The Blue Paint

I went back to the gallery two days later, on a Tuesday morning, because I couldn’t sleep and I needed to know why my name had disappeared from the wall.

The front doors were unlocked for the cleaning crew, and nobody stopped me on my way to the west room.

That was where my show was supposed to hang.

My name had been on that wall for six months.

Now the lights were up and the walls were mostly bare, and in the far corner, near the service door, there was an easel.

I recognized the easel before I recognized the painting.

It was a simple wooden one with a broken back leg my husband had reset with a screw years ago, and I’d hauled it into the gallery for my own use because the ones they stocked wobbled.

On the easel was a canvas I knew the way I know my own handwriting.

It was a half-finished cityscape, three brownstones and a slice of morning light, and I had stopped working on it in March because the light on the second building wouldn’t behave.

The paint was still wet.

I put one finger near the bottom edge and it came away blue.

I stood there breathing for a minute, maybe two, and I told myself I was mistaken, that two painters can use the same gray, that I’d shown the underpainting to people, that a copy was possible.

But the truth was I’d never finished it, so there was nothing to copy except my own unfinished work.

I turned to the wall card, the little white placard that tells buyers who they’re looking at, and it said Camille Voss.

Below that, in smaller letters, it said, “Oil on linen, 2024.”

I stood in front of it so long the cleaning woman asked me twice if I was all right.

Paint cans were stacked on the floor beside the easel, six of them, in the same blue and slate and bone colors I buy from a shop in Brooklyn that hardly anyone uses because the pigment is too heavy to work with.

I know that because I’m the one who told Camille about that shop, back when she was my student and I still trusted her with small things.

I sat down on the floor in front of my own painting and waited for someone to come in and explain it to me.

Daniel Roth found me there about twenty minutes later, still on the floor with my coat over my knees.

He didn’t look surprised to see me.

He looked like a man who had been walking around with something uncomfortable in his pocket for a while.

“Tori,” he said.

“You shouldn’t be in here this early.”

“When was the contract signed?”

I asked him.

He knelt down and looked at the canvas and then at me, and I could tell he was doing the math on how much he wanted to give me.

Finally he said, “Weeks ago.

Three of them, give or take.”

“Signed by who?”

“Camille.

And a representative of the estate on the pieces that came from your studio.”

That word stopped me.

Estate.

Like I was dead.

He must have seen my face, because he kept going before I could ask.

“Tori, I need you to think carefully before you answer me.

When was the last time you had access to your studio?”

I told him the truth, which was two months, because I’d been in Ohio with my mother and then I came back and found the lock changed and the landlord telling me the rent had been settled through the summer by a third party.

I had assumed my stepson Marcus, who works here at the gallery, had done that for me out of some kind of clumsy kindness.

Daniel sat back on his heels and read the wall card one more time.

“I think,” he said, very quietly, “we need to find out who else had a key.”