Page 12 of Private Viewing

"Huh," Charlie said.

Out loud. Into the cold.

"Huh," he said again, and something in his whole body unlocked, some door he'd never even found the frame of, and it wasn't a lightning bolt and it wasn't a crisis and it didn't hurt — that was the part he'd never be able to explain — it was relief. It was the specific clean relief of finally naming a color you've been mixing wrong for two weeks. Oh. That's the blue. It was the blue the whole time. Of course it was the blue.

He turned around. Dani was leaning on the counter, watching him, holding her own coffee, and she had a look on her face like she was trying very hard not to have a look on her face.

"I like him," Charlie said. Testing it. It sounded true, so he said the truer version. "I — Dani. I like Laurent. Like — like him." He waited for the floor to do something. The floor did nothing. The cat, on the windowsill, did nothing. "I've never — I didn't ever — with a guy, I never even — huh. I never looked. It never came up, so I never looked, and now I looked, and it's — " He gestured at the painting, at the whole warm impossible corner of it. "It's him. It's been him for weeks. I've been painting him and calling it an aesthetic observation like a moron."

Dani set her coffee down.

"You're not gonna be weird about it?" Charlie said. "Because I need you to not be weird, I've got like four feelings happening and no room for you having feelings about my feelings."

"Baby," Dani said. "I've been writing it down for a month."

"You have not."

"You described his forearms to me. Three times. Three separate times. 'The way he picked up the painting by the dry edges.' You did a whole thing about his handwriting. You've stayed up till dawn painting the light on some man's face and calling it a corner problem." She crossed the loft and took the cold coffee out of his hand and set it down and put both her clay-dusted hands on his shoulders and looked at him, warm and blunt and a little wet in the eyes, his best friend, his whole family in this city. "I wasn't gonna tell you. You can't tell somebody that. They have to find it. But I have been dying, Charlie. I have been so normal at you for four weeks. Do you know how hard it is to be normal at you?"

"You could've given me a hint."

"I gave you nine hundred hints. I refilled your coffee while you drew his hands." She squeezed his shoulders once. "You okay?"

Charlie checked. That was the wild thing, the thing he kept circling back to. He checked, all the way down, the way he checked a painting for the false note — and there wasn't one. No dread. No what does this mean about my whole life. No lid slamming. Just the relief, and under the relief, rising, something that was going to be a problem, something bright and reckless and completely sure of itself.

"I'm great," Charlie said, and it came out amazed. "That's the insane part. I'm — Dani, I'm great. I feel like I finally got the color right." He looked back at the painting, at the corner that was finally going to be true because he could finally say what it was. "I gotta tell him."

Dani's face did a complicated thing. "Okay, so, that — let's think about that. He's your — he's got your whole career in his hands, literally, the show's in like—"

"I know."

"He's forty-something and French and he's got a name on a building and you're—"

"I know, Dani."

"—and you found this out eleven minutes ago—"

"I'm slow but I'm thorough," Charlie said, already pulling his jacket off the hook, already gone, because that was the other thing about Charlie, the thing every teacher had circled in red: when he finally saw a thing true, he could not, physically could not, sit on it. The truth got in around the edges and then it had to get out. "I'm not gonna do anything stupid. I'm just gonna tell him. He gets to do whatever he wants with it. But I'm not gonna know a true thing this big and stand around painting corners about it."

"That is the definition of doing something stupid—"

"Feed the cat," Charlie said, and kissed the top of Dani's dusty head, and went.

***

The install was in full swing when he got to Marchand, handlers on ladders, the whole main room torn up with crates and bubble wrap and Naomi in the middle of it with her tablet running the war. His three canvases were leaning against the east wall, waiting for their spots. The subway man. The harbor. And the third one still at home, unfinished, because he finally knew how to finish it and hadn't yet.

Laurent was by the far wall with a level in his hand, arguing quietly with a handler about a quarter inch. Of course he was. Charlie stood in the doorway and looked at him — really looked, with the new permission, with the door open — and the man was just standing there in his soft dark nothing-clothes holding a level, being exact about a quarter inch, and Charlie's whole chest went warm and reckless and sure.

Yeah, he thought. Okay. Yeah. It's him. Look at him being right about a quarter inch.

"Charlie." Naomi spotted him. "You're early, we're not ready for you, the labels aren't—"

"Can I borrow him for a second," Charlie said, nodding at Laurent. "Two minutes. Then I'll disappear, I swear, I won't touch anything, I've learned."

Naomi looked at him. Then she looked at Laurent across the room. Then she looked back at Charlie with an expression that Charlie, in his newly-opened state, suddenly understood — she knew, she'd known before he did, everybody had apparently known before he did, the whole city was ahead of him on this — and she said, quietly, "Office. Two minutes. The door doesn't lock and I can see it from here, so." She let that sit. "Two minutes."

Laurent came, because Charlie asked. That was a thing Charlie was only now cataloguing: Laurent came when Charlie asked. Set the level down and crossed the torn-up room and followed him into the little back office, the same office, the desk, the good chair, the doorway where a man had once looked at him for one whole second like the walls were gone.