He puts his arm around me and kisses the top of my shoulder. “Those were all me.” He gives me a soft squeeze before releasing me. “I just like to use additional pseudonyms while travelling. I use the names of my favorite abstract painters. Mark Rothco and Sam Gilliam… I would’ve used Jackson P., but I thought that might be too obvious.” He displays a cheeky grin and I playfully push against his bicep.
“Okay so you like to confuse people?” I narrow my eyes, partly teasing.
“I… like to be more anonymous than not,” he admits. “But also, I like the mystery. What’s life without a little bit of intrigue??” He beams as he tips his forehead toward me, and I can tell he means it. A man of intrigue he is, then! Good to know.
I ask him a few more questions about his travels, his paintings,his plans. He tells me he’s an early riser, and I groan while admitting that I’m a night owl. I find out he has an older brother and that they were raised by their mom and herthreesisters. We have more in common about our upbringings than I expected.
He deflects deeper questions and asks me about my journey to Brooklyn. I share a few of the wild one-liners Harper and her friend have doled out when I’ve helped them with their social media shoots. He shakes his head laughing and rolls his eyes with me.
“Humans are fascinating, aren’t they?” he says to me. And I agree. Fascinating and terrible and sometimes tantalizing, everything all at once.
He shares his surprise at the success of the Muse series and alludes to the luck he had with his first piece. I think he’s referring to the Mischa painting, due to its virality… but I’m not one hundred percent sure. His eyes glaze over for a moment when he mentions it, and I can tell there’s a depth of feeling there that he’s trying to pass over. My nosy (and a bit jealous) side wants to ask more questions, but I bite my tongue. Despite all his optimism and positivity and joie de vivre, I pick up on a thread of cynicism when he discusses the art world, or even society at large.
“It’s everything, you know.” He smiles sideways at me, one arm draped over my shoulders, holding me close and keeping me warm. “Art drives humanity forward, while also documenting our experience, inspiring it.” I can feel his tense passion vibrating just beneath the skin. I’m certain he can make a full speech on the subject. He continues, “But very few people are able to make the time for it nowadays, much less make money from it, or allocatetoit.” He trails off and sits back to stare across the room, over the canvas we’d just worked on together. “And unfortunately, you do run into some shady characters in this world.”
I chew on that—hoping he isn’t one of them.
“Earlier you mentioned your fifteen minutes of fame,” I begin, wanting to understand him. He turns to look at meexpectantly, waiting for a question. “I know, um”—I bite my lip—“I mean, I’veseenthat there are a lot of beautiful women out there who would pay you to paint them”—I hesitate—“like this.” I sweep my arm toward the canvas. His eyes dance.
“Youare a beautiful woman, Charlotte,” he says softly. “What’s your question?”
I try to contain my shy smile. “I mean surely there are more beautiful, andfamouswomen who would pay youa lotof money to paint them.” If Mischa speaks to her peers about him the same way she speaks in her Vogue interview, I have no doubt he had plenty of potential high-net worth clients. “Why are you doing what you’re doing? Going around to amateur studios, spending time with normal people?”
“Normal people,” he repeats and chuckles, shaking his head. “Well, yes I do think I’m in the middle of my fifteen minutes of fame.” He rubs his chin. “And I thought maybe I could use it to help people, bring attention to regular studios around the country and unknown artists—get the public interested in their local art scene again.” He smiles and takes his hand off my thigh to give a one-handed shrug. “It’s the best idea I could think of to spread some of the success I’m having to others who deserve more attention for their work.”
My heart squeezes. He could be making tens of thousands, or I don’t know, hundreds of thousands of dollars running his Muse series through the rich and famous. Instead, he’s trying to uplift visual art as a whole—to uplift people like me, and Alex and even Daisy, not that that was why she was interested in him at McArthur’s.
Devo absentmindedly goes to run his palm down the back of my hair. His hand stops once it gets tangled in the paint-matted waves. He’s shaken out of his reverie. “Charlotte—” His eyebrows draw together apologetically as he takes in my extra colorful appearance. “Unless you want this paint to be near-impossible to wash out, you should get in the shower.”
My eyes widen. This paint better come off me! “Oh!” I exclaim. “I thought you said it washes out??”
“It does...” he says, but scrunches his nose.
His eyes home in on my discarded jeans. He gets up to collect them and hands them to me. “Don’t worry, you have time, but”—he tilts his head to the side in concession—“it is extra tough to remove once it’s fully dry.”
“Oh gosh,” I say, feeling the drying clumps in my hair.
“Come here.” He opens his arms after I slide my pants up my legs and pop the button through the hole. I walk into his embrace one last time. He kisses the top of my head again and we rock back and forth in a tight embrace. “Thank you for today,” he says above my head. “You were incredible, and it was an honor.”
Why do I feel so emotional around this farewell? I glance at the drying paint, and I can just make out the outline of my body. It’s nowhere near what a final Muse Painting looks like. He’s got some work to do.
“Good luck.” I jut my chin towards the canvas.
He lets me go and lightly knocks my chin with a knuckle. “I don’t need it,” he says. “You’ve already given me everything I could possibly need.” I roll my eyes at him, but secretly, I’m flattered. I pull my phone out of my purse and bring up a ride-share app—there’s no way I’m subwaying in this state. Devo places his hand over the screen, forcing me to look up at him.
“There’s already a car outside for you,” he says, “if you want it.”
“What?” I say in disbelief.
“I had my assistant find someone willing to wait”—he shifts his feet—“while you were in the bathroom.”
“Oh,” I say, surprised. “Thank you.” And I mean it. I feel taken care of, and it’s… soothing. I could get used to this, but I know I shouldn’t.
He gives a side smile and then spins me around and gives me a light slap on the ass.
“Hey!”
“Get a move on, Charlotte,” he says as I playfully glare at him over my shoulder and move toward the door. “Leave the artist to his work! And save that beautiful hair of yours!”
