“The serfs are all working on the latest Michael Bay movie,” I called back, and regretted it, because again the response was silence. Mystified silence? Social condemnation? I should be acting more formal. Driven. A gallerina was polished. She was ambitious. She was overqualified, with an impressive art history degree and letters of reference from prominent collectors. She dreamed . . . of what? Of learning the business here so that she could go work at Catesby’s or another auction house, so that she could go into consulting. Mostly she dreamed of building her own modest collection. An artist sought meaning. A curator sought significance. The gallerina sought taste. The longer and harder she worked, the more she looked the part, the more she became an arbiter of what others should own.

I hadn’t seen too many gallerinas at the Rocque, but sometimes a female intern left the museum for that path. Invariably she had been born wealthy, had a real collector in the family, and possessed some flawless physical trait: her skin, her hair, her figure. The gallery side of the art world, where the deals were made, would pull her like a magnet from the museum side, because she enjoyed the commerce and because she could become the living representation of the formality of those white cubes—austere and classical, splashed by well-chosen color.

Now that I was here, I could see the attraction of the gallerina life. My new suit made me feel like the air around me parted differently, that my waist and hips formed a perfect contour, and my shoulders lanced above my breasts, strong as a man’s, but finer. If only the garment worked on my eye and my conversational abilities and plane tickets to Miami and Basel the way that it worked on my body. I could see myself gliding through this sophisticated life, making the right choices about which art would stand the test of time.

A neat stand-up file perched on one edge of my desk. I grabbed a folder and opened it. A list of names, some of them wealthy collectors, some with check marks, then a tally below for RSVPs. The invitation list for the opening? I noticed Janis Rocque on it, but no check next to her name.

I shoved the folder back, grabbed the next. A gallery guide, marked PLEASE PROOF. Phew. Proofreading was familiar ground.

Hal Giroux’s Shoe Cathedral

Longtime Los Angeles luminary Hal Giroux brings his monumental installation Shoe Cathedral to the Westing Gallery from November 2–December 22, 2003. An exclusive invitation-only reception on November 1 will be followed by open gallery hours Tuesday–Sunday, 11:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.