Bridge of Sighs

he’d have to find some other grievance. The
Bridge of Sighs
canvas, probably, even though it was unfinished and not intended for New York, or maybe any other show. What Noonan meant by painting it and why he continued to work on it so obsessively were two things he hoped to discover soon. Why his old man, long in the grave where he belonged, should start haunting him now was another. Finishing his coffee, he slipped some euros under the saucer and, placing his palms flat on the table, pushed himself to his feet. The pressure caused a dull throbbing pain in his wrist, familiar, somehow reassuring. He’d been in Europe when his father died, so he had no idea whether the old man had been felled by a single big problem or a legion of smaller ones.
Legions.
Was that what troubles came in?
             
     
    B ACK AT THE STUDIO, Noonan saw the mail had arrived, so he brought it upstairs and tossed it and the Columbia envelope onto the table next to his bed.
    “Noonan, is that you?” Hugh’s voice came ringing down from the studio. “Come up here. I need an explanation and I need it urgently.”
    Which meant that he’d taken the bait, just as Noonan had known he would. The finished canvases for the New York show he’d left in plain sight along the studio’s outer wall, where the light was best. The portrait, though, he’d left draped on the easel, knowing full well that Hugh, of all people, would be curious. Childish behavior, he had to admit, wanting the painting to be seen but not ready to show it.
    “I need you up here this instant, before I lose what’s left of my sanity.”
    Upstairs, his old friend Hugh Morgan, notorious art dealer and international arbiter of taste, was dressed in the professional New Yorker manner—that is, for New York, and not for the place he happened to be just then. In Hugh’s case, black designer jeans, black V-neck sweater and black blazer, as if he’d come to court a Venetian widow. He’d ferreted out Noonan’s small stash of good wine, opened a bottle and, as Noonan had predicted, now stood before the easel where the portrait sat undraped, his expression so full of revulsion that Noonan immediately saw the folly of not hiding the damn thing. Which was not to say that there wasn’t also, he had to admit, a measure of perverse satisfaction.
    “I was saving this Barolo, actually,” he said, pouring himself a glass, then reluctantly joining his friend at the easel.
    They’d come up in the art world together, having met in London in the seventies, expatriates avoiding military service. Hugh had a small gallery in Soho and gave Noonan his first real show. Later, with the amnesty, he’d returned to the States and opened a gallery in New York, then, over the years, in Paris and Rome. Noonan had remained in Europe, chasing women and commissions and good light—the right balance of conflict and ease—until finally settling in Venice a decade ago. Next month, when he went to New York, it would be his first trip to the country in more than twenty years.
    Hugh regarded the painting, the painter, then the painting again. “Shouldn’t you be getting younger?” he said.
    “You don’t like it?”
    “Well, it’s all worm, isn’t it.” It had long been Hugh’s contention that Noonan’s only subject, regardless of who or what he was painting, was the worm in the apple, the small, off-putting detail that registered in the viewer’s subconscious and undermined the overall effect, the too-pale white spot on the skin that hinted at malignancy beneath. The result, in Hugh’s view, of growing up in a place where everyone was being poisoned, to a greater or lesser degree, from an early age.
    “We’re all poisoned at an early age,” Noonan was fond of reminding him.
    “‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do’?”
    “I was thinking of original sin more than Larkin, but whatever. Anyway it isn’t finished.”
    “Are you saying I’ll like it when you’re done?”
    Noonan shrugged, then held the Barolo up to the light, squinting at it.
    “I mean, Christ,” Hugh said, waving at the painting as if to make it disappear. “Have you titled it? May I suggest
Portrait of the Artist as a Serial Killer
?
As Burn Victim
? Who paints something like this?”
    Caravaggio, for one, Noonan thought.
David with the Head of Goliath.
Perhaps Noonan’s favorite canvas. How long had it been since he’d laid eyes on it, that monstrous, severed head,