Page 27 of Graceless

CATE

Ihad cleaned the same square inch of varnish for forty minutes.

The angel had stopped watching me somewhere around minute twenty — even a five-hundred-year-old painting has limits — and the swab in my hand had gone dry, and I kept moving it anyway, tiny professional circles over paint I'd finished yesterday, because the alternative to moving it was turning around, and eighteen inches behind my right shoulder was a man whose knuckles I could still feel on my neck.

Still. A full day later. That specific two inches of skin under my ear had apparently declared independence from the rest of my nervous system and was running its own government now, and its entire domestic policy was replaying the moment his hand came up and touched my hair like it was something worth being careful with.

And then he ran.

That's the part I kept arriving back at, every time my brain did the loop — and my brain was doing the loop the way the D does Coney Island, terminally, on schedule. He leaned in. I didn't imagine it. I had replayed it frame by frame like the Zapruder film. The man leaned. His eyes went to my mouth. The whole basement got small and warm and inevitable — and then he crossed the room at a speed I still can't explain and told me the light was going at three o'clock in the afternoon and left like the building was on fire.

So I'd spent the night lying under the water stain shaped like Sicily with two facts that would not reconcile. That man almost kissed me. And that man looked at the almost, and ran.

Nina would say I'm being insane. Nina would say, honey, a man who touches your hair like that is not running FROM you. But Nina wasn't in the basement, and Nina didn't watch him put a whole room between us in half a second like I was a grease fire, and Nina didn't stand there afterward holding a swab like an idiot with her pulse going and her chin still tipped up for a kiss that had left the premises.

I didn't tell her. Last night's report had a crater in the middle of it the size of an almost, and I talked around it for twenty minutes, and if she noticed — she noticed — she let me keep it.

The bell had rung at eight this morning, same as always. I'd opened the door with my speech ready — I had ANOTHER speech, I am a woman of speeches, this one was called We're Both Adults — and he'd said "Miss Fontana" in the flattest register the man owns, walked past me down the stairs, taken the chair, and become furniture with a jaw.

Miss Fontana. Back to Miss Fontana. Three days of Cate dying on the stairs behind him, and I'd carried my dead speech down after him and we'd spent the morning as two professionals professionally not discussing the eight inches that had almost stopped existing between our mouths.

So: forty minutes on one square inch. The silence in the basement had a texture like a held breath, and every time I moved my head I could feel him not-looking at me with a precision that was somehow worse than staring, and my body — my stupid, traitorous, extremely awake body — kept leaning back into a moment the man himself had sprinted away from, and I was starting to hate all three of us. Him. Me. The body.

Around ten I couldn't take the quiet anymore and made coffee, because that's what my hands do when my head is on fire. I set his cup on the arm of the chair the way I had every day this week.

"Thank you, Miss Fontana."

"You're welcome, Mr. Barrett."

You're welcome, Mr. Barrett. Four days of Cate, of ya big weirdo, of appliance jokes and stool legislation — and now we were two strangers at a parish function, passing beverages. I went back to the easel and attacked a square inch of varnish like it owed me money.

"The raking light," he said, maybe an hour later. "It's angled off the scar."

"I know where my light is angled."

"Hm."

"Don't." I didn't turn around. "Don't hm me today."

He did not hm me. The silence resumed, worse.

We survived the morning like that. We survived the afternoon the same way — me working, him watching the window, both of us fluent in a silence neither of us would translate — and the light was going gray when I reached for the white spirit and the jar was low.

Not empty — low, which for me is the same thing; a conservator who hits the bottom of the jar mid-cleaning is a conservator who improvises, and improvisers kill paintings. The supply house on Stillwell keeps late hours. The jar was maybe two days from actually low.

I took it like a lifeboat.

"I need white spirit." I was already untying my apron. "Supply house. An hour, maybe less."

He stood.

"The rider says on-site during active work," I said, pointing at the chair. "The work is staying here. You follow the painting. Follow it from the chair."

Something crossed his face — there and gone, too fast to name, and after yesterday I was done trying to name the things that crossed his face; my accuracy rate was garbage. He looked at the window, at the light in it, and for a second I thought he'd argue, and I had a whole speech ready about which of us had lived on this block her entire life and which of us was furniture with a clipboard.

"Take the avenue," is all he said. "Not the side streets."

"I've been walking here since before you—" I stopped, because I'd been about to say since before you were born, and some instinct pulled the sentence like a hand pulling me off a curb. "Chair," I said, and went, and I took the stairs a little too fast, and the cold outside hit my face like a mercy.