Page 4 of Private Viewing

"Your telephone number. She'll take it. I want to see the rest of it." A beat. "The work. Where you make it. Not—" a small gesture at the painting against Charlie's hip, at the whole catastrophe of the last ten minutes "—not like this. Properly. In your studio, with the others around it, in the light you make it in." He said studio like he already knew it wasn't a studio, like he was being generous with the word on purpose, and Charlie should probably have been insulted and instead was just — warm again. Stupidly.

"You want to do a studio visit," Charlie said. "To my studio."

"That is the standard term, yes."

"It's in Ridgewood."

"I'm aware Queens exists."

"There's a cat. Not mine. He's just around. He has opinions."

"I'll manage the cat."

Charlie looked at him. Laurent Marchand, coat over his arm, blue-green paint drying on his shoe, standing in his own perfect white room asking to come see a bunch of canvases in a cutup loft in Ridgewood with a cat and a space heater and Dani's kiln in the corner. It made no sense. Rich gallery guys did not do this. They had assistants who had interns who looked at Instagram. Charlie had spent six years learning exactly how this world didn't open for people like him, and here was the front door of it, swung wide, for no reason he could name except that he'd fallen down and dragged a wet painting across a floor.

He should ask why. That was the smart move. What's the catch. What do you want. Why me. Dani's voice, already, in his head: baby, nobody does something for free in that world, what's he getting.

But the man had crouched. On the dirty floor. In the nice trousers. To look at the thing Charlie made at six in the morning when he couldn't sleep because the blue was wrong.

"Sure, man," Charlie said.

Something flickered across Laurent's face — that same little stall, quick, there and gone, like man had landed somewhere unexpected and he was deciding what to do about it. Then it smoothed.

"Sure," Laurent repeated, dry as the gallery walls. "Man." He turned to Naomi, who had watched the entire thing over the top of her glasses with the face of a woman witnessing a car accident she'd predicted out loud. "Take his number."

"I heard," Naomi said. "I've been standing here."

Laurent walked toward the back with his coat over his arm and his ruined shoe and did not look back, and Charlie stood there dripping linseed onto a Chelsea floor, holding his own too-green painting against his hip, feeling like the ground had tilted about four inches and nobody else had noticed.

Naomi held out her tablet. "Number," she said.

He gave it. His hands smelled like turpentine and his heart was doing something embarrassing and across the gallery the little white bakery bag sat forgotten on the corner of the desk, folded neat at the top, going cold.

"He forgot his—" Charlie started.

"He didn't forget it," Naomi said, without looking up. "He never eats it here. He just likes to know it's there." She handed the tablet back, and for the first time she looked at Charlie like he was a person and not a spill. "You should go home and let that dry," she said. "Both of you should."

Charlie didn't ask what the second half meant. He was too busy trying to get out the door with a wet painting and whatever had just happened to his afternoon.

He did not make it to Bushwick. He texted the guy who knew a guy: rain check, long story, painting got into a fight. Then he got on the M train with his ruined wrapping and his blue-green disaster, and the whole way back to Ridgewood he could still smell it — linseed, turpentine, and, faint, following him like a hand on the back of his neck, warm butter and good coffee.

Weird day, he told himself.

He was so wrong about how weird his life was about to get that it was almost funny.

Chapter 2

Studio Visit

The espresso in Ridgewood was a crime, and Laurent drank all of it.

That was the first thing he noticed about himself, sitting on a paint-stained stool in a loft that smelled of turpentine and someone's microwaved lunch, holding a chipped mug of something the young man had made in a machine that should have been reported to an authority: he drank all of it. He, who had once sent a cortado back across a café in the sixth arrondissement because the milk had been scalded — he drank the entire cup of this brown insult and said thank you.

You are behaving strangely, he informed himself, and set the mug down on a milk crate.

He had told Naomi it was due diligence. The boy has something. I want to see the range before I decide. True, as far as it went. Naomi had looked at him over her glasses in the particular way she'd perfected across eleven years — the way that said she was letting him have the lie because it was more efficient than the argument — and told him the car would be a mistake in that neighborhood and to take the train.

She'd been right about the train. She was right about most things, which was why he kept her and why she was insufferable.