It worked. Everybody laughed. Tom reached over and poured me one. Tyler handed me a lit cigarette.

“Here, take this too,” he joked, and I took a long puff and rolled my shoulders, like a boxer, and everybody smiled, though Jes’s was predatory. Then all of a sudden I was talking.

“I make enormous oil paintings,” I told them, a quiver in my voice at first, “because they are the pinnacle of labor. They are expensive, delicate, unwieldy. They take more work than anything else I could imagine—work and investment and time and space—and that work, that labor, takes me outside of myself. The paintings are not a criticism—or an indictment—or a commentary.” The quiver stopped, and I heard myself speaking in another woman’s voice, one that was confident and sure. “They are objects that exist unto themselves, moving and beautiful, worthy of the space they take up in the world, political because they do not crouch in a corner, because their labor is obvious. Their weight is obvious. Their heft cannot be ignored or dismissed. They are the only part of me that is big,” I said, and then everyone, even Jes, silently stared at me as though I had said something radical, and I could not believe what I said about my own work. It sounded so vain.

“I know that I’m not supposed to be vain,” I heard myself saying, “that I’m supposed to be humble. But my work is huge and loud and important even if they are, as you said, just paintings. I know that’s outré—everyone else is playing some hundred-year-old game where they make fun of the gallery, and the collectors, and the people who are taking selfies, and find a clever new way to sell immateriality and throw gold in the river, to be wink-wink know-it-alls, repurposing the archive to destroy the institution from the inside…but I’m not ironic. I make things that are emotional,” I confessed, and in that moment, with the candles flickering and the lake splashing against the pillars beneath us, it was true. “And it’s all that I am.”

For a split second, everyone looked at me with these funny little smiles, and I thought it was all ruined. I thought about Maria Clarke’s terrible drawings and wondered if I was the latest version—if I’d be leaving here humiliated and alone. But then Tom slapped Lena on the back and said, “In Italian I think she said vaffanculo,” and then the others were throwing their napkins at me, and Lena was laughing, with her hands up in defeat, and Jes turned away to light a cigarette, and Tyler wrapped his pinkie around mine under the table, and Max pointed at my wine and said, “I’ll have a glass of that,” and it felt like I’d held, if only for a moment, my own.

*  *  *