I glance at the monitor. “We’re on a camera,” I say. “You can cover it. You can have it taken down tomorrow. I put it in for one reason. It isn’t the one you’re accusing me of.”
“What reason?”
“So when a man who isn’t me decides ‘anonymous’ means entitlement, I can stop him before you have to prove to yourself again that your voice won’t save you. So when a rumor turns intoa car waiting outside, I get there first. So when the foundation wants to call your work partnership, I can call them first. So when the critic who wants a map decides to follow you home, he ends up writing about a different room the next day.”
“I didn’t ask you to build a net,” she mumbles.
“You’re right,” I say. “You didn’t. You built a show and a set of rules. My work intersects your work. That’s it.”
“You want thanks,” she says.
“No.”
“You want credit?”
“No.”
“You want obedience.”
I let the word sit there because denying it makes it worse. She wants to see if I flinch when she names the thing that keeps men barking at women after they say no. I don’t bark. I move things out of the way. The movement looks like obedience to people who think they deserve compliance.
“I want you alive,” I say. “On your terms.”
“And the rooms you built,” she says. “You want them off the map.”
“Yes.”
“And me on the end of this line,” she says.
“Now that you’re here,” I say, “yes.”
She exhales. It’s not relief. It’s recalibration. On the feed, she sits. She puts the card flat on the table and sets her phone next to it on speaker. The lamp makes a halo out of paper and black ink. Her hands go still. The tremor is gone. When she speaks again, her voice is as even as mine was at the beginning.
“If I keep you on the phone, you do what I say,” she says. “No men in my studio while I’m not here. No hands on my tools. No cameras at the gallery tomorrow except what my curator approves. No press language that implies partnership.No donors without names in back rooms. You want to keep doing your job, you do it in a way that doesn’t rewrite mine.”
“Agreed,” I say. I expected to negotiate. She made a list instead. I prefer lists.
“And you answer questions I ask,”
“Ask.”
“How did you get inside my studio?” she pauses. “No lies.”
“Permit during a building repair,” I say. “Beam work. We installed a small device in the seam. It is not aimed at your bed. It does not record audio. It does not go live unless motion triggers it. It doesn’t upload to a cloud. If you want it gone tomorrow, I’ll send a contractor at eight and have it out by eight-thirty.”
“Who put the card in the bathroom?”
“A woman on my payroll,” I answer.
“What do you have on me?” she asks. “Files? Lists? I’m not naïve.”
“Press notes. Interview schedule. The same public material the gallery has. The things I remember from watching you work: your brushes, the way you mark your palette, so you don’t scoop from the wrong pile, your habit of checking locks twice, the exact shade you mix when you correct a lip that went too red under fluorescent lights. I don’t keep a diary of your shoulders.”
“Bullshit,” she says, but there isn’t heat in it. “You keep everything.”
“I keep outcomes,” I say. “Not souvenirs.”
She’s quiet for another moment.. The rain gets louder in the microphones outside. The ocean knocks something on the rocks below and it thuds once like a warning. I let the sound sit in the room. It keeps me from filling silence with talking that will make both of us regret the night.
