Page 49 of Graceless

"If somebody's nice to me," I said, "I will be extremely rude and leave immediately. I promise. On the saints."

"Cate."

"Before dark," I said. "It's a pastry, not a heist."

I was still laughing when I got to the bottom of the stoop. I made it all the way to the platform before I checked behind me.

Twice.

Tara Buonocore has an office at Columbia the way I have a career: technically, provisionally, and shared with people who have no idea she's there. Fourth floor of a building named for a donor nobody remembers, a room with three desks and one window, and her corner of it is a barricade of books with a space heater she is not allowed to have and a kettle she is definitely not allowed to have, and taped to the shelf above her desk, a photocopied fresco of a demon being weighed on a scale, under which she has written, in Sharpie, SAME.

I met her six years ago over the Sicilian John the Baptist with the second head. Somebody at the auction house wanted an iconography opinion nobody wanted to pay for, and what arrived was an adjunct in a coat two coats too thin for the weather who took one look at my raking-light photos, said "oh, he's got a twin, hello," and then talked for three straight hours without once being boring. We split a pastry then, too. Some people you keep.

"Cat Fontana." She hauled the good chair over from an absent colleague's desk like a thief. "Sit. I have tea, I have a heater the fire marshal doesn't know about, and I have forty minutes before I teach Renaissance survey to eleven teenagers who think Botticelli is a pasta. What's in the folder?"

"Before I open it," I said, "ground rules. No photographs of my photographs. I can't tell you where it is, who owns it, or how it got there. And you never saw it."

Her whole face lit up like the tree at Rockefeller. "This is already the best thing that has ever happened in this office," she said, "including the time the ceiling fell. Open the folder."

I opened the folder.

I'd printed them myself, at home, off the drive that does not leave my body — Sal's rules, and I was keeping them, mostly, and if bringing prints to Morningside Heights was a violation of the spirit, the spirit could take it up with me later. Detail shots only. The robe, ash going to white. The pooled hem. The face. And last, the raking-light frame, the one I'd taken at one in the morning with my arms prickling: the shoulders, bare and scarred, where wings root in every Annunciation ever built.

Tara went through them the way I'd gone through the panel. Slow. Corner to corner. The office noise fell away from her — she does the thing Sal does, the thing I do, the thing that marks the tribe: the object gets all of her, and the rest of the world can file a complaint.

"Talk me through the campaign," she said, quiet, all the Rockefeller gone out of her voice and something better in it.

I talked her through it. Original composition: wingless, kneeling, collapsed, weeping, looking out. Four hundred years later a second campaign, first-rate, paid: wings added on top, figure stood up, face dried, serenity issued.

"And the second hand hides his own work."

"Invisible. Matched craquelure. You'd die of old age before you found it from a pew."

"So." She laid the face down in front of her and put her fingertips at its edges, not touching. "Here's your iconography opinion, free of charge, worth every penny. There is no tradition — none, Cat, and I want you to hear the none, I don't say none — of a wingless, weeping, collapsed angel in an Annunciation. It's not a regional variant. It's not a workshop getting creative. The angel in that scene has one job, and the job is glory: he arrives standing, because he arrives from above, because the entire grammar of the picture is that the divine condescends and the kneeling goes the other way. A painter in that century knew that grammar the way you know a stop sign." She tapped the margin, once. "Your painter ran the stop sign on purpose, at noon, in front of the church. So either he was a heretic with a death wish⁠—"

"Or?"

"Or it's not an Annunciation." She looked up at me, and her eyes were doing the delighted-scholar thing, the thing that's half Christmas and half ambulance. "You don't kneel a figure like that to announce something, Cat. You kneel him because he fell down. What if it's not a scene at all? What if it's a portrait?"

The space heater ticked. Somewhere down the hall a door opened on a lecture and shut on it again.

"A portrait of what," I said, and my voice behaved.

"Okay." Tara stood up, which for Tara is punctuation, and pulled a paperback off the barricade — a Bible, rubber-banded, swollen with flags. "Quick question. Total non sequitur. What do you know about the Book of Enoch?"

"It's — apocryphal something? It's on the crazy shelf. It's next to the lizard-people documentaries."

"That's the reputation, yes. Here's the résumé." She held up one finger. "Ancient Jewish text. Older than Christianity. The first section's called the Book of the Watchers, and it tells a whole story that Genesis only mutters about — you know the verse, sons of God, daughters of men. It's still in everyone's Bible, Genesis six, they couldn't scrub it, it's load-bearing. Enoch is the book that tells you what actually happened: a company of angels — Watchers, they were called, because that was the job, they were set to watch — came down. On purpose. Because they wanted. And it names them, Cat. It's not 'some angels.' It's a roster. Twenty officers, chiefs of ten, name by name, like a crew manifest." Second finger. "And the book was buried. Not lost — excluded. It didn't make the canon, east or west, with exactly one exception: the Ethiopian church kept it, in Ge'ez, which is the only reason we have the whole thing at all. For everybody else it just quietly stopped being copied, which is how you kill a book without ever holding a trial. And then in the nineteen-forties" — third finger, and she was grinning now, the ambulance grin — "fragments of it walk out of the caves at Qumran with the Dead Sea Scrolls. The buried book physically came back out of the ground. That part's not a theory, that's carbon-datable."

"Tara. I restore paintings. I came here for iconography, not a conversion."

"Relax, it's history, not church. History can't hurt you." She sat back down. "That's a lie, actually. Forget I said it. Because here's the part I need you to sit still for, and I need you to remember I'm the most boring kind of scholar there is, I check footnotes for fun." She snapped the rubber band off the Bible and went to a flagged page like a hawk dropping. "The Epistle of Jude. In the canon. In every Bible in every drawer of every motel in America. Twenty-five verses long, and in verses fourteen and fifteen, Jude — canonical Jude — quotes Enoch. Directly. By name." She read it out, low, and the little office got littler: "And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying: Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints. That's First Enoch one-nine, Cat, near enough word for word, quoted as true prophecy. And two verses before that, Jude mentions the angels who didn't keep their proper domain — who left their station. He's citing the case. He assumes his readers know the book."

My arms did the thing. Both of them, wrist to shoulder, and I put my hands around my tea so they'd have something to do.

"So follow the logic," Tara said, "because it's not my logic, it's two thousand years old — Tertullian was making this exact argument around the year two hundred, this is a documented fight: if Jude is scripture, and Jude vouches for Enoch — then the canon authenticates the book the canon buried. The thing in your Bible points at the thing they took out of it. They sealed the building and left a window open, and the window has been open for two thousand years, and almost nobody looks at it, because it's twenty-five verses long and it's shelved behind Revelation like a mop closet."

"People will say Constantine did it," I said, because the crazy shelf lives in my neighborhood too. "Cut the books. At that council."