The second floor was crowded all the way to the stairs, but the lower floor was noticeably calmer. I followed the handsome typography on the wall pointing toward the exhibition hall and walked farther in. The farther I got from the entrance and the commotion upstairs, the more the calm, dreamy lounge music filling the interior began to reach my ears.
"......"
The moment I turned the concrete corner and, under soft indirect lighting, saw the painting hanging on the wall, my toes wriggled inside my canvas sneakers. Heat rushed to my face. I could feel the upper rim of my ear burning red.
It felt like going to school one day and finding my diary posted page by page on the bulletin board next to the front gate. Or like those occasional dreams where everyone around me is fully dressed while I alone am naked—an embarrassment I watch as if I were someone else, helpless and mortified.
That was the first feeling.
The roughly twenty viewers looked mostly like people killing time while waiting for things to thin out upstairs. But that didn’t matter. I was a complete nobody, and I wasn’t stupid enough not to realize that, from where I stood, simply getting an opportunity like this was tremendous luck and something to be grateful for.
Alienation, a nude of Juhan that still didn’t have a proper title and was temporarily labeled Untitled, and one more piece I’d finished after that—three paintings in total were hung side by side with space between them.
The gallery was not as small as I’d expected. A little over ten works were displayed with enough room that they didn’t intrude on one another’s individuality. Watching people drift in front of each piece in their own way, I moved toward the empty wall to the right of the entrance—nothing hung there—and leaned my shoulder against it.
There weren’t many visitors, but among them, one man stood out for lingering unusually long in front of Alienation, while most others gave more attention to the two recent works.
Standing straight with a long umbrella in a plastic sleeve touching the floor, he was an East Asian man with hair long enough to brush his shoulders. From the glimpse of his profile I couldn’t be sure, but he looked Korean. And even from that brief side view, I could guess he was quite neat and handsome.
Even after two or three teenagers tittered as they passed—Alienation was bolder and more mischievous in style than the two recent works—the man remained there for a long time.
After that, he went back and forth among the three paintings, checking the captions over and over. As if he were trying to confirm that what he’d seen was unquestionably true.
Among people who moved along the route like they were on a slow stroll, stopping in front of a painting for ten seconds at most, his behavior couldn’t help but stand out.
It was the first moment I faced, in person, the meaning of a painting not as a tool for expressing me, but as a painting that viewers interpret, feel, and receive as they please.
The initial shame faded. What hung there was no longer my naked flaw.
It had become a light joke for every visitor here, including the long-haired man; a bland slice of everyday life they brushed past like a streetlamp or a shop window; or perhaps their own naked flaws mirrored back at them.
At last the man began to move.
He took a few steps away from the painting, then turned back. As I’d expected, he was better than average in looks. Our eyes met—me still leaning against the wall—and, remembering what my English teacher had taught me about etiquette, I offered a slight smile. But he ignored the greeting, kept his face set, and walked out of the gallery.
He didn’t look like someone who’d just found a painting he liked. I felt a little sorry, sensing that his long scrutiny of my work probably hadn’t been for positive reasons. But what hung there had already left my hands and existed on its own. Even if it made someone’s face go hard, there was nothing I could do now.
I stood there leaning against the wall for about thirty minutes, watching the visitors. As I observed the varied reactions of the people viewing my paintings, I was surprised to feel a desire to draw stir inside me.
Until now, the urge to draw had always begun within me; now it was being triggered from another direction.
I wanted to expose myself a bit longer to that intriguingly unfamiliar sensation, but it was time to move on if I was going to keep to the plan.
Before leaving the gallery, like that man a little earlier, I looked back. They had come out of me and had once been part of me, but now they existed independently of me—living and moving as others gave them new meanings and reshaped them through their own perspectives.
A couple who had passed in front of me earlier while I was sitting on a bench now stood before Alienation, talking with serious faces. I watched them a moment longer, then left the gallery without lingering.
