Page 23 of Alone With You in the Ether

“Well, that assumes I like it for its precision, doesn’t it?” she replied.

“Do you?”

“Absolutely not,” she said, and he blinked.

“Then what do you—”

“Whistler intentionally did not paint specifics,” she said, appearing to have incidentally tripped and fallen into an answer. “Many people mocked his work. They thought his pieces lacked emotion because he told no story. But he wasn’t trying to tell a story—according to Whistler, art should stand alone from context. Art was simply art,” Regan explained, “with inconsequential specifics. The year? Unimportant,” she answered herself. “The place? Close to irrelevant. What you’re seeing before you is a single intake of breath—onemoment. It is the beauty of the world in its most objective state, because the artist isn’t expressing any meaning. He isn’t trying to define you or teach you or tell you what space to occupy, he’s just—”

She exhaled sharply, turning to look at the slowly fading sun behind her.

“Look at the colors,” she said, her voice less insistent now and more imploring. “Look how somber it is, how lonely. He named his paintings after music so that none of the senses would go unsatisfied. You can see the lights,” she added, gesturing to them, “to prove he’s not alone in the world. It’s going on around him in a slow, incoherent fade, but there’s nothing to connect you, the observer, to this moment. Nothing rooting you to anything except for this single intake of breath, sitting over the English Channel just before the sun goes down. It’s art because it’s art, which is circular in its way,” she said, and then blinked, that same half-smile lingering at the edges of her mouth when she turned to face him. “A perfect circle, if you will,” she said, “because it is and it was and it will be, all at once.”

“That’s a cycle,” he said, “not a circle,” but he understood what she meant.

She nodded once, concluding the exchange.

“Anyway,” she said, gesturing them to Monet, “moving on.”

Aldo said nothing else until the end of the tour, though he waited until he was the last to remain.

“So,” Regan said, her gaze sliding to his to invite him back to her space of consideration. “What did you learn about me?”

“Not as much as I thought,” he said. “But also quite a bit more.”

“Helpful,” she said drily. “Anything specific?”

“You tell me,” he suggested, but then, “What did you learn about me? Because if the answer is nothing, then it wasn’t a conversation,” he pointed out. “Doesn’t count if you didn’t learn anything.”

She opened her mouth, then stopped.

“Let me ask you something,” she said. “How many people were on this tour?”

He thought about it. “Four?”

“Fifteen. Did you notice the girl looking at you?”

“What girl?”

“Right,” she said, “exactly. Also, are you aware that you’ve worn the same clothes all three times we’ve seen each other?”

He glanced down. “They’re clean.”

“That’s not what I asked,” she said briskly. “What about the couple next to you?”

He tried to conjure an image of the group and summoned only the sensation of overcrowding. “What about them?”

“They wereglaringat you.” She looked delighted.

“I don’t see how any of this is relevant,” Aldo said, and then, to his surprise, Regan’s expression contorted in unbridled laughter, the sound of it dancing up to the ceiling and ricocheting back with a surprising warmth around his ears.

“Let’s just say I learned you’re very single-minded,” she told him, shaking her head. “You were very fixated on sorting out whatever it is you were trying to sort out,” she explained, “and I think at least half of the group wanted to murder you.”

That wasn’t out of the ordinary; Aldo had learned over time to ignore that sort of thing. Regan glanced at him for reciprocation, obviously expecting his answer to the same question—she seemed a person highly dependent on reciprocation—but he was unsure how to put it in words.

“Out with it,” she said, and he sighed.

“Well,” he said, “I learned something. I just don’t know what it is yet.”

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