Chapter 20
1120 Words
ELENA
I was at the gallery on Tuesday.
Marcus Webb had been managing the daily operations for two weeks. He was competent and the artists liked him. The collectors trusted him too.
I come in twice a week now. Sometimes three times. Never because I had to but because the gallery was the one place in my life that had never asked me to be anything other than what I was and I needed that more than I needed the rest.
Tuesday was for the new installation. A series of large format photographs like the industrial landscapes, a Finnish photographer I had been watching for two years and it's going up in the east wing. I was checking the placement of the third piece when Petra knocked on the open door.
"Mr. Carter is here," she said.
I looked up.
She read my expression correctly.
"Nicholas — not your husband."
I kept my face where it was.
"Send him in."
**
He came through the gallery the same way. This was his third visit.
The first had been the Solis prints. The second the Brennan. Now the Finnish photographer's work, which had not been publicly announced and was not yet on the gallery's website.
Nicholas Carter could not have known about unless he had been paying attention to something that told him what was coming in.
I did not say any of this though.
"The new installation," he said, looking at the piece nearest the entrance.
A steel mill at dusk, the light doing something extraordinary to the geometry of it.
"Just going up today," I said. "Aino Mäkinen. Finnish. She works exclusively in post-industrial sites."
He looked at it for a long moment. "She's interested in what's left."
"Yes." I looked at him sideways. "That's exactly it."
He glanced at me. Something in his expression that was not the boardroom face.
"Show me the rest," he said.
**
We moved through the east wing slowly.
He was a good viewer. I had established this across three visits. He simply looked, and when something held him he stayed with it until it released him.
He moved on without apology.
At the fourth piece, he stopped.
An abandoned paper mill in eastern Finland. Interior shot, the roof partially collapsed, winter light coming through in shafts. Something about the light made the decay look like intention rather than neglect.
"This one," he said.
"I thought you might say that."
He looked at me. "Why?"
"It's the most demanding piece in the series," I said. "It doesn't explain itself. You have to meet it where it is." I looked at the photograph. "You do that with everything."
He was quiet for a moment.
"Is that an observation or a criticism?" he said.
"Neither," I said. "Just true."
We looked at the photograph together for a moment.
"I'll take it," he said.
"I haven't told you the price."
"Whatever it is."
I almost smiled. I led him toward the back room where I had the provenance documents and the condition report.
The administrative machinery of a transaction that was also, on some level, not entirely about the transaction.
The back room was utilitarian. Bright fluorescent light, crates stacked along one wall, the worktable covered in packing material. I moved toward the filing cabinet where I kept the documentation.
My foot caught the edge of a packing crate.
It happened fast. I lurch forward, and grab at nothing. I saw the absolute certainty of the floor arriving.
It didn't arrive.
His hand closed around my arm. Then his other hand at my back. The falling stopped and I was upright. He was very close and neither of us moved for a moment that lasted longer than it should have.
I became aware of several things in quick succession.
The steadiness of his grip.
The warmth of his hands through my jacket.
And underneath both of those things, there was something else. Something that reached me before thought, before decision.
A scent.
Cool and deep. Something underneath it that was green and outdoor. It was grown rather than manufactured.
Rain.
Not a thought exactly. A sensation. The particular cold of it soaking through fabric. A surface under my hands like a warm metal, a car bonnet. A voice, low and controlled, saying something I couldn't hold onto long enough to hear.
I blinked.
The back room. The fluorescent light. Nicholas beside me with his hands still on my arms.
"Are you all right?" he said.
"Yes." I stepped back.
He released me immediately.
"Sorry. I should watch where I'm going."
"Watch the crates," he said.
I looked at him.
The scent was still there. Faint now but present. My mind kept reaching for it and finding nothing. It was just the sensation of almost, of something just beyond the edge of recall.
"Your cologne," I said.
He looked at me. "What about it?"
"I can't place it."
He was quiet for a moment. As if deciding something.
"It's not commercially available," he said. "There's a maker in Vermont. A small operation. He grows most of the ingredients on a farm outside Burlington. Forty bottles a year. I've been wearing it for a long time."
I looked at him.
"You've been to this farm," I said.
"Several times." A pause. Something in his expression that was not the door closed all the way. "He's particular about who he sells to. He wanted to know I understood what I was buying."
"And did you?"
"Eventually," he said.
I had smelled this before.
Not here and not in this room.
Somewhere in the dark. In fragments. In the almost-memories I had been circling for weeks without being able to land on.
I looked at Nicholas Carter's face — the clean angles of it, the deliberate stillness — and felt something move through me that I could not name and did not try to.
"The documents," I said.
"Yes," he said.
We went back to the main gallery.
I gave him the provenance paperwork and promised that the piece would be installed at Carter Group by the end of the month.
At the door, he stopped.
"The Mäkinen series," he said. "When the full installation is complete, I'd like to see it."
"I'll let you know when it's ready," I said.
He nodded once.
At the door he turned back.
"Elena."
I looked at him.
He held my gaze for a moment.
"Thank you," he said. "For the work."
He left.
I stood in the gallery and listened to the door close.
The scent was still in the room.
Faint, but present.
I knew that scent.
I had known it somewhere in the dark.
I just couldn't find where.
Yet.
- Writer
