Chapter 4 #2
Charlie found him by the coats an hour later, two beers in and glowing with it, that reckless warmth turned all the way up, and Laurent — who had spent the hour building the wall back, brick by brick, reason by reason — felt the whole structure sway.
"You disappeared," Charlie said. "I kept looking over and you'd gone all — statue.
You do that. You go statue when something's happening.
I've decided it's my favorite thing you do, it's like a tell, it means the room got real.
" He was close, closer than the coats required, his voice pitched low and easy just for Laurent under the noise of the bar, and he smelled like beer and turpentine and himself.
"That lady. The gray cashmere. She's a big deal, right? Naomi went weird when she came in."
"Sabine Kessler. She's the biggest deal in the room. Possibly the city."
"She kept looking at me."
"She wants to meet you." Laurent kept his voice level. "She could change your life. You should let her."
"Yeah?" Charlie tilted his head, reading Laurent's face, and Charlie was too good at reading faces, that was the whole problem, that was the thing that made the paintings and the thing that was about to make Laurent's life unlivable.
"You don't look like you think I should let her.
You've got the statue thing but different.
This one's — " He studied Laurent for a second longer, and his voice dropped further, and something came into it that Charlie plainly did not have a word for yet, because he'd never once had to look for the word, warm and puzzled and reaching. "This one's kind of new."
And then Charlie put his hand on Laurent's arm.
Just his arm. Just above the elbow, warm through the good wool, the easy touch of a tactile man who touched everyone, who'd probably clapped that cruel critic on the shoulder an hour ago and thought nothing of it. It meant nothing. Laurent knew it meant nothing.
It went through him like the third rail.
For one second — the doorway second, the one Laurent had also been carrying around and failing to color — the two of them stood by the coats with Charlie's hand on his arm and the whole loud room reduced to the six inches between them, and Laurent looked at the boy's open puzzled reaching face, at the mouth, at the exact thing he wanted and had told Naomi he had four hundred thousand excellent reasons not to take, and he understood with perfect clarity that Charlie did not know.
That was the thing. Charlie was standing there feeling something enormous with no name on it and no lid, looking at Laurent like the answer to a question he hadn't finished asking himself, and if Laurent moved — if Laurent so much as tilted — Charlie would follow, because Charlie followed the truth wherever it got in around the edges, that was who he was.
And he'd wake up tomorrow having followed it somewhere he'd never chosen to go, handed there by a man twenty years older who'd had every reason in the world to know better.
Laurent stepped back.
One clean step, the same step as the doorway, the step he was apparently going to spend this entire season taking. Charlie's hand fell away.
"Let Sabine change your life," Laurent said.
Gently. As gently as he'd ever said anything.
"That's what I'm here for — to put you in front of the people who can.
Not to — " He stopped. Reassembled. "Go home, Charlie.
You've got a painting to finish and you're two beers past useful. I'll see you at the install."
Something flickered over Charlie's face — not hurt, exactly, more like a man who'd reached for a light switch in the dark and found the wall an inch to the left of where he'd been sure it was.
Confusion. A question deferred. "Yeah," he said.
"Okay. The install." He pulled his denim jacket off the hook, and at the door he turned back, and the grin was back but there was something under it now, something Laurent had put there.
"You'd tell me, right? If the room got real. You'd tell me."
"Go home," Laurent said.
He watched the boy go out into the November cold. Then he stood at the coats of the Foundry, in the only honest room in Chelsea, and made himself the promise, cold and clean and correct, the promise he was so certain he could keep:
Nothing. It will be nothing. He doesn't know what he wants, and I will not be the thing that decides it for him. He gets the show, the career, Sabine, all of it — clean, his, unspoiled. And I get to keep my name and the knowledge that for once in my life I wanted something and left it on the desk.
Professional. Always.
He believed it for nearly the whole cab ride home.
Then he got upstairs to the Tribeca apartment with the one painting on the wall he'd never explain to anyone, and he stood in the dark and did not turn on the light, and he thought about a hand on his arm and a face reaching for a word, and he understood that leaving the pastry on the desk had never once made him want it less.
It had only ever taught him how to starve.