The Second Coat

THE SECOND COAT

The face was almost gone.

Elena stood before it in the August light that came through the studio window in a slab of white heat, and the canvas held nothing she could call a woman anymore. There was the ghost of a jaw. There was the suggestion of an eyelid. There was the memory of a mouth painted by a hand that had died before her birth, and over all of it the varnish had gone cloudy with age and darker with the smoke of a century of candles, and someone, at some point, had held this face to a flame to keep warm. She knew that kind of violence. It was slow, and brown, and indifferent, and it left just enough behind to be unbearable.

The man in the doorway had been standing there long enough for the cicadas outside to finish their sentence and begin again.

"Signorina." His Italian was flat, the Italian of a man who had learned it late and only what he needed. "My father paid for this work in the spring of nineteen forty-nine."

"Your father is dead."

"Yes."

"Then the debt is yours. Debts are paid to the living."

He crossed the room the way the emptied streets moved that August, slowly, without hurry, as if the city had simply stopped wanting anything. He set the crate beside her workbench, where her own canvases slept in their frames, and did not touch the canvas itself.

"My name is Adrian," he said. "My father collected damaged portraits of one woman. For thirty years. He bought them wherever they were sold, at any price, and he commissioned new ones from painters who would not ask questions. This is the last one. The most damaged. He asked that it be restored by your hand only."

"Many hands will restore anything," she said. "Improving is what restoration sells."

"He said every other restorer he hired made the woman beautiful, and he could not bear it. He said only your hand would give her back."

Elena looked at the ghost of the jaw. The suggestion of the eyelid. The particular slope of the nose that painters had flattered or failed for fifty years.

She knew.

She had known since his hand had set the crate on the floor with the care of a man laying down a body. She knew the jaw. She knew the mouth. She knew the nose, and the laugh-line no painter had been able to render, and the particular way the woman's face had lit when Elena was nine, in a kitchen in Siena, from a window like a portrait left open, her mother laughing at nothing, holding a cup, made beautiful by a light that had nothing to do with beauty.

"Who is she?" he asked.

"Her name was Giulia."

"Then you know her."

"I know what she did. I was nine. I don't know what she was."

He was quiet for a long time. The cicadas ran on outside, and somewhere down toward the river the bells of Santa Maria del Fiore went through the afternoon, marking the hour in the emptying city.

"That," he said at last, "is what I need you to tell me."

She took the commission. Not for the money, the receipt was already old, the signature dead, the debt paid in a currency she would never see. She took it because no one had ever asked her to give her mother back, and because the wanting that came into her that minute was cold, and clean, and unmistakably hers, and she wanted to know whether a face could be given back at all. She wanted, with a patience she had never needed before, to find out.

The weeks that followed were the heart of August. Florence emptied further around them. The terraces darkened. The shops along the Lungarno pulled down their shutters one by one, and the Arno lay low and brown under the Ponte Vecchio, and the cicadas' endless sentence filled the days with a sound that was not music and not noise but something the city used to keep itself awake. Elena worked in the long heat. She opened the face the way she opened everything: solvent, solvent, patience.

It came out of the canvas in degrees, and each degree was a door.

The first coat she lifted gave back the jaw, and with the jaw came back the kitchen in Siena, which she had not visited in memory since before the wanting had a name. Her mother, nine years old to her, in the window light, holding the cup, laughing at nothing. She had been told, later, by a woman who had been there and who did not remain, that Giulia laughed like that whenever the wanting came into the room before anyone else could name it. Elena had not understood the sentence then. She came to understand it as she worked, coat by coat — understanding itself a coat, one that could be lifted off. Some things were kept in rooms she had stopped opening, and the wanting that had lived in those rooms all along was the same wanting living in her now.

The mouth came out of the canvas second, because the mouth was what every painter had wanted most, and the mouth was what every painter had most failed. Under her hand it stopped being a suggestion. It became specific. It became hers. And specificity was the wound of it. A mouth you could say was beautiful could be kept at a distance. A mouth you knew was the mouth — the one that had laughed at nothing in the Siena kitchen, the one that had spoken her name the last time, with that particular tilt, in a voice Elena could now hear again after twenty years of hearing nothing — that mouth was not a face. That mouth was a question with her name on it.

Adrian came each evening. He stood at the window, where the light went in, and did not look at the canvas until she told him he could. He brought nothing. Wine she did not drink, bread she did not eat. He was there the way the river was there, a fixed fact of the evening, keeping the city awake.

Once he leaned in to look at her hands. He was close enough that she could smell him, something cold, cedar, rain that had not fallen. His breath touched her wrist, and she felt it as a technical event, and wrote it down later, in the dark, in a hand she did not recognize as her own.

He told her, in the evenings, what he could. Fragments, the way a man tells the truth without meaning to. His father had known Giulia before Elena was born. He had known her the way one knows a thing that answers back. He had wanted, for thirty years after she was gone, not her face — that was not it, he said, and said it with a tiredness she could feel in the room — but what she felt. What she had felt about him. He had collected the portraits because every one of them was a question asked of a dead woman, and he had bought and commissioned and waited for thirty years for an answer that would not come, because the answer was not in the paint. The answer was in the feeling, and the feeling had left with her.

