Page 9 of Private Viewing

Laurent looked at him.

For one full second — Charlie would take this second home, he'd be up at 6 a.m. with it, he'd try to get its color and fail — Laurent looked at him like the desk was gone, like the name on the glass was gone, like there was no Greenwich man and no season and no rule, like Charlie had walked around the back of the man and found the door with the light on and put his hand on it. Something moved in his face that Charlie had no folder for.

Then Laurent stepped back. One clean step, the doorway suddenly a doorway again.

"Choose the plain frames," Laurent said. Smooth. Cool. Reassembled. "I'll see you at the install." And he walked out into the white room where Naomi was, where the phone was, where there were witnesses, and Charlie stood in the office with a blank sheet that now had his mother's name on it and a feeling he still didn't have a color for, going warm and strange all through his chest, and he told himself it was the show. The wall. The east light. Getting seen. Anybody would feel like this, getting seen like that.

Sure, said a small voice, in Dani's cadence. That's what it is. The wall.

He rode the M home practicing the not-thinking-about-it, and he was terrible at it, and he stayed up till 6 a.m. anyway — not with the second, in the end, but with a new canvas, the third piece, the one that had to be new. He didn't know yet what it was going to be.

He just knew it was going to be full of that dirty blue, and one impossible warm thing coming in around the edges, without his permission, where the truth got in.

Chapter 4

The Foundry

The Foundry had not been renovated since it stopped being an actual foundry, which was the entire point, and which cost — Laurent had done the math once, idly, at the bar — roughly four times what renovating it would have. The exposed brick was real and the tin ceiling was real and the bathrooms were a genuine crisis, and every dealer, critic, and collector in Chelsea ended up here after openings to say the things they couldn't say in the good light. It was the only room in the neighborhood where the truth was legal. Laurent hated it and came every time.

Tonight the whole scene had decamped from a mediocre opening on Twenty-Second, which meant the place was full of people being brilliant at each other, and Laurent stood at the end of the bar with a bourbon he wasn't drinking and watched Charlie Vasquez charm a room that should, by every rule Laurent understood, have eaten him alive.

It wasn't eating him. That was the remarkable thing. Charlie had come in a paint-flecked denim jacket among people who'd dressed down on purpose and expensively, and he'd said something to a critic famous for her cruelty that had made her laugh — actually laugh, teeth and everything, a sound Laurent had heard perhaps twice in a decade — and now he was leaning on a support beam telling a story with both hands to a knot of people who'd started out to condescend to him and had forgotten to. Charlie didn't perform belonging. He simply declined to notice he didn't. He treated the whole apparatus — the money, the codes, the borrowed taste — like a party he'd been invited to by mistake and had decided to enjoy anyway.

It's the same thing as the painting, Laurent thought, watching. He looks at the room like it might disappear. So the room falls in love with him.

This was a professional observation.

He drank the bourbon he wasn't drinking.

"You're doing the thing," Naomi said, arriving at his elbow with a glass of wine she'd correctly assessed as undrinkable and was holding for social cover only. "The still thing. You've been doing it for twenty minutes."

"I'm resting my face."

"Your face doesn't rest. Your face works harder than the rest of you combined." She followed his line of sight to Charlie, who was now demonstrating something that involved miming a very large fish. "He's good in a room. I didn't think he would be. I thought he'd be a disaster."

"He is a disaster. He's just a load-bearing one."

Naomi made a small noise into her wine. Across the room Charlie caught Laurent looking — the way he caught everything, a barometric read of the whole space — and his face did the open thing, the whole-face thing, lit up like he'd found the one person in the room he'd been looking for, and lifted his glass an inch in a small private hey. Just for Laurent. In front of everyone and meaning nothing by it, because Charlie meant nothing dangerous by anything, and Laurent lifted his own glass back a matching inch and told himself the warmth that went through him was the bourbon.

Then Sabine Kessler came through the door, and the temperature of the room changed the way it always did.

***

She didn't make an entrance. That was Sabine's genius; she'd retired from making entrances thirty years and one hundred million dollars ago. She simply arrived, in gray cashmere and no jewelry except the ring, and the room reorganized itself around her without appearing to, conversations tilting a few degrees her direction the way plants tilt toward a window. She sat on three museum boards. She could put an artist in a permanent collection with a phone call or end a career by declining to. Laurent had spent eleven years in a careful, mutual, entirely unsentimental relationship with her, the kind you have with weather you depend on for your crops.

"Laurent." She kissed the air by his cheek, smelling of something old and expensive and dry. "I hear you've found a person."

"I find a great many people."

"You've found a person." She had a way of applying weight to a word that made it a headline. "Marguerite told me. She said you gave a boy the whole east wall and wouldn't let anyone title the work. That's not you being generous, that's you being certain, and you're never certain, so." She turned, unhurried, and looked across the room, and found Charlie in about a second and a half, because Sabine's eye was the only one in the city Laurent genuinely respected. "Ah," she said softly. "Him. Of course it's him. Look at that."

"He's in the November show. Three pieces."

"He should be in more than a show." She was still looking. Charlie was mid-fish-story, laughing at his own hands. "Where did he come from?"

"Queens."

"I mean who has him. Who's advising him. Who's — no, I can see the answer, the answer is nobody, he's completely raw." Sabine said raw the way another woman might say diamond, and something in Laurent went cold and alert, the way it did before a deal turned. "God, look at him. No school, no gallery history, no bad early work to bury. He's a blank check. You could do anything with that." She turned back to Laurent and smiled, warm, genuine, terrible. "I adore raw. Raw is so easy to finish."