Chapter 13
CATE
He came back.
I surfaced when the bed took his weight and got one eye open at the clock — an hour and ten minutes, which for a man who said an hour is either impressive or suspicious and I was too far gone to decide which — and he said "go back to sleep" against my hair, and I did, and when I woke up on Sunday he was still there.
Awake. Watching the ceiling like it owed him money.
"Well?" I said.
"Nothing," he said.
I called Nina at noon, from the kitchen, with the door shut.
"So," I said.
"So what." A pause, and I heard her put something down. "Caterina Rosa. So what."
"So I have information."
"I'm sitting." A chair scraped. "I'm sitting on my kitchen floor, that's how fast I'm sitting. GO."
"He stayed over."
The sound Nina Costanzo made is not in any language. It went up at the end.
"Nina—"
"Is he there? Is he there RIGHT NOW?"
"He's in the other room. Keep your voice down."
"HE'S IN THE OTHER ROOM?"
"Nina, I swear to God—"
"I'm whispering," said Nina, at full volume. "This is me whispering. Go."
"Friday," I said, "and then also Saturday, and I'd like to say that Friday was not the plan—"
"Nobody CARES about the plan—"
"—and he slept on my couch first, which lasted about two hours—"
"Two hours."
"—and then I went out to the living room at three in the morning and told him he was not sleeping on my couch."
"YOU DID NOT."
"I did."
"Cat." Her voice dropped into the register she uses for miracles and hospital news. "You asked him?"
And that stopped me, because she was right, and she'd found the actual thing under all of it in about eleven seconds, the way she has since we were seven.
"Yeah," I said.
"Okay." Nina was quiet for a second. When she came back her voice had gone thick. "Okay. Details. Now. Everything. I want it in order and I want it slow."
"He looks better with his clothes off than on."
"MADONNA."
"Nina—"
"No, I need a minute — a man that size — Cat, is he — is everything—"
"NINA."
"I'm a married woman, I'm allowed to be curious in a scholarly way—"
I told her some of it. Not the scars, because those are his. Not the way the room felt at the end, because I don't have words for that yet and I'm not handing it over half-built. And not much else, because there was one wall between me and a man who hears everything, and I am not an idiot.
"Okay," she said finally. "Now the important part. How do you feel."
I looked at my kitchen. The two cups in the rack. His coat on the back of my chair like it lived there.
"Nina, I don't know one single true thing about this man."
"That's not what I asked."
"I know what you asked."
"So answer it."
"I'm happy," I said, and my voice did something on the second word, and that was the whole phone call right there. "I'm so happy I can't stand up straight, and I'm terrified, and both of those are about the same thing, which I would like on the record as deeply unfair."
"Yeah," said Nina softly. "Welcome. That's the deal."
Then she made me swear on the saints again, because apparently the first two times were provisional.
He didn't leave on Sunday either. Neither of us mentioned it.
Monday morning I told him I was going to Manhattan.
"The painting stays," I said, pulling my good coat on, the interview coat, the one that says this woman has never once been behind on her taxes. "No active work today until I'm back, which makes this a you-and-the-alarm-panel situation. Bond with it. It has a little green light."
He was standing by the window with his coffee — his coffee now; the man had a cup, we'd become a two-cup operation, I wasn't examining it — and he put it down.
"Where in Manhattan."
"Uptown. Columbia. Consulting an expert."
"I'll take you."
"You will not. It's iconography, Raq. It's the kind of meeting where two broke women split one pastry and argue about the fifteenth century for forty minutes." I found my scarf. "You follow the painting. The painting is staying on the easel. Connect the dots."
"Then I'll come as far as the building."
"Why?"
He didn't answer that.
"Uh-huh." I wound the scarf. "See, that's the thing. You want me to take you seriously, but every time I ask why, you get very interested in the window." I looked up at him, and he was doing exactly that. "What are you actually worried about? Say it out loud. Say the sentence."
Nothing. The whole big silent architecture of him, standing in my kitchen, not saying the sentence.
"That's what I thought." I got up on my toes and kissed his jaw, which required commitment. "You're cute when you're worried about me. Little odd, but cute."
"Cate—"
"I'm going to Morningside Heights, you big dummy. In the daytime. On the subway. With about nine hundred graduate students." I was laughing by then, and getting my bag, and he was watching me the way he watches the street. "I'll be fine."
