Chapter 8
CATE
Ihad cleaned the same square inch of varnish for forty minutes.
The angel had stopped watching me somewhere around minute twenty — even a five-hundred-year-old painting has limits — and the swab in my hand had gone dry, and I kept moving it anyway, tiny professional circles over paint I'd finished yesterday, because the alternative to moving it was turning around, and eighteen inches behind my right shoulder was a man whose knuckles I could still feel on my neck.
Still. A full day later. That specific two inches of skin under my ear had apparently declared independence from the rest of my nervous system and was running its own government now, and its entire domestic policy was replaying the moment his hand came up and touched my hair like it was something worth being careful with.
And then he ran.
That's the part I kept arriving back at, every time my brain did the loop — and my brain was doing the loop the way the D does Coney Island, terminally, on schedule.
He leaned in. I didn't imagine it. I had replayed it frame by frame like the Zapruder film.
The man leaned. His eyes went to my mouth.
The whole basement got small and warm and inevitable — and then he crossed the room at a speed I still can't explain and told me the light was going at three o'clock in the afternoon and left like the building was on fire.
So I'd spent the night lying under the water stain shaped like Sicily with two facts that would not reconcile. That man almost kissed me. And that man looked at the almost, and ran.
Nina would say I'm being insane. Nina would say, honey, a man who touches your hair like that is not running FROM you.
But Nina wasn't in the basement, and Nina didn't watch him put a whole room between us in half a second like I was a grease fire, and Nina didn't stand there afterward holding a swab like an idiot with her pulse going and her chin still tipped up for a kiss that had left the premises.
I didn't tell her. Last night's report had a crater in the middle of it the size of an almost, and I talked around it for twenty minutes, and if she noticed — she noticed — she let me keep it.
The bell had rung at eight this morning, same as always.
I'd opened the door with my speech ready — I had ANOTHER speech, I am a woman of speeches, this one was called We're Both Adults — and he'd said "Miss Fontana" in the flattest register the man owns, walked past me down the stairs, taken the chair, and become furniture with a jaw.
Miss Fontana. Back to Miss Fontana. Three days of Cate dying on the stairs behind him, and I'd carried my dead speech down after him and we'd spent the morning as two professionals professionally not discussing the eight inches that had almost stopped existing between our mouths.
So: forty minutes on one square inch. The silence in the basement had a texture like a held breath, and every time I moved my head I could feel him not-looking at me with a precision that was somehow worse than staring, and my body — my stupid, traitorous, extremely awake body — kept leaning back into a moment the man himself had sprinted away from, and I was starting to hate all three of us. Him. Me. The body.
Around ten I couldn't take the quiet anymore and made coffee, because that's what my hands do when my head is on fire. I set his cup on the arm of the chair the way I had every day this week.
"Thank you, Miss Fontana."
"You're welcome, Mr. Barrett."
You're welcome, Mr. Barrett. Four days of Cate, of ya big weirdo, of appliance jokes and stool legislation — and now we were two strangers at a parish function, passing beverages. I went back to the easel and attacked a square inch of varnish like it owed me money.
"The raking light," he said, maybe an hour later. "It's angled off the scar."
"I know where my light is angled."
"Hm."
"Don't." I didn't turn around. "Don't hm me today."
He did not hm me. The silence resumed, worse.
We survived the morning like that. We survived the afternoon the same way — me working, him watching the window, both of us fluent in a silence neither of us would translate — and the light was going gray when I reached for the white spirit and the jar was low.
Not empty — low, which for me is the same thing; a conservator who hits the bottom of the jar mid-cleaning is a conservator who improvises, and improvisers kill paintings. The supply house on Stillwell keeps late hours. The jar was maybe two days from actually low.
I took it like a lifeboat.
"I need white spirit." I was already untying my apron. "Supply house. An hour, maybe less."
He stood.
"The rider says on-site during active work," I said, pointing at the chair. "The work is staying here. You follow the painting. Follow it from the chair."
