Chapter 97: LIUXIAN’S FOOD CHOICES WERE RARELY WRONG

"Come on," Guiying said, already moving. "I want to see the main galleries."

Liuxian fell into step beside him without a word, which was one of the things Guiying had quietly come to appreciate about him—he never made you explain yourself twice when your direction was already clear.

The main galleries were further in, past a set of tall double doors that opened into a space that made you stop involuntarily just from the scale of it.

The ceiling vaulted high overhead, the light coming down clean and diffused from skylights that ran the full length of the room, and the pieces on the walls were the kind you’d heard about, read about, seen in print so many times that seeing them in person still managed to be a surprise.

Because print lied.

Print always lied.

It flattened things, reduced them, gave you the information without the presence.

Guiying stood in the entrance of the room and felt the presence.

"Oh," he said, quietly, to no one in particular.

There was a Klimt on the far wall.

Not the famous one, not the "Kiss" or the "Judith," but one of the landscape pieces—a square canvas dense with gold and color, the kind of surface that looked almost tactile from a distance, like you could press your fingers into it and feel something.

The gold leaf caught the gallery light differently depending on where you stood, shifting between warm and cool in a way that made the painting seem alive, like it was breathing in a rhythm too slow for the eye to follow but present nonetheless.

Guiying walked toward it the way you walk toward something you’d been waiting for without knowing you were waiting for it.

He stopped a few feet from it and just looked.

The attendant, a young woman in a dark blazer with the museum’s small lapel pin on her jacket, noticed them stop and drifted over with the quiet, unhurried manner of someone who loved their job and never made you feel like they were performing it.

"Klimt’s landscape work is often overlooked in favor of his figurative pieces," she said, settling beside them at a comfortable distance. "He painted these for himself, largely away from commission, away from patronage. He would go to the countryside in the summers and work on them in long sessions, sometimes for weeks on end."

She paused. "What’s interesting is the technique. He used a square format deliberately, which was unusual. He felt rectangles implied direction—that your eye was being told where to go. The square resists that. It holds you in the center of itself."

Guiying looked at the canvas.

The square format.

He hadn’t consciously noticed it before she said it, but now that she had, he felt it—the way the painting contained you rather than guided you.

"He wanted the viewer to arrive at their own conclusion," the attendant continued, "rather than be led to one." She smiled slightly. "Which is either generous or maddening, depending on who you ask."

She left them to it after that, drifting back to her position near the doorway, available without being present.

Guiying appreciated that too.

He stood in front of the Klimt for a long time.

"What’s your conclusion?" Liuxian said, from beside him.

Guiying tilted his head slightly. The gold shifted.

"That he was very happy when he painted this," he said. "Or that he was trying very hard to remember what happiness felt like. One of the two." He paused. "I can’t decide which one. Maybe that’s the point."

Liuxian looked at the painting. "Which would you prefer it to be?"

Guiying considered this seriously.

"Happiness," he said. "I’d prefer it to be happy."

There was a Hopper further along the room, an interior scene—a woman sitting alone at a table near a large window, the light outside going amber and late, the kind of light that belonged to a specific hour and no other. 𝚏𝕣𝐞𝗲𝐰𝕖𝐛𝐧𝕠𝕧𝚎𝚕.𝐜𝚘𝗺

The woman wasn’t doing anything in particular. She was simply there, in the light, in the late afternoon, in whatever she was thinking.

The attendant appeared again, gentle as before.

"Hopper painted loneliness the way other painters painted beauty," she said. "Not as something to be fixed or mourned. Just documented. Present." She paused. "He said once that what he wanted to paint was the sunlight on the side of a house. That’s all. And somehow that became this."

She gestured at the woman at the window, the amber light, the particular quality of the silence in the frame.

Then she stepped back and left them with it.

Guiying looked at the painting for a long moment.

"She doesn’t look sad," he said.

"No," Liuxian agreed.

"She looks... settled," Guiying said. "Like she’s been running for a long time and she finally sat down." He was quiet for a moment. "Like she’s decided the light is enough for right now."

He felt Liuxian look at him.

Guiying kept his eyes on the painting.

"Hungry?" Liuxian said, after a moment.

Guiying laughed, short and genuine. "You’re always thinking about food."

"It’s past two," Liuxian said.

Guiying looked at his watch. It was, in fact, past two.

He had no idea where the morning had gone, which was, he supposed, the sign of a good museum. The sign of a good anything, really.

That time moved differently inside it.

"Fine," he said. "But I want to come back one day."

"We’ll come back, soon," Liuxian said.

Guiying took one last photograph of the Hopper—just the light in the corner of the frame, the way it fell across the floor—and then tucked his camera back against his side and turned away from the wall.

They walked out of the main gallery together, back into the bright, hushed corridors, back toward the afternoon and whatever Liuxian had already quietly decided about where they were going to eat.

Guiying didn’t ask. He had learned by now that Liuxian’s food choices were rarely wrong.

He walked beside him and thought about the woman in the amber light, settled and still, deciding the light was enough.

He thought he was beginning to understand that particular feeling.