Chapter 10 #2
I did a lap of the basement. I actually did a small lap.
"You're doing a lap," Raq said. "Talk."
"There's another painting under this painting."
"Is that rare?"
"It's not even rare. Panels got reused, compositions got updated, patrons changed their minds — pentimenti, overpaint campaigns, happens constantly.
" I was leaning into the loupe, and my voice was doing the thing it does when my hands need the rest of me to shut up, going and going.
"What's rare is the quality. Whoever did the top layer could paint.
This isn't a parish handyman piously freshening up the altarpiece.
This is a first-rate hand, matching the original's palette, hiding his own brushwork, going to enormous trouble so that nobody would ever—" My swab came around a fold and stopped.
"So that nobody would ever what," Raq said.
I didn't answer. At the bottom edge of my cleared window, where the angel's robe met the gold of the ground, the original paint was doing something I had never seen in this scene in my life.
The hem pooled. On the floor. The way cloth pools around a figure who has come down hard on both knees and stayed there.
Angels arrive standing. Two thousand years of Annunciations, and Gabriel comes in like a doorman at the Plaza — upright, gorgeous, job to do, lily in hand. They kneel to nobody in that scene; the whole grammar of the picture is that the kneeling goes the other way.
This one was on the ground.
I worked until my shoulders quit, slept badly, and went back in.
The next day I moved up the figure. Correct methodology — establish the extent of the campaign, work systematically toward the face — and also I was flying.
Sal always says the panel tells you where to go next. This one was practically shouting.
Raq watched me work. He'd stopped pretending to look at the window — the watching had weight now, had had weight since the stoop, and it sat on the back of my neck all day like sun, and I'd stopped minding it, which I noticed the way you notice a stair missing under your foot, and kept climbing anyway.
By then I was keeping evidence on that man whether I admitted it or not, and the evidence said: he had stopped looking at the panel.
He used to look. He'd stood at my shoulder over the scorch marks and asked his terrible perfect questions.
Somewhere in that week — somewhere around the time the kneeling started coming up out of the dark — his eyes had left the painting and not gone back.
Not when I left it uncovered at lunch. Not when the raking light made the whole studio a theater.
Not when any human being in possession of a pulse would have stolen one glance at the thing making the crazy lady cry into her solvents.
A man paid to guard a painting, and he kept his eyes off it the way you keep your eyes off an open casket. Deliberately.
I put that with the rest of him, in the place I was keeping the rest of him. The place was getting full.
The day I reached the face, it was four in the afternoon, and the light was going amber.
Three hours in the loupe, one square inch at a time.
The solvent sat its thirty seconds, the swab rolled, the top paint gave — reluctant, then all at once — and a face nobody living had ever seen came up out of the dark at me.
First person since the painter. I'd chased that feeling my whole working life: laundered saints, freshened Madonnas, one memorable Sicilian John the Baptist with an entire second head.
The angel's surface face was serenity itself — downcast eyes, sweet bow mouth, the bland heavenly courtesy of ten thousand altarpieces. That face rolled up onto my cotton in gray whispers, thirty seconds at a time.
The face underneath was weeping.
Not decorous, doctrinal weeping — not one pearl tear placed by committee.
The face under the face was ruined. Eyes swollen, red-rimmed.
The mouth open on something — a word, a plea, the start of a howl, I couldn't tell.
Grief, looking straight out of the panel.
Not downcast. Looking at you. At me. The expression of the newly bereaved — the one I knew from the mirror over Nonna's dresser, the how is everyone still walking around expression — painted by somebody who had either worn that face or held someone who had.
I sat back off the loupe and my eyes were streaming. I registered it from a small professional distance, the way you register humidity.
"Stop," I said, to myself, out loud, like an idiot. My voice came out in pieces.
I wiped my face on my wrist and turned around.
Raq was standing. Not by the chair — closer, ten feet off, stopped mid-floor like he'd hit a wall I couldn't see. And he wasn't looking at the panel. He was looking at me.
"You're crying," he said. Flat. The form's one line.
"I'm working. This is working. Occupational thing. Sit down, you're violating the accords."
He didn't sit. "What's under there."
And I heard myself say it, and it came out steady:
"An angel that shouldn't exist."
Something crossed his face and was gone.
"Shouldn't exist," he said. "According to who."
"According to everybody. According to the entire visual language of Western art, which has exactly one job in this scene, and this painter looked at the job and did—" I gestured at the panel with the swab, and my hand wasn't steady, and I put it down.
"You wouldn't understand. It's an iconography thing. "
"Try me."
"No," I said, and heard how it came out, and softened it the way I do, with procedure. "Client confidentiality. You're premises security. The premises are fine."
He looked at me a moment longer — and for one breath, ten feet of basement air felt like a thing that could be crossed, and some unauthorized part of me wanted him to cross it.
He went back to the chair.
I turned back to the angel and told my pulse it was being ridiculous. It didn't listen.
When the light went I threw the muslin drape over the frame, and he stood and collected his coat, and I walked him up for once — I don't know why, I didn't examine it — and we stood at my open door with the March dark coming in, and the doorframe was right there.
The doorframe. Neither of us looked at it, which is a way of looking at it.
"Lock the door," he said.
"It's always locked. Good night, Raq."
He held my eyes one second past the length that means nothing. Then the street took him, and I stood there with my hand on the frame like an idiot, feeling the brick through the paint.
I gave it twenty minutes. Then I lifted the drape and went back in. You don't stop mid-campaign — the solvent window was open, and the rider could take it up with the solvent.
I called Sal on video that night. Not because the report required it — because I'd hit the edge of what I could hold alone, which for me is a thing with maybe three previous occurrences, all hospitals.
I walked the phone through the cleared zones slowly: the pooled hem, the collapsed kneel, the ash-gray robe, and last, longest, the face.
Sal on my cracked screen is mostly forehead and glare off his reading glasses, and he watches paintings the way old trainers watch fights, talking constantly — there, see, the glaze there, whose hand does that remind you, look at that economy — sixty years of shop patter, never off, it's how he thinks.
He watched the face and the patter stopped.
Nothing dramatic. Just silence, from a man who has narrated every painting to pass under his hands since Eisenhower.
The gravy-hour noise of his daughter's kitchen went on behind him, plates and a television, and Sal looked at my angel with his glasses pushed up into his hair and the loupe-crease standing in his forehead like a scar, and he was silent so long I checked the connection.
"Sal."
"I saw something like this once." His voice had gone somewhere private. "Long time ago. Never finished the job."
"What do you mean you never finished—"