Page 6 of Private Viewing

It took an hour to go through them all, and Laurent did the thing he did, the thing that had made him what he was: he sorted. Instinct first, then justification. This one and this one and this one — yes. That one no, too pleased with itself. The subway man, yes, obviously, God. The refrigerator, off the table, not his to want. He moved along the walls and Charlie trailed him, answering when Laurent asked and otherwise letting him work, and Laurent noticed that too — that the boy who could not stop talking knew, precisely, when to stop talking. It was almost professional. It undid Laurent slightly, that Charlie had that gear and had chosen, in the gallery, not to use it. He'd let Laurent think he was only chaos.

"Where did you study," Laurent asked, at the far wall.

"I didn't. Community college for two years, then I couldn't pay, so." Charlie shrugged, the shrug Laurent was starting to catalogue. "YouTube and being annoying at museums until the guards knew me."

"Good. School would have ruined this." He hadn't meant to say it warmly. It came out warmly. He recalibrated. "School teaches you what's already been decided. You don't have any of that in you. It's your one advantage and you should protect it violently."

"My one advantage."

"Your one useful advantage," Laurent said. "You have others. They will get in your way." He stepped back from the wall and let himself look at the whole room at once, the thirty canvases, the north light, the boy in the middle of it in a paint-ruined shirt, and he made the decision he had, if he was honest — and he was rarely honest, it was overrated — made on the floor of his gallery four days ago, with a blue-green streak drying on his shoe.

"I'm doing a group show in November," Laurent said. "Six artists. It opens the season. It's the show people come to decide what the year is going to be about." He kept his voice level, transactional, the voice he used for prices. "There's a great deal riding on it. There are collectors who plan their entire acquisition year around what's on those walls. One in particular." He did not say Sabine Kessler's name. Sabine's name in this room would have been a currency these people didn't need to be handling yet. "It is not a small thing to be in it. Most of the artists have waited years."

Charlie had gone still. Not Laurent's kind of still — the boy couldn't do Laurent's kind of still — but a held breath, a hope visibly being restrained, and Laurent recognized it because he'd invented the technique. Don't want it out loud. Wanting it out loud is how they take it back.

"I want three of these in it," Laurent said. "The subway man. This one." The dirty-blue harbor. "And one more we'll choose. New work, ideally, if you can make it by November without losing what makes it yours." He paused. "Not the refrigerator. That one stays here."

The silence in the loft was total. Even the cat, in the kitchen, had stopped whatever crime it was committing.

"You're serious," Charlie said.

"I don't drink coffee this bad for people I'm not serious about."

Charlie laughed again, that whole-face thing, and this time Laurent was ready for it and it got him anyway, and somewhere in the kitchen Dani said "Charlie" in a voice like a door being kicked open, and Charlie crossed the loft and — for one alarming half-second Laurent thought the boy was going to embrace him, actually put his paint-covered arms around him, and Laurent's entire body prepared for it with a readiness that frightened him — but Charlie pulled up short, remembered himself, and stuck out a hand instead. Formal. Trying to be a professional. His hand was warm and rough and there was cadmium under the nails and he shook Laurent's hand like he was trying not to break it.

"Thank you," Charlie said. "I'm not gonna — okay, I'm a little gonna cry, but I'm gonna do it later, in private, like a man."

"Please do," Laurent said. "I have a policy about crying in studios."

"What's the policy."

"It's very bad for the work and I don't want to see it."

He took his hand back. He needed it back. He'd held it a moment too long, or Charlie had, or nobody had and he was inventing things, which was another new development he'd have to examine on the train.

Here is what Laurent told himself, standing in that gold loft with the deal made:

That this was taste. That he had built forty-five years and one perfect white room on the strength of exactly this — the ability to walk into a place nobody was looking and find the thing before anyone else, to be first, to be right. That finding Charlie was a professional triumph and nothing else. That the subway man would sell for a number that would change this boy's life, and the season would be his, and Sabine Kessler would stand in front of the harbor painting and know, again, that Laurent Marchand's eye was the best in the city. That his throat had done that thing at the refrigerator painting because it was a good painting, because he was a man who still had feelings about good paintings, thank God, after everything.

That the way the light had come through the window and caught the side of Charlie's stupid open face while he laughed had been an aesthetic observation.

He told himself all of it, in order, and he almost believed the first four.

Professional, he thought, on his way to the door, and he made it a rule the way he made everything a rule, because rules were the walls he lived inside and they had never once failed him. Whatever this is. You will be professional. Always. There is a version of this where you get to have the work and keep your name intact, and it is the only version. Do not be a cliché. Do not be the dealer who—

"Hey." Charlie caught him at the door with the pastry box, holding it out. "You barely — you didn't have one. Take one for the train at least."

"They're for you."

"Take one." Charlie put the kouign-amann in his hand, the one nobody had wanted, the ugly one, warm still from sitting in the sun by the window. "You clearly like this one or you wouldn't have gotten it. Nobody buys the weird one by accident."

Laurent looked at the pastry in his hand. Fifteen years of buying them and leaving them, and this boy had watched him for four days total and handed him the exact one he'd wanted and never once allowed himself, and said nobody buys the weird one by accident, and had no idea, none, what he'd just done, was already turning back to his paintings, to his impossible unearned luck, calling something to Dani about celebrating.

"Thank you," Laurent said, quietly, to the room, to no one.

He ate it on the platform at Myrtle-Wyckoff, standing up, the butter and burnt sugar exactly as good as he'd known it would be, watching the M come out of the tunnel, and he thought about the light on the boy's face and the rule he'd just made and how long, realistically, he was going to keep it.

Not long, said a voice in him he'd spent twenty years soundproofing.