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the elevator chrome. She leaned over to C.C. “Should I get my hair colored?”
    â€œShould you what?” said C.C., startled.
    â€œWell? Look at it. My hair. You think it could’ve turned a definite white like yours is doing, or a stunning gray. But, no, it’s thinned and faded to no color at all.”
    Quiola burst out laughing, while the curator stared at the closing elevator doors.
    â€œWell?” Liz demanded. “Color is everything. Especially blue,” and she smiled, which appeared to encourage the curator. But her smile was not for him, it was for blue: midnight, cerulean, navy, cobalt, all the fragments of water and sky from the Mediterranean clarity of California midday to the ebony of indigo night.
    â€œNever thought of you as a blue-haired lady,” said Quiola, deadpan. “But if you want, I’m sure we can find a hairdresser in the City to give you a rinse.”
    Fortunately for the curator, the elevator doors re-opened here. Liz let C.C. have her arm, Quiola her elbow, and they made their slow way to a podium of sorts, where History was going to be enthroned for the event. As they moved through the applauding crowd Liz was glad she hadn’t worn her glasses. All the faces, as featureless as a Matisse, seemed wonderfully distant.
    â€œWho are these people?” she muttered.
    â€œJust make nice,” whispered C.C.
    â€œNo, really,” said Liz, a bit louder and more annoyed. “My friends are all dead.”
    â€œNot
yet
, they aren’t,” snapped C.C.
    Liz let herself be lowered onto what amounted to a divan, like a tough Venus on the half-shell. People nattered on at her, and she answered with what she hoped passed for polite nonsense, and was grateful when Quiola handed her a glass of iced sherry – her particular kind of sherry – along with a plate of goodies. She concentrated on what mattered: food. Tomorrow: a ride around the Park.
    â€œI hope the goddamn weather clears,” she said, to no one in particular.
    Unlike Liz, both Quiola and C.C. had working obligations at the opening: C.C. had a “shed” full of things her dealer said she couldn’t deal, and an installation postponed; meanwhile, Quiola shopped half-heartedly around for someone who might deal her into the humming hub of the art universe. C.C. might have helped, but the older woman thought it would be vulgar to do so, since they’d once been lovers. Liz would let no one take advantage of her belated fame, not even Quiola.
    The gallery buzzed with the tense of pitch. Quiola soon ran out of gas. Deflation set in, and she longed for the one sanctuary that Liz’s fame made possible, the Plaza suite, full of chintz and silence and a wet bar. She scanned the room and found C.C. standing, alone, before one of the smallest canvases in the gallery.
    As a rule, a Moore canvas is big. Sometime in the 1940s Liz went large with minutiae. Yet, unlike O’Keefe, she’d chosen minutia her generation thought unsuited to her sex: no giant genital flowers for her. Instead she’d harkened back to her childhood, when she’d been schooled to sketch bees from her father’s apiary, to make the miniature sculpture of insect anatomy into arching, huge but intricate surreal abstraction.
    Not everyone’s taste, to be sure.
    Yet her famous massive miniatures did not mean she’d given up on small. C.C. was standing in front of a sequence of a dozen tiny paintings, called the
Series B
. Liz had done one a year, for a dozen years, as a chronicle of how that particular year had been to live. She’d started the series as something between and joke and a jab in 1945, when her future husband, the sculptor Paul Gaines, complained that she was so often distracted, so unto herself, he wondered if she even knew the War was over. As a response, she painted
Series B One
. In it, a lone figure, thin and dark, dances away from the jagged teeth of a fluid