Bridge of Sighs

do these people come from? I do rather like the cut of his jib, though.”
    “Irony isn’t everything,” Noonan noted, sliding off his stool so he could retrieve the bowl of peanuts, which he set between them. Extracting a nut from its skin, he tossed the empty shell over his shoulder onto the floor. The two men sat there grinning at each other until Hugh’s grin turned into a chuckle, and Noonan couldn’t help joining in.
    “Fantastic,” Hugh said.
    “Not bad,” Noonan agreed.
    “Not bad? Your ass, not bad. Did I or did I not tell you that
Sarah
would sell big?”
    The painting was actually titled
Young Woman at a Window.
He’d been calling it
Sarah
from the start but decided at the last minute on
Young Woman
in the unlikely event Sarah should ever see it or, worse yet, Lucy.
    Hugh had called from New York the day it arrived. “You weren’t kidding, were you? It did paint itself.”
    “Can you make room?”
    “You’re joking, right?” Hugh said. “Who is she?”
    “Just someone I knew a long time ago.”
    “A Robert Noonan painting with no worm,” Hugh marveled now, just as he had over the phone. “A first. Let me guess. The lovely Sarah escaped imperfection by not submitting to your charms?”
    “That might’ve had something to do with it,” he admitted.
    “Have you contacted her? Told her she exists on canvas, immortal, her virtue intact? That you’ve brought her quiveringly to life beneath your stiff but gentle brush?”
    “Oh, fuck off,” Noonan said. Though in truth he would have liked for her to see it.
    “Probably not a great idea, now that I think about it,” Hugh conceded. “Is she married?”
    “Last I knew.”
    “Paintings like that have been known to cause divorces. And speaking of divorces, I wouldn’t be anxious to show her to the girls either,” Hugh said. “One look and they’ll know why their marriages to you were doomed before they began. They’ll never loan you another dime. Of course, after today you won’t need to borrow money for a while.”
    Noonan had almost dropped the phone when he heard the price tag Hugh had in mind for
Sarah.
    “I just wish I’d known about her a month earlier. I’d have gone back to the printer and raised the price of every other painting in the show.”
    “Even the
Bridge of Sighs
?” It had brought the second-highest price in the show, only a few thousand less.
    “Well, it’s not the same painting anymore, is it,” Hugh said smugly. No doubt he figured he himself was responsible. He was probably telling people he went to Venice a few months earlier and gave Noonan a good talking-to. What they were viewing was the result. Who knew? Maybe there was some truth to that.
    “Still a lot of worm in that one,” Noonan said defensively, but Hugh was right, of course. Though not very much had changed, it wasn’t the same painting.
Sarah
had changed it. He’d worked on the two canvases side by side, and it was as if the light from Sarah’s open window had illuminated the other painting. It fell first on the painting within the painting, of the Bridge of Sighs. Noonan had put it in the painting on impulse, then negated the impulse with shadows so dark that Hugh had seen a gallows there. Once it could be seen for what it was, Noonan had been free to accept it as the controlling metaphor, suggesting the painting had more to do with despair than justice. Up to that point he’d been painting the ogre of his childhood, a man who, though he didn’t know it, was about to get what he had coming to him. A portrait of a bully, controller, philanderer and epic hypocrite, whose fist was perpetually cocked in volcanic anger, the reason his mother kept running away, and the reason she needed to swallow those tiny pills with her morning coffee, the reason, long after Noonan had fled, she finally became so vague she’d swallowed one too many.
    Once bathed in the light of
Sarah
’s window, he had become someone who’d already gotten what was coming to him, who’d lost everything, whose crossing of the Bridge of Sighs simply made it official, who knew full well what Bobby Marconi, though old enough to occupy the barstool next to him, had been too young even to suspect—just how mortally tired of himself a man could become, how exhausting and demoralizing being true to one’s deepest nature could be, the terrible toll such fidelity exacted. Bobby Marconi had always considered his father’s other life with his West End woman evidence of