When Accounting for Taste, my show at Parker Projects, became a reality, she acted like she was thrilled for me, and brought her friends to the opening, all those other people-cum-brands, and they took photos and oohed and aahed, and I felt embarrassed for myself that I’d become another piece of content for them to curate, and I was ashamed, too, that I couldn’t get that kind of crowd on my own—they were here for her. I always felt like I was in competition with Max, even though there was no competition, none at all, because she would always win. But she made the gallery happy, and the paintings sold, so it didn’t matter how I felt. Max tried to see me more after that—once I became somebody. She wanted me to appear on her wall—to be part of the photo stream of her existence.

But I wanted nothing more than to go back in time, to when we were young and I was nobody, and have her still want to be my friend, and there was no way to do that, so the gulf between us did not narrow. Still: She brought another crowd to The Distance Between Our Moral Imaginations, my second show at Parker, even though I didn’t ask that time, and the crowd oohed and aahed again, and the work sold, and I got to switch to Milot and to make more paintings. Two years went by. Then my loft burned down, I drove upstate, and I ran into her on the day that I finished the first painting in my second, fraudulent set of Rich Ugly Old Maids.

*  *  *

On that day, floating half drunk on the black lake above Pine City, I drank myself stupid, mourning the loss of my loft and my New York life, a loss thrown into relief by Max’s appearance in the farmers market parking lot. I hadn’t cried yet, but I was working my way up to it.

I was, in fact, wallowing, which is very close to crying. I wallowed hard, in all the self-pity I could muster, on an empty lake with a soon-to-be-empty bottle.

I wanted so badly to get in the truck and drive home, but since I didn’t have a home, I settled for riding the currents. I lurked on the shoreline that I assumed belonged to Max, but the house wasn’t visible; a sharp hill banked ahead, hiding their world from Pine City. Nothing as pedestrian as lakefront living for Max and Charlie.

The hill was round enough to be human-made and so steep it was nearly a cliff. A group of people appeared atop it, pointing left and right and all around, cameras in their hands. They wore the wide-strap linen fascist-minimalist garb of gallery flacks. Two black-suited arms waved behind them.

“Hey!” I slurred. “Yoo-hoo!”