The second floor was still as boisterous as if a party were going on, but I did manage to congratulate Shushu in person. Busy as he was, he stepped away for a moment and walked me to the gallery entrance.
"I didn’t want to be accused of overprotecting you, so I’ve tried not to fuss, but... it’s a strange city and it’s raining. Why not just take the car everywhere?"
Holding up an umbrella wide enough for two and tilting it farther toward me, he looked worried.
But before I met him, I’d gotten along just fine accepting as part of life the hassle of taking a bus in the rain, the annoyance of damp socks as water seeped into my sneakers. Besides, the rain had thinned to a fine, drifting mist.
Faced with his expression—as if I’d said I was about to charge into a fire bare-skinned—I couldn’t help but laugh.
"I’m only going to visit the two galleries I missed yesterday and head straight back to the hotel. I’ll message you every time I move. You know I don’t do anything you really need to worry about."
He sighed lightly as he took his hand from his pants pocket and straightened the collar area of my jacket. His breath touched near my forehead.
"Mostly, yes. It’s just that sometimes your spur-of-the-moment moves make my heart drop."
Did I? I didn’t think I’d ever done anything worth worrying about. I looked up at him, puzzled. He gave a conceding smile and handed me the umbrella.
Even after that he couldn’t quite relax his expression and rattled off a string of perfectly sensible cautions. I half-forced him to go ahead of me, then started down the rainy street.
It took over four hours to slowly tour the two galleries I’d missed because I’d stayed longer than planned at the Art Institute of Chicago yesterday, and then to walk back to the hotel. Except for a fifteen-minute break for coffee and a muffin at a café near one gallery, I’d been on my feet the whole time, so by the end my legs felt heavy.
In the elevator up to my room, I had to grip the bar and lean into the corner. Thinking I hadn’t felt this kind of physical fatigue in quite a while, I chuckled at my reflection in the gleaming elevator doors.
It felt remote that only a few months ago moving boxes nearly every day and soaking my T-shirt with sweat had been routine. And now I was in a /N_o_v_e_l_i_g_h_t/ city I’d never even thought about visiting—Chicago.
My body was tired, but my head was rushing with images I wanted to draw. He’d said experience is an artist’s capital, and he was right. From the morning when I’d faced my paintings on the gallery wall, all the way until I returned to the hotel—everything I’d seen, heard, and sensed pricked at the skin of my senses like needles, raising vivid beads of bright red blood.
The images were still scattered, not yet gathered into a single concept, but I wanted to capture them before they dulled.
As soon as I reached the room, I took off only my jacket and started sketching right away. Over several pages I recorded the images I wanted in quick croquis. Where needed, I added short notes.
Time wasn’t abundant, so I focused, finished four or five pages of sketches, then hurriedly undressed and headed to the bathroom. When I came out from my shower, he was in my room.
He was standing at the table by the window, looking down at my drawing notebook. He lifted his head and looked over at me.
"When did you get here?"
I didn’t have to try; the moment I saw him, the muscles in my face loosened and a smile wanted to slip out. Biting my lower lip and forcing my quickening steps to slow, I walked toward him. His eyes skimmed my entire body in a quick instant. The way his gaze caressed me—hungry and fervent—felt like a taut wrap tightening around a freshly showered body.
"Ah... sorry. It was open, so I looked a little."
He apologized, suppressing the desire that flickered in his eyes.
"It’s fine."
I smiled and shook my head at his apologetic look as he let the page fall from his fingers. He ran my damp hair between his fingers and lightly wrapped an arm around my waist. Saying it was okay to look at the drawings seemed to have put him in a good mood.
Wanting more of his scent—deep, intense, never vulgar, heavy in a way that made me sink—I carefully pressed my nose to the shoulder of his jacket. That scent was faint, almost not there, but every perfume he used and every combination worked for me.
"Did the event go well?"
"Mm, the event itself went fine, but..."
