Chapter 10 #3
"Where are the wings," he said, over me, flat, and it was not the voice of a man asking. It was the voice of a man checking.
My stomach went somewhere. "I'm not there yet. The shoulders are still under overpaint, I've been working the face—"
"Look now. While I'm on."
So I set the phone on the easel ledge, and I raked the light — killed the work lamp's flood, brought the beam across the surface at a fingernail's height, the angle that makes a painting stop being a picture and start being terrain.
Raking light doesn't read color. It reads topography.
Every ridge of original brushwork stands up in relief; every old scrape throws a shadow; the panel turns into a relief map of everything ever done to it, and there, under the painted wings — the big conventional glory-wings of the top campaign, spread like a hotel headboard — the original surface told it.
Two long, low, symmetrical scars. Shoulder blades to mid-back, right where wings root in every Annunciation ever built.
The original had had wings — laid in, built up, gilded; I could read the ghost of feather-work in the ridging, patient, loving, hundreds of hours — and then somebody had sanded them down.
To the gesso. To the bone. Not scraped in anger, not vandalized: abraded, evenly, thoroughly, the way I sand a fill — with intention, with skill, with time.
And then the same original hand — the same palette, the same fine grieving glazes, I'd stake my name on it — had painted over the ruin of his own wings the ash-gray robe of a figure on its knees.
The painter had made his angel winged. Then the painter had unmade the wings himself, and painted the loss.
And four hundred years later, a second hand — first-rate, careful, paid — had come along and put the wings back on top, and stood the kneeling figure up, and dried the face, and turned a scream into an altarpiece.
"Cat." Sal, very quiet, from the ledge. "Who else has seen this."
"Nobody. You. Me." I didn't say: and a man in a chair who only saw the back of my head. "Sal, what did you see? You said you saw something like—"
"Not on the phone." And then, before I could get a grip on that sentence, in his shop voice, too fast: "Document everything.
You photograph every stage, you upload nothing, you keep the drive on your body.
Condition report language only in writing — overpaint campaign, undocumented intervention.
Do your job, get paid. Cat. Tell me you heard me. "
"I heard you."
"Good girl," said Sal, who has not called me that since I was twenty-two, and hung up on his own dread, which is how Sal says be careful.
I stood alone in my studio with the raking light still on, and the scars stood up out of that panel like a thing you could put your fingers in, and I said the thesis out loud to the eleven saints, because a conclusion isn't real until you've said it to somebody who can't repeat it.
"You weren't damaged," I told the angel. "You were censored."
The angel looked back at me, ruined, mouth open on its held note, and out of nowhere and against every professional instinct I own, I thought about the man on my stoop saying you brought the painting, I follow the painting — and my arms did the thing. Both of them.
I photographed the exposed corner at one in the morning — the face, the scars under raking light, forty frames, bracketed, the drive in my bra like a Sicilian grandmother's rent money — and I was killing the lights when every hair on both my arms stood straight up.
The skin on the back of my neck went cold — the way Nonna used to say, somebody walking over your grave, and I never understood that expression until that exact second. I hadn't seen anything. I hadn't looked at anything. My body turned me to the window. My eyes caught up.
There was a shape on the roofline across the street.
Tall. Still. A vent stack, probably. The water tank on the corner building — there is no water tank on the corner building, but my brain dealt the card anyway, because the alternative was standing there thinking about what else holds that still on a roof at one in the morning.
Then I would have sworn it moved. The top of it. A slow tilt, like a head — and I blinked, and it was just a shape again, roofline, chimneys, nothing. And I couldn't look away.
I don't know how long I stood there. Long enough that my eyes burned.
Then the chain on my alley gate moved.
Metal on metal. Slow. And everything in me snapped down out of the sky and into my alley, because THAT I had a word for.
That was a person. Somebody was in my alley, at my gate, four feet from my basement window at one in the morning — and the roofline and its water tank fell out of my head entirely, because gooseflesh is one thing, but somebody at the gate is a call-somebody situation.
Across the street, the streetlight went out.
I didn't call 911. I didn't decide not to. My thumb just had the recents open before the rest of me voted, and it dialed the man who takes knives off people, and it rang once.
"Raq," I whispered, "there's somebody outside."