17. The Gallery of Gazes
Chapter seventeen
The Gallery of Gazes
Sterling
The air in the Steiner Gallery is too thin, filtered through expensive HVAC and scented with chilled white wine and citrus floor wax.
My life smells like cedar and roasted coffee and the ghost of smoke that lives in the fibers of my skin no matter how hard I scrub.
Standing here in charcoal gray wool that fits too well, I feel like a man who has spent a decade in heavy boots trying to remember how to walk in Italian leather.
Mandy is beside me in a silk wrap dress the color of a bruised plum, and I have spent the entire cab ride not thinking about four nights ago.
The power went out. That is the official version. The power went out and we sat on the couch with a candle and played a stupid game and told each other things we had spent six years not saying, and then we stopped talking entirely.
We have not mentioned it since. Not the next morning over coffee, not in the twenty-one text messages exchanged in four days, every one of which has been about logistics.
Whether the cat is out of the expensive food.
What time the car comes. Whether I own a tie.
She has been up at six every morning, which she has never once been in the six years I have known her, and I have been taking extra shifts, which is its own kind of answer.
It is a silence with weight and dimension and it has been living in the loft with us like a third roommate nobody wants to introduce.
So I put my hand on the small of her back, and I know exactly what that stretch of her feels like without the silk in the way, and I keep my face completely still.
“You’re vibrating,” I say, leaning in enough to drop my voice into the register that works on people at scenes. “If you hit a certain frequency you’ll shatter the glass on that sculpture, and I don’t think your dad’s insurance covers sonic-boom-related property damage at private art events.”
She glances up at me and then away, fast, the way she has been doing for four days.
There is a smudge of graphite near her hairline that she missed in the rush, a tiny human detail I want to put my thumb against. “I am not vibrating,” she says.
Her voice is brittle, thin ice over deep water.
“I am participating in a cultural milestone. My mother called it the social event of the season, which is Peterson for if you embarrass me in front of these people I will bring it up every Christmas until I die.”
“Copy that. Tactical social maneuvers only.” I let my hand settle. Her breathing changes. She does not move away. “I’ll keep the firehouse stories to a minimum. Although I think your father would enjoy the one about the grease fire in the kitchen. It has a very clear moral about maintenance.”
We move through the crowd like something practiced, and that is the part that scares me.
Every step she takes is synced to mine. When a waiter cuts across us with a tray of bacon-wrapped dates my fingers tighten on her spine and pull her in, and it is not a decision, it is a reflex, and reflexes are the things you cannot fake and cannot un-learn.
“Mandy! Sterling! Over here.”
Carol Peterson is waving from beside a canvas that appears to be a meditation on the color beige.
She is in cream lace with a smile that never quite reaches her eyes.
Robert stands next to her, wire-rimmed glasses catching the track lighting, and gives me a nod of somber respect that I have not earned and find myself wanting to keep.
“There you are.” Carol’s eyes do a quick clinical sweep of her daughter, hunting a loose thread.
She reaches out and adjusts a strand of Mandy’s hair with cool, efficient fingers.
“You look lovely, dear. Doesn’t she look lovely, Sterling.
We thought you’d been cornered by the abstract expressionists.
Once they start on color theory it’s impossible to escape. ”
“Stunning,” I say, and it comes out with a conviction that is not in the script. My thumb traces a slow arc against her spine through the silk. “But then she always does. Even in llama socks with a graphite smudge. It’s a high bar for the rest of us.”
Carol arches a perfectly plucked eyebrow. “Llama socks?”
“Inside joke.” Mandy says it fast. The heat coming off her neck is a physical pulse. “Sterling has a very specific sense of humor. It’s a roommate thing. Or, you know. A couple thing. You spend enough mornings in the same space, you pick things up.”
“Sign of a healthy relationship,” Robert says, stepping in to pat my shoulder.
Man to man. “A little levity. Keeps the foundation strong. We were just telling the Millers about your work at Station 99. Remarkable career. Service. Sacrifice. That’s what this family values.
” He glances at his daughter, and something in his face resets to a lower setting, the way a man looks at a hobby he has decided to be gracious about.
