Page 34 of Graceless

I went back to the easel. My knuckle held the print of his thumb for an hour. It happened again the next morning, and the morning after that. Neither of us fixed it.

And once, mid-sentence — I was narrating solvent ratios to the panel, riveting stuff — I turned to ask if he was listening, and his eyes were on my mouth. Not the window. My mouth. He moved them off me, unhurried, the way you'd holster something, and I lost the ratio I was holding and had to start the count again.

The terms held all week the way a dam holds. Technically. With pressure readings.

The overpaint came up off the old varnish in soft gray curls on the cotton, and I stopped breathing, because what was underneath was a different painting.

The robe under the robe was a different color.

Not restoration-different. Composition-different. The surface robe was the pink of every Annunciation you've ever walked past; the robe underneath was gray going to white at the hem, ash colors, penitential colors, and the fold structure didn't match — the folds underneath were the folds of a figure kneeling, not standing. Somebody had not repaired this angel. Somebody had repainted him entire — a whole second angel built over the first.

I did a lap of the basement. I actually did a small lap.

"You're doing a lap," Raq said. "Talk."

"There's another painting under this painting."

"Is that rare?"

"It's not even rare. Panels got reused, compositions got updated, patrons changed their minds — pentimenti, overpaint campaigns, happens constantly." I was leaning into the loupe, and my voice was doing the thing it does when my hands need the rest of me to shut up, going and going. "What's rare is the quality. Whoever did the top layer could paint. This isn't a parish handyman piously freshening up the altarpiece. This is a first-rate hand, matching the original's palette, hiding his own brushwork, going to enormous trouble so that nobody would ever—" My swab came around a fold and stopped.

"So that nobody would ever what," Raq said.

I didn't answer. At the bottom edge of my cleared window, where the angel's robe met the gold of the ground, the original paint was doing something I had never seen in this scene in my life. The hem pooled. On the floor. The way cloth pools around a figure who has come down hard on both knees and stayed there.

Angels arrive standing. Two thousand years of Annunciations, and Gabriel comes in like a doorman at the Plaza — upright, gorgeous, job to do, lily in hand. They kneel to nobody in that scene; the whole grammar of the picture is that the kneeling goes the other way.

This one was on the ground.

I worked until my shoulders quit, slept badly, and went back in. The next day I moved up the figure. Correct methodology — establish the extent of the campaign, work systematically toward the face — and also I was flying. Sal always says the panel tells you where to go next. This one was practically shouting.

Raq watched me work. He'd stopped pretending to look at the window — the watching had weight now, had had weight since the stoop, and it sat on the back of my neck all day like sun, and I'd stopped minding it, which I noticed the way you notice a stair missing under your foot, and kept climbing anyway.

By then I was keeping evidence on that man whether I admitted it or not, and the evidence said: he had stopped looking at the panel.

He used to look. He'd stood at my shoulder over the scorch marks and asked his terrible perfect questions. Somewhere in that week — somewhere around the time the kneeling started coming up out of the dark — his eyes had left the painting and not gone back. Not when I left it uncovered at lunch. Not when the raking light made the whole studio a theater. Not when any human being in possession of a pulse would have stolen one glance at the thing making the crazy lady cry into her solvents. A man paid to guard a painting, and he kept his eyes off it the way you keep your eyes off an open casket. Deliberately.

I put that with the rest of him, in the place I was keeping the rest of him. The place was getting full.

The day I reached the face, it was four in the afternoon, and the light was going amber.

Three hours in the loupe, one square inch at a time. The solvent sat its thirty seconds, the swab rolled, the top paint gave — reluctant, then all at once — and a face nobody living had ever seen came up out of the dark at me. First person since the painter. I'd chased that feeling my whole working life: laundered saints, freshened Madonnas, one memorable Sicilian John the Baptist with an entire second head.

The angel's surface face was serenity itself — downcast eyes, sweet bow mouth, the bland heavenly courtesy of ten thousand altarpieces. That face rolled up onto my cotton in gray whispers, thirty seconds at a time.

The face underneath was weeping.

Not decorous, doctrinal weeping — not one pearl tear placed by committee. The face under the face was ruined. Eyes swollen, red-rimmed. The mouth open on something — a word, a plea, the start of a howl, I couldn't tell. Grief, looking straight out of the panel. Not downcast. Looking at you. At me. The expression of the newly bereaved — the one I knew from the mirror over Nonna's dresser, the how is everyone still walking around expression — painted by somebody who had either worn that face or held someone who had.

I sat back off the loupe and my eyes were streaming. I registered it from a small professional distance, the way you register humidity.

"Stop," I said, to myself, out loud, like an idiot. My voice came out in pieces.

I wiped my face on my wrist and turned around.

Raq was standing. Not by the chair — closer, ten feet off, stopped mid-floor like he'd hit a wall I couldn't see. And he wasn't looking at the panel. He was looking at me.

"You're crying," he said. Flat. The form's one line.