BUCKET BESIDE ME, I GATHERED the pears that had fallen from the backyard tree, reaching carefully to avoid the bees that drank themselves silly on the sun-fermented fruit. As the green orbs piled up, I thought about Janis. At Rocque planning meetings, Janis always sat erect, with her feet crossed in practical black flats. The suits she wore—navy or gray, and never a skirt—seemed designed to erase any impressions her body might deliver, and emphasized instead her fierce, ageless face. Her nose was long but shapely, her hair swept forward over a high forehead, and her gaze had the depth of a cauldron. Her alto voice cut through chatter and commanded silence. No one knew what would come out of her mouth: rousing praise or a precise and painful rebuke; art-world gossip; imperious pronouncements, sometimes wise, “We don’t look at great art and think That’s beautiful; we think That’s true,” sometimes bizarrely regionalist, “San Francisco is for gamers and toadies.” But Janis wasn’t a performer. She only talked when necessary. Her dark head cocked to listen to our curators, and bent, frowning over some new report on the Rocque’s depressing finances. She nodded when new staff members spoke up, encouraging them. She steered the museum through the entire Still Lives crisis with firm kindness, transforming my fears at incurring her disapproval into an abiding yearning to impress her.

Back in July, Janis had sent an inquiry into my health, and a request. I know you are off duty these days, but I need the right person to write about Kim Lord. When Still Lives comes down, two of her paintings will be installed in our permanent collection. We need a good wall text to go with them. Nothing sensational, but the facts must be there.

I labored over the assignment for three days and sent Janis the results. She quibbled with a line and then wanted more, and soon we found ourselves in a correspondence that ranged beyond the text to what had happened to us at the museum when Kim was murdered by another Rocque employee, and a rich collector confessed to rigging the artist’s career. In person, Janis would never have opened up so much to me. I was sure of it. But something about my distance and my injury complicated her usual conduct with personnel. She’d seen me carried, bleeding, away from her property. She knew what I’d done. She felt sympathy for me, and she needed to make sense of the tragedy with someone who wasn’t at the museum, walking among all her shocked and hurting staff.

Yesterday, Janis sent me a new message: terse, a few lines. She said she was glad that I was returning soon, and she wanted to know if I had gone to Los Angeles Art College and knew anyone there.