She said the last word, gallerina, with a slightly mocking tone. The term carried both the spite and the admiration that people (well, yes, including me) had for the beautiful, cool young women who often operated as gatekeepers to the upscale art showrooms.

“Not really,” I said, puzzled. “I don’t do that well with rich people.”

My voice crumpled as I realized my gaffe, but Janis chuckled. “No kidding,” she said, then held up her hand when I tried to apologize. Her driver sped down the hill and turned right on Olive, neatly threading past a man pushing an ice cream cart stickered with images of ice pops and cones. “I’ll let you hear everything from Ray first.”

I kept myself from reacting at Ray’s name, but Janis had sunk into her seat, shutting her eyes. Without her stern, bright gaze, she looked older, frailer than fifty-three. The veins stood out in her neck and hands. It seemed unfair to observe her this way, stripped of her usual armor, and yet I had the odd feeling she wanted me to see it, her tiredness, and that this was a message, too.

A few more blocks, and the corporate skyscrapers of Bunker Hill receded behind us. Janis would have been a young child when the city razed hundreds of the hill’s “blighted” Victorian mansions and relocated thousands of its residents to erect the face of L.A.’s new downtown. She would have come of age in the decades-long fiasco that followed: housing towers on the summit with sixty percent occupancy, while in the hill’s shadow the simultaneous demolition of Skid Row hotels and sharp increase of homeless Vietnam vets and the mentally ill led to the rise of permanent tent cities in the street. In her twenties, Janis had watched her father campaign to convert a former police-car garage into a contemporary art museum, and when he died young, she had carried on his vision and made it hers. She fought the late-eighties culture battles with the Rocque’s epic exhibition Indecency, showing every artist decried as “offensive” by a powerful U.S. senator. She paved the way for the country’s first major Chicano art retrospective, financed the nineties’ whimsical displays of dirty dinner dishes and sea creatures in formaldehyde, and led the Rocque into the twenty-first century with Still Lives. No wonder she was weary.