When I was still engaged, I inherited an art gallery I didn’t want. I had made the mistake, a few years earlier, of responding to a Craigslist ad seeking an “Inspired Artist with an Eye for Greatness and a Personality.” None of these words resonated with me—I hadn’t been an inspired artist with an eye for greatness since graduating art school with copious debt and unemployability, both of which were promised to me upon my acceptance. But the hourly rate to be a ditzy art gallerist’s assistant was four times more than I was making as a cashier at TJ Maxx.

I waved my degree at her and secured the job. For three years, the gallerist and I spent eight hours a day, six days a week together, before she vanished. I found a sticky note with her loopy, chaotic handwriting:

Taking off for a bit. Will May be in Cannes. Gallery is all yours. Be good. XO.

This wasn’t surprising. She was flighty like that, the kind of flighty that you can chalk up to artistic airheadedness until it poses a personal inconvenience. The note had lost its stick, and I wondered what I would have done if it had simply blown away. I probably would have sat on my stool by the door, waiting forever.

Reasons I should not be the sole owner and operator of an art gallery:

1. Bad at convincing people to buy art, especially the uninspired landscapes and gory self-portraits painted by The Owner.

2. Bad with money.

3. Bad attitude towards art and the art community in general following a brief post-graduate stint teaching retirees to draw. There is nothing more disheartening than seeing old talent wasted.

4. Bad history of getting involved with men who identify as “artists.”

The Owner purchased the gallery space in a neighborhood that, at the time, had been considered up-and-coming, a positive and covert way of saying gentrified. Since the purchase, however, the neighborhood had almost abruptly started getting “un-gentrified.” The people who were once targeted as potential residents had decided to crusade against gentrification seemingly overnight. It’s worth noting that this sudden moral shift coincided with the release of a proudly “woke” HBO miniseries.

Art Gallery ManagerThe position is multi-faceted as it involves overseeing many different aspects:

• Ensuring proper care and installation of the works of art in the exhibition space

• Negotiating sales with clients

• Greeting and conversing with visitors/clients

• Networking with art collectors and artists

• Coordinating and hosting events

• Maintaining the cleanliness and visual appeal of the gallery

Needless to say, I was in over my head. In my experience, people don’t go to galleries to buy art. I have over three years of credit card receipts and sales orders to prove this theory true. People like to look, then leave. Empty-handed. The majority of our foot traffic were couples in the early stages of dating, most often when it was raining. They would let themselves in, rain dripping off their coats, shoes squeaking on my freshly cleaned floors, giggling and smiling at each other, like they were proud to be interesting enough to visit an art gallery. They would also inevitably be clutching paper cups from Starbucks which I would have to ask them to throw away.

The Owner used to relish doing this. She loved emphasizing the need to protect the art, as though we housed Van Goghs and Renoirs, not pieces from The Owner’s friends or their trust-funded children. I asked her once what she thought they were going to do:

Do you think they’ll throw their coffee at the art?

One can never be too careful in dealing with provocative art.

Hmph. I wish this art provoked something in me. Then I might at least be interested in trying to sell it.

How did you ever get to be so cynical?

I wanted to be an artist.

Oh, I forgot about that. You poor thing.

The couples would either begrudgingly throw away their cups or leave. I was always hopeful for the latter. It made me cringe—watching them pad around the gallery in their soggy shoes and attempting to impress each other with insightful comments. They had not yet discovered each other’s shortcomings, that he leaves his pubic hair littered across the toilet seat, that she forgets to empty her cat’s litterbox. They still live in romantic delirium that only exists when vision is clouded by lust.

My fiancé, at the time, was a high school teacher at an inner-city school. The students, our leaders of tomorrow, frequently heckled him. Regardless, this daily abuse was what he referred to as his calling. He never complained about work, no matter how physically or emotionally exhausted he was when he came home. The chasm between our two worlds was too great a subject to broach. Even I found it perverse how often I stomped into the apartment, cranky and grumbling about another long day of passively protecting art. Meanwhile he stayed late after school to provide extra tutoring sessions and facilitate study groups. Dating someone who is actively trying to make the world a better place can be very demoralizing.

The Fiancé’s Five Complaints: a handwritten note taped to my bathroom mirror à la Martin Luther, dated October 5th:

1. You don’t like to take advice. It’s amazing to consider where you would be in your life if you did.

2. You harp on things that are well within your control. Sell the gallery already. The Owner isn’t coming back. You are The Owner.

