Bridge of Sighs

door slam in the courtyard below.
    “I’d just about given up on you,” Hugh told him now.
    “I started something new this morning,” Noonan said. “A better painter would’ve stayed in the studio.”
    “Tell me.”
    “It’ll be the best painting in the show.”
    “A whole new canvas? That you can finish in time?”
    “It’ll paint itself.”
    Hugh grinned. “Excellent. Now can we lose the self-portrait?”
    “It’s not a self-portrait. It’s my father.” There, he thought. You said it. And he realized it didn’t matter that Hugh knew; it was no longer a secret worth keeping and probably never had been. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. The new one comes first.”
    He already had a title:
Sarah at the Window.
He’d dreamed the painting whole last night and woke up weeping with gratitude. It had happened before—dreaming a painting—though maybe only ten times in his entire life. The first time he wasn’t even a painter yet, had never picked up a brush. It would be the better part of a decade before he’d understand that such dreams were paintings trying to emerge, or, if not an actual painting, the feeling that would be contained within the painting, its source and center on the canvas. Sometimes a single powerful dream would result in half a dozen canvases, a sequence of seemingly unconnected works, though he himself always recognized an emotional linkage, despite being powerless to articulate it. The good news was that he’d never felt much need to explain. When the fit was upon him, as it was now, he had but one need, and that was to paint.
    “Your father,” Hugh repeated. “Well, I did say it wasn’t you, didn’t I.”
    Noonan consulted his watch. “You’re going to miss your plane.”
    “Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?” Right on cue, the waiter arrived with Hugh’s bill, which he signed with a flick of his wrist. “Walk me to my taxi?”
    Noonan supposed that was the least he could do, so he grabbed the larger of his friend’s bags, and the two men headed down the terrace to where several water taxis bobbed.
    “So,” Hugh said, “will you go back to it? After this new one?”
    Noonan couldn’t help smiling. Yesterday he’d advised him to burn the damn thing; today he was afraid he wouldn’t return to it. “It’s possible,” he said. It was hard to explain how something could be important one minute, irrelevant the next. “Once I know this new one’s safe.”
    Hugh shrugged, accepting what he must, as he’d always done, because what else could he do? “Well, you’re behaving like a lunatic this morning. Fortunately, for you that’s a good thing. Are you going to be okay?”
    Strangely enough, Noonan thought he was. He wouldn’t have been given this new painting if he weren’t well enough to paint it. Perverse logic, maybe, but there you were. “I’ll be fine.”
    “Is there anything you need? Anything I can do?”
    Yes, Noonan thought. Go.
    Hugh smirked, as if he’d just read Noonan’s thoughts, and stepped into the taxi. When Noonan handed the bag to the driver, Hugh, instead of offering to shake hands, sighed, consulted his watch and said, “You might as well come on board.”
    What? Was the man insane? Did he expect Noonan to accompany him to the airport? He had a fucking painting to get back to.
    “We’ll run you over to the Giudecca,” Hugh said, then gave instructions to the driver in Italian. “It’ll save you ten or fifteen minutes’ waiting for the vaporetto.”
    “Really?” Noonan said, stepping aboard. He could’ve kissed him. “I’d hate for you to miss your flight.” But he didn’t say this until they were under way and there was no chance for Hugh to change his mind. This was pure selfishness, he told himself, but in truth he didn’t care and never had. Not when there was canvas waiting and paint to put on it.
             
     
    N OONAN WAS SEVENTEEN when he had the first of what he would come to think of as his “paint dreams.” He’d just moved out of his parents’ house in the Borough and into a cavernous space above the old Rexall drugstore downtown on Hudson Street. At one time it had been partitioned into small offices, though the interior walls had come down and the whole floor gutted right down to its wood planks. There were tall, soot-blackened windows in both the front, which overlooked the street, and the rear, with a view of the back alley and an abandoned glove shop. The place was unheated and