Ten Years of Stipends

When Pace tipped his cabernet down the front of my gown, the gallery went quiet so fast you could hear the photographers shift their feet on the parquet.

The dress was a Carolina Herrera column, custom, ivory silk. It had arrived at my Carlyle suite that morning from the atelier with a card in his handwriting: *For tonight.*

He used to drink whatever I couldn't. He'd take a glass off a tray before I touched it because, he said, my stomach was bad and even a sip wrecked me. He'd watched me throw up cheap white wine in a Greenwich powder room once when I was twenty and told the hostess I had a migraine.

Now he handed his empty glass back to a passing server without looking at it. Like a thing he no longer needed touching his skin.