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“How do you and your little camera ever get people to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, anyway?”
    “When I did that thing at school for the show at that gallery, it just took time. I mean, for every minute I could use, I probably talked to our beloved classmates for an hour.”
    “It sounds like
Wild Kingdom,
you know? You lay there in the bushes forever just to finally catch a warthog taking a crap.”
    “Making a documentary is totally like
Wild Kingdom.
You wait and you wait and you listen and you ask and then you have to be lucky. Like, I know there’s at least one guard here who’d say he’s kinder or more patient or happier or something just from being around all this beautiful stuff.”
    “Well, I don’t feel a whole lot happier. This place gives me a headache.” She points to a portrait. Some nobleman with a huge wig and a simper. She drags me closer. “Painting’s hard — I get that. All the little hairs, the sun off his gold buttons. But why him? He’s probably humping the downstairs maid while his wife’s upstairs with her insides falling out from having one kid after another. Where’s his wife’s picture, huh? Or where’s the cook and the girl who does the laundry?”
    “They can’t afford to have somebody paint their pictures.”
    “Exactly! So why should I give a shit about him?”
    My grandma knows a lot of people. She stops and talks to them for a minute, anyway, and introduces us over and over. All of a sudden, Colleen is having a hard time holding it together. She was okay outside and okay when we talked to that guard. Now she’s not so okay. She’s gone all pale and twitchy.
    When I first met Colleen and started to hang with her, my grandma said she hoped I wasn’t one of those men who liked to rescue women. She said Colleen was just the kind of victim to bring out that tendency in me. My father was like that, she said.
    Except it was Colleen who rescued me. Took me places I’d never have gone to on my own. Took off her clothes so I could see a real naked girl once in my life. Helped me off with mine and didn’t laugh or throw up.
    I go and stand beside her. I put my arm around her and pull her toward me. I feel her breathe about a hundred times a minute.
    “Take it easy.”
    She nods. “I know. It’s just a little panic attack. No big deal.”
    The concert is at the end of a long gallery on the east side of the building. A hundred and fifty folding chairs in a semicircle. A huge painting — as big as a trampoline — right behind where the musicians will sit.
    “I don’t want anybody next to me,” she says, holding my hand tight.
    “All right. I’ll tell Grandma my hip is bothering me. We’ll stand by the door.”
    When I get back from passing around my little lie, Colleen is watching the musicians. They’ve been escorted in by two guards. God forbid some terrorists would capture a cellist.
    They’re nervous, tuning their violins, fussing with their collars. Colleen hands me the program she’s been reading and I glance at the bios: Juilliard. The Eastman School. First violin for the St. Louis Symphony. Winner of a Ruth Cole Webber scholarship.
    Just then Grandma hurries back to whisper, “Listen carefully to the adagio in this first piece.”
    A minute later, the quartet passes us, and during the applause that starts at just the sight of them, Colleen says, “I have to get out of here.” And she bolts.
    I can’t keep up, but I still follow her down the long hall, past the pears and the cheese in the still life, past the duke of something and his smug wife, past Virtue and Vice in a sixteenth-century slap-down, all the way through the big glass doors to the garden, with its huge, shadowy sculptures and shimmery pond.
    I stand off to one side, watch her punch numbers, then bark into her cell phone, “I don’t understand your so-called Higher Power at all, okay? What kind of Higher Power would stick me with this life? And my boyfriend limps all the