All Chapters of Go Away Chris : Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

Ayesha's POVDecember arrived with the particular cold that settled into old buildings and that no amount of radiator adjustment fully resolved, and I spent the first week of it in the gallery overseeing Suki's show with the focused attention that opening weeks required, which meant I was at the gallery long hours and at home for the compressed, essential parts of the day.Suki's show was good. Genuinely good, not in the qualified way of someone's first real solo effort that you praise for its ambition and forgive for its unevenness, but in the way of work that has found its voice and is speaking at full volume. The opening night brought people who bought things, which was the most honest measure of a show's success, and Suki stood in the center of it with the expression of someone who is slightly overwhelmed and deeply glad.Diana came, which Suki had not expected and which moved her visibly. Diana stood in front of the narrow blue and gray piece for a long time and said nothing, whi

Ayesha's POVI met Ken Adler on a Wednesday afternoon in February, which was not a significant Wednesday in any other respect. The gallery had a small mid-week showing of three new artists I was trialing, modest work displayed modestly, the kind of afternoon event that brought in a slow, interested trickle rather than a crowd.He came in near the end of the afternoon, when most of the other visitors had gone, and stood in front of the work of an artist named Joe, a young man who painted domestic interiors with a particular attention to the quality of empty rooms and the specific melancholy of spaces that were recently left.I was near the desk, updating attendance notes, and I watched the new visitor from the corner of my attention the way I always watched people in the gallery, not to assess them but because how people stood in front of art told you things about them that conversation didn't always reach.He stood in front of Joe's largest piece for a long time. He was medium height,

Chris's POVI made the appointment the following Monday. Not because I was entirely convinced I needed it, which itself was probably evidence that I did, but because Ayesha had asked me to and because the request had come from a place so measured and so clearly earned that refusing it would have been a particular kind of cowardice I was not willing to add to an already long account.The therapist's name was Dr. Osei. He had been recommended by David, who had seen him briefly after a difficult period in his own marriage two years earlier and who had described him, in the direct way David described things he considered important, as someone who did not allow you to talk around the thing you had come to talk about.His office was in a quiet building ten minutes from the Azul offices, a room with natural light and two chairs facing each other at an angle that was neither confrontational nor evasive, which I appreciated in the way you appreciate something that has been thought about. He wa

Chris's POVGordon Reeves had been on the Azul board for eleven years. He was seventy-one, sharp in the way of men who have spent decades reading rooms and people, and he had a quality of directness that I had always respected, the willingness to say the difficult thing without pleasure in the difficulty. He was not a man who enjoyed delivering bad news. He delivered it because he thought you deserved to have it.He asked to see me on a Thursday morning in April, in the quiet way of a board member who wants a conversation that does not appear in any formal record. We met at the club he had been a member of for thirty years, in a room with low light and leather chairs and the specific atmosphere of a place where significant things were said without being written down.He ordered tea. I ordered coffee. We talked about the Pearson contract, which had finally closed the previous week, and about a new initiative I was exploring that he had questions about, and then the tea and coffee arriv

Chris's POVThe final piece arrived in May.It was constructed with more patience and more precision than anything that had come before it, which told me, in retrospect, that Vanessa had understood the earlier attempts as insufficient and had taken her time with this one. She had found the specific angle that the previous approaches had been missing, which was not an image or a reputation or a board member's concern, but something that would arrive as unambiguous, in the form of a person whose presence alone would do the work without a single word needing to be said.I was at a professional dinner, a quarterly event with key stakeholders that I attended without fail. Ayesha was not with me. She had been at a late gallery event and had mentioned she might come if it finished early enough, which it hadn't.The dinner was at a hotel venue, a large room with round tables and the particular hum of a hundred people in professional conversation. I was at the primary table with Gordon and two