I sat down and pulled the heavy canvas napkin over my lap, feeling very briefly ashamed of myself as he filled my glass with a 1990 Bordeaux, a wine I knew from my days at the restaurant. It was too good for me under any circumstance, especially this one. He was clean-shaven as always, hair jet black, shirt white and untucked, dark-gray trousers slim and pressed. But tonight there were bags under his eyes, and a slight hunch to his shoulders. I glanced into the area of his studio visible beyond his narrow figure and realized it contained a whirlwind of drawings, practically hundreds, stacked on every surface, plans for shows from a decade ago, along with new ideas. I loved the thin paper he used, all that white and blue, and how it seemed so delicate and specific and intentional, how everything was a plan. Helen, his ex-wife, was the booming, enthusiastic personality of Eliot&Sprain who made all the deals and did all the publicity. Charlie stayed in the background, more or less, to deal with the artists and the visions for the work.

“Long day?” I asked, pointing to his studio.

“You’ve no idea,” he said, raising his glass. “Cheers.” He downed a swallow immediately. “The Beijing project I was telling you about at the party?” I nodded. “…is turning bad. They now want to put a high-speed monorail on the bottom, which means the air around it will be filled with fumes and the artist would need thirty times the weight capacity. They’re asking her to become, or hire, I suppose, an architect. It’s a disaster.”

“Why don’t you delegate all this stuff?” I asked him. “I mean, you don’t need to be dealing with these details. Isn’t that the artist’s job?”

“That’s the difference between us and the others,” he said. “We only have about forty artists. Hen and I handle everything on our own. This way everything always gets done right the first time. We’ve never lost an artist, you know. Nobody has left Eliot&Sprain. Not ever.” His eyelid, pale and greasy, twitched. His hand flew up to hold it still.

“Sorry.” He chuckled. “I’m falling apart.”

“That sounds very stressful.”

“It’s mostly boring,” he said, tilting his head. “I’m the only one paid to be bored; it won’t do to pass the burden. Let’s talk about something else. Or my eye will jump off my face.”

“It’s not boring. It sounds hard,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever done anything that hard in my life.”

“You spontaneously create monumental objects of desire,” he offered. “No big deal.”