"That's what I'm asking now," he said. "Not what she was. What she felt."

"You want me to restore the verdict," she said. "You want the face to say what she thought about you."

"I want it to say what it thought about me."

She looked at him, this man who had inherited a wanting he had never earned and spent his life paying for it. The wanting was visible in him, hot and unpaid and enormous, and she felt her own wanting come up against it like two hands meeting over water, and she did not look away, and she did not name either of them.

On the last night of August the face was finished.

She stood back in the white of the late light and looked at her mother's face restored by her own hand. It was not beautiful. It was specific. The mouth was particular. The eyes were old eyes in a young face, and they looked at her across the room with a gaze that had no business existing, and Elena felt the wanting come in again and stand very still, the way a held breath stands.

Behind her, Adrian had come to stand at her shoulder. She could feel him. She did not turn.

"You've given her back," he said.

"I've given her back a face," Elena said. "What I've given back is yours. That's the difference. That's the whole difference."

She turned.

"What did she feel?" she asked.

He answered with his mouth.

Her hand went to his face first, the restorer's hand, steadying a surface, her thumb on his jaw, the same jaw, the same slope of the nose that every painter had flattered or failed, and she kissed him the way you test a thing, coldly, to see what it was made of. It was not made of what she expected. It was made of thirty years of wanting, inherited and unpaid, and it wanted her back.

She kissed him again, and harder. His hands came to the small of her back and pulled her in, and she felt his wanting come on her, hot and inherited, desperate in a way hers had never been, and she let it be felt, because wanting was the whole of it, wanting was the debt, and she had decided that night to collect.

His mouth was on her throat before her shirt was undone. She pushed back from him against the window glass, the cold of August on her neck, and his mouth was lower, and lower, and she knew with her body before her mind that she was answering his question, that every question he had ever asked was being answered now, in the only language that counted, and she came down out of his reach and took him with her instead.

She took him to the workbench, where the cans of solvent stood in their row, and she undid him with the impatience of a woman who had waited all August. He was undone quickly. She moved him against the glass, and the face was behind her in its frame, and she did not look up. She took him hard, and the glass was cold against her, and the cicadas were running on outside, and she came against it with her eyes shut, and when she opened them the face was looking at her.

She turned. She made him follow. She took him standing, between herself and her mother's restored gaze, and he came into her slowly, as if paying the last of a long account, and she took all of him, and his penis, thick and hot, set into her, and she gripped the edge of the workbench and let him go deeper, and the wanting that was hers, cold and clean and hers, went white at the edges.

"She looked at me," he said, low, buried in her, "as if I were something she had to survive."

The line landed inside her like a blade placed by a surgeon. She had worn that look herself, at nineteen, at twenty-five, whenever the wanting came into her and she had decided to keep it. She knew what it was to survive a wanting — and knew now, with the white at her edges, that he had never once been answered, and that she was answering him now, and that neither of them would be able to undo it.

She gripped the workbench and took him again, and again, and screamed once, short and bright, a sound she did not know she had. Then she pushed out of him and crossed the room in one step and took him by the front of his shirt and carried him to the bed at the end of the room, where her mother's face looked across from its frame with its new mouth and its old eyes, and she laid him down and lay on top of him, and took him once more in the dark between them, and when she came she took the pillow and pressed it to her face and screamed into the cloth, not from pain, from the sheer weight of being known. He came into her at the same minute, slowly, as if closing a book he had read for thirty years.

Afterward there was silence, and the cicadas, and the face in its frame, looking. He pulled out of her at last and lay on his back with his hands open above his head, and she lay above him for a long moment, feeling it settle back into itself, cold and hers again, the way it had been at nine, in the kitchen, when her mother's wanting was already in the room. She knew what that was. She had always known.

She dressed first. She had dressed first before, at nine, and she had learned early what to do with mornings like this: stand up, and be the one who kept the room.

The crate waited by the door, where she had set it, the way one sets a body down. She looked at the face in its frame — the laugh-line no painter had been able to render, now rendered at last by a hand that had spent its life giving faces back.

"Adrian."

"Yes."

"The work isn't finished."

He sat up. The city's late gold came through the window, and the cicadas finished their sentence and began again, and he looked at her with the wanting he had carried thirty years, still unpaid, and she saw it, and did not look away.

"It's yours to keep," she said. "Not to take. Yours to keep, where the light comes in at noon, where the question can be worked on. I told you what she felt. I'm telling you what she feels now. It's a question. Questions are kept, not delivered. They're worked on, coat by coat, in the long light, until the answer comes out specific, and hers, and unbearable."

He did not answer for a long time. Then he crossed the room slowly, without hurry, the way the streets had moved all that August, and he left the canvas where it stood.

"My father would have approved," he said.

"Your father can keep the receipt," she said.

And she carried the face out into the August emptiness, down the shuttered street, where the cicadas were running on and the Arno lay low and brown and the bells marked the hour in the city that had stopped wanting anything. She would give it years. She had the face now, and patience, and her own hands — and knew, with the wanting standing very still inside her, that what Giulia felt was a question that could be worked on until it answered itself.

She had always been patient with faces.