Bridge of Sighs

until she walked into Mrs. Feldman’s apartment and saw her mother’s face framed on the wall.
    But Miss Rosa wasn’t buying it. “Must’ve known and you forgot,” she’d said when she first heard this story. “Your mama told you about that picture and said she was gon put it up on the wall. You juss forgot. Too spooky otherways. Thass why I believe in Jesus. Ain’t nothin’ spooky ’bout Him. Know what you gettin’ and it ain’t no voodoo neither.”
    Which she repeated now. “Jesus doan spookify things. Got all the trouble we needin’ in this neighborhood without ghosts. No haints allowed nowhere I live, an’ thass final. Tell you what, though. I get back inside, I’m gon look blue door up in my dream book and play the number. Could be a sign. Could be Jesus got it in His mind for me to be rich and He’s just now gettin’ round to it. Fine with me.”
    “And me,” Sarah told her.
    “Me, too,” Kayla said, beaming. “I
like
money.”

HOME
     
    N OONAN WAS already on his third draft beer when he saw Hugh grinning at him in the mirror that ran along the back wall. Dressed all in black when he visited Noonan in Venice, he was now in white, this being spring in New York, and from his breast pocket he took a silk handkerchief and swatted it theatrically at the stool before sitting down.
    He surveyed the Soho bar with distaste and pushed away the wooden bowl of in-the-shell peanuts. “You might’ve picked someplace where we could order champagne, at least.”
    “I don’t like champagne.”
    When the bartender tore himself away from the ball game that was on above the bar, Hugh ordered a designer vodka Noonan had never heard of.
    “Okay, I’ll bite,” he said. “How did you find me?” Weary of the introductions and flesh-pressing, the unctuous praise and New York small talk, he’d sneaked out an hour ago, hoping that in his absence people might pay more attention to Anne. About the only truly enjoyable part of the event—and this was a complete surprise—had been talking with the small group of Columbia grad students who’d arrived in the wake of their professor, Popov, aka Irwin the Contrite, still a supercilious little putz, but mellower now, either that or Noonan was. The students were a motley crew, grotesquely tattooed and horribly stapled, some of them, in all looking like torture survivors who’d managed somehow to retain their innocence. They seemed to think he knew something they didn’t, whereas to Noonan, the opposite was likely closer to the truth. They kept referring, with great enthusiasm, to painters and other artists he’d never heard of, but they didn’t seem troubled in the least by his ignorance, as if he’d earned it, given his stature. “We’ll catch you up in no time,” one young woman predicted. That she and her friends, who paid hefty tuition, should be required to educate him, who would be paid a hefty salary, evidently didn’t bother her. “And what would I give you in return?” he asked, a question he wrongly thought might stump them. “You’ll tell us our work sucks and why,” one boy said gloomily, though without visible resentment. “
Does
your work suck?” Noonan had asked the boy. “Yes,” said a young woman who was apparently his girlfriend. “Definitely,” another young man said. “We all suck. But you’ll inspire us and whip us into shape. And on Friday afternoons we all go out drinking and you’ll buy the beer.”
    How could you not like them? Noonan doubted he’d make them worse painters, though doing no harm didn’t strike him as a particularly lofty academic goal. Did they know he couldn’t give them what they wanted most: a blueprint? Did they understand he couldn’t tell them how it was done, only how he’d done it? He could tell them he’d painted and had kept painting. He could look at their work and ask them questions about it. He could maybe correct a few bad habits. And, on Fridays, he could buy the beer.
    “I saw you turn right when you left the gallery,” Hugh was explaining, “so I did the same and entered the first dive where it looked like a man could get into a knife fight.”
    This last he said just as the bartender arrived with his vodka. “Pay no attention to this man,” Noonan told him. “He’s a homosexual.”
    “So am I,” said the bartender, glaring at Noonan pointedly. “What of it?”
    When he finally drifted back down the bar, Hugh said, “A New York fag with no sense of irony? Where