Someone hung the moon wrong, that night in June, so that when the curtains drew up for the second act, the actress, draped in glitter and dipped in silver, fell from her white-painted perch and spilled her skull across the stage. Her rolling eyes went tumbling back; a blonde became a redhead.

Cries in the black – the leading man swept himself to his knees and picked up a fragment of her glass crown (she had played a queen). He stared out from his shins. My wife’s mother remained in her seat; held her pregnant stomach with one hand and Tommy’s hand with the other. Yes, that was Tommy Teller; the Devil in the flash; “Final Bow for Lucy Ray.”

Her husband was elsewhere. He hated anything foreign except for Gianna Gentileschi with her birdlike arms and wraith-stuck gaze. (Gianna was – I am told – a lousy ballerina. She had – I always thought – long, sinewy limbs which were fastened to her body at odd angles. He probably told her she looked French.)

“But my husband never saw Lucy Ray act. She could make anything real. Perhaps – ” here her low voice would shudder, and Lucy II would, eventually, mime along: “ – that is what made her death so unreal.”

My Lucy was born two days after on a cool June evening, when the clouds drew themselves into a partition between the sky and the hospital bed to obscure the position of the stars. Later, as I played my piano and Gianna tapped her crippled foot, I caught Lucy’s image only in negative, midair against green-glass studio mirrors, wreathes of movement conjuring just-erased chalk on slate. I wondered what she looked like on her back. Saintlike Lucy never looked like she saw me. No, she preferred the director with tight tie shot to chiseled chin, an exclamation mark in reverse. But I never stared at the girls as they bent over to loose the ribbons on their slippers or work a bruise. Just lashed those notes, sweating.

…is an artist from New York City. She graduated from Camberwell College of Arts and lives in London.