“Don’t worry, you’re good,” Max said nicely. “I bet you wiped it all off on Tyler Savage’s face.”

I snorted. “I absolutely did not. He’s very clearly with Jes Winsome.”

“Ah. Jes. She’s starting to look like a wizard. But she’s ‘post-studio.’ No competition.”

We both laughed.

“He’s up for it, though. Always some new summer girl,” Max said melodically, looking out the window. Jes had used the same phrase—summer girl—and now I understood. “He’s slept with half the women at this party.”

“Since Carey died?”

“Since? More like during. They were like that, though. Anyway—he’s a lover, not a fighter. Speaking of—how’s George?” she asked. “Is he still around?”

“No,” I replied, shaking my head. “He left me, what, a year ago? I retroactively support his decision. I was the worst.”

“You’re never the worst. You’re the best.”

“We were the worst, then. All we did was drink and have sex.”

“What else is there to do?” She laughed, but I didn’t think it was funny, because she was married to somebody who had a hell of a lot more to offer than drinking and fooling around.

“Do you get along with Charlie’s ex?” I asked, suddenly curious. “Helen. It’s impressive they still run the gallery together.”

“Hen? Oh sure. She doesn’t care about me—she treats me like a child, kind of, but not in a mean way. She’s twenty years older than me. It doesn’t bug me. I must seem very young to her. But…it’s probably easier because they divorced before we got together. When they finished the house. This house killed their marriage, they both say.”

My skull felt heavy on my twig neck. Ketamine. I stared glassily at the spines of the heavy books that lined the brass shelves beyond her shining mass of hair, on artists whose work was only barely familiar to me. Their names lurked at the fringe of my mind: Bas Jan Ader, Hannah Wilke, Charlotte Posenenske.

There was a narrow volume on Lee Lozano, a painter I knew only from her Wave paintings—ten solid colors into which she had etched uniform striations in single sessions that ranged from eight hours to three days. The paintings were showstopping in their simplicity, radiating infinite space. I’d read once that there was an eleventh painting but she physically could not finish it and so it remained as a pencil outline, a broken window. She died somewhere tragically, I remembered, but could not recall how.

Max said something that I didn’t hear.

“One more time?” I asked.

“I’m sorry you lost your home,” she said sincerely, for the second time.