Anthea told me she went to the bathrooms in the basement, by the cinema, when she needed to cry at work. Joanna recommended the stairwell behind the librarian’s office. I just sat silently at my desk, staring hard at my computer screen, rubbing my eyes as if they were smarting from all the data entry.

I was lucky to be here, checking measurements and shining the sentences that would appear on object labels. The open-plan offices felt like a new-age monastery; we showed our devotion through our long hours and low salaries, our gratitude and obsession with our work euphemistically called attention to detail in all the job advertisements. These offices were almost always silent save the soft clatter of our keyboards and the occasional ring of the elevator doors opening when somebody left for the galleries filled with bright, white light, where the crowds gathered to take photographs of endlessly reproduced images, paying homage to our gods, to modernism.

I wanted to stay, forever, because of the paintings. I wanted to stay forever because of Frank O’Hara, who worked as a curator and wrote poems on his lunch breaks, and Grace Hartigan, his friend and mine, who was the only woman included in The New American Painting, organised by the museum in 1958. I could see Grace as my friend only because I worked here, researching her relationship to the museum. She had died when I was twenty-one; I had first encountered her name in an Artforum obituary…

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