“Patricia sent me the catalog in January,” he said. “I’ve been following your work for about two years, actually. Through a gallery in Edinburgh that carried three of your pieces.”
I didn’t know a gallery in Edinburgh had carried my pieces. Patricia managed more than she reported.
“The Roaring Fork painting,” he said. “That’s the view from County Road 154, isn’t it. Just past the bridge.”
“You remember that road?”
“I drove it every day sophomore year.” He paused. “I’m sorry about what just happened.”
“Don’t be,” I said. “He’s been doing that for years. Tonight was just the first time it cost him an audience.”
Marcus looked at me for a moment with something careful in his expression.
“Can I take you to dinner after this?” he said. “I have some things I’d like to talk about. Professional things, first. And then, if you’re willing, other things.”
—
The professional things were significant.
Marcus had spent the last fourteen years building an architectural and design firm headquartered in London with satellite offices in Dubai, Chicago, and Auckland. Webb Studio. I had heard of them, actually, without ever connecting the name to the boy in AP English. They designed public spaces — libraries, civic plazas, cultural centers — and they commissioned original artwork for every installation.
Not prints. Not licensed reproductions.
Original commissioned paintings.
He’d been looking for an artist for a new project for eight months. A cultural center in Telluride, Colorado. Thirty thousand square feet. Five major interior spaces.
“I want Colorado landscapes,” he said. “Real ones. The kind that remember what they are.”
We sat in a restaurant on Larimer Street until midnight.
Outside, the temperature had dropped to seven degrees, and snow was falling in slow, purposeful flakes past the window.
I said yes to the commission before dessert.
—
The other things took longer.
We met for coffee the next morning before his flight. Then he extended his flight by three days. Then we drove up to Glenwood Springs, where my mother fed him pot roast and asked him seventeen questions and he answered all of them.
We were not reckless about it.
We had both been reckless before, in different ways, and we were old enough to know what it cost.
But we were not slow, either.
—
I found out about Derek’s situation six weeks later, not because I was looking, but because Patricia mentioned it at a meeting.
Apparently Derek had been telling people he was an art investor. Had used that identity to gain entry to three separate private collection events in Denver and Colorado Springs. Had represented himself as a consultant with credentials he didn’t have.
Two of the collectors he’d approached had done their own checking.
They filed complaints with the Colorado Attorney General’s office in February.
Derek was not charged with anything criminal, ultimately. But the investigation was public. His name appeared in the Denver Business Journal under a headline that was worse than being charged, because it asked a question instead of stating a fact, and questions follow people longer.
The startup he’d been quietly pitching to investors collapsed two weeks after the article ran.
Cassidy, I heard, had moved back to Scottsdale.
—
I did not feel the satisfaction I might have expected.
I had imagined, in my worst moments after he took the microphone, that I would feel something large and bright when his recklessness finally caught him. But when it came, I was in my studio in Glenwood Springs at six in the morning with a cup of coffee going cold on the windowsill and a half-finished canvas on the easel — the second of the five Telluride pieces — and Patricia’s text just sat on my phone while I finished the brushstroke I was working on.
Then I set the brush down.
Then I read it.
Then I went back to the painting.
—
The Telluride Cultural Center opened fourteen months later, on a Saturday in June, with the mountains showing clearly and the air smelling like pine and high altitude and the brief sweetness of summer starting.
My five paintings occupied the main atrium.
The largest one — eight feet by twelve, the Elk Mountains at first light — hung opposite the entrance, so it was the first thing anyone saw when they walked through the door.
My mother came. Patricia came. Marcus stood beside me when they pulled the covering away, and in the moment before the room responded, I felt his hand find mine.
The Elk Mountains held their light in the painting the way they held it in life — briefly, without apology, and with no interest in being anything other than what they were.
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