“It’s refreshing to see Mandy with someone who understands the weight of responsibility.
Someone who doesn’t treat life like a series of aesthetic choices. ”
I feel Mandy go very still under my hand.
I should say something. There is a version of me that says something. Instead, I hear myself doing the thing I do, which is take the hit and make it funny so nobody has to sit in the discomfort of it.
“I just like breaking things and getting paid for it, sir. The helping people part is a perk that keeps my mother from worrying.” The circle laughs, the polite tinkling sound that means we have passed.
“Though I’ll admit, protecting Mandy from her own kitchen is the most dangerous work I’ve done to date. ”
Carol launches into the Tuscany wedding, a cousin, a specific shade of peach, the logistics of a three-tier cake crossing the Atlantic, and I duck my head toward Mandy’s ear.
“Is it just me,” I say, “or does that one look like an extremely angry duck?”
She follows my nod to the canvas, all aggressive yellow and jagged black. “That’s Existential Void Number Four, Sterling. It represents the silence of the universe.”
“Right. Angry duck. The duck is silent because it’s in a void. Very deep.”
She chokes on a laugh, a real one, bright against the practiced giggles around us, and Carol stops mid-sentence to look at us with an expression that goes uncharacteristically soft.
She is not hunting flaws now. She is looking at a daughter who is finally settled.
There is a jagged stone of guilt sitting under my sternum but I am enjoying myself anyway, which is the worst part.
“You two are just wonderful together,” says an older woman in a sequined jacket, drifting up with a half-empty flute and the scent of lily of the valley. “You can tell they know each other, can’t you, Carol. There’s a shorthand there. You can’t fake that.”
“Oh, absolutely,” Carol says, thick with a pride I know is turning her daughter’s stomach. “I told Robert years ago that Mandy just needed someone who could anchor her.”
My hand splays wide on Mandy’s back for a fraction of a second, as if I could hold her in place against the weight of it.
I want to tell them they have it backwards.
I am the guy with the spare room and the hero complex.
She is the one whose whole life went up in flames and who has been putting it back together in a stranger’s loft without once asking anyone to feel sorry for her.
I smile and nod and say nothing, because the truth is a vacuum that would take the room and their happiness with it.
The gallery owner rings a small bell and the crowd tides toward the podium for opening remarks about the language of light. I steer Mandy into a quieter corner near a canvas of deep vibrating indigo, where the lighting is dimmer and the party reduces to a muffled roar, like the sea inside a shell.
I take my hand off her back and shove both hands in my pockets so I do not reach for her again.
We stand there looking at the indigo. It is thick in places, scraped thin in others.
“We’re getting good at this,” I say. My voice comes out without the dry edge. “The hand-holding. The looks. My crew thinks I’m a goner. Jake’s already pricing the bachelor party. Your parents are picking china.”
“They’re Petersons.” Her sarcasm has a papery quality, ready to crumble. “They picked the pattern the second you mentioned a stable 401(k) and a clean driving record.”
I do not laugh, and the absence of it startles her. I turn to face her fully and lean a shoulder on the white wall.
“Mandy.” I wait until she looks at me. “We’re going to have to talk about it eventually.”
Her whole body registers it before her face does. “Talk about what.”
“Don’t.” It comes out gentler than I mean it to. “Four days. You’ve been getting up at six. You hate six.”
“I’ve had a lot to do.”
“I know.” I let that sit. “I’m not asking you to explain it. I’m asking whether we’re going to keep pretending the power didn’t go out.”
She wraps her arms around her middle, holding her own ribs together. She is staring at the indigo like it owes her something.
“Have you ever thought about it?” I ask. I say it so quietly the words nearly go under the air conditioning. “Not the performance. Not the notebook or the rules or the safe words. Just, us. Could we ever be more than a thing we’re doing?”
The air goes out of the corner.
I watch her, waiting for a sign. I think about the way she stood on that curb in the firelight, the only solid thing in a world of ash. For one heartbeat I think she is going to say yes. I see the hesitation, the softening at her mouth.
Then the wall goes back up. I can see the exact moment, the fear crossing her face before she buries it under Peterson logic and a broken heart. I’m just the guy standing in the blast zone.