The Green Man

The liver of sulfur arrived in dry flakes the color of old teeth, and Oren Bask dissolved a thumbnail's worth in a glass jar of warm water, watching the solution bloom amber, then deepen toward something between tea and infection, the smell of it — rotten eggs, sulfurous, volcanic — rising through the studio while he held the first torch in his left hand and the brush in his right and began to paint decay onto the surface of a bronze that had been polished to the color of a new penny not thirty minutes before.

He worked the solution in long strokes across the forehead of the garden figure, a Green Man with oak leaves erupting from his open mouth, the kind of decorative commission that paid the foundry's electricity bill and kept Giuseppe in cigarettes and coffee and the particular Sardinian biscuits he ate at eleven each morning without variation or apology.

The bronze darkened on contact.

First a blush of amber, then a muddy brown, then — as he brought the torch close and the heat accelerated the reaction — a deep chocolate that would, if he stopped now and sealed it, look like the surface of something that had stood in an English garden for a century, collecting rain and the slow chemistry of atmosphere and time.

But he did not stop.

He dipped the brush again and laid another coat, and this time brought the torch closer, and the brown went past brown into a territory that had no easy name, a color that lived in the space between black and green, the way certain beetles look when the light catches them at the precise wrong angle, and then he hit the surface with a quick burst from the spray bottle — cold water on hot bronze — and the thermal shock fractured the developing patina into a network of microscopic cracks that would, over the next three coats, fill with cupric deposits and produce the verdigris that his client in Surrey wanted, the green of old money, the green of something that had always been there.

Oren was fifty-three years old and had been a patinator for thirty-one of those years, first as an apprentice in his father's shop in Reykjavik where the bronzes were small and the winters were not, then in London at the Morris Singer foundry before it closed, then in Berlin for a brief and unhappy period that he did not discuss, and finally here in Pietrasanta, the town in Tuscany that the sculptors had been coming to since the Renaissance because the marble quarries of Carrara were twelve kilometers to the north and the foundries had grown up in their shadow like smaller plants in the shade of enormous trees, feeding on the runoff, and what had been a marble town became also a bronze town, and the patinators came because the bronze came, and Oren came because a patinator he admired told him that the light in Pietrasanta was different, that the light itself was a patina laid over everything by the particular quality of the air coming off the Ligurian Sea mixed with the marble dust that never entirely settled, and this had turned out to be true, or true enough that Oren had stayed.

He was a large man but not a heavy one, built in the manner of Icelandic men who have been handling metal since adolescence, broad through the shoulders and forearms with hands that looked like they had been designed for a creature slightly larger than a human being.

His studio occupied the ground floor of a converted stable on Via Sant'Agostino, three blocks from the Duomo and its white marble facade that blazed in the morning and went pink in the evening and was, Oren had often thought, itself a kind of patina — the marble slowly becoming something other than what the quarry had intended.

He set down the torch and the brush and stepped back.

The Green Man stared at him with its hollow eyes, leaves curling from the corners of its mouth like green speech, like the forest speaking through a human face, and the patina was coming along in the way that good patinas always came along, which was to say slowly and then all at once, the surface finding itself through the accumulation of chemistry and heat and the patinator's hand, which was the only part of the process that could not be reduced to a formula.

Lina was upstairs.

He could hear her moving through the apartment, the particular pattern of her footsteps that he had learned over twenty-six years of marriage the way a musician learns a piece of music — not the notes themselves but the spaces between them, the hesitations, the places where the rhythm changed, and he had noticed three weeks ago that her rhythm had changed, that there was a new pause in the sequence, a gathering of breath between the kitchen and the bedroom that had not been there before, and he had said nothing because saying something would make it real and because Oren Bask was a man who dealt in surfaces, who understood that the thing itself and the thing you saw were never the same, that the green on a bronze was not the bronze, that the patina was a lie agreed upon between the maker and the viewer, and he preferred, in most circumstances, the lie.

But three weeks ago the lie had failed.

