The New York Commission

The sculptor's name was David Hersh and he lived in Brooklyn and made large figurative bronzes that looked, from a distance, like classical sculpture and that revealed, on closer inspection, a strangeness — a torso that was also a doorway, a hand that was also a root system, a face that was also a landscape — and this strangeness was what made his work interesting and what made the patina work interesting, because the patina had to honor both the figurative and the abstract, had to look old enough to be classical and strange enough to be contemporary, and this was the kind of challenge that Oren enjoyed, the kind that required him to think about the surface as a participant in the meaning rather than merely a coating applied to the meaning.

The figure was three meters tall and had been modeled in clay and molded in silicone rubber and cast in wax and the wax had arrived at Fonderia Mariani in four sections — torso, head, left leg-and-base, right leg-and-base — each section packed in a wooden crate lined with foam, and Oren and Giuseppe and Marco had unpacked the sections and assembled them on a steel frame in the center of the foundry floor, and the figure stood there now like a visitor from another world, a brown wax giant surrounded by the equipment and materials of the foundry, looking down at the men who would cast it with the blank expression of something that did not yet have eyes.

Oren worked on the New York commission with the intensity of a man who needed to be working.

He needed it the way the bronze needed its alloy, the way the wax needed its armature, the way the shell needed its coats — structurally, essentially, as a condition of remaining intact — and the work provided what nothing else could provide, which was a set of problems that had solutions, a series of tasks that could be completed, a world in which his skill mattered, in which his knowledge was relevant, in which the outcome was, if not guaranteed, at least influenceable, and this was the difference between the foundry and the apartment, between the bronze and Lina, between the work and the life — the work could be influenced, the life could not, and Oren retreated into the work the way a hermit crab retreats into a shell, not