3. You are obviously depressed but have yet to fill your antidepressant prescription.

4. You say you are against body objectification but no one hates your body more than you.

5. I fell in love with you when you were an artist. Now you are just someone who used to create art.

Signed, The Ex-Fiancé

Ninety-Five Theses, Number 4: As long as hatred of self abides (that is, true inward repentance) the penalty of sin abides, until we enter the kingdom of heaven.

I lost one artist within a week of serving as the reluctant gallerist. She accused me of driving the prices of her art down. I asked her if she thought it was better to sell for a small sum rather than not sell at all. She pulled her remaining pieces off the wall and told me I had no business running an art gallery. I agreed.

With my mediocre management skills at the helm, it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep my albatross alive. At least that’s what the accountant I also inherited told me. He made a chart and pointed to a black dot at the top. That’s where you should be. He pointed to a red dot at the very bottom. That’s where you are.

To keep the literal and metaphorical lights on, I was getting dangerously close to offering paint and sip nights in the studio at the back of the gallery. It was a suggestion from a window-shopper who, based on the blood-red soles of her heels, could certainly afford to be a paying customer.

The Ex-Fiancé and I met in the sort of way that has been reduced to an indie screenplay as often as a Hallmark Christmas movie. We were newly graduated Bachelor of Arts degree-holders invigorated by academia and yet to be jaded by life beyond the classroom. We ended up with part-time gigs at the same community college: he was tutoring ESL students, and I was teaching one section of Drawing 101 for a teacher on a maternity leave from which, much like The Owner’s trip to Cannes, she would never return. He was the opposite of my standard love interest: malnourished artist with translucent skin, a requisite smoking habit, breath perpetually tasting of Parliaments, at least ten years older than me, emboldened to promulgate their self-indulgent worldview, with a tenuous relationship with parents who were either WASPy and willing to supply funds or estranged and eager to be disappointed. Upon meeting my Ex-Fiancé, I realized that my “type” resembled someone who was decaying. He, conversely, was distinctly alive. I had the wistful sense that he would and must be in my life. Of course, I didn’t know why or for how long.

My preferred theory about why Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear: After receiving a letter that his brother was getting married, he cut off his left ear, then went to a brothel and gave the bloody organ—wrapped in paper—to a prostitute. Then he ran away. Historians cite desperate jealousy. They say he heard wedding bells.

As The Ex-Fiancé pointed out, I don’t like to take advice. So instead of offering paint and sip nights intended for single women going through a breakup and couples who have only ever tried missionary, I decided to put on erotic sketch and sip nights. The first roadblock was that I was too embarrassed to ask anyone if they would be willing to be a nude model. My Craigslist ad only produced pictures of penises—both flaccid and erect—posed next to unexpected objects for scale. Electric toothbrushes. A Yankee Candle. Baby carrots. Regular carrots. A golf club. A king-size Snickers Bar. I was outraged and disgusted until I remembered what exactly I had been requesting.

The first thing they teach you in art school:

Nude vs. Naked

Nude: The subject is posing, is passive, is inanimate,
is often portrayed lying down/supine, is intended
for the viewing pleasure of the spectator.

Naked: The subject is not posing, is living, is caught
by surprise, is vulnerable, is not intended for the
viewing pleasure of anyone.

The first erotic sketch and sip night was held on the evening of October 6th. A group of nervous, horny misfits sat on stools before easels arranged in a circle. They clutched their graphite pencils in one hand and plastic cups of wine (my only out-of-pocket expense) in the other. They exchanged eager grins. My naked body crossed the studio and arranged itself in the center of the ring. What now?

In 1963, the year Sylvia Plath died by suicide, 44% of suicides in England and Wales were via the lethal gas in ovens. Fifteen years later, when natural gas fully took over, the number of all suicides—not just by gas—plummeted. If Sylvia stuck her head in the oven in 1977, she would only have gotten a mild headache. And probably a sore neck. So it said in a book I read once. Without the carbon monoxide, the opportunity for certain death was not guaranteed. People want control when they die. They want the sure thing. When I shared this information with The Ex-Fiancé, he wanted to know how I became the sort of person to seek these things out.

The art gallery’s studio was well appointed, thanks to The Owner’s fearlessness in the face of debt collectors. This wasn’t a great time to have access to a gas-powered kiln.

The first boy I ever kissed wasn’t a boy but a potter. He was obsessed with buying a kiln and regaling me with the economics of them and the importance of buying one of superior quality. It seemed like a lofty aspiration for someone who made uninteresting pots in his father’s garage.

There is something depressing about throwing clay. I didn’t want him to know that I became an “artist.” He’s the sort of person that will get off on taking all the credit.

