“I want you to know I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what you’re going through,” she whispered.

But no one has any use for consolation from a young woman in love, a pretty young woman who is probably always in love, both with herself and with others who always return that love, always reflect it brightly back in her direction. Without thinking, I pushed a teal vase from the side table to let it shatter on the floor. A moment passed. I did not apologize.

I turned to Shelley, who was facing away from me as if I were a stranger getting undressed. The line dipped down sharply at the end of the graph for Depth of Love. I wanted to know why, but unlike the other points of ascent and decline there was no explanation, no paragraph detailing an inciting incident with a date and time. Perhaps it takes something to receive love, I thought as I felt my jaw lock and stay there. Perhaps your ability to feel it waned, perhaps you are the one who ruins things, it was you, you—and there it was again, that useless, human blame two people will toss between each other when they become too tired or weak to carry the weight of love.

I stalked down the road as if I had been physically beaten, stepping unevenly. A dreadful, deadly feeling. I have no choice but to put it here, to put it somewhere, to translate it into language so it won’t hang around my neck like a locket filled with poison.

In moments that year I thought I saw X relax a little, as if this achievement had really changed her, but I found several pages of handwritten notes picking apart a single essay that the writer Elvia Wilk published in Future Looks Magazine just weeks before the retrospective opened. One line in particular seemed to have driven X mad: “The problem with her oeuvre, which is also a problem with her personas—her oeuvre and personas cannot be dissociated—is that it fights a merciless battle against complicity with the existing culture, against the incomprehension that accompanies each social and professional recognition, beginning with X’s own.”* All her notes amounted to a single question that Wilk raised and X was unable to resolve—could she both disdain the state of this country’s culture as a whole and still reasonably desire or accept its approval?