Meanwhile, she had opened a gallery. First she'd gone to work at one on Madison Avenue with the intention of learning the business. She had an argument with the woman who ran the place and quit after two months, then got a similar job downtown on Spring Street. She didn't much care for the artwork in either establishment; the photo-realists at the uptown gallery struck her as sterile, while she saw the commercial can-vases at the SoHo gallery as clicheád and cloying, a high-ticket equivalent of Holiday Inn seascapes and bullfighters.

More to the point, she found the business itself unpleasant, the snobbery, the petty jealousies, the relentless courting of investors and corporate collectors. "I thought I quit prostitution," she said one night, "and here I am pimping for a bunch of bad painters. I don't get it." She went in the following morning and gave notice.

What she wanted, she decided, was a sort of cross between a gallery and a curiosity shop. She'd stock it with things she liked, and she'd try to sell them to people who were looking for something to hang on the wall, or place on the coffee table. She had a good eye, everyone told her that, and she'd taken more courses over the years at Hunter and NYU and the New School than your average art historian, so why shouldn't she take her best shot?

It turned out to be easy to get started. There were a lot of vacant storefronts in the neighborhood that season, and she checked them all out and charmed the owner of a building on Ninth and Fifty-fifth into giving her a good lease at a reasonable rent. Over the years she'd packed a locker in an Eleventh Avenue warehouse with things she'd bought and tired of; the two of us went through it and filled the back of a borrowed station wagon with prints and canvases, and that gave her enough stock to open.

Toward the end of her first month of operation she paid a second visit to the Matisse show at the Museum of Modern Art and came back wide-eyed.