Chapter 10
CATE
Proceed at her discretion. Uncover whatever is there. Document everything.
Men with that kind of money do not say whatever. They say pending review. They say subject to approval, and then they make you wait three weeks so you remember whose painting it is. This one had handed me the keys the same afternoon I asked for them, and I was so happy I didn't stop to ask why.
Sunday I went to Nina's, the way I have every Sunday since Nonna's been gone.
Under the el at 86th with the D banging overhead, past the fish store with the gates half down and Sal Jr. hosing the sidewalk, past Mrs. Esposito on her folding chair in forty-degree March like the chair was a government post she could not abandon.
"Caterina. You look thin."
I'd seen her two days ago. "You look beautiful, Mrs. E."
"Don't be fresh."
Nina's kitchen at gravy hour: the pot going since ten, the TV arguing with nobody in the front room, Gina doing homework at one end of the table with the specific fury of a twelve-year-old asked to exist near family.
Nina's mother was at the stove, and Nina's grandmother was at the table breaking the ends off green beans, and Nina was everywhere at once — and for one second, standing in the doorway with my containers, I saw them the way you see a painting.
Four of them. One line, unbroken, running in both directions. And for a second I couldn't swallow.
Then Nina's grandmother said, "Caterina, you gonna stand there like the gas man?" and Nina's mother put the spoon in my hand and told me to stir, and the moment passed the way moments are allowed to pass in that kitchen: standing up, with a job.
Nina cooked and cross-examined at the same time, which is her gift, wooden spoon reclaimed and pointed like a gavel.
"So. The appliance. How's the appliance."
"He sits. I work. It's riveting."
"Uh-huh." Stir. "Connie's cousin walked past your place twice this week. And Donnie's been running commentary up and down the block — man the size of a garage door, eight o'clock every morning, like clockwork. He does a whole bit, I hear. There's a voice."
"Donnie needs a hobby."
"Donnie HAS a hobby." The spoon pointed at me. "Same hobby as everybody on that block. It's you."
I made it through dinner — through the macaroni, through the gravy, through Gina's recitation of everything wrong with the seventh grade, I held the line like a professional.
She took me apart at the sink. She washed, I dried, and we both looked at the window over the faucet instead of at each other, because that's where the real talking happens in that house.
"Okay," Nina said, to the window. "Now the part you've been not saying all afternoon."
"There's no part."
"Cat. You've dried that same pot three times. Your face has been doing a thing since the rigatoni. I've known that face since Sister Immaculata's class. Spill it or I start guessing, and you hate my guessing."
I looked at the pot. The pot had no advice.
"Two guys pulled a knife on me on 25th," I said, "and Barrett took it away from them in about one second, and then he walked me home, and then we kissed on my stoop until my legs stopped working, and then he vanished. Again. That's the part."
Silence. The faucet ran. In the front room the TV said something enthusiastic about a mattress sale.
"MADONNA—" Nina shut the water off and turned around with the sponge still in her fist, and I watched her whole system try to process two emergencies at once, the fear and the delight colliding in her face like two guys going for the same parking spot.
"A KNIFE? Somebody pulled a KNIFE on you and I'm hearing about it at my SINK?
Are you — were you hurt, did they touch you, why didn't you—"
"I'm fine. Nobody touched me. It was over before it started, Nina, I mean that literally, I've had sneezes that lasted longer—"
"—and you KISSED him?" The delight won the parking spot. She threw the sponge into the sink. "You kissed the refrigerator. You MADE OUT with the REFRIGERATOR. On the STOOP, like it's 1962—"
"Keep your voice down—"
"—Gina, sweetheart, go check on the television."
Gina, who had absolutely been listening, evacuated with her homework at the speed of someone planning to listen from the hallway.
Nina turned back to me. She gripped the counter. Quieter, with her whole chest: "Tell me everything. Start with the knife, because I need to be scared first. Then we do the kissing, because I need my strength."
So I told her. The supply run, the side street — "you took the SIDE street" — the two of them off the loading dock, the forty-dollars-a-gallon thought, and then Barrett arriving out of nowhere, the knife folding closed in his hand like a church bulletin.
"Out of nowhere from WHERE? You left him at the house."
"I left him at the house."
"That's three blocks."
"I'm aware of the geography, Nina."
