The Gallery After Hours

My name is Meredith, I am 62 years old, and I own a small contemporary gallery downtown in the arts district. My wife Tonya is 59 and she worked as a florist for most of her adult life, and now she works part time at the gallery doing the books and keeping the plants alive, which is funny because she killed every plant we ever had at home.

We have been married 35 years. I proposed to her a week after we met at an artist's opening, when I was 27 and she was 24, and she laughed at me and then said yes, and I have never once regretted it. But I will tell you what does happen after 35 years, and that is a pattern. Friday is takeout and a movie. Saturday we sleep in and go to the farmers market. Sex is Tuesday and Sunday, and it is good, I want that understood, but it is the same good, the same order of operations, the same sigh at the same moment, and somewhere along the last ten years we stopped surprising each other.

So one Tuesday morning, right after the Tuesday in question, I said to her over coffee, "I want to do something with you, and you have to promise not to laugh."

She looked at me over her mug and said, "Now you're making me want to laugh."

"Friday night, after closing, we meet at the gallery. We pretend we don't know each other. You come in as a stranger, I come on as the mysterious owner, and we flirt like it's the first time."

She put the mug down slow. "You want to role play at your own gallery."

"I do."

"And what happens if the stranger likes the owner?"

"Then I suppose the owner finds out," I said, and she smiled in a way I had not seen in a while, sort of crooked and private, and said, "OK, old man, you're on. But don't assume you know what the stranger is gonna do."

That right there was the best sentence I had heard in a decade.

* * *

Friday came and I closed up at six and left the track lights on low in the main hall, the way we do for evening viewings, so the paintings glow and the floor goes all soft and dark. I put on a decent shirt and I waited, and I will admit I was nervous like a kid, checking my phone twice, which was ridiculous since I had been married to the woman longer than some of my artists had been alive.

At seven she came through the front door, and I mean she came through it, because Tonya had on a black dress I had never seen before, fitted, with a low back, and her hair down, and heels, and I forgot my opening line entirely.

She caught me staring and grinned for half a second before she smoothed her face into something coy. "Hi," she said. "I'm sorry, I know it's after hours. The door was unlocked and the lights were on, and I saw the show listing online. Is this a bad time?"

I recovered. "Not at all. I was just closing, but I can give you a private tour, if you'd like. I'm the owner. Meredith."

"Tonya," she said, and shook my hand and held it a beat longer than strangers would. Her hand was warm and I knew every callus on it and still it felt new.

We started at the west wall with the abstracts, and I put my hand on the small of her back to steer her, and I felt her breath change, and that one little thing did more for me than I can explain. I leaned close to her ear while she studied a big blue canvas and said, "You have the most extraordinary neck. I've been trying not to look at it since you walked in."

"Have you," she said, not turning around. "Do you say that to every woman you give tours to?"

"Never. I mostly say things about the paintings. I'm clearly out of practice."

"Well," she said, drifting to the next piece, "you're doing fine so far." She stopped in front of a small nude study we had gotten from a painter out of Santa Fe, and she tilted her head. "Is this the sort of thing you like? As an owner, I mean. As a collector."

"I like things that make me want to keep looking," I said. "Which is a problem, because you've been standing in front of that painting for two minutes and I haven't looked at it once."

She laughed, and it was her real laugh, and she swatted my arm and said, "You're terrible, Meredith. Is that really your name? It sounds made up."

"It's Scottish. My mother was stubborn about it."

"I like it. It suits you. Sort of craggy and old fashioned." She glanced at me sideways. "How old are you, anyway?"

"Sixty two. And before you ask, yes, I can still keep up."

"I didn't ask," she said, walking on, "but I'm glad to have it on file."

About that time the door to the framing workshop opened in the back and Hamish came out wiping his hands on a rag, because of course he was working late, the man is never not working late, he has done our framing and hauling for six years and he is 37 and built like a door and stubbornly polite. He stopped when he saw us.

"Sorry, Mered," he said, and then caught himself and looked at Tonya and back at me, and I could see him deciding whether I wanted him to know or not, and I made the choice for him.

"Hamish, come meet Tonya. She's a guest. Tonya, Hamish does all our framing, and half the reason the gallery doesn't fall down."

Tonya put her hand out and Hamish took it, and she said, "Nice to meet you. Are you enjoying watching me get flirted at by your boss?"

Hamish laughed. "He's paying me extra to stand in the wings and say, well done, sir."

"See, you're both terrible," she said. But I watched her eyes, and while Hamish talked about the frame he was building, a big maple job for the Hunter show, she kept looking at his hands, at the way he turned the rag over and picked at a fleck of sawdust on his thumb, and she looked a good while, and then she caught me noticing and did not even blush, just raised an eyebrow at me like, well.

We went back to the office for wine, the three of us, and I poured us generous glasses and we sat around the little table among the invoices and the flat files, and Tonya took off her heels under the table, I could hear them drop, an old habit, and Hamish asked her what brought her out on a Friday night and she said, "A whim. I decided this year I'm doing things on whims."

"I approve of whims," Hamish said.

"Then here's one," I said, and I looked at Tonya first to make sure she was with me, and she was, I could tell, so I said it. "The game tonight is that nobody here knows anybody. We're three strangers at a gallery after hours, and we can be whoever we want to be, and whatever happens, happens, and tomorrow we all go back to being who we actually are. All in?"

Hamish looked at Tonya and Tonya looked at me, and I want to tell you the look she gave me was an answer to a question we had maybe never said out loud in 35 years.

"I'm in," she said. "Strangers. Got it." She picked up her glass and her chair scraped as she moved it, and she moved it around the corner of the table so she was sitting beside Hamish, closer than she needed to be, close enough that her knee touched his, and Hamish went still the way a man goes still when he does not trust his luck.

"Just so we're clear," Hamish said slowly, "this is a game, and everyone in it wants to be in it."

"That's the rule," Tonya said. "Anyone can say stop, any time, and we stop and have more wine." She turned to him. "So. Stranger. Tell me something about yourself that isn't boring."

He thought about it, turning his glass. "I'm an art handler. I build frames, I haul crates, I hang things straight. And I've been coming to this gallery six years and I have never once stayed past closing for a social reason, until tonight."

"Why tonight?" she asked.

"Seemed like the night for it," he said, and looked at her, and she looked back.

I sat there across the table with my wine and watched my wife of 35 years lean in toward a man two years older than our marriage and ask him about the maple frame he was building, and touch his forearm when he mentioned the miters, and laugh at