk tomorrow, in my office, with the paperwork in front of us.”

“What paperwork?”

“Tomorrow,” he said.

Then he touched my elbow, just once, and walked away.

I set my empty wine glass on a windowsill and I went looking for my coat.

That is when Camille found me again.

She was standing near the coat-room door with her wrap already over her arm, and she looked me up and down the way she used to do when she was a student and wanted me to think she wasn’t listening.

“He used to say you painted like a woman apologizing,” she said.

My chest went cold.

Paul said that.

He said it once, to me, in our studio on a Sunday morning, and he meant it as a joke, and I had laughed, and then I had painted for two weeks without sleeping until I proved him wrong.

There were only two people in that studio that morning.

Paul and me.

Unless someone was listening at the door.

Unless someone had been listening at the door for years.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“Of course you don’t,” she said, and she smiled at me with real warmth, which was somehow worse than the mocking smile from before.

Then she turned and walked out into the street, and the door closed behind her, and I was alone in a hallway that smelled like cold rain and floor wax.

I went into the coat-room to get my coat.

I reached into the pocket and my hand found paper that wasn’t mine.

It was a single page, torn at the edge, lined the way the pages in my studio journal are lined, and it had my handwriting on it.

It was a note I had written to myself on the morning after Paul died.

I only ever kept that journal in one place, in a drawer in my studio in Queens, under a clean rag.

I stood in that coat-room with the page in my hand and I heard my own blood in my ears.

I had not brought that journal to Manhattan.

I had not brought it anywhere in years.