Chapter 29: Seen

It happened on a Thursday.

Not a significant Thursday. Not a Thursday that had announced itself as the kind that changed things. A Thursday that had begun with Noah refusing to wear anything except his dinosaur pajamas to his playgroup which had required a negotiation of considerable diplomatic complexity, and which had continued with me in the studio by eight thirty working in the north facing light on a piece I had started the previous week and could not quite finish because something in the center of it was not yet true and I had not yet identified what.

I was working on that problem when the studio door opened.

I had not locked it.

This was a new development. For the first three weeks of having the studio I had locked the door with the habitual privacy of someone who had always worked alone and had learned to protect the space where the work happened from everything outside it. Then gradually and without a specific decision being made I had stopped locking it because the people who came through it, Damien with coffee in the mornings, Noah with urgent dinosaur related announcements, Eleanor on Wednesdays when she had started coming for lunch, were not interruptions. They were part of the fabric of the place now. Part of what made the north facing light feel like mine.

So the door was unlocked.

And the person who came through it on that Thursday morning was not Damien or Noah or Eleanor.

It was a woman I had never seen before. Somewhere in her fifties. Short silver hair cut with the precise intentionality of someone who had decided exactly who they were and dressed accordingly. She was wearing a dark coat and carrying a leather portfolio and she stopped in the doorway of my studio and looked at the paintings on the walls with an expression that was not the polite interest of someone being shown around.

It was the expression of someone who had found something.

"I'm sorry," I said. "Can I help you."

She did not look at me immediately. She was looking at the painting of Damien. The first one. Dark and warm with the amber thing at the center.

"This building's management company sent me up," she said without turning. "I'm here to look at the Cole apartment. I have an appointment." She paused. "The elevator stopped at the wrong floor."

I looked at her.

"The Cole apartment is one floor down," I said.

"I know that now," she said. She turned and looked at me. Her eyes were very direct and very alive and doing the thing that certain people's eyes did when they were genuinely interested in something and not concealing it. "How long have you been painting."

"Twelve years," I said.

"Professionally."

"Hopefully," I said.

Something moved across her face. A recalibration. "These are not the work of someone hoping," she said simply. She looked at the woman in the doorway painting. "This one."

"That one is not for sale," I said immediately.

"I didn't ask if it was for sale," she said. "I asked about it." She studied it for a moment. "The light source is inside the figure rather than external. That's not a technical choice. That's a philosophical one."

I looked at the painting.

"Yes," I said.

"Who taught you that," she said.

"Nobody," I said. "It's just how I see things."

She was quiet for a moment. Then she crossed the studio and looked at the other pieces. The new one on the easel. Three smaller canvases against the east wall that I had finished in the past two weeks. A large unfinished piece on the floor that I was still arguing with.

She took her time.

I stood beside my easel and watched her look and did not perform casualness because performing casualness in front of someone who was genuinely looking would have been an insult to both of us.

"My name is Diana Reeves," she said finally, turning to face me. "I have a gallery on West 24th."

I knew the name.

Not from personal experience. From the particular reverence with which other artists said it. Diana Reeves's gallery was not the largest in Chelsea and was not the most commercially successful and was consistently the most significant because Diana Reeves had a specific and well documented gift for finding work that was doing something true and putting it in front of people who could recognize truth when they encountered it.

I kept my face entirely neutral.

"Mia Santos," I said.

"I know," she said. "I looked at your name on the building directory downstairs while I was waiting for the elevator." She paused. "I would like to show your work."

The north facing light came through the windows and fell across the studio floor between us and I stood in it and held the largest thing I had ever been offered with both hands and breathed through it.

"When," I said.

"March," she said. "A solo show. Six weeks. I have a cancellation and a space that needs work that is doing something real rather than something clever." She looked at the amber painting again. "This work is doing something real."

I looked at my paintings.

Twelve years of working in small apartments and bad light and secondhand materials with nobody asking to see it. Forty seven paintings in a sketchbook that had collected rejection letters with the patient accumulation of someone who had not stopped believing in the work even when believing was the most expensive thing she could afford.

"I need to think about it," I said.

Diana Reeves looked at me with those direct alive eyes.

"No you don't," she said. Not unkindly. With the particular honesty of someone who had had this conversation many times and had learned that the thinking about it was rarely actually about the decision and almost always about the fear.

I looked at her for a moment.

"March," I said.

"March," she confirmed.

She left her card on the worktable and took one more long look at the woman in the doorway painting and then walked out of the studio and presumably found the correct floor and the Cole apartment management appointment she had arrived for and I stood in the north facing light alone for a long time.

Then I called Rosa.

Rosa said something in Spanish that I chose not to translate and then said "I told you. I told you for twelve years Mia I told you." And then she was quiet for a moment and when she spoke again her voice was very small and very full. "You deserve this. Say it."

"Rosa," I said.

"Say it," she said.

"I deserve this," I said.

"Again," she said.

"Rosa."

"Again."

"I deserve this," I said. And this time the saying of it did something that the first time had not quite managed. Something settled. Some old persistent doubt that had been sitting in the back of everything rearranged itself into something quieter and less insistent.

I deserved this.

I called Damien next.

He was in a meeting. His assistant told me so and asked if she should interrupt and I said no and left a message that said simply call me when you're done and went back to the unfinished piece on the floor that I had been arguing with all morning.

I understood what was missing in the center of it now.

It had taken Diana Reeves's eyes on it to show me but the moment she left the answer was obvious the way answers always were once you were ready to see them. I picked up a brush and worked quickly with the certainty of someone who had arrived finally at the true thing inside the piece and needed to get it down before the certainty passed.

I was still working when Damien came in.

I heard him stop behind me.

He was quiet for a moment. Reading the room the way he always read rooms.

"You called," he said.

"I did," I said. I kept working. "A woman came in this morning. Diana Reeves."

A pause.

"The gallery," he said.

"Yes," I said.

"Mia."

"She wants a solo show," I said. "March. Six weeks." I stepped back from the piece. Looked at it. The center was right now. "I said yes."

I turned around.

Damien was standing in the middle of the studio and the expression on his face was the most completely undefended thing I had ever seen on it. Not the large quiet certain one. Something bigger than that. Something that had no architecture around it at all and was not trying to have any.

He crossed the room.

He took my face in both hands the way he did and looked at me with those dark eyes that were very full and said nothing for a moment.

"Twelve years," I said softly.

"I know," he said.

"Of nobody asking to see it," I said.

"I know," he said again.

"Diana Reeves asked," I said.

"Yes," he said.

"In my studio," I said. "With north facing windows."

He pressed his lips to my forehead and held them there for a moment and I felt him breathe and I put my hands against his chest and felt his heartbeat steady and certain beneath my palms.

"You did this," I said softly. "The windows."

"You did this," he said against my forehead. "Every day in this room. Every painting. Twelve years of doing the work when nobody was asking to see it." He lifted his head and looked at me. "The windows just held the light."

I looked at him.

"I love you," I said.

"I know," he said.

"Stop," I said.

He almost smiled.

Then he kissed me in the north facing light with paint on my hands and everything exactly where it was supposed to be.

And outside the city went on.

And March was coming.