Milo
The left on Michigan Avenue stopped requiring a decision sometime in the third week.
He noticed it in the third week. His hands turning the wheel before the route had formed, the car pointing toward the Grotto without his involvement. He sat back and let the hands do it. He’d been in worse situations than being taken somewhere by his own muscle memory.
He was playing better.
Kovac’s morning stillness had shifted, the chin-lift of someone deciding whether an improvement was real or temporary.
Brody asked for coffee sooner in the post-practice cycle, reading him as more available.
The puck was finding his stick with more ease, the way a lock opened when the tension on the key was right instead of forced.
Not a skill he’d acquired. A friction that had gone.
Brody said it in the locker room. Not directly. He was working the tape off his wrists, seated in the stall next to Milo’s. “You look different.”
“Same,” Milo said.
Brody peeled the last strip. Balled the tape and tossed it at the trash without looking. It went in. “Yeah,” he said.
Milo laced his street shoes and went to practice, and the puck kept finding his stick, and he did not examine why.
* * *
Adrian mentioned the show while restocking the top shelf and not looking at Milo. Group show. Eastern Market gallery. Next weekend. One of the pieces was his.
He didn’t say which one. He wasn’t inviting Milo. He was just saying.
Milo nodded and drank his bourbon and went home and spent the following week not thinking about whether he would go.
He went.
The gallery was a converted industrial space on a side street off Russell.
Brick walls, high ceilings, the kind of lighting that made everything look natural and nothing look lit.
Polished concrete floor scuffed at the threshold.
He arrived forty minutes late, which he’d planned from a postcard he’d photographed off Adrian’s worktable when Adrian was in the other room.
Late meant the room was full enough that another body didn’t register.
He took a glass of wine from the tray near the door. Sharp, cold, faintly chemical. He drank it anyway. He moved along the left wall and did not look for Adrian.
He’d been developing an education without meaning to.
It came from sitting in the wooden chair near Adrian’s south wall, the one with the uneven front leg, watching Adrian work and explain things when he felt like it.
Value, saturation, the difference between what the eye saw and what the brain built.
The difference between a color that sat on the surface and a color that had been built in layers so it appeared to come from inside the canvas.
Milo had enough now to see that the choices in these pieces were choices. Not enough to name them all. Enough.
He stopped at a series of small paintings along the left wall.
Landscapes, maybe, or the memory of landscapes.
Blue and green in proportions that made his eye want to stay.
The name card said an artist he didn’t know.
The price said more than his first car. He looked at the brushwork and tried to see what Adrian would see and understood that what Adrian would see was about four levels deeper than what he was seeing, the way a hockey coach could watch ten seconds of footage and read the whole system while a civilian just saw skating.
A ceramicist’s work took up the back corner.
Bowls and vases with irregular rims, the surfaces rough where the hands had worked, the glaze matte and gray with flashes of something darker underneath.
He recognized the earrings before he recognized the form.
Nina’s work. Nina made things that looked like they’d been pulled from the ground rather than shaped from clay.
He found Adrian across the room, talking to a couple in front of a piece on the far wall.
The gallery jacket was fitted, slightly too short in the sleeves because Adrian was slightly too tall for most things, and when he gestured a stripe of paint showed at his inner wrist. His laugh, when it came, pulled the couple toward him, and they leaned in without deciding to.
Adrian in a room full of people was Adrian at the bar multiplied, the warmth radiating outward, pulling everyone into his orbit.
Milo watched from behind a cluster of people near the wine table and felt the specific misery of wanting to cross the room and stand beside someone and knowing he couldn’t.
The painting was on the far wall, alone, given more space than the pieces around it.
The gallery light was different from the studio’s work lamp and different from the morning light through Adrian’s north windows.
In this light the layers of the background were visible as layers, the figure emerging from actual depth.
The face was finished. The jaw, the mouth, the eyes.
Everything Milo had watched Adrian circle for weeks was here, complete.
He stood in front of it long enough that other people’s paths bent around him.
