Chapter 5
RAQ
Two long pushes. I stood on the stoop holding a clipboard I did not need, wearing a name I had borrowed, waiting for a woman with a rolling pin to decide whether to let me in.
Coffee through the door — dark roast, over-extracted, ground too fine. Under that, old plaster. Under that, her.
The locks cycled. Three of them, the new ones, brass and steel doing the work the old Segal never could. She opened the door and the morning light came off the street and found her, and I stood on her stoop and let it happen to me.
Dark hair, still wet at the temples, pinned up with something inadequate to the job — one lock already down, against her neck, and I marked its exact position the way I have marked artillery.
Brown eyes, lids heavy. A crease from the pillow, left cheek, fading.
Five foot four in wool socks, one of which had a hole at the ankle bone, and she was holding her coffee like a weapon, and she was the single most dangerous thing I had encountered in ten thousand years, and I had spent the night on a rooftop confirming there was nothing dangerous on this block.
"You're early," she said.
"It's eight."
"I know what time it is. I have clocks. What I don't have is a security guard in my studio before coffee. So you'll stand there."
I stood there. She drank. She watched me over the rim, and the watching had a weight to it, and I let her do it because the alternative was speaking, and I did not trust what I would say.
"Before any of this happens." She didn't move from the doorway. "Fifth Avenue."
"You have answers about Fifth Avenue."
"I have answers about the painting and the policy. I don't have an answer for how a man moves two city blocks in under a second and then disappears." Steady hands on the mug. Steady eyes. The cadence had edges on it, worked smooth. "That answer. Before you come into my house."
"You could say thank you. Most people pulled out of the path of a bus say thank you."
"I DID say thank you. On the street. While you were doing the disappearing. Which is the part we're discussing."
"I was fast."
"You were impossible."
"And you're alive. Those are related." I held the clipboard at my side. "I don't have a better answer. Not one you'd believe this morning."
Her jaw did something — an argument assembling, then standing down. She stepped back from the door.
"This isn't over," she said. "I want that on the record."
"Noted."
"Come down. Don't touch anything."
Thirteen steps, narrow. I angled my shoulders at the turn.
The ceiling at the bottom was built for the women who'd lived here, and the whole house closed around me like a fist, and the solvents hit — sharp, mineral — and under them, again, her, the warmth of a body that had been working in a closed room, and it went into me and did not come back out, and I had not consented to that, and it did not care.
The saints hit next. Eleven of them, framed, hung at the heights a short woman could reach. Dust on the frames. Paint behind them a different color. I identified seven by iconography before I reached the workbench.
The studio: small. A workbench the length of the south wall, tools in rows worn pale into the wood. Brushes sorted by width, handles out. Scalpels in a roll. Swabs wound by hand — too consistent to be careless, too individual to be bought.
The panel on the easel. Five centuries of silence under tea-colored varnish, and an angel's face looking out of it with great patience.
The painter had guessed. Not well.
"Rules," she said, and set the mug down.
"The chair lives by the stairs." She pointed at it — straight-backed, wooden, built for someone a foot shorter than me, worn pale at the arms. "The chair is where security sits.
Security does not stand behind me while I work.
Security does not touch the workbench. Security does not breathe on five hundred years of gesso.
And security absolutely does not offer opinions. "
"Understood."
"Good."
I picked up the chair one-handed and moved it eighteen inches left.
"What — no. What are you doing. The chair lives by the stairs, I just said the chair lives —"
"Sightline to the window."
She looked at the window. Looked at the chair. Worked the angle — fast — and the argument died in her jaw.
"Fine." She pointed at the chair like it had testified against her. "Stay."
I sat. The chair took my weight with a sound like a small complaint. She turned to the easel, picked up a swab, dipped it, touched it to the varnish.
She lasted four minutes.
"This is weird." Not turning around. "I want that noted, for the record, additionally. A stranger sitting in my grandmother's kitchen chair watching me clean a painting. Objectively weird."
I said nothing. She had not asked a question.
"Do you do this a lot? Sit in people's houses? Is this a career? Did you go to school for it?"
"No."
"No to which part?"
"All of it."
