Chapter 1 #2
And there it was. The little trapdoor that opened under Charlie in every one of these rooms. He could feel the shape of how this went.
He'd say me, and the man's face would do the thing, the recalibration, the oh — and then the polite retreat, the ah, well, because a guy who moves crates for Reggie doesn't get to be the reason a Frenchman crouched on a dirty floor in nice trousers.
So Charlie didn't say it. He crouched instead — carefully, this time, watching his hips — and he lifted the painting by its raw wooden edges, the only dry parts, and he turned it over.
On the back, bottom right, in the same too-green blue, before it had dried:
Charlie.
No last name. There'd never been a last name that felt like his. Just the one word, the way he signed everything, the way it was on the lease under a name nobody but the landlord used.
Laurent looked at the signature for a long moment. Then at Charlie's face. Then — and this was the part Charlie would think about later, on the train, and not be able to explain to Dani — then something in the man's mouth moved, not quite a smile, more like a smile he was choosing not to spend.
"Charlie," Laurent said, trying it out. The French did something to it. Made it sound like it had two syllables and both of them mattered.
"That's the one."
"You made this at six in the morning."
Charlie blinked. "How do you—"
"It's still wet in October and you carried it on the train.
" Laurent's eyes flicked to the paper, the tape, the whole sad wrapping job.
"You couldn't wait for it to dry because you finished it and you had somewhere to be.
So. Early." He said it like it was obvious.
Like reading Charlie's whole morning off a torn brown bag was a thing anybody could do.
Nobody did that. Nobody had ever done that.
"Six-forty when I wrapped it," Charlie said, because his mouth was apparently just going to keep going. "The wrapping took a while. I'm not — wrapping's not my ministry."
That got it. The smile he'd been saving. It landed for about a second and a half and then Laurent put it away again, and Charlie felt weirdly like he'd won something at a fair.
***
Reggie appeared from the back with the empty dolly and the specific energy of a man who wanted very badly to leave, and stopped dead when he saw the smear on the floor, the ruined paper, his fill-in guy standing three inches from Laurent Marchand.
"Charlie," Reggie said. "What did you do."
"Load-bearing incident," Charlie said. "Everybody's insured. The Reinhardt's fine."
"It's a Reinhardt?" Naomi said, sharp.
"It's not a Reinhardt," Laurent said, not turning around. "Reginald, your man is finished for the day. Leave the last two, I'll have them installed properly." Reggie opened his mouth. "You'll be paid for the full call. Go."
Reggie looked at Charlie. Charlie shrugged, the universal I have no idea what's happening either shrug. Reggie, a man who had survived thirty years in this city by knowing when a room had changed temperature, took the dolly and went.
Which left Charlie standing in the middle of Marchand Gallery with a wet painting, a smeared floor, and a Frenchman who was now, quietly, looking at the painting again.
"I really am sorry about the shoes," Charlie said.
"The shoes don't matter."
"They look like they matter."
Laurent glanced down at the streak of blue-green up the dark leather, like he'd forgotten it was there.
"They're shoes," he said, and — this was the thing that got Charlie, this was the detail he'd be turning over later — he didn't say it like a rich guy being gracious about a nice thing.
He said it like a man who genuinely, in that moment, could not locate why a shoe would matter more than the painting on his floor.
Then something crossed his face, some second thought, and he added, cooler, "I have others. "
Sure you do, buddy. Charlie looked at the sweater, the coat folded over the arm of a chair, all of it soft and dark and cut close, none of it shouting. Off the rack somewhere fine, probably. A sale rack. Frenchman had good taste and knew where the good sales were, that tracked.
"Okay," Charlie said. "So. I'm gonna get this out of your — I'll clean the floor, I've got—" He had nothing. He had a water bottle and half a granola bar. "I'll figure out the floor."
"Leave the floor."
"I can't just leave a floor."
"You can leave my floor," Laurent said, "which is mine, and which I am telling you to leave.
" He straightened, and there it was again, the shift from the man crouched on the concrete to the man whose name was etched into the glass over the door — Charlie had walked past it a hundred times, MARCHAND, thin gold letters, the kind of confidence that didn't need to be big.
Laurent picked his coat up off the chair and did not put it on, just held it, and looked at Charlie in a way that had gone careful again.