She had come downstairs to the studio on a Tuesday morning, which was unusual because she did not like the smell of the chemicals — the liver of sulfur, the ferric nitrate, the hydrochloric acid he used for the really aggressive greens — and she had stood in the doorway in her blue cotton dress, the one she had bought in the market in Lucca the previous September, and she had said, I found a lump, and she had said it the way she said everything, which was plainly, without ornament, the way a person reports the weather or the price of bread, and Oren had set down the torch he was holding and had not known what to do with his hands.

They had gone to the hospital in Viareggio the next day, and then to a specialist in Pisa, and then to another specialist in Florence, and now the results were upstairs, sitting on the kitchen table in an envelope from the Azienda Ospedaliera Universitaria Pisana, and Lina was moving through the apartment in her changed rhythm, and Oren was down here painting decay onto a garden figure because the commission had a deadline and because the chemistry did not wait and because, in the particular economy of his fear, it was easier to control the corrosion of bronze than to open an envelope.

The solution in the glass jar had gone cold.

He heated more water in the electric kettle that he kept on the workbench next to the jars of ferric nitrate and cupric nitrate and the small brown bottles of muriatic acid, and he dissolved another pinch of liver of sulfur and tested the temperature with the back of his wrist the way he had seen Lina test the temperature of bathwater when their daughter, Katla, was a baby, lifting the infant into the tub with a care that suggested she was handling something that could shatter, which of course she was, and Katla was now twenty-four and living in Copenhagen and had not shattered yet but the care remained, encoded in her mother's hands, in the way Lina still reached for things — a glass, a door handle, a piece of fruit — as though the world required gentleness.

He applied the fourth coat.

The Green Man was developing well now, the verdigris coming in across the high points of the leaves and the ridge of the brow while the recesses stayed dark, which was correct, which was how oxidation actually worked in nature — the exposed surfaces changed first, the sheltered surfaces last — and the art of patina was the art of mimicking this natural hierarchy, this democracy of decay in which the prominent suffered first and the hidden were preserved, and Oren thought, not for the first time, that this was also the way of grief, that it was the visible parts of a person — the face, the voice, the way they moved through a room — that showed the damage first, while the inner architecture held its shape long after the surface had gone to green.

He would finish the Green Man today.

He would seal it with a coat of paste wax — the specific formulation he mixed himself from beeswax and carnauba wax and a small amount of turpentine, heated in a double boiler until it reached the consistency of cold cream — and then he would carry it upstairs and wrap it in the custom foam that Giuseppe had cut, and it would go into its crate and the crate would go to the shipping company on Via Marzocco that handled all the foundry's international freight, and it would travel by truck to Livorno and by ship to Southampton and by another truck to Surrey where it would be installed in the garden of a man named Collins who had made his money in insurance and wanted something old-looking for the garden of his new house, and the Green Man would stand there in the English rain and the English light and would acquire, over the years, its own legitimate patina on top of the patina that Oren had applied, and eventually the two would become indistinguishable, the artificial aging absorbed into the actual aging like a lie told so long it becomes the truth.

But first he had to go upstairs.

He cleaned the brushes in a jar of warm water and arranged them bristle-up in the ceramic cup that Katla had made in a pottery class when she was nine, the glaze a violent purple that had mellowed over the years into something almost tasteful, and he capped the jar of liver-of-sulfur solution and set the torch on its stand and pulled off his nitrile gloves and washed his hands in the utility sink, the water running amber with chemical residue, and he dried them on the shop towel that hung from a nail by the door and he stood for a moment at the bottom of the stairs and listened.

She was in the kitchen.

He could hear the specific sound of her making coffee in the moka pot — the clank of the base being set on the burner, the small adjustment of the flame, the eventual gargle and hiss of the water rising through the grounds — and this sound, which he had heard ten thousand times and which was as familiar to him as his own breathing, struck him now with a force that was physical, that landed in his chest like a fist, because he understood suddenly that there was a number, an unknown but finite number, of times he would hear this sound, and the envelope on the kitchen table might tell him roughly what that number was.

He went up.