She looked at me for a long moment, and I watched her decide not to chase it — the way she does when a fact won't behave and dinner's still on the table. "Ex-military," she said, half to herself, like tightening a screw that keeps backing out. "They train for that. Okay. The kissing."
"It just happened. He looked at me and said, 'You're angry that you were afraid.' Just like that. Like he'd been reading my mail for thirty years. And I was shaking, and then I don't know which of us moved."
"And?"
"And what?"
"Caterina Rosa. AND?"
"And it was —" I looked at the window. "You know when I take overpaint off something, and a face nobody's seen in five hundred years comes up out of the dark, and I'm the one standing there? First person since the painter. You know how I get."
"Yeah."
"It was like being the painting."
Nina didn't say anything for a second. Then she put her hand flat on her chest, over the crucifix, and said, "Okay. Wow. Okay," and took her hand off her chest and pointed at me. "New terms. I meet him."
"Nina—"
"I'm not asking to interrogate the man, I'm asking to LOOK at him.
From a distance. Like the aurora borealis.
" She picked the sponge back up, negotiation concluded in her favor, the way all negotiations with Nina conclude.
"And the calls continue. Every night. Non-negotiable.
A man takes a knife off two guys in one second, I want a heartbeat check on you every twenty-four hours like a hospital. "
"Fine."
"Swear on the saints."
"I don't believe in the saints."
"SWEAR ANYWAY."
I swore anyway. And when I left she held my face in both her dish-warm hands in the doorway, in front of the whole street, and looked at me the way she's looked at me since we were seven, and said, "You're happy.
Under all of it. You know that, right?" — and didn't wait for an answer, which was merciful, because I didn't have one.
I walked home under the el with the containers she forced on me, and my block was my block, gates down, lights on, Donnie's window flickering blue, and I let myself in through three locks and stood in my kitchen listening to how quiet it was.
The quiet had never bothered me before.
The next morning, the bell rang twice, and the real work began.
Two long pushes, and my pulse did a thing I didn't authorize, and I stood in my hallway for one second getting my face right before I opened the door. That's where we were now. I needed a second to open my door.
He looked — I don't have a better word for it — spent. Not tired; I've never seen him tired; something else, something banked lower than usual, and his sweep of the street before he came in ran longer than the paranoia standard, both directions, twice. I didn't ask.
Uncovering is mostly chemistry, and chemistry is mostly patience, and patience is mostly cotton.
I spent two days on tests before I touched an inch that mattered.
Little rolled swabs, a solvent ladder, each mix logged — you go up the ladder rung by rung until the overpaint softens and the original underneath doesn't care, and if you're lucky, if the centuries are on your side for once, there's a varnish layer between the two like a sheet of glass, and the overpaint comes off it clean, and the original underneath was never touched at all.
I was lucky. On the third day I got the layer to cleave, low on the robe, in the corner where the decades-old patch had already told me somebody'd been.
The days had a shape by then, and the shape had a problem.
Mid-morning I made coffee, because I'm Italian and he's breathing. I brought him the cup.
He reached for it. My fingers were still on it. For one second we both held it — his thumb against my knuckle, the ceramic going warm between us — and neither of us let go, and neither of us looked at the cup, and the basement got very small.
"Thank you," he said.
"Uh-huh," I said, like a person.
I went back to the easel. My knuckle held the print of his thumb for an hour. It happened again the next morning, and the morning after that. Neither of us fixed it.
And once, mid-sentence — I was narrating solvent ratios to the panel, riveting stuff — I turned to ask if he was listening, and his eyes were on my mouth.
Not the window. My mouth. He moved them off me, unhurried, the way you'd holster something, and I lost the ratio I was holding and had to start the count again.
The terms held all week the way a dam holds. Technically. With pressure readings.
The overpaint came up off the old varnish in soft gray curls on the cotton, and I stopped breathing, because what was underneath was a different painting.
The robe under the robe was a different color.
Not restoration-different. Composition-different.
The surface robe was the pink of every Annunciation you've ever walked past; the robe underneath was gray going to white at the hem, ash colors, penitential colors, and the fold structure didn't match — the folds underneath were the folds of a figure kneeling, not standing.
Somebody had not repaired this angel. Somebody had repainted him entire — a whole second angel built over the first.