It is a rainy night when you stop into the gallery. You are wearing an overcoat, long wool and black, and your scarf is wrapped tightly around your neck. You are on your way to a bar where jazz is the only music in the jukebox and elegant women with downcast eyes sit alone at the bar, drinking manhattans made with a good bourbon, and strong. You are on your way there to meet some new romance of yours, some new flame; things are indeterminate, and perhaps you have met only once before, and never kissed. You have in your gut the beginnings of a desire for this person, the kind that grows to consume you, but here in this hour of the night it is only just incubated by your thoughts of what this evening might hold: the desire fueled not by the presence of this person but by the thought of what their presence might mean. In your head you are hearing the opening music from a foreign film, mournful, and your hands are in your pockets because you have forgotten your gloves. It is too cold to smoke a cigarette, and the soft rain collects on the hairs of your overcoat, not penetrating, but sparkling in small drops that fall when you shrug your shoulders in to warm your neck. And you are walking along the busy street with car wheels splashing through puddles, and the sounds of street cars stopping and buses rumbling and people moving quickly everywhere, some with umbrellas, some with raincoats, some with hats and gloves. It is a night like this and you are thinking to yourself that when you get to the bar you will order a scotch, a single malt and not a blend: but not too expensive. And you are thinking to yourself that dinner sounds nice too, dinner somewhere with good food and wine, and you can sit there by the window talking of things urbane and profound, and watching pedestrians huddled in doorways outside as the rain intensifies, scurrying to open doors of cabs, carrying them away to their next destination. It is a night like this and you are thinking of other nights like this, some in spring when the weather is more unpredictable, some in summer when men throw their dinner jackets over their shoulders and worry about perspiration, some in autumn when the cold has not quite become bitter. And you are thinking that you should not yet allow this desire to consume you, not just yet. It is hard to say where things might lead. Walking down this street in this rain with these people around, you realize you are early for your evening, and passing by an open art gallery, a painting visible from outside catches your eye, a vast expanse of canvas almost white, except for a corner, where a vivid moment of paint arrives, tantalizing the eye. What is depicts is evocative but not realist, spontaneous, almost aggressive in its statement. You want more: this paint, exiled to the edge, insists on its primacy over the canvas, and the canvas resists. It is intricate, against the undifferentiated expanse; it is vibrant, against the blankness; it is exuberant, against the expressionlessness. You press yourself closer to the window. The gallery is empty, save for a man behind a white desk in the back. He is not looking at you. You think for a minute: is this enough? To see these paintings through a layer of glass, at oblique angles, distorted, untrue. Then you find yourself pushing open the glass door to the gallery, shaking your arms to loose the drops of water still clinging to your coat and scraping your boots on the entry mat, the ubiquitous grey kind with ridges to clear dirty soles. The man in the back behind the desk takes note of your presence with a glance and a nod, and having determined you are a mere interrogator of art and not a potential buyer, he returns to his work. And you are shaking off the chill and looking around: the gallery is the same as the world over, white walls, open space, the paintings lined up just so. The connection between the art on the walls and the feeling of the space is immediate and visceral, an aesthetic sucker punch. The white wall and the white canvas are one and you identify yourself as that spark of color, as that flush of interruption in an otherwise smooth and serene world. But then you take a deep breath, the feeling fades. You are looking at mostly blank canvases again, with little splashes of color that in their configurations suggest with confirming contortions of the human body, distant landscapes examined through a telescope, chattering insects, a blurry haze at dusk catching the orange tint of the sky. The titles corroborate no metaphor: Untitled, they all read. Oil on canvas. You move around the gallery in an art inspection shuffle, examining each one. Untitled. Oil on canvas. Each one the same. Each painting slightly different, the splash of color in a different position, the palette employed a variation of crimsons and forest greens and ochres and midnight blues, with streaks of violet and fuschia. For a second, a minute, an hour, you are removed from you present self, thrust back into your past with a violent motion, so that you are again playing in the foxtails outside of a vacation rental, hiking through redwoods and ferns, watching the play of light at sunrise across your first lover's hair. And then: snapped back into the present by a sound: the shuffle of new feet entering the gallery. Alone no longer, your reverie recedes. You are in a gallery again, with painting on the walls, and a man behind a desk, and a new visitor. A drop of perspiration has formed in your right armpit, and now it falls the brief distance between your flesh and the fabric of your shirt. The feeling of it landing reverberates through your skin and you know then it is time to leave, time to be on your way again. Without a backwards glance you walk to the heavy glass door, pull it open, and step out into the night again. And everywhere there is movement and motion, and you are late now, and in your gut that small spark of desire has grown, intensified, and you wonder as you dodge the umbrellas and animated limbs of passersby whether, once ensconced in the dimly lit bar, with a scotch in your hand and the gaze of a stranger focused upon you, you will share your reverie, share your moment of ex-temporality, or whether you will quietly hold it inside like a small thing, delicate and rare and cherished, to be observed and remembered only when a space in the world of quiet potential opens and you, reluctantly, step in.

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