Page 2 of Private Viewing

The man wasn't looking at his shoe. He wasn't looking at Charlie. He was looking at the painting.

It had flipped as it slid, ended up half face-up, the torn paper peeled back off most of it, and it lay there on the floor of Marchand Gallery in a way Charlie would have paid actual money to prevent — his painting, his 6 a.m. painting, the one with the blue that had gone too green, faceup on the concrete under those perfect little lights.

And the man had gone completely still.

Charlie knew still. He'd grown up around people who went still — his abuela in front of a novena, his mother over a bill she was pretending not to read. This was a different still. This was the still of someone who'd been walking through his own life on autopilot and had just walked into a wall. The man's face, which had been so busy not committing to anything, had stopped performing entirely, and for one second — one — it was just open. Naked, almost. Like Charlie had caught him coming out of the shower.

Then it was gone, folded back up, and the man crouched. Slowly. In those trousers, on that filthy smear, which — okay, that told Charlie something too, that he'd crouch.

"Don't touch it," Charlie said, panicked. "It's wet, you'll—"

"I know it's wet." Quiet. Not looking up. "I can see that it's wet." He had his hands clasped between his knees, elbows on his thighs, and he was looking at the painting the way Charlie looked at other people's paintings maybe twice a year, if he was lucky, if the show was good. Reading it. Actually reading it. His eyes moved across it in a line and stopped, in the corner, on the blue.

"That green in the blue," the man said. It wasn't a question. "You did that on purpose."

Charlie's whole body did something stupid and warm. He ignored it.

"I mean, I—" He stopped. Started over, because no promises had trained the hope out of him and here it was crawling back. "Yeah. I did. Everyone tells me it reads wrong. Reads dirty."

"It reads like water that has a bottom," the man said. "Water you would not put your hand in." He tilted his head. "It's not pretty. You didn't try to make it pretty."

"No," Charlie said. His voice came out weird.

The man stood. Charlie stood with him, too fast, and they were close now, closer than the gallery's curated oxygen probably allowed, and the coffee-and-butter smell was all mixed up with the turpentine coming off Charlie's own hands, and somewhere behind them Naomi said, gently, like she was defusing something, "Laurent."

Laurent. Charlie filed it. He was bad at names and good at faces and this was going to be an exception.

"Whose is it," Laurent said. To Naomi, not to Charlie. Like Charlie was a piece of the furniture that had happened to be standing next to it. "Is it something of ours? Did it come in with the Halvorsen shipment?"

"It didn't come in with anything," Naomi said. "It came in with him." A pause. "The mover."

Laurent looked at Charlie. Really looked, this time — took him in from the sweat-stuck shirt to the ruined knees of his jeans to the paint, everywhere, always the paint. And Charlie watched the man do the math and get an answer he didn't like, because that's what everyone did, every gatekeeper, every guy who knew a guy: they looked at Charlie in his work clothes with his loud face and his bodega breakfast and they decided what he was before he'd opened his mouth about it.

"You carry other people's paintings," Laurent said slowly, "and you also carry this one. Around. To your job."

"Had a thing after," Charlie said. "Was gonna show it to somebody. Now I'm gonna show it to a mop."

"Who's the artist?"

And there it was. The little trapdoor that opened under Charlie in every one of these rooms. He could feel the shape of how this went. He'd say me, and the man's face would do the thing, the recalibration, the oh — and then the polite retreat, the ah, well, because a guy who moves crates for Reggie doesn't get to be the reason a Frenchman crouched on a dirty floor in nice trousers.

So Charlie didn't say it. He crouched instead — carefully, this time, watching his hips — and he lifted the painting by its raw wooden edges, the only dry parts, and he turned it over.

On the back, bottom right, in the same too-green blue, before it had dried:

Charlie.

No last name. There'd never been a last name that felt like his. Just the one word, the way he signed everything, the way it was on the lease under a name nobody but the landlord used.

Laurent looked at the signature for a long moment. Then at Charlie's face. Then — and this was the part Charlie would think about later, on the train, and not be able to explain to Dani — then something in the man's mouth moved, not quite a smile, more like a smile he was choosing not to spend.

"Charlie," Laurent said, trying it out. The French did something to it. Made it sound like it had two syllables and both of them mattered.

"That's the one."

"You made this at six in the morning."

Charlie blinked. "How do you—"