He sent me an email a few years ago stating that he felt morally obligated to notify all his previous sexual partners that he had contracted HPV. I replied that a) we had never had sex and b) our last contact had been five years prior. He took this as an opportunity to reignite the old flame of the summer when I was eighteen and asked if I still had the soup bowl he made for me, the one painted “Celestial Indigo.” I told him I broke it, but really I think it was hauled off to Goodwill at some point. I didn’t want him to think anyone was getting any use out of it.

There was a gourmet cookie shop around the corner from the apartment where The Ex-Fiancé and I lived. I was irrationally annoyed that someone had the audacity to open such a specific business in a place where we used to have a liquor store, a useful store. I said this to The Ex-Fiancé often until he finally told me to just get over it already. The cookie shop didn’t even sell coffee, but they did have an urn of water and Dixie cups. Things would have been different if the cookies were good.

The day before he ended the engagement, he arranged a meeting there. Neutral territory that we both equally disliked. He took a plastic knife and cut through the gooey mess. He placed one half on a napkin in front of me and the grease immediately drenched through, circling the cookie in a yellowy pool of its own lard.

I watched him take a bite of his piece and noted the speckles of cinnamon sugar on his lower lip. He described the cookie as “Play-Dohy.” I agreed that it was probably made in an Easy-Bake Oven. We both finished our halves and talked some more about nothing.

People ask me questions as they sketch. I don’t mind. It helps pass the time. Typically, they are harmless. What TV shows are you streaming right now? Do you have any good recipes for leftover leeks?

Other times they’re more jarring. What’s your bra size? Where did you lose your virginity? How old were you when you got your first period?

Sometimes I get unnecessary observations. One man with a severe widow’s peak and a mole directly under his nose: Your nipples are hard enough to cut glass. And I should know, he said. I’m in the glass business.

I asked him what kind of glass he made. Really any kind of glass. Doors, shower enclosures, tabletops. What about windows, I asked.

He frowned. Not that kind of glass.

The Profitability of My Art Gallery vs. The Perceived Happiness of My Engagement

The findings are too conclusive to justify further research.

Unaffordable rent aside, I never liked the idea of living in a “studio” anyways, so I moved out of the apartment and into the back of the art gallery. You have to cut costs where you can, says the accountant. I sleep on a couch from Craigslist covered with a bleach-spotted bedsheet and live out of an open suitcase with a busted wheel. I collect the leftover bottles from the erotic sketch and sip nights and start drinking the dregs. I make use of the gym membership I never worked up the courage to cancel and start showering in the locker room. It was The Ex-Fiancé’s idea for us both to join a few Januarys ago. He was always galvanized by the New Year, believed wholeheartedly in new beginnings and the possibility of bettering himself. He never went to the gym either.

In 1988, the performance artist Marina Abramovic and her partner in love and art, Ulay, staged The Lovers. The couple stood at opposite ends of the Great Wall of China and began walking towards each other, almost 6,000 kilometers, where they would meet in the middle and be married. It took eight years to arrange the performance, by which time their relationship had fallen apart. Still, they both made the three-month journey towards each other. When Marina and Ulay finally reunited, he told her that the translator who walked the Wall with him was pregnant with his child. They said goodbye and went their separate ways.

Switzerland, a mutual friend who managed to remain neutral throughout the aftermath of the breakup despite my best efforts to sway them, tells me that The Ex-Fiancé has a new girlfriend. But I’m his girlfriend, I say automatically, as though I’m a robot programmed for loyalty and love. The friend assures me that I am not and reminds me how long it has been. The New Girlfriend is a brain surgeon. She went to Harvard. She has a Wikipedia page. Not that it matters. Switzerland says The Ex-Fiancé refers to her as his partner. Somehow this is the greatest betrayal of all.

Emotional Masturbation: On our (Ex) Anniversary, I watch a documentary about Marina and her retrospective, a performance at MoMA called The Artist is Present. She sits in a wooden chair for eight hours a day, ninety days in a row, staring straight ahead, while patrons of the museum approach and sit opposite her to share a period of silence. On the night of the opening, Ulay arrives and takes the guest chair. The two former lovers have not spoken since they parted at the Great Wall. Twenty-two years later, they sit across from one another. Marina reaches out and takes Ulay’s hands for a few moments while they communicate forty years in ninety seconds of silence. He rises and leaves; she remains in her chair, wiping away tears before the next person takes the seat. My life will never be that poetic.