Measured. Like he'd let something show and was now doing inventory.
"How long have you been painting," Laurent said.
"My whole life. Seriously for like six years. Since I stopped pretending I was gonna do anything else."
"And you show where?"
Charlie laughed, short. "I show in my apartment.
To my roommate. She's got great range as an audience, she'll cry at anything.
" He hitched the painting up against his hip, the dry edge, careful.
"I've been in a couple group things. Nothing you'd — nothing here.
This is not my — " He gestured with his chin at the room, the light, the nothing that cost so much. "This is a different zip code."
"Chelsea is a zip code," Laurent said. "You're standing in it."
"You know what I mean."
For a second Laurent didn't answer. He was looking at Charlie with an expression Charlie couldn't read at all, which almost never happened — Charlie read people for a living, basically, read the color and the weather of them — and this one was closed, a door with the light on behind it.
"Give Naomi your number," Laurent said finally.
Charlie's brain did a full stall. "My—"
"Your telephone number. She'll take it. I want to see the rest of it.
" A beat. "The work. Where you make it. Not—" a small gesture at the painting against Charlie's hip, at the whole catastrophe of the last ten minutes "—not like this.
Properly. In your studio, with the others around it, in the light you make it in.
" He said studio like he already knew it wasn't a studio, like he was being generous with the word on purpose, and Charlie should probably have been insulted and instead was just — warm again. Stupidly.
"You want to do a studio visit," Charlie said. "To my studio."
"That is the standard term, yes."
"It's in Ridgewood."
"I'm aware Queens exists."
"There's a cat. Not mine. He's just around. He has opinions."
"I'll manage the cat."
Charlie looked at him. Laurent Marchand, coat over his arm, blue-green paint drying on his shoe, standing in his own perfect white room asking to come see a bunch of canvases in a cutup loft in Ridgewood with a cat and a space heater and Dani's kiln in the corner.
It made no sense. Rich gallery guys did not do this.
They had assistants who had interns who looked at Instagram.
Charlie had spent six years learning exactly how this world didn't open for people like him, and here was the front door of it, swung wide, for no reason he could name except that he'd fallen down and dragged a wet painting across a floor.
He should ask why. That was the smart move. What's the catch. What do you want. Why me. Dani's voice, already, in his head: baby, nobody does something for free in that world, what's he getting.
But the man had crouched. On the dirty floor. In the nice trousers. To look at the thing Charlie made at six in the morning when he couldn't sleep because the blue was wrong.
"Sure, man," Charlie said.
Something flickered across Laurent's face — that same little stall, quick, there and gone, like man had landed somewhere unexpected and he was deciding what to do about it. Then it smoothed.
"Sure," Laurent repeated, dry as the gallery walls. "Man." He turned to Naomi, who had watched the entire thing over the top of her glasses with the face of a woman witnessing a car accident she'd predicted out loud. "Take his number."
"I heard," Naomi said. "I've been standing here."
Laurent walked toward the back with his coat over his arm and his ruined shoe and did not look back, and Charlie stood there dripping linseed onto a Chelsea floor, holding his own too-green painting against his hip, feeling like the ground had tilted about four inches and nobody else had noticed.
Naomi held out her tablet. "Number," she said.
He gave it. His hands smelled like turpentine and his heart was doing something embarrassing and across the gallery the little white bakery bag sat forgotten on the corner of the desk, folded neat at the top, going cold.
"He forgot his—" Charlie started.
"He didn't forget it," Naomi said, without looking up. "He never eats it here. He just likes to know it's there." She handed the tablet back, and for the first time she looked at Charlie like he was a person and not a spill. "You should go home and let that dry," she said. "Both of you should."
Charlie didn't ask what the second half meant. He was too busy trying to get out the door with a wet painting and whatever had just happened to his afternoon.
He did not make it to Bushwick. He texted the guy who knew a guy: rain check, long story, painting got into a fight.
Then he got on the M train with his ruined wrapping and his blue-green disaster, and the whole way back to Ridgewood he could still smell it — linseed, turpentine, and, faint, following him like a hand on the back of his neck, warm butter and good coffee.
Weird day, he told himself.
He was so wrong about how weird his life was about to get that it was almost funny.