The apartment was small — a kitchen, a bedroom, a bathroom, a room that was sometimes a guest room and sometimes a storage room and was currently both — and the kitchen was the largest room in it, the room where they ate and talked and read and sat in the evenings listening to the radio, because they were people who listened to the radio, who preferred voices without faces, and the kitchen had a window that looked east over the rooftops to the mountains, and in the morning the light came through this window and landed on the wooden table that Oren had bought from a carpenter in Camaiore twenty years ago and had never regretted, and the envelope was on this table, in this light, and Lina was at the stove with her back to him.

She did not turn around.

She said, The coffee is almost ready, and she said it in Italian because they spoke Italian to each other now, had done so for years, the language of the country having become the language of the marriage in the way that a patina becomes the surface — not replacing what was underneath but rendering it invisible — and sometimes, in moments of intimacy or distress, the earlier languages surfaced, his Icelandic, her Norwegian, like the bronze showing through a worn spot in the finish.

He sat down at the table.

The envelope was the standard size of Italian medical correspondence, slightly larger than American envelopes, a buff color, with the hospital's insignia printed in the upper left corner — a shield with a cross and what might have been a serpent or might have been a river, he had never looked closely enough to determine which — and his name was written on it too, BASK OREN, because in Italy the surname came first, and this small inversion had always pleased him, the way it made him feel like a different person, a person defined first by his family and only second by himself.

Lina brought the coffee to the table.

Two cups, the white ceramic ones with the blue rims that she had found at the market in Forte dei Marmi, and she set them down with the precision that characterized everything she did, the cups exactly parallel, the handles facing right because they were both right-handed, and she sat across from him and looked at the envelope and then looked at him and he saw that she had already opened it, that the flap was loose, that she had read it and resealed it in the way that a person rearranges a room after a catastrophe, putting the furniture back but not quite right, and he understood from her face — not from her expression, which was calm, but from the particular stillness of her calm, the way it sat on her features like a mask on an armature — that the news was not good.

He picked up the envelope.

The paper inside was thin, the kind of paper that Italian bureaucracies used for everything from water bills to death certificates, a paper that seemed to have been designed for impermanence, and the text was in Italian, dense and medical, and he read it the way he read technical manuals for new patina chemicals, slowly, translating each term into something he could use, and the terms were these: adenocarcinoma del pancreas, stadio III, localmente avanzato, and he knew enough medical Italian from twenty-three years of living in this country and enough medical English from having a body that periodically required maintenance to understand what these terms meant, and what they meant was that his wife had pancreatic cancer and that it was advanced and that the word advanced, in this context, did not mean what it meant when applied to a patina — something that had progressed satisfyingly toward its intended result — but rather the opposite, something that had progressed past the point where progression could be stopped.

Lina drank her coffee.

She drank it the way she always drank coffee, in small precise sips with the cup held in both hands, her fingers laced around the warm ceramic, and her hands did not shake, and her face did not change, and Oren thought that she was the bravest person he had ever known and that this thought was useless, that bravery was a quality that meant something only in contexts where the outcome could be changed, and in this context the outcome could not be changed, only its timeline, and perhaps not even that.

He set the paper down on the table.

Outside the window the mountains were doing what they always did in the morning light, which was to go from grey to gold in a slow gradient that took about thirty minutes and that Oren had watched thousands of times from this exact seat and that he now watched again because looking at the mountains was easier than looking at the paper and because the mountains were made of marble and marble lasted and he needed, in this moment, to look at something that lasted.

Lina said, We should call Katla.

He said, Yes.

She said, And you should call your mother.

He said, Yes.

She said, And then we should talk to Dr. Marchetti about what happens next.

He said, Yes.

And then they sat in the kitchen in the morning light and drank their coffee and did not call anyone and did not talk about what happened next and the silence between them was not the silence of people who have nothing to say but the silence of people who have too much to say and no language for it, and Oren understood that this was how it would be now, that the enormous thing would sit between them like a bronze before its patina, raw and bright and impossible to look at directly, and that they would, over time, develop a surface for it, a way of talking about it that was not quite talking about it, a patina of normalcy that would allow them to function, and that this patina, like all patinas, would be a controlled deception, a beauty made from damage, and that he would apply it with the same skill and care that he applied to his bronzes because this was the only skill he had.

Downstairs, the Green Man waited.