The jaw in the painting held the whole figure together.
The eyes were his eyes. The cheekbone that sat higher on the left.
The crook at the bridge of his nose from the puck that caught him at seventeen.
He knew it from the inside and was seeing it from the outside for the first time, in a room with strangers who looked at it and saw a painting and did not see him.
Except that it was him. And anyone who’d sat across from him in the right light would know.
He became aware of being watched.
He turned. A woman in wide-frame glasses stood six feet away.
Shorter than him, thick-knit jacket, earrings with an irregular rim and the matte gray of the ceramics in the back corner.
She was positioned like someone who belonged to the art rather than the audience, and she’d been watching him long enough to have reached a conclusion.
Her eyes went from his face to the painting and back.
Arms crossed. Chin up. The look of someone confirming a hypothesis she’d held for weeks.
He looked away first.
He finished the wine, set the glass on a tray near the exit, and went out into the cold.
* * *
Milo knew Adrian’s footsteps before he turned. The pace and weight of them, slightly uneven because Adrian’s right shoe wore faster than the left. A door opened behind him, releasing warmth and gallery noise, and closed.
Adrian was in the gallery jacket, glasses fogged, pushing them up with one knuckle, the one with the permanent ultramarine smudge. His breath came out white.
“You came,” he said.
“I was in the neighborhood,” Milo said.
“The neighborhood.”
“Broadly.”
The corner of Adrian’s mouth gave up the rest of the smile. “The painting. You saw it.”
“Yeah,” Milo said.
They started walking. Both of them, without a decision, in the same direction.
The street was quiet, the kind of side street where the storefronts went dark by nine and the only light came from the overhead wires and the spill from the restaurants on the next block.
Their breath mixed in the cold air between them.
Adrian talked about one of the other pieces, the ceramicist’s work, something about negative space and how Nina was furious with the kiln results but that the fury had produced better work than the plan would have.
He talked with his hands. He’d carried the wine glass out of the gallery without noticing, and it traced arcs in the air beside him, catching the streetlight.
His other hand moved through the cold, shaping the argument, punctuating the point about negative space with a gesture that was itself mostly negative space, and Milo watched his hands and listened and the cold bit at his ears and he thought about the painting and the face in it and the fact that Adrian had put his face in a room with strangers and given it gallery light and the strangers had looked at it and some of them would come back and look again.
Adrian was talking about the kiln doing what it wanted regardless of the artist’s intention, and the way he said it, the delight in his voice at the idea of a process that exceeded the plan, landed somewhere unexpected in his own thinking.
He laughed. His head tipped back, his throat exposed to the cold, and his shoulder came toward Milo’s. Almost making contact.
Milo’s hand came out of his pocket.
His fingers found the back of Adrian’s hand.
The warmth of it. Paint-roughened knuckles, the temperature of a body in cold air, just warmer than the cold around it.
His fingers curved. Almost closed. The near-contact sending a current up through his wrist and into his chest. Adrian’s fingers began to open, making space, making room.
A man came out of the restaurant two doors ahead, holding it open for someone behind him, interior light spilling across the sidewalk and the voices of other people’s evenings pouring through the gap, and Milo’s hand went back into his pocket.
The cold where the warmth had been.
Adrian’s stride didn’t break. His hand stayed open at his side for a beat, the fingers uncurling from a contact that had left, and then it went to the wine glass.
They walked. The restaurant door closed and the street settled back into its earlier quiet, the voices gone, just the two of them and the sound of their shoes on cold sidewalk.
“I saw that,” Adrian said. Without changing his pace. Without looking at Milo. His voice carrying the same level tone he used when he was telling you a fact he’d decided not to have an opinion about.
Milo kept his eyes forward.
“Okay,” Adrian said.
They walked to the corner. The distance between them the same as before and not the same. The streetlight overhead turned their breath into something visible, two columns of white that rose and dispersed and did not touch.
“Cold,” Milo said.
“Yeah.” Adrian’s voice had the evenness of a man choosing not to say the next thing.