What she did instead was more interesting. She called the owner of the art supply store, whom she knew slightly, because the art world of our city is small and everyone knows everyone. And she did not scream at him. She told him, calmly and precisely, what had happened in his store that afternoon. She told him that his manager had followed an elderly woman through the store, accused her by implication of shoplifting, and thrown her out for looking poor. And then she told him who the woman was.
And she let him sit with the horror of it. Because the owner, unlike his manager, knew exactly who Marguerite Toussaint was. My work had been featured in the very magazines his store advertised in. He understood, immediately and completely, that his store had committed not just a moral outrage but a spectacular unforced error, that they had taken one of the most significant living artists in the region, a woman who bought supplies constantly and could buy the most expensive things they stocked without blinking, and thrown her out for looking poor.
But Vivian, and this is the crucial part, did not let the owner make it about my status either. When he began to fall over himself apologizing, when he began to talk about comping my purchases and giving me a lifetime discount and how mortified he was to have treated someone so important this way, Vivian stopped him.
āMichael,ā she said. āListen to me. Youāre apologizing for the wrong thing. Youāre horrified because you found out she was important. But your manager didnāt know she was important, and thatās not the point. Your manager threw an old woman out of your store for looking poor. If she had been exactly what she looked like, a poor old woman who loved to paint, it would have been just as wrong. Do you understand me? The apology I want, the only one worth anything, is not to the famous artist. Itās to every person your store treats this way who doesnāt happen to have a gallerist three doors down to make this phone call.ā
There was a long silence on the phone, Iām told, and then the owner said, quietly, that he understood, and that he was ashamed, and that he thought she was right.
What came of it was this. The owner came, personally, to the gallery, to apologize to me. And to his credit, heād heard what Vivian said, because his apology was not the groveling of a man whoād offended a celebrity. It was the genuine contrition of a man whoād been shown something ugly about the business heād built. He apologized for how Iād been treated. And then he said that heād been thinking about what Vivian told him, and that he was going to change how his staff was trained, that he was going to make it a firing offense to follow or profile a customer based on their appearance, that he was horrified to realize how many people his store had probably treated this way over the years, people who hadnāt been important enough for anyone to make a phone call.
I told him that this was the only apology worth accepting, and that I accepted it. And I meant it.
The manager was not fired. I want to say that, because I think it matters. I asked that he not be fired. I did not want a young manās livelihood destroyed as a sacrifice to my wounded dignity. What I wanted, and what the owner agreed to, was that the manager would be part of the retraining, that he would have to understand what heād done and why it was wrong, not because heād humiliated someone important but because heād humiliated someone. Whether that understanding took, I donāt know. You canāt force a person to see. But you can give them the chance, and destroying him would have given him only a grievance, not a lesson.
I did go back to that store, eventually. I finished my shopping. The cadmium red was still good. And the manager, when he saw me, went pale, and then he came over, and he apologized to me directly, and I could not tell you whether heād truly learned anything or was simply afraid, but he said the words, and I accepted them, and I bought my supplies and went home and painted.
Here is what I have carried away from that day.
I have been, in one lifetime, both the invisible poor woman and the celebrated artist, and they were the same woman, wearing the same paint-stained clothes, and the only thing that changed was whether the person looking at me happened to know my name. And that has taught me something about the whole apparatus of who we see and who we donāt. The manager who followed me through his store was not an unusual monster. He was an ordinary person doing what our whole culture trains us to do, which is to read a personās worth off their surface, to decide in an instant, based on clothes and age and bearing, who matters and who can be discarded. He was wrong about me in a way that happened to be dramatic, because I turned out to have a name that made his error expensive. But he is wrong in exactly the same way about every shabby, ordinary, un-famous person he profiles and follows and makes uncomfortable, and those people have no gallerist three doors down, and their stories donāt get told.
The thing I want you to take from this is not that the manager should have recognized me. Thatās the shallow lesson, and itās the wrong one. The deep lesson is that it should not have mattered whether he recognized me. The poor old woman I appeared to be deserved to shop in peace exactly as much as the famous artist I turned out to be. They were the same person. They are always the same person. Every nobody is a somebody whose name you havenāt learned, and more than that, every nobody is a somebody even if you never learn their name, even if thereās no name to learn, even if they are exactly as ordinary as they appear. The ordinariness was never a reason to treat them as less. That was always the lie.
Iām seventy-four. Iāve made my peace with most things. But I have not made my peace with the sorting, the endless sorting of people into those who matter and those who donāt, and I donāt intend to. I paint, these days, a great deal about invisibility, about the people the world looks past. The critics say itās a new direction in my work. They donāt know that it comes from being followed through an art supply store by a boy who thought I was nobody.
He thought I was nobody.
He was righter than he knew, and more wrong than he could imagine. I was nobody. I was just an old woman who liked to paint. And that was always, already, enough to deserve better than what he gave me.
