Bridge of Sighs

his salt to tears.
    But what Hugh said was “What are you
really
afraid of?”
    To that question he had no ready response. Still, Noonan was surprised to hear himself respond honestly. “Right this minute? Every little thing.”
             
     
    A ND, STRANGELY ENOUGH, not the big thing. He wasn’t—Noonan felt quite certain of this—afraid to die. If he had cancer, well, he had cancer. If it was treatable, then, as Hugh said, he would treat it. Cancer just was what it was. You weren’t obligated to assign any meaning to it, especially if you hailed from Thomaston, New York, where the stream that meandered through town was a different color every day, thick with dyes now acknowledged to be carcinogenic. If it
was
cancer, he reflected, there was a kind of ironic symmetry to it—to have fled his hometown so long ago and never looked back, only to be felled in the end by some long-dormant, mutated gene.
    Sure, cancer, if that’s what it was, would mean fewer canvases when he’d have preferred more, but a decade hence, at seventy, that would still be true, as it would again at eighty. Nobody ever got enough, but if this was it, Noonan wouldn’t feel cheated. He’d never imagined he’d be long-lived, nor did he particularly feel he deserved to be. There was no law that good painters got to live longer than bad ones or, for that matter, lawyers. He had little to complain about.
    Okay, so forget cancer. It was the bouts of uncontrollable grief, even more than the occasional night terrors, that scared him. That mysterious sorrow, its source unfathomable. He was simply grieving. But for what, he couldn’t say. Had some internal switch broken, slipping his emotions off their tether, out of their natural context? If so, why just sorrow? Why not joy? He hadn’t had any sudden, inexplicable, overwhelming attacks of that. Or jealousy, or lust, or shame. One minute the grief wasn’t there, the next it was, rising in him like nausea. The afternoon in dell’Orto he’d seen Lichtner coming toward him up the Fondamenta della Sensa, but by then Noonan was already lost, utterly overcome. Pretending not to hear the man call his name, he’d ducked down a narrow
calle
and hurried into the church, where he’d knelt for nearly half an hour before Tintoretto’s
The Last Judgment,
waiting for the waves of ridiculous, comic sorrow to subside. He knew from experience they eventually would, just as he knew he’d be left exhausted, mystified and, yes, frightened.
    While he knelt there, the church’s front door had opened several times, flooding the somber interior with soft light, but it hadn’t occurred to Noonan that Lichtner had followed him inside. How long had the little putz observed him? And since that afternoon—what, five months ago? more?—how many people had he told about the incident at how many dinner parties and in what dramatic detail? He’d probably made a parlor game out of it. “You’ll never guess who I saw sobbing his guts out in Madonna dell’Orto last week. I’ll give you a hint. A local painter.” Everyone would play along, of course, and the guesses, by the time the pasta course had been cleared, would have become increasingly far-fetched, until someone finally said, in disbelief, “Don’t tell me it was Noonan.” And Lichtner, triumphant, “All right, I won’t tell you, but that’s who it was, nevertheless.” “Beneath
The Last Judgment,
you say?” one of the women at the table would offer. “Oh, I
do
like that. That’s lovely. Who says there’s no justice?”
    “I’ve been telling you for months he’s losing it,” the hostess of the party would chime in then, and if Harvey Bellows was there, he’d recall how one morning, on his way to the Ferrovia at four-thirty, he’d rounded a corner and practically run into Noonan, who offered little more than a grunt for greeting or apology, hurrying off into the Venetian night as if the devil himself had been after him. Where could he have been coming from or going to at such an hour? Not the airport or the train station, the wrong direction for either of those; besides, he hadn’t had any luggage. Probably visiting some married woman. Most of the women at the dinner party would have been married, and odds were good that at least one could testify from personal experience to Noonan’s prowess in this regard.
    “Weeping before
The Last Judgment,
” that first woman would’ve repeated. “I
do
like that.” Though she