The cashier at my favorite Chinese food restaurant, the one where I get take-out every Friday night, notices when I start ordering the General Tso’s Combination Plate for 1. She still barks at me when I call—10 minutes!—before slamming the phone down, but something softens when I pick up my order. No beef with broccoli? No Crab Rangoon? No egg roll? She doesn’t ask for my name when I walk up to the counter, just looks me up and down. He picked up once, she tells me. Beef with broccoli. He was very rude. He was in a very bad mood. That sounds like him. Sometimes. Towards the end, I guess. You too, she shakes her head. You are in a very bad mood too. She staples the paper bag closed. It is important to remember, she says, that if a time was good, a time could be good again. Cash or card?

The erotic sketch and sip nights take off. A place at the other end of downtown even rips off the idea and starts hosting their own. I’ve heard their models are good looking, very good looking, and sometimes touch themselves while smiling lewdly and making sustained eye contact with the artists. That’s not how we do things here, I tell my customers.

Five years after their silent reunion, Ulay took Marina to court. According to the terms of a 1999 contract covering sales of their joint works, he claimed, she had paid him insufficient royalties.

The Nick Carraway Times (my younger, more vulnerable years):

Me: All I want to do is hang out with you. You never hear old people say “hang out.” I could hang out with you for the rest of my life. And then when you die first—I’m sorry but, barring some unforeseen tragedy, the science indicates that you will—I’ll go to your grave just to hang out with you.

Him: Please don’t talk like that.

Me: I mean it. I never understood what it was like to never get sick of someone. To be together and together and together and still think: I hope you never have to leave.

Him: Remember that time you were driving us to the zoo and we were talking about something—I can’t for the life of me remember what—and we were stopped at a red light, laughing and looking at each other and then I looked away and realized we were sitting on train tracks? I wasn’t scared. Even though I knew you were too clueless—I’m sorry, but you know you can be a bit out-to-lunch on certain things, common sense things like driving laws—I had this ease, this equanimity that the light would turn green before anything bad happened.

Me: “Anything bad” is a polite way of saying “splat.”

Him: Are you picturing a comic speech bubble with “splat” in all caps?

Me: Yes. I like when you say “equanimity.”

Him: You’re the only person I would want to go “splat” with.

I ask Switzerland to casually—very casually—suggest to The Ex-Fiancé that he should attend the final erotic sketch and sip night. My Hail Mary to remind him of number five on his list of complaints. He fell in love with me when I was an artist. Here I am. An artist.

After this last hurrah, I will pack up all The Owner’s artwork and easels and paint and pencils. I will try to sell the few things that might be worth something on Craigslist. The couch and the kiln. I will put most things on the side of the road. I won’t haul them off to Goodwill. I will pass over the keys to a twenty-something Instagram chef who will turn this space into a bakery that sells only madeleine cookies. Apparently, the local crusade against gentrification, like my erotic sketch and sip nights, was a fad, reminiscent of so many flash mobs and Livestrong bracelets and ice bucket challenges before it.

I don’t look at the artists (paying customers) when I enter the circle. It’s late spring. The windows are open. My body is soft. I perch on the edge of the stool. I feel his familiar presence. I let the life I almost had drift away from me. I will long for it forever. I hear the voice of a Harvard-educated brain surgeon say, “Hmm, interesting. I wouldn’t have thought to draw her eyes closed.”

At the end of the hourlong session, the artists roll up and snap rubber bands around their masterpieces which they will carry awkwardly for the rest of their evenings, no one the wiser that the paper tube conceals an amateur charcoal drawing of an anonymous nude woman. I remain standing in the center of the circle, motionless, waiting for The Ex-Fiancé. I have already drafted my monologue and am prepared to recite it by heart. He comes towards me while The Partner waits politely by the door. Based on her pleasant indifference, I can tell she doesn’t know her partner could have drawn me with his eyes closed. Her piece was objectively good in a calculated, scholarly way. The Ex-Fiancé looks at me, something he has done more than any person I have ever known. My robe is draped over the chair beside me, but I don’t reach for it.

He smiles. You really should have called these ‘neurotic sketch and sip nights.’

Oh, well. You know me.

Yes, I do.

I tell him I’m thinking of turning the space into an artisanal deviled egg shop next, but he doesn’t get the joke.

It was good to see you, he says as I stand before him, naked. Then my person who is no longer my person follows his partner who is not his girlfriend out of the gallery that is not my gallery that is now my studio, holding her hand in his left hand and nothing in the other.

Yelp Review

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Overall an OK experience. My girlfriend and i had a Groupon so we figured we’d try it out. Good location, easy to get to by subway & near some decent restaurants. The vibe was mostly cool except the model was crying. idk if that’s always how it goes but it was kinda awkward since she wasn’t wearing any clothes or anything. I probably won’t go again, but the price was fair, so there’s no harm in giving it a try.