He followed me to the door and said, grimly, "Take the avenue to the station. Crowded cars. If a stranger is kind to you, walk away from him."
"If somebody's nice to me," I said, "I will be extremely rude and leave immediately. I promise. On the saints."
"Cate."
"Before dark," I said. "It's a pastry, not a heist."
I was still laughing when I got to the bottom of the stoop. I made it all the way to the platform before I checked behind me.
Twice.
Tara Buonocore has an office at Columbia the way I have a career: technically, provisionally, and shared with people who have no idea she's there.
Fourth floor of a building named for a donor nobody remembers, a room with three desks and one window, and her corner of it is a barricade of books with a space heater she is not allowed to have and a kettle she is definitely not allowed to have, and taped to the shelf above her desk, a photocopied fresco of a demon being weighed on a scale, under which she has written, in Sharpie, SAME.
I met her six years ago over the Sicilian John the Baptist with the second head.
Somebody at the auction house wanted an iconography opinion nobody wanted to pay for, and what arrived was an adjunct in a coat two coats too thin for the weather who took one look at my raking-light photos, said "oh, he's got a twin, hello," and then talked for three straight hours without once being boring.
We split a pastry then, too. Some people you keep.
"Cat Fontana." She hauled the good chair over from an absent colleague's desk like a thief. "Sit. I have tea, I have a heater the fire marshal doesn't know about, and I have forty minutes before I teach Renaissance survey to eleven teenagers who think Botticelli is a pasta. What's in the folder?"
"Before I open it," I said, "ground rules. No photographs of my photographs. I can't tell you where it is, who owns it, or how it got there. And you never saw it."
Her whole face lit up like the tree at Rockefeller. "This is already the best thing that has ever happened in this office," she said, "including the time the ceiling fell. Open the folder."
I opened the folder.
I'd printed them myself, at home, off the drive that does not leave my body — Sal's rules, and I was keeping them, mostly, and if bringing prints to Morningside Heights was a violation of the spirit, the spirit could take it up with me later.
Detail shots only. The robe, ash going to white.
The pooled hem. The face. And last, the raking-light frame, the one I'd taken at one in the morning with my arms prickling: the shoulders, bare and scarred, where wings root in every Annunciation ever built.
Tara went through them the way I'd gone through the panel. Slow. Corner to corner. The office noise fell away from her — she does the thing Sal does, the thing I do, the thing that marks the tribe: the object gets all of her, and the rest of the world can file a complaint.
"Talk me through the campaign," she said, quiet, all the Rockefeller gone out of her voice and something better in it.
I talked her through it. Original composition: wingless, kneeling, collapsed, weeping, looking out. Four hundred years later a second campaign, first-rate, paid: wings added on top, figure stood up, face dried, serenity issued.
"And the second hand hides his own work."
"Invisible. Matched craquelure. You'd die of old age before you found it from a pew."
"So." She laid the face down in front of her and put her fingertips at its edges, not touching.
"Here's your iconography opinion, free of charge, worth every penny.
There is no tradition — none, Cat, and I want you to hear the none, I don't say none — of a wingless, weeping, collapsed angel in an Annunciation.
It's not a regional variant. It's not a workshop getting creative.
The angel in that scene has one job, and the job is glory: he arrives standing, because he arrives from above, because the entire grammar of the picture is that the divine condescends and the kneeling goes the other way.
A painter in that century knew that grammar the way you know a stop sign.
" She tapped the margin, once. "Your painter ran the stop sign on purpose, at noon, in front of the church.
So either he was a heretic with a death wish—"
"Or?"
"Or it's not an Annunciation." She looked up at me, and her eyes were doing the delighted-scholar thing, the thing that's half Christmas and half ambulance.
"You don't kneel a figure like that to announce something, Cat.
You kneel him because he fell down. What if it's not a scene at all? What if it's a portrait?"
The space heater ticked. Somewhere down the hall a door opened on a lecture and shut on it again.
"A portrait of what," I said, and my voice behaved.
"Okay." Tara stood up, which for Tara is punctuation, and pulled a paperback off the barricade — a Bible, rubber-banded, swollen with flags. "Quick question. Total non sequitur. What do you know about the Book of Enoch?"
"It's — apocryphal something? It's on the crazy shelf. It's next to the lizard-people documentaries."