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.
He had taken the L to the M, and somewhere around Myrtle-Wyckoff the city had changed around him, gone from the Manhattan that knew his name to the Queens that did not, and Laurent had felt the old thing move under his ribs — the specific discomfort of a man in the wrong coat.
He was overdressed. He was always overdressed here; here was a place where overdressed meant stranger, meant money, meant what does he want.
He knew that read. He'd spent a great deal of his life learning to erase it, and he could not erase it in Ridgewood, where the awnings were in three languages and a man was selling mangoes with chili off a cart and everything was so loud and so alive and so close to something Laurent did not let himself think about that he'd walked the last four blocks too fast, just to be moving.
He had brought pastries. This, too, was strange, and he'd examined it on the train.
A white box from the good place on Ninth, tied with string.
Croissants, two pains au chocolat, a kouign-amann he suspected these people would not appreciate.
An offering. Civilized, he'd told himself.
One brings something. He had not examined the second, quieter fact — that he never ate the pastries he bought, that he'd been buying them for fifteen years and leaving them, and that this was the first time in memory he had bought them for someone else's mouth.
***
"You brought — okay, hold on." The roommate had opened the box and was looking into it like it might contain a small animal.
Dani, she'd said, sticking out a clay-gray hand for him to shake, sizing him up in one clean sweep from his shoes to his haircut with the frank assessment of a customs official.
"Charlie. Charlie, come look at what the Frenchman brought. "
"I have a name," Laurent said.
"You have a great name. It's on a building." She lifted the kouign-amann out with two fingers. "What is this one. It looks like it lost a fight."
"It's a kouign-amann. Butter and caramelized sugar, laminated."
"He said laminated," Dani said, to the room, to the cat, to the universe. The cat — enormous, orange, sitting in the exact center of the floor like a paperweight — regarded Laurent with contempt. Laurent regarded it back. He respected contempt. It was honest.
And then Charlie came out from behind the shelving, wiping his hands on a rag that was more paint than rag, and Laurent's carefully arranged morning stopped being about pastry.
He'd remembered the boy wrong. Not wrong — incompletely.
At the gallery Charlie had been a disaster in motion, sweat and apology and that appalling grin, and Laurent had filed him under a category and moved on, the way he filed everyone, because filing people was how you survived a room.
But here, in his own light — and it was good light, Laurent registered with irritation, the loft faced the right way, north and a little west, the October afternoon coming through the filthy industrial glass in long gold bars that no gallery could buy — here Charlie looked like he'd been poured into the place.
At home in a way Laurent had not been at home anywhere in twenty years.
"You came," Charlie said. He seemed genuinely surprised. "You actually — huh. I owe Dani ten bucks."
"You bet against me."
"I bet on you being a normal rich guy who sends an assistant.
My mistake." Charlie tossed the rag onto a table and looked at the pastry box and his whole face changed, went open and delighted, and Laurent had to look away from it, at the paintings, which was the entire reason he'd come, which was safe.
It was not safe.
There were maybe thirty canvases. Stacked against the walls, hung salon-style up one brick face floor to ceiling, leaning three deep by the windows.
And Laurent, who had walked into ten thousand studios, who had built an entire life on the ability to look at a room of work and know within ninety seconds whether it was worth his time — Laurent stood in the middle of Charlie's loft and felt the floor go slightly unreliable beneath him.
They were good. That was the small, wrong, insufficient word for it. They were good the way weather was wet.
He moved to the nearest wall without asking. Nobody stopped him; he was aware of Charlie going very quiet behind him, of Dani murmuring something and taking the cat and the pastry box into the kitchen area to give him the room, and he was grateful and did not say so. He looked.
Color that shouldn't work and did. That dirty blue again, everywhere, a signature before the signature — Charlie thought in the colors other people threw out.
A large one of a man asleep on a subway, done in grays and a single unforgivable orange, and the orange was the whole painting, it was the man's entire life, and Laurent stood in front of it for longer than was dignified.
A small one of a kitchen at night, the light of an open refrigerator, and it made Laurent's throat do something he had not authorized.
He had grown up with that light. That exact light, that hour, the specific loneliness of it, and this child from Queens had put it on a canvas eighteen inches square and it was true, it was so true it was almost rude.
"That one's not for sale," Charlie said, close behind him. "I mean. None of them are technically for sale, they're just — that one especially."
"Why especially."
A pause. "My ma's kitchen," Charlie said. "She used to stand there. Couldn't sleep. I'd hear the fridge."
Laurent said nothing. He was very good at saying nothing; it was one of his best things. But he was standing in front of a painting of his own childhood that belonged to someone else's mother, and the nothing he was saying had a great deal in it.
"You paint what you can't say out loud," he managed, finally.
"I paint what I can't shut up about," Charlie said. "Same thing, maybe. You okay? You've gone kind of a color."
"I'm assessing."
"You're assessing real quiet."
"That is how assessing is done."
Charlie laughed — the real one, not the grin, a short surprised sound — and Laurent turned his head and made the mistake of looking at him doing it.
The boy laughed with his whole face, no economy at all, holding nothing back for later, and it was the most reckless thing Laurent had seen in years.
He thought, with the clean horror of a man watching a wineglass go off the edge of a table: Oh, no.
He turned back to the wall. Safer. The wall did not laugh.
***
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.