"Ray and the people he was with were convinced it still could be a money maker. So their idea was to buy it cheap, rebuild it, and tiien either sell it to someone else or else reopen it and run it themselves.

Warren Corey, one of the senior partners at Butler, Corey, was involved with the group, and that year I was working for him. All of us were in Boston for something connected with it, licensing hearings or something, and after the hearing I went to the gallery. I'd always admired Eric's work, and that's how we met. I'm the only one who gained anything from that racetrack project. The deal itself fell through.

"Now Eric, he looks at things from the artist's perspective, and that's had an influence on me, affected how I see the world. And again, that's what I mean. About how we're the sum of our experience; what we are."

The text of the interview was illustrated by several photographs, one of her in a judicial robe, another of her at her desk in her new chambers, three showing her at home, casually dressed in a tawny cowled sweater and fitted jeans, her black hair in a shiny page-boy framing her slightly feline face. Eric had said she'd done a good job and should be very pleased, and she had said: "The photographer did a good job; I grant you that. But I don't think I did. Do I really talk like that, say famous things like that, to people I don't know? Cripes, I sound like such a phony there, like the way Ray used to, accepting one of his semi-annual awards for being such a wonderful house nigger."

"It does the job, though," Eric had said, and he had been correct. The profile made her seem to deserve the distinction she had achieved.