He excused himself after the second cup of coffee and went back to the studio and picked up the torch and the brush and resumed the fifth coat of liver of sulfur, and the smell of rotten eggs filled the room, and the bronze darkened under his hand, and he worked with a precision that was, he knew, a form of flight, a way of being somewhere other than the kitchen with the envelope and the morning light and his wife's composed face, and the Green Man's leaves went from brown to green in the way that all things go from brown to green, which is to say chemically, inevitably, one reaction at a time.

The formula for the patina he was applying was simple: potassium polysulfide dissolved in water, heated, applied to clean bronze with a brush, accelerated with a torch.

The formula for what was happening upstairs was not simple.

He finished the fifth coat and assessed the result. The verdigris was good — a mottled blue-green across the high points, the kind of uneven coloration that convinced the eye because nature was never even, nature was always patchy and accidental, and the art was to replicate the accident, to make the random look random, which was much harder than making the random look orderly, and this was why patinators were paid well, because anyone could paint a bronze one color but only a few people could paint it all the colors of time.

He sealed the Green Man with three coats of wax, buffing each one with a soft cotton cloth until the surface developed a low sheen, not glossy — glossy was wrong, glossy said new — but a quiet luster that said the surface had been cared for, had been touched by hands over years, and when he was finished the Green Man looked like it had been sitting in a garden in Surrey for a hundred years, accumulating weather and memory, and Oren wrapped it in the foam and placed it in the crate and nailed the crate shut and wrote the address on the side with a black marker in his careful block letters and the Green Man was done.

He stood in the studio and looked at the empty worktable and thought about the commission.

The commission had come three weeks before Lina's diagnosis, which was to say five weeks ago, from a woman in Rome named Valentina Conti who was a curator at the MAXXI museum and who had seen Oren's patina work on a large abstract bronze by the sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro and had contacted him not for his patina services but for a sculpture of his own, because she had somehow learned that Oren made his own work too, small pieces that he showed occasionally in a gallery in Lucca and that sold infrequently and for modest prices to collectors who appreciated the quality of the surface, the patina, which was always the best part of Oren's sculptures because the forms themselves were competent but not inspired while the surfaces were extraordinary, transcendent even, and Valentina Conti wanted a memorial sculpture, a piece for the garden of her family's house in the Castelli Romani where her mother had died the previous winter, and she wanted it to be bronze, and she wanted the patina to be green, the green of old things, the green of time, and she wanted it by September, which was five months away, which was possible if he started soon.

He had not started.

He had not started because the diagnosis had come and the diagnosis had rearranged everything, the way an earthquake rearranges a room, not destroying the objects but changing their positions so that the familiar became strange, and the commission, which had felt exciting and important three weeks ago, now felt like something from another life, a life in which Lina did not have adenocarcinoma del pancreas, stadio III, localmente avanzato, a life in which September was just September and not a deadline that might coincide with another deadline, one that no oncologist could precisely predict.

But commissions did not wait.

And the foundry had costs. And Katla's rent in Copenhagen was seven thousand kroner a month. And Lina's treatment, whatever it turned out to be, would cost money that the Italian health system would cover only partially, and the rest would come from somewhere, and the somewhere was Oren's hands and the chemicals on his workbench and the torch and the brush and the accumulated knowledge of thirty-one years of turning raw bronze into something that looked like it had lived.

He would start the commission tomorrow.

Tonight he would go upstairs and sit with Lina in the kitchen and they would eat the dinner she had prepared — because she was still preparing dinner, because the diagnosis had not yet changed the rituals, only the silence around them — and they would listen to the radio and they would not talk about the envelope and the coffee would be strong and the bread would be good and the light through the east-facing window would go from gold to pink to grey and the mountains would disappear into the darkness and the day would end.

And in the morning the sun would rise over the marble quarries and the light would come through the window and land on the table where the envelope had been and Oren would go downstairs to the studio and begin to build, in wax, the form that would eventually be cast in bronze and covered in the green of artificial time, and this would be the beginning, and every beginning, he knew, was also the beginning of an end, and the wax was always lost in the casting and the bronze was always raw before the patina and the patina was always a lie and the lie was always beautiful and the beauty was always, in the end, the only thing that remained.