She turned around. The swab in her right hand, held like someone else would hold a cigarette.
And she looked at me — straight on, unhurried, the way she'd looked at the panel — and something in my chest locked.
I am not looked at. Passed over, feared, catalogued by things that wanted my name for leverage — but not looked at, not like this, not like a surface someone intended to understand.
Four seconds. She did it in four seconds, with paint in her nail beds, and I sat in a dead woman's chair and let her, and was furious, and did not look away.
"You understand 'all of it' isn't an answer," she said. "That's the shape of an answer with nothing inside."
"You asked three questions. The answer to all three is no."
"So what did you go to school for?"
"I didn't."
"Of course you didn't." She went back to the varnish. "Nina's going to want to know everything about you, by the way. Everything. I'd apologize in advance but honestly you've earned it."
"Who's Nina?"
The swab stopped. She turned around slowly, like the chair had spoken.
"He asks a question. All morning I get 'no' and 'all of it,' and NOW the man voluntarily asks a — Nina's my best friend. Since second grade. She bit a kid for me once. She's already threatened to come over here and stand guard while I work, so."
"Guard you from what."
"From YOU, mostly."
"From me." I looked at her. "Why would she need to do that?"
Not a deflection. I wanted the answer. A woman I had never met had me marked as something to guard against, and if I had given something away — through the door, on the street, in a description passed between friends — I needed to know what.
She stared at me for a long moment. Something moved across her face — the look you give a man who has failed a test so simple you didn't know it was a test.
"It's a joke," she said, slowly. "She's dramatic. And protective. That's — people say things like that. Ya big weirdo." She turned back to the panel, and then, to the varnish, under her breath but not under enough: "Why would she need to do that. God."
I looked at the window. The window was the assignment.
I had interrogated a joke. I was aware of it approximately four seconds too late, which was four seconds later than anything had gotten past me in a thousand years.
"Where are you from?"
"Originally?"
"No, last Tuesday. — Yes, originally."
"Nowhere you've been."
"Try me. I've been to New Jersey."
The laugh moved in me before I caught it. Her eyes narrowed anyway, like she'd heard it.
"Older than New Jersey," I said.
"Everything is older than New Jersey." She wound a fresh swab, fingers rolling the cotton tight, automatic, ten thousand repetitions in the motion. "Okay. You won't say where you're from, you won't explain Fifth Avenue, and 'no' is apparently a complete sentence. What CAN I ask you?"
"Anything."
"I just did. Five times. I got nothing."
"You got accurate answers."
"Right — because interesting answers are the ones people build." She pointed the swab at me. "You said that. Through my door. I wrote it down after. You have a whole bit, and I have it in writing."
She had written it down.
Heat went through me — low, sudden, entirely physical, my blood remembering something my mind had starved out long ago.
My words, in her handwriting, kept — and I wanted the paper, wanted the handwriting, wanted her wrist under my fingers while she wrote, and the wanting had teeth and gravity and a direction, and the direction was her, bent over the panel with that lock of hair against her neck, three steps away that I was not going to take.
I looked at the window. I made myself look at the window.
The window had never needed this much looking at.
Corners. Glass. Angle of light. Street beyond: empty, correct, quiet.
The scan held for half a second, and then it bent — back toward her, toward the line of her neck, the lock of hair against it, the tendon that surfaced when she tilted her head under the raking light.
I corrected. The scan bent again. The correction cost more the second time, and I sat in the small chair in the small basement and understood, flatly, that I was in a situation with no precedent and no protocol and no exit that I intended to use.
"Why'd you run away?" she said.
I looked back at her. She was working, not looking at me — she'd waited until her back was half-turned to ask it.
"On Fifth," she said. "After. You didn't walk off, you — went. Like the building was on fire. People who save someone's life usually stick around for the part where they get thanked. You ran like you stole something."
I had. Approximately.
"You were safe," I said. "Staying served nothing."
"Staying served nothing." She repeated it flat, an appraiser reading a bad signature. "You know normal people say 'you're welcome,' right? Or 'it was nothing.'"
I went still — the old stillness, the one that empties rooms.
Her hand paused on the varnish. Her shoulders came up a half-inch.