I looked up at his trailing words. Narrowing his eyes, he tucked my wet hair behind my ear and said,
"When I asked you to come to a lunch tomorrow, Shushu made a huge fuss. Even if it’s not work or networking or anything like that, you can still build some acquaintance with people. He’s better than before, but he’s still stubbornly closed off."
He must have thought he was complaining at length about something I didn’t need to know, because he stopped there. Then he checked his watch, changed his expression, and smiled gently.
"I want to shower again before we go out. Want to wait while I get ready?"
"I will."
After he returned to his room, I dried my hair first. I wasn’t growing it out on purpose, but before coming to Chicago we’d gone for haircuts together and I’d only had mine trimmed, so unless I tucked it behind my ears, the in-between length looked a little messy.
I didn’t know how to style it with gel or wax; I figured I should cut it short once we were back in Seoul. I was just undoing the knot of my robe to change when the doorbell rang. It seemed my sister had finished getting ready a bit early and come up first. Tightening the belt again and retying the knot, I headed to the door.
"Who is it?"
"......Is Lau Weikun here?"
"......"
After a brief pause, the voice outside wasn’t my sister’s.
Through the fisheye lens I saw a man hovering in the hall. He didn’t look like hotel staff, but since he’d come asking for him by name, I couldn’t pretend not to hear.
As soon as I pulled the left door chain inward and opened up, I recognized the visitor at a glance. He was the man who had stood a long time in front of Alienation at the gallery that morning.
The odd coincidence made my eyes widen on their own, but he didn’t seem to recognize me at all. He looked impatient, knitting his brows as he stared straight at my face.
"Are you Korean by any chance?"
When I said yes, his doubtful gaze swept once over me in a shower robe. The man didn’t bother to hide that he intended to figure out exactly who I was.
"Where’s the person staying in this room? Is it okay for you to open the door like that? He’s going to be really mad."
He spoke like he knew him better than the guy who’d opened the door from inside—me.
"He’s... in the shower."
At my answer, the man clicked his tongue and shrugged as if incredulous. From his mutter about how bold we were in broad daylight, he probably imagined he and I had been tangled up in sex until just now. And he seemed to have concluded I was a sex partner brought here by him.
"I’ll just go in and wait. That’s fine, right?"
It sounded like he was asking permission, but without waiting for an answer he stepped over the threshold. Yet, as he himself had said, I had no right to let just anyone in. I eased into his path and gave him a troubled look.
"If you tell me who you are, I can let him know..."
His mouth twisted as he glanced at me sidelong. He looked like he had no intention of hiding or softening any of his feelings toward me.
"Is Baek Yuni already here?"
It was his voice.
He pulled the towel off his head and, looking from the master bedroom into the entry hall, walked slowly toward the door. From his emptied expression and his eyes alone, it was hard to read what he felt seeing the man.
"What is this."
At his openly hostile reaction, the man shook his head and laughed.
"That’s what you say after years apart?"
"I asked what this is."
Barefoot, he walked to the entryway and drew me behind him by the arm. Judging by the way he pressed forward, crowding the other man, this was not a welcome guest.
The man flicked his gaze between him and me—both in shower robes—and then, as if none of that mattered, looked straight at him and spoke.
"I came because I have something to say."
"Do we have the kind of relationship where you can show up like this, say you have something to say, and I’m supposed to carve out my precious time to listen?"
"Shushu’s work is selling well. It’s opening day and most of it already had sold-out tags. You’re staying at the same hotel, right?"
"So what. Are you here to threaten me or something?"
The man snorted and let his eyes drop at an angle. Then he tapped the tile of the hall with his long umbrella in its plastic sleeve.
"You’re really something, you know that? I was honestly shocked. You tracked down the artist of Alienation after all?"
"......"
He sounded like someone poking around everywhere to find whatever weakness the other might have. Yet for someone aiming at another’s weak point, he himself looked cornered.
Unsure how to handle this, he stared at the man with a complicated expression. Then he glanced back to his left where I stood and made up his mind.
