Page 10 of Private Viewing

There it was.

Laurent had heard that sentence, or its cousins, a thousand times. He'd said its cousins. It was the language of his entire trade — develop, position, build out, bring along — the vocabulary of turning a person into an asset, and he'd never once flinched at it, because flinching at it was for people who couldn't afford Chelsea. And he stood at the bar of the Foundry and heard Sabine Kessler say raw is so easy to finish about Charlie Vasquez, about the boy who painted refrigerator light because it was true, and he wanted — with a clarity that arrived like a slap — to put his body between them.

Finish him, he thought. You want to finish him. Sand him until he's legible. Until he's a Kessler discovery with a clean provenance and a market and no dirty blue left in him.

And under that thought, arriving at the same instant, uninvited, fully formed, the real one:

You don't want her to have him. You don't want anyone to have him. You want—

Laurent set the bourbon down on the bar with great care, because his hand had developed an opinion.

"He's not for sale as a project," Laurent said. Evenly. "He's an artist in a group show."

Sabine's eyes came back to him, and they were sharp now, the collector's eyes, reading the canvas of his face for the thing under the varnish. She'd bought and sold men more careful than Laurent for forty years. He watched her see it. He watched her file it, the way he filed things, and he understood that he had just made a mistake in a room where mistakes were the only legal tender.

"Mm," Sabine said, which from her was a paragraph. "Introduce me to your artist, Laurent." She patted his arm, once, the pat of a woman who has decided something. "Before the season starts. I'd hate to make him an offer you weren't in the room for."

She went to find her seat. Laurent stayed at the bar with his hand that had an opinion and the truth he'd just told himself, and across the room Charlie finished the fish story, and the knot of people laughed, and Charlie looked for Laurent again — first, before anyone, looked for him first — and Laurent had to turn and study the bottles behind the bar like a man reading scripture.

***

"You have a look," Naomi said.

She'd come back. Or she'd never left. He wasn't tracking well.

"I don't have a look."

"You have the look you had about the Basquiat," Naomi said. "The little one, the drawing, in the estate sale, when you knew it was real and everyone else thought it was a student copy and you didn't say a word, you just went very still and I watched you decide to spend money we did not have." She sipped the wine she wasn't drinking. "It cost us four hundred thousand dollars and it was the best decision you ever made and I have never seen that exact look on your face since. Until about four minutes ago." A pause, not unkind. "So. Who is he. And don't tell me he's an artist in a group show, because I typed the wall labels, I know what he is on paper. I'm asking what he is to you."

Laurent looked at his oldest colleague, the one person alive who'd watched him build the entire fiction from the studs up and had never once told anyone where the seams were.

"He's twenty-five," Laurent said.

"I know how old he is."

"He's twenty-five, and he came out of nowhere, and I gave him the east wall, and if anything happens — if it looks like anything happened — the story writes itself. Marchand's discovery. Marchand's boy. They'll say I've got no eye, only appetite. They'll say the work got the wall because the artist got the dealer. And they'll say it about him worse than they say it about me, because I've got a name to lose and he's got a name I just finished convincing him to put on the label." He heard his own voice, low and fast, the accent gone, the way it went only with Naomi and, lately, alarmingly, in a certain office doorway. "It would erase him. Everything real about the work, gone, folded into a story about who he slept with. Sabine wants to finish him. I'd be finishing him a different way and telling myself it was love."

Naomi was quiet a moment.

"That's a lot of reasons," she said.

"They're good reasons."

"They're excellent reasons. You've clearly had them for a while." She set the wine down. "You notice you didn't answer the question."

He didn't answer it now, either. He couldn't, in the Foundry, in the truth-room, where saying it would make it real and load-bearing and impossible to un-know. He was good at not saying things. It was one of his best things.

***

Charlie found him by the coats an hour later, two beers in and glowing with it, that reckless warmth turned all the way up, and Laurent — who had spent the hour building the wall back, brick by brick, reason by reason — felt the whole structure sway.

"You disappeared," Charlie said. "I kept looking over and you'd gone all — statue. You do that. You go statue when something's happening. I've decided it's my favorite thing you do, it's like a tell, it means the room got real." He was close, closer than the coats required, his voice pitched low and easy just for Laurent under the noise of the bar, and he smelled like beer and turpentine and himself. "That lady. The gray cashmere. She's a big deal, right? Naomi went weird when she came in."

"Sabine Kessler. She's the biggest deal in the room. Possibly the city."

"She kept looking at me."

"She wants to meet you." Laurent kept his voice level. "She could change your life. You should let her."