Page 3 of Private Viewing

"It's still wet in October and you carried it on the train." Laurent's eyes flicked to the paper, the tape, the whole sad wrapping job. "You couldn't wait for it to dry because you finished it and you had somewhere to be. So. Early." He said it like it was obvious. Like reading Charlie's whole morning off a torn brown bag was a thing anybody could do.

Nobody did that. Nobody had ever done that.

"Six-forty when I wrapped it," Charlie said, because his mouth was apparently just going to keep going. "The wrapping took a while. I'm not — wrapping's not my ministry."

That got it. The smile he'd been saving. It landed for about a second and a half and then Laurent put it away again, and Charlie felt weirdly like he'd won something at a fair.

***

Reggie appeared from the back with the empty dolly and the specific energy of a man who wanted very badly to leave, and stopped dead when he saw the smear on the floor, the ruined paper, his fill-in guy standing three inches from Laurent Marchand.

"Charlie," Reggie said. "What did you do."

"Load-bearing incident," Charlie said. "Everybody's insured. The Reinhardt's fine."

"It's a Reinhardt?" Naomi said, sharp.

"It's not a Reinhardt," Laurent said, not turning around. "Reginald, your man is finished for the day. Leave the last two, I'll have them installed properly." Reggie opened his mouth. "You'll be paid for the full call. Go."

Reggie looked at Charlie. Charlie shrugged, the universal I have no idea what's happening either shrug. Reggie, a man who had survived thirty years in this city by knowing when a room had changed temperature, took the dolly and went.

Which left Charlie standing in the middle of Marchand Gallery with a wet painting, a smeared floor, and a Frenchman who was now, quietly, looking at the painting again.

"I really am sorry about the shoes," Charlie said.

"The shoes don't matter."

"They look like they matter."

Laurent glanced down at the streak of blue-green up the dark leather, like he'd forgotten it was there. "They're shoes," he said, and — this was the thing that got Charlie, this was the detail he'd be turning over later — he didn't say it like a rich guy being gracious about a nice thing. He said it like a man who genuinely, in that moment, could not locate why a shoe would matter more than the painting on his floor. Then something crossed his face, some second thought, and he added, cooler, "I have others."

Sure you do, buddy. Charlie looked at the sweater, the coat folded over the arm of a chair, all of it soft and dark and cut close, none of it shouting. Off the rack somewhere fine, probably. A sale rack. Frenchman had good taste and knew where the good sales were, that tracked.

"Okay," Charlie said. "So. I'm gonna get this out of your — I'll clean the floor, I've got—" He had nothing. He had a water bottle and half a granola bar. "I'll figure out the floor."

"Leave the floor."

"I can't just leave a floor."

"You can leave my floor," Laurent said, "which is mine, and which I am telling you to leave." He straightened, and there it was again, the shift from the man crouched on the concrete to the man whose name was etched into the glass over the door — Charlie had walked past it a hundred times, MARCHAND, thin gold letters, the kind of confidence that didn't need to be big. Laurent picked his coat up off the chair and did not put it on, just held it, and looked at Charlie in a way that had gone careful again. Measured. Like he'd let something show and was now doing inventory.

"How long have you been painting," Laurent said.

"My whole life. Seriously for like six years. Since I stopped pretending I was gonna do anything else."

"And you show where?"

Charlie laughed, short. "I show in my apartment. To my roommate. She's got great range as an audience, she'll cry at anything." He hitched the painting up against his hip, the dry edge, careful. "I've been in a couple group things. Nothing you'd — nothing here. This is not my — " He gestured with his chin at the room, the light, the nothing that cost so much. "This is a different zip code."

"Chelsea is a zip code," Laurent said. "You're standing in it."

"You know what I mean."

For a second Laurent didn't answer. He was looking at Charlie with an expression Charlie couldn't read at all, which almost never happened — Charlie read people for a living, basically, read the color and the weather of them — and this one was closed, a door with the light on behind it.

"Give Naomi your number," Laurent said finally.

Charlie's brain did a full stall. "My—"