POV: Seren Adaeze
The woman from the law firm called back within the hour and told me, very politely, that the buyer would prefer to meet at my gallery rather than their offices. I said that was fine. I said Tuesday at two worked for me. I wrote down the time and then sat for a long while thinking about what kind of person sends a letter like that and then wants to come to your space instead of their own.
The kind who wants to see how you behave on your home ground. That was my conclusion, someone who studies people before they deal with them.
I rearranged the gallery twice on Tuesday morning, not to impress anyone, I just needed something to do with my hands that was not thinking.
By one-thirty I had stopped moving things and started standing near the window watching the street, which was worse. I expected someone older, sixties maybe, the kind of collector who buys art the way other people collect something they have too much room for, comfortable and certain and slightly bored with everything including their own money.
At two o'clock exactly, a car stopped outside.
One person got out. He stood on the pavement for a moment, not looking at the gallery window, not checking his phone, just still, the way you are still when you already know exactly where you are and have no need to confirm it.
He was not sixty.
He came through the door and I had about three seconds to adjust every assumption I had built over the past four days. Tall. Dark hair. A suit that did not look expensive the way suits look expensive when someone is trying to look expensive, it looked expensive the way a well-made thing just looks like itself. He was maybe thirty-five, the kind of person who had not been surprised by anything in a long time and had made a kind of peace with that.
"Ms. Adaeze," he said.
Not a question. He knew who I was before I answered.
"That's me." Very articulate. I cleared my throat. "You're the buyer."
"Lucian Veyne." He did not offer his hand. He looked at me the way you look at something you have been thinking about for a while and are now checking against your mental image of it. I had the uncomfortable feeling I matched.
I waited for him to look at the paintings. Everyone looks at the paintings when they walk in, it is the first thing always, even people who claim they are not interested in art. The walls demand it.
He did not look at the paintings.
He kept his eyes on me and I felt the full weight of that choice, because it was a choice. He was telling me something without saying it. I just could not work out exactly what.
"Would you like to sit," I said.
"I'm fine standing." He moved toward the center of the room slowly, still not looking at the walls. "I want to ask you something and I'd like you to answer it honestly rather than carefully."
"Those aren't always different things."
"For most people they are." He stopped about two meters away. "How do you choose what to paint?"
I had prepared for a lot of questions on the way here in my head. That was not one of them.
"I don't always," I said, which was more honest than I intended.
He nodded like that confirmed something. He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and took out a photograph. He held it for a moment without showing it to me. "I've been to three of your exhibitions," he said. "Bought seven pieces total, not three, the other four through different firms so the pattern wouldn't be obvious." He paused. "I wanted to understand what I was looking at before I introduced myself."
The floor felt slightly less solid than it had a moment ago.
"Seven," I said.
"Seven."
I thought about every piece I had sold in the past two years and tried to map them against that number and could not do it cleanly. He had been in the same rooms as me, possibly more than once, watching.
"That's a strange way to introduce yourself," I said.
"I know." He finally turned to look at the walls. He moved along them slowly and deliberately and I watched him look, which was different from watching anyone else look. He was not admiring, he was reading. His eyes moved across each painting the way you read a page, left to right, tracking something specific.
He stopped at the large cliff painting on the far wall.
He stood there for longer than he stopped anywhere else.
Then he turned and walked back to me and held out the photograph.
I took it.
It took me a moment to understand what I was looking at, a black and white photograph, old paper, slightly faded at the edges, the kind of texture that comes from decades in a sleeve somewhere. It showed a cliff face, stone, layered and irregular, with a narrow path cut into it leading up to a dark opening at the top.
I looked up at my painting on the wall, then back down at the photograph.
Same cliff. Same exact curve at the left edge. Same shadow falling from the same overhang. Same path. Every detail matching, including one I had never been able to explain even to myself, a small cluster of rock near the base shaped like a closed fist.
"That photograph," Lucian said quietly, "was taken in 1974 by my grandfather, off the coast of a place that does not appear on any public map." He waited while I kept looking at both. "Your painting was submitted to a Lisbon gallery eighteen months ago. You made it, according to the exhibition notes, in a single night."
I could not find anything to say that was not either too much or completely useless.
"I've never been to that cliff," I said finally.
"I know."
"I've never seen that photograph before."
"I know that too." His voice was even, not unkind, not triumphant either, just carrying the weight of someone who has been sitting with a question for a long time and has finally found the right person to ask. "Ms. Adaeze, my grandfather spent thirty years trying to find that place again after he took that picture. He never did." He looked at my painting on the wall. "You painted it from memory. I need to understand how."