Bridge of Sighs

wouldn’t say why, not with her husband sitting next to her.
    At any rate, by now the tale had probably reached across the Atlantic. Venice’s expatriate community of wanderers—writers, artists and visiting academics—was tight-knit, and Noonan could imagine how swiftly the story would have traveled. It also explained why, though he’d done his best to discourage it, Hugh had insisted on coming right before his show in New York. His excuse had been that he was worried about Anne, who was high maintenance, no doubt about it, so Noonan hadn’t doubted him. Now it appeared that he himself was the true object of Hugh’s concern. And maybe even
that
wasn’t the worst of it. Maybe Hugh hadn’t really wanted to visit at all. Maybe he’d just come to find out if Noonan was in any condition to proceed with the show. Having heard that something was wrong, possibly from a number of different sources, he’d decided to find out.
    Declining Hugh’s halfhearted offer of a nightcap at his hotel, he returned to the Giudecca at loose ends, having drunk too much to work but wanting to work anyway, and not knowing what he’d do with the night if he didn’t. Undraping the portrait, he studied his father. Had he admitted this to himself before tonight, that the figure on the canvas was his father? He’d begun the painting a month earlier, as a self-portrait, then realized they were his father’s eyes, not his own, looking back at him. In retrospect, reason enough to quit right then, but he hadn’t. Over the next few days he found himself emphasizing the physical features they shared, minimizing those he’d inherited from his mother, marveling that as he did these things the man in the painting somehow became less his father and more Noonan himself, as if by subtracting his mother he was arriving at his own essence. The process wasn’t unlike telling a police sketch artist “I think his nose was a little wider,” except that he was making suggestions to himself that were based on distant, not recent, memory. He’d added the birthmark last, on a whim, the final damning detail, though for the life of him he couldn’t decide which of them it damned. Nothing about what he was doing made any sense. How could giving the figure the features of one man make him more recognizably another? Was he losing his mind or going someplace new and exciting, where no other painter had ever gone before? Would the result be art or just creepy exhibitionism?
    This, he now realized, was surely why he’d wanted Hugh to see the canvas. And his reaction—that the painting was a lie—was, in a sense, exactly what Noonan had hoped for. I am
not
my father. Yet hadn’t Hugh, his old friend, recognized it as a self-portrait? The possibility that the man in the painting could be anyone other than Noonan himself hadn’t even occurred to him.
    Hugh
had
been right about one thing, though, much as Noonan hated to admit it. Given that the left side of the face was in shadow, what was over his left shoulder—the painting within the painting—shouldn’t have been illuminated. Normally, there was nothing Noonan was more conscious of or meticulous about than light. How had he missed something so elementary?
    “I don’t know,” Evangeline confessed. “How
did
you miss it?”
    Intent on the canvas, Noonan hadn’t heard her come in. Or, for that matter, realized he’d been speaking. “Hey,” he said, trying to cover his surprise at her sudden appearance. She was dressed for the gallery, which, to judge by the time, she’d probably just closed. It had been a slow year, and she was staying open later. What he couldn’t quite decide was whether he was glad to see her. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
    “Or call up the stairs?”
    “I guess not.”
    She came over to where he sat, put her hands on his shoulders and kissed the top of his head. When, he wondered, had he become the kind of man a woman could sneak up on?
    “How’s the Great One?”
    “I assume you refer to Hugh?”
    “No offense,” she said, “but yes. I see you broke out the good wine.” The empty Barolo still stood on the table next to the easel.
    “He doesn’t think I have cancer.”
    “Don’t sound so disappointed. For what it’s worth, neither do I. You’re losing weight because you forget to eat.”
    “He thinks I’m depressed. Suicidal, even, except he didn’t say that exactly.” He’d come pretty close, though, over the zabaglione at Harry’s. When