Chapter 119: Planning A New Video

Both of them were still staring, which struck Adrian as an unreasonable response to a sentence that hadn’t been complicated.

He declined to explain. Jenna would turn it into a discussion about channel strategy, and Rose would find a way to be amused by it. Neither sounded worth the effort.

"Repeatable," Jenna said, retrieving the thread like a dog with a stick. "Not a formula. A format. Something we can do every week that doesn’t feel like last week’s leftovers."

"A format," Adrian repeated. "Like a recipe."

"Like a recipe that doesn’t taste like the last one."

"That’s called cooking," Rose said.

"There’s an exhibition downtown," she went on, turning her pencil over. "Tomorrow afternoon. I’ve wanted to see it for weeks." A pause, as careful as a hand on a canvas. "It might give us a challenge."

"Perfect." Jenna was already typing. "We film it. Walk-and-talk, her explaining paintings, me roasting them—"

"We look first," Adrian said. "Without a camera in anyone’s face. If something’s worth filming, we’ll know afterward."

Jenna objected for four minutes. Rose backed him in two sentences, and Jenna folded with the grace of a woman paying a parking fine. They stayed a little longer, trading ideas and laughing at the worst ones, until the clock on his microwave said it was time to stop pretending to be a production company.

The Harlow Gallery occupied a converted bank, and the front desk still had the vault door, propped open like a joke nobody had retired.

The ticket was $18, which Adrian noticed the way other people noticed weather. Rose paid before he could reach for his wallet and handed him his like a dare.

She was a different person in front of a painting. The posture changed first, the careful straightness gone soft at the shoulders, then the voice, which dropped into something quiet and private. She stopped at a small canvas of a kitchen table, the kind of thing he’d have walked past on the way to a bench.

"Look at the light," Rose said. "He painted one cup. Everything else is waiting for it."

Adrian looked. It was a cup. He understood maybe a third of her reasoning, but listening to her was more interesting than pretending to understand, so he listened.

Jenna had opinions. She had many, and they arrived loaded. She questioned the composition of one painting, dismissed another artist’s color choices as "a hostage situation in teal," then spent five minutes defending a huge red canvas Rose had called overrated.

"It’s a red rectangle," Rose said.

"It’s a red rectangle that knows what it’s doing," Jenna said. "Look at the edges. He didn’t blur anything. He meant every one."

They both turned to him at once, which he was starting to understand was the real exhibit. "Well?" Jenna said. "Pick."

He had judged a bicycle, a teapot, and three portraits, and none of it had prepared him for a rectangle. He had no qualifications. He had an $18 ticket and a pair of eyes. He pointed at the red one.

"Yes," Jenna said. "Why?"

"It’s a good frame."

"The frame." She turned slowly, in the voice of a woman whose victory had been revoked. "You picked it for the frame."

Rose laughed hard enough to lean on the wall beside a placard that asked visitors not to lean on the wall. A guard in the corner watched them with the weary vigilance of a man who’d seen every sort of person lean. Adrian wondered whether he should start charging for his participation.

After that, it got easier. He stopped trying to understand everything and watched the two of them instead. Rose answered the feeling behind a painting. Jenna wanted to know if the artist had executed the idea. Neither gave an inch, and he caught himself following the argument long after he’d stopped looking at the art.

Rose caught him at it. She was mid-sentence about a woman painted from behind, and she stopped, turned, and found his eyes already on her.

"Are you finally appreciating art?"

"I’m appreciating something."

She shoved his shoulder, lightly, a warning wrapped in a smile. "Don’t get comfortable."

He decided it had been a risky word and a good one.

"Somebody’s getting special treatment," Jenna said from two paintings away, mildly, like she was reading a label.

He assumed she meant Rose, the girlfriend. Then she looked at him a second too long, and he wasn’t sure which treatment she’d meant.

Before he could ask, Rose pulled out her sketchbook. "Here."

It was a simple drawing, a few lines and a smudge of thumb. He looked at it a while before he recognized the expression. Eyes lowered. Mouth held still, as if it were trying not to interrupt. It was the face he made when she talked.

"From memory," Rose said, and she didn’t look away.

He did not know what to do with that information. He filed it somewhere warm and decided to look at it later.

Jenna leaned over to inspect it. "Unfair advantage. You get to study him whenever you want." She said it casually and then spent longer on the page than the line deserved.

"Do you want her to draw you too?" Adrian asked.

"I don’t need anyone recording my face for posterity."

"You could ask nicely," Rose said.

"Where’s the cafe?" Jenna said, to no one.

They found a noodle place two blocks away, and the next video wrote itself over a shared plate of dumplings. Each of them would choose a painting from the exhibition for someone else to recreate without seeing the original.

"Rule one," Jenna said, drawing a line in the air with a chopstick. "No looking at the original. Not once. Not even peripherally."

"Rule two," Rose said. "Whoever picks the painting has to defend it."

"Defend it how?"

"Out loud. With a straight face." She glanced at him. "Adrian’s good at that."

Jenna proposed rules to keep it fair. Rose adjusted three of them to make it more painful. Adrian accepted the final version with the growing suspicion that they’d each found a new way to make him suffer for the audience. It sounded like something strangers might actually enjoy.

By the time the check came, the afternoon had become evening. Rose had her own way home, so she stood first, kissed him once, and told him not to spend the whole recording pretending he knew what he was doing. She left with the satisfied look of a woman who’d embarrassed him at least once today.

Jenna’s transport was less settled. After a short negotiation with her phone, Adrian offered to drive her. She hesitated, and made clear that she wasn’t asking for a favor and would find another way if she had to.

"I know," he said.

The Corolla was quieter without Rose. Jenna watched the streetlights pass and, for once, didn’t argue with them. "Left at the bakery," she said, which was the only direction she gave for ten minutes. Without an audience she seemed less interested in the channel and more willing to talk about herself.

"I need it to work because I helped build it," she said. "Not because you can afford the equipment. If it only works because you wrote the checks, it’s not mine."

"That’s one of the reasons I respect it," he said. "The lights were yours."

She looked at him long enough to decide whether he was serious, which he was, then turned to the window. "You can occasionally say something decent," she muttered, "when you’re not acting like an old man."

He let it pass. It was the nicest thing she’d said to him, and he knew better than to hand it back.

At her building he stopped the car and unlocked the doors. Jenna thanked him, but she didn’t get out. Her fingers rested on the handle, and he was about to ask whether she’d forgotten something when she turned and kissed him.

It was brief, and nothing about it was accidental. Her hand touched his collar and was gone before he’d located a single useful word. His brain produced the same static it had once produced in a convenience store, with different shampoo.

"Goodnight," Jenna said, with the expression of a woman determined to behave as though she’d done nothing unusual. She climbed out, crossed the walkway, and hurried inside without once looking back.

Adrian stayed where he was, staring at the door. The engine ticked. A moth made a long, doomed pass at the porch light.

’That wasn’t on the schedule.’

He didn’t open the System. He had a feeling it would have an opinion.

His phone lit up on the dash before he could decide what to make of any of it.

Rose: Did you get Jenna home safe?

He looked at the message. Then at the door Jenna had vanished through. Then at the message again, which hadn’t improved.

The honest answer was yes. The complete answer was longer, and he didn’t know yet how long.

Planning the next video, he decided, had been the least complicated thing he’d done all day.