Page 11 of Private Viewing

"Yeah?" Charlie tilted his head, reading Laurent's face, and Charlie was too good at reading faces, that was the whole problem, that was the thing that made the paintings and the thing that was about to make Laurent's life unlivable. "You don't look like you think I should let her. You've got the statue thing but different. This one's — " He studied Laurent for a second longer, and his voice dropped further, and something came into it that Charlie plainly did not have a word for yet, because he'd never once had to look for the word, warm and puzzled and reaching. "This one's kind of new."

And then Charlie put his hand on Laurent's arm.

Just his arm. Just above the elbow, warm through the good wool, the easy touch of a tactile man who touched everyone, who'd probably clapped that cruel critic on the shoulder an hour ago and thought nothing of it. It meant nothing. Laurent knew it meant nothing.

It went through him like the third rail.

For one second — the doorway second, the one Laurent had also been carrying around and failing to color — the two of them stood by the coats with Charlie's hand on his arm and the whole loud room reduced to the six inches between them, and Laurent looked at the boy's open puzzled reaching face, at the mouth, at the exact thing he wanted and had told Naomi he had four hundred thousand excellent reasons not to take, and he understood with perfect clarity that Charlie did not know. That was the thing. Charlie was standing there feeling something enormous with no name on it and no lid, looking at Laurent like the answer to a question he hadn't finished asking himself, and if Laurent moved — if Laurent so much as tilted — Charlie would follow, because Charlie followed the truth wherever it got in around the edges, that was who he was.

And he'd wake up tomorrow having followed it somewhere he'd never chosen to go, handed there by a man twenty years older who'd had every reason in the world to know better.

Laurent stepped back.

One clean step, the same step as the doorway, the step he was apparently going to spend this entire season taking. Charlie's hand fell away.

"Let Sabine change your life," Laurent said. Gently. As gently as he'd ever said anything. "That's what I'm here for — to put you in front of the people who can. Not to — " He stopped. Reassembled. "Go home, Charlie. You've got a painting to finish and you're two beers past useful. I'll see you at the install."

Something flickered over Charlie's face — not hurt, exactly, more like a man who'd reached for a light switch in the dark and found the wall an inch to the left of where he'd been sure it was. Confusion. A question deferred. "Yeah," he said. "Okay. The install." He pulled his denim jacket off the hook, and at the door he turned back, and the grin was back but there was something under it now, something Laurent had put there. "You'd tell me, right? If the room got real. You'd tell me."

"Go home," Laurent said.

He watched the boy go out into the November cold. Then he stood at the coats of the Foundry, in the only honest room in Chelsea, and made himself the promise, cold and clean and correct, the promise he was so certain he could keep:

Nothing. It will be nothing. He doesn't know what he wants, and I will not be the thing that decides it for him. He gets the show, the career, Sabine, all of it — clean, his, unspoiled. And I get to keep my name and the knowledge that for once in my life I wanted something and left it on the desk.

Professional. Always.

He believed it for nearly the whole cab ride home.

Then he got upstairs to the Tribeca apartment with the one painting on the wall he'd never explain to anyone, and he stood in the dark and did not turn on the light, and he thought about a hand on his arm and a face reaching for a word, and he understood that leaving the pastry on the desk had never once made him want it less.

It had only ever taught him how to starve.

Chapter 5

The Color of It

The third painting had been lying to Charlie for two weeks, and at 5:40 in the morning it finally told him the truth.

He'd been circling it since the Foundry. It was big, the biggest of the three, and it was all that dirty blue he couldn't get away from, and there was something coming in at the top left corner, some warm thing, a wash he kept building and scraping and building — and every version was wrong, and he couldn't say why, which never happened. Charlie always knew why. A color was too green or a shape was too pleased with itself or the light was coming from a direction the painting didn't believe in. He had reasons. He had a whole life of reasons.

This one had no reason. It just wasn't true yet, and he'd been standing in front of it in the cold loft at ungodly hours getting angrier and angrier at a rectangle.

Dani found him there at 5:40, coming in from the kiln with clay dust in her hair and the specific patience of a woman who had lived with an artist long enough to know not to talk to him before he'd solved the thing.

"It's the warm part," Charlie said, to the painting, not to her. "The warm thing in the corner. It's fake. I keep painting warm and it comes out — decorative. Like I'm putting it there because the blue needs relief. That's a cheat. That's me composing." He heard Laurent in his own head, uninvited, the way Laurent had been getting into his head for weeks now: you didn't decide he was lonely and paint loneliness. "It's not supposed to be there because the painting needs it. It's supposed to be there because it's — true. Because it got in around the edges."

"Because what got in," Dani said. Carefully. Not looking at him. Pouring the world's worst coffee.

"The warm thing." Charlie stared at the corner. "I don't know what the warm thing is. That's the problem. You can't paint a warm thing true if you won't say what it is."

And here is how it happened, in the order it happened, because Charlie would try to explain it to Dani later and fail and try to paint it and get closer:

He was looking at the corner of a painting, trying to name a color, and he thought — the way you think a thing you've thought a hundred times without hearing it — it's the same warm as the loft when he was standing in it. The October gold on the side of Laurent's face while he assessed real quiet. The thing that had come through the dirty window and lit the man up and that Charlie had filed, weeks ago, as an aesthetic observation, because that was the phrase that had floated up and it had seemed like enough.

It had not been an aesthetic observation.

Charlie stood very still in the cold loft with a mug of terrible coffee going cold in his hand and let himself, for the first time, actually look at the thing he'd been setting down gently and coming back for and setting down again for weeks. He looked at it the way he looked at everything — head-on, greedy, like it might disappear. He looked at how he'd searched every room at the Foundry for one face first, before anyone. How the man stepping back by the coats had felt like a door closing on a room Charlie hadn't known he lived in. How he'd stayed up till six three separate times to hold onto a second that was just Laurent looking at him in a doorway. How every single version of the warm thing in this painting was Laurent, was the gold on Laurent, was what it felt like to be seen all the way down by a person who buys the weird pastry and never eats it.