Something crossed his face — there and gone, too fast to name, and after yesterday I was done trying to name the things that crossed his face; my accuracy rate was garbage.
He looked at the window, at the light in it, and for a second I thought he'd argue, and I had a whole speech ready about which of us had lived on this block her entire life and which of us was furniture with a clipboard.
"Take the avenue," is all he said. "Not the side streets."
"I've been walking here since before you—" I stopped, because I'd been about to say since before you were born, and some instinct pulled the sentence like a hand pulling me off a curb. "Chair," I said, and went, and I took the stairs a little too fast, and the cold outside hit my face like a mercy.
I took the avenue there. Coming back, with a gallon can in each hand and the light gone and the cold funneling down the cross streets the way it does in March, I took the side street, because it's four minutes shorter and because he'd told me not to, in exactly that order.
They came off the loading dock of the tile place on 25th.
Two of them. I heard them before I saw them — that's the part I keep, that my ears knew first, some frequency in the footsteps that said wrong while my eyes were still on the pavement ice — and then the taller one was in front of me and the world got very simple.
"Bags," he said. He had his hood up and a knife held low against his leg, casual, the way you'd carry keys.
The other one moved behind me. My heart went off like something dropped in a kitchen, and my hands kept holding the cans, because they're forty dollars a gallon, which is the single stupidest thought I have ever had at knifepoint and I had it with my whole chest.
"Okay," I said. "Okay. They're solvents, they're nothing, they're—"
I put the cans down. I was watching the knife. That's why I can't tell you where he came from.
There was the knife, and the space of one breath, and then the space was him — filling it, all of it, between me and the blade like a wall that had always been there, and I never heard him arrive.
I'd left him in a chair three blocks away.
The tall one's arm was up where the knife had been and the knife was in his hand now — Raq's, the wrong hand, the impossible hand — and he folded it closed with his thumb, one-handed, unhurried, like putting away his own pen.
"No," he said. To both of them. Just that.
It cost him nothing. No stance, no shout, none of the movie grammar.
He stood there in his good coat holding a folded knife that had been open in another man's fist one second ago, and he looked at them with the flat patience of a man at the front of a very long line, and whatever they saw in that look emptied them both out through the soles of their feet.
The tall one went back a step, then off the curb, then they were running, actually running, sneakers slapping ice, and the street was just a street again — me, him, two cans of white spirit sitting upright on the pavement like witnesses.
He picked up the cans. His face when he turned to me was terrible in a way I had no word for — not angry at me, not at them exactly, something underneath both, banked way down and held.
"You took the side street," he said.
"You were watching the painting."
"Yes," he said. "That was the arrangement."
We walked back to my corner in a silence you could have chipped with a chisel.
My legs did the thing where they work fine until you're safe.
By the stoop they were going, and my hands had started — the shake arrives on its own schedule, always after, always when it's least useful — and I got the key into the gate on the third try and then turned around to say something normal, something proportionate, thank you or don't tell Sal or forty dollars a gallon, and what came out instead, at volume, was:
"How were you there?"
He didn't answer.
"Three blocks. Chained door. You were in the chair, I left you in the chair, and you were — nobody walks that. Nobody runs that. I turned around for one second and you were already—"
"You're not hurt," he said. Flat. A man reading the only line on the form that mattered to him.
"I know I'm not hurt!"
"You're angry that you were afraid."
And that — that went in like a blade going exactly where a knife hadn't.
Because it was true, and nobody's supposed to see that, that's load-bearing, the whole apparatus stands on nobody seeing that — and he'd read it off me in the dark from four feet away the way I read overpaint under raking light, and there was one second where the street tilted and the March cold went straight through my coat and I was furious and alive and shaking, with the gate at my back and his impossible face above me looking down with something finally, finally moving in it —
And this time neither of us ran.
I don't know which of us moved. The doorframe hit my back and his hand was in my hair and his mouth came down on mine.
Not careful. Not a question. His lips were softer than anything that hard had a right to be, and then they weren't soft at all, and I opened for him because my body didn't ask me first — and he made a sound low in his chest that I felt through my coat, through my ribs, in my teeth.
