Page 149 of ClickBack

He steps aside. The artist gives me the same tissue and cardboard treatment, and we continue through the room carrying our separate purchases. I like that he offered. I like being able to leave with something I chose without turning payment into a discussion about what I can afford.

A teenager in a Philadelphia cap approaches us near the first large canvas. His mother has her phone ready but makes him ask for himself. Jarrett hands me his package, takes the photograph, and asks the boy whether he plays. They talk briefly about the team he has just made. When Jarrett returns, he takes both packages so I can read the card beside the painting.

I look up from the artist’s name to the canvas. A face emerges through layers of blue and rust, one eye distinct, the other partly hidden. I step to the right. The expression changes.

“Your painting,” I say.

Jarrett waits beside me.

“It’s hers.”

“Yeah.”

“You watched me walking around your living room trying to figure that out.”

“You were concentrating.”

“You could have told me.”

“You said you didn’t want help.”

I had said that. I had been trying to find the spot where the man in his painting stopped looking worried and began to look amused. Jarrett had offered to move the lamp. I thought he was being funny.

“How long have you had it?”

“Since I moved into this place. Saw it before that.”

“Your designer found it?”

“No. I found it.”

I look at him. “I thought she chose all of it.”

“Most of it. That one was mine.”

We move to the next canvas. He lets me stand in front of it without explaining what I should see. I try the left side, then come back toward him. This face seems sad from wherever I look.

“I don’t think she’s going to cheer up,” I say.

“Maybe she doesn’t want to.”

I look at the painting again. I had been trying to make it do what the other one did.

The artist joins us while I’m considering that. She recognizes Jarrett and asks how the piece looks in his apartment. He takes out his phone to show her a photograph, one he clearly took for that purpose. The television is off. The lamp is on. He has moved the small sculpture that usually sits in front of the canvas.

I watch her study it.

“That’s a good place for him,” she says.

“Took me a while.”

“He kept looking at you until you got it right?”

Jarrett laughs. “Something like that.”

He introduces me, and the artist asks whether I have seen the new work yet. I tell her I’ve been moving around it. She asks what changed when I did, and we talk about the face I couldn’t make happy. She listens without correcting me. Before she leaves, she tells me to spend some time with the smaller canvas near the end of the wall.

Jarrett follows me over to it. “She doesn’t tell everybody where to go next.”