He chuckles bitterly. “It makes me think of an art term: grisaille.”

Grisaille? French, obviously, but I’m not familiar with it, which is instantly bugging me. “I don’t know it,” I force myself to admit. “What does it mean?”

“Like painting with gray, gray tonalities. A sorta monochromatic style, mainly to depict sculpture in a painting, I believe. There are a couple of well-known examples of it, but I can’t think of them at the moment, my mind’s a mess. But it’s all about . . . gray.”

“Related to chiaroscuro, maybe?” I’m trying to sound like I’m not art history ignorant, ’cause the fact is I’m not, as I’ve already tried to establish. I know a Rubens from a fucking Reuben sandwich, OK? I know a pair of Titians from a pair of tits. I put in two years at Stanford, the Harvard of California, where the fucking Google guys went, before I became a porn star, and I’m damn proud of it. I’m no fucking bimbo, I’m no fucking dumbo, I’ve read Rimbaud and my career is pretty fucking jumbo. I slayed in high school, got over 700 on every fucking part of my SATs. I got a fucking academic rack.

“Well, that’s Italian,” says Doc.

“I know that,” I go. I’m trying to come up with the perfect fine-art rejoinder when, just a few blocks from the hospital, we turn onto Butterfly Drive and there’s practically a crowd in the middle of the street.