And the taste of him — warm and dark and faintly like a struck match, like something that had been burning somewhere a long time — went straight down my spine.
I fisted both hands in his coat and pulled.
He let me move him — this man who doesn't move — and the weight of him pressed me into the doorframe, chest and hips and the hard heat of all of it, until my toes were barely holding the ground.
One hand cradled the back of my skull off the brick.
The other found my waist and gripped — spread rib to hip — and hauled me up into him, and the sound I made into his mouth was nothing I have ever made before, and his whole body answered it. A shudder. Deep. Like a struck string.
He kissed me the way I clean five-hundred-year-old paint — like there was something real under the surface and it had been dark a long time — slow, deep, his teeth catching my lower lip, and the cold was gone, the street was gone, there was brick behind me and furnace in front of me and I wanted his coat off, I wanted his hands under mine, I wanted —
And then he stopped.
All at once, entirely, the way the bus once didn't. He pulled back with his breath gone ragged — his breath, the tide table, ragged — and his eyes in the stoop light had gone wrong.
Not dark. That was the thing — they were always dark, dark past dark, with that blue banked way down under them like something burning behind smoked glass.
The glass was gone. The blue was up — all the way up, surfaced, bright in a way one streetlight and a March night could not account for, blue like the bottom of a flame where it touches the wick — and for one full second the man on my stoop looked at me with eyes that were not, in any way I could defend to anyone, human.
Then he blinked, and the glass came back, and it was just a beautiful man breathing hard in bad light, looking at me the way men look at fires they have set and cannot afford.
"That—" I started.
He stepped back off my stoop. He was leaving. Again. Unbelievably, the man was leaving AGAIN, at speed, like the doorway was on fire and I was the fire, and at the bottom step he paused with his back half to me and said something.
Not to me. Down, and away, at the pavement, at the dark, at nothing — one short phrase, low, in a language I have never heard in my life.
And I've heard languages; this is Brooklyn, I've been yelled at in nine of them.
This was none of them. This was old the way the panel is old, worn the way stairs get worn — vowels like deep water, one long hiss like a blade drawn slow — and it did something to the animal in me that no language has any business doing: every hair on both my arms stood straight up, and the bones behind my ears went cold, and something at the very bottom of my spine said you have heard this before, which was a lie, which had to be a lie.
Then he was gone.
Not walked away — gone. I was looking at him. Between the bottom step and the streetlight there was a length of sidewalk a man has to cross, and he didn't cross it, he was on it and then the street was empty, and the cold moved into the space where he'd been.
I stood in my doorway holding my heartbeat. The cans were on the step — he'd set them down at some point; I have no memory of it. My mouth felt rewired. My arms would not put their hair down.
It didn't happen, I decided. The kiss happened — fine, adrenaline, two people and a knife and body chemistry, a thing that happens, a thing we would both professionally ignore by morning, I would ignore it first and hardest, I am excellent at ignoring things, I have a system and eleven saints.
That was the plan and I was already failing at it, standing there in the cold rebuilding the exact pressure of his hand at the back of my head, when the window went up overhead.
"Caterina." Donnie's voice descended into the night with the joy of a man whose whole year had just been made. "CAT-a-REE-na. I knew it. I said to Joey, I said—"
"Donnie, I swear to God and every saint in my hallway, if you don't shut that window RIGHT NOW I will tell your mother what's actually in your recycling."
The window shut. Not all the way — Donnie never gives you all the way — but enough.
I got inside. I chained the door. And if some sentence tried to put itself together — about the speed, and the eyes, and a language older than churches — I didn't let it finish.
Sane women don't finish sentences like that.
Sane women take a bath, check the chain, and decide the streetlight was doing something strange, because the alternative is not a thought, it's a cliff.
I took the bath. I checked the chain. I lay under the water stain shaped like Sicily with every hair on my arms still standing, and the last thought that got through before the thinking stopped making sense was the one I couldn't refuse:
He hadn't been talking to himself.
He'd been talking to something.