Bridge of Sighs

Caravaggio’s own, still full of rage, held aloft by a weakling for all the world to see? He’d like to see it once more before he died.
    “My God,” Hugh continued, “you look like you’re poised to lunge right out of the canvas at prospective buyers. This troubles me, Noonan. I’m sorry, but I have to say this troubles me.”
    “Have you ever noticed that when people use the expression ‘I have to say,’ what follows usually needn’t be said?”
    “And what is
this
?” Hugh said, ignoring Noonan in his infuriating time-honored fashion, pointing at the dark rectangle on the wall behind the subject.
    “A painting,” Noonan explained. “That glint of gold is its frame.”
    “I know it’s a painting. Of what?”
    “Does it matter?”
    “It looks like a fucking gallows.”
    It was the Bridge of Sighs, actually, or would’ve been, had Noonan allowed more of the picture into the light. Not that he saw any particular reason to explain. “Then it is.”
    “So what’s it
doing
there?”
    “I’m sorry. It’s supposed to do something?”
    “Oh, stop. You know what I mean. You’re predicting you’ll hang one day? Or saying you
deserve
it?”
    “Stop being melodramatic. And where do you get burn victim?”
    “That dark stain on the forehead? At the hairline?”
    “The birthmark?”
    Hugh poked him on the forehead with his index finger. “The point is, you don’t
have
a birthmark.”
    Noonan covered the canvas again. “Do you have any feelings about the paintings you were actually supposed to look at?”
    Together, Hugh rather reluctantly, they went over to the finished paintings along the wall. Next week they’d all be crated up and shipped to New York. Was it Noonan’s imagination or had Hugh rearranged them? They now sat in chronological order. He didn’t think that was how he’d set them, but who knew, maybe he had.
    “It’ll all sell, of course,” Hugh conceded, as if this went without saying. But the “of course” implied a reservation or criticism of some sort, something he’d get around to expressing later, probably over dinner. “You were wise not to commit more than three pieces to that casino.”
    “That wasn’t your advice at the time,” Noonan felt compelled to remind him.
    “Well, the money was good, wasn’t it. And you needed it rather badly just then.”
    “As opposed to now?”
    “I’ve often wondered, Robbie, what exactly it is that you
do
with your money.”
    Hugh was not alone in this. Noonan, together with his accountant, wondered the same thing quarterly. His father’s military discipline had demanded that a person account for the whereabouts of every bent nickel, which of course went a long way toward explaining the vague pride his son always felt when his own money vanished without a trace.
    “You live like a pauper,” Hugh continued with a sweeping gesture, “yet you’re hopelessly in debt.”
    “‘Hopelessly’ might be a little strong,” Noonan told him, “connoting as it does a lack of hope, of which I’m never wholly destitute.”
    “It
de
notes a lack of hope, actually,” Hugh corrected. “You might as well tell me. Whom do you owe these days, and in what tragic amounts? The girls, I assume. Who else?” “The girls” were Noonan’s ex-wives, who, for reasons best known to themselves, continued to grant him loans. Men generally knew better.
    “I’d have to ask around,” he sighed. In truth, his limited understanding of how much he owed pretty much paralleled his vague sense of where his money went. “My only real expense is this place.”
    “Don’t get me started,” Hugh said, flummoxed as always by his friend’s militant, self-destructive inertia when it came to finding a new studio.
    The Giudecca space had been affordable for most of the decade, but then the Venetian who owned the building, a man with whom Noonan had had an understanding, died and that understanding along with him. His son, having been informed that his renter was a famous painter, immediately quadrupled the rent. A cretin, to be sure, but on the plus side he lived in Milan and seemed not to mind terribly that Noonan was chronically six months in arrears, so long as he paid in cash, income that would never be declared. It was all very Italian. But for the past year Hugh had been trying, with the help of a local realtor, to locate less costly studio space, and Noonan was having none of it. “When I’m finished as a painter,” he said, “I want to be