A woman gets onto a Q train and takes a seat across from me. She’s in her late fifties or early sixties, rail-thin, and her skin-tight black ensemble looks rather threadbare. She’s pushing a cart filled with grocery bags, and as she maneuvers into a seat opposite me I’m in no way surprised when, the train lurching forward, she loses her balance and bumps into the person next to her, losing her grip on the cart, which careens into another standing passenger. She mutters a few words of apology, sits back down , then plunges into her copy of the Daily News. I look up from my book now and then, my gaze drawn to her strange physique and curiously amused-looking expression. Do I know her from somewhere? We arrive at the first stop in Brooklyn and as the train departs, she sits up from where she was leaning on the cart, the balance in the car tips and the cart rolls straight across the aisle where it knocks into someone’s knees. Again she murmurs an apology, and in this moment it dawns on me: I recognize her from my opening at K.’s gallery now more than ten years ago. During the remainder of the commute I reconstruct the circumstances of our encounter: she had arrived early and unaccompanied to the opening, and for the first half-hour or so she cornered me, talking animatedly about my art and her own career as a choreographer. I was eager to escape the conversation, overcome as I was with nervousness about the opening, meeting other guests and friends, etc., and I remember thinking at the time that there was something ‘off’ about the woman (but I assumed she was one of K.’s eccentric acquaintances). When she finally departed everyone seemed to heave a collective sigh of relief. K. had approached me and said, ‘Ugh, I thought that woman would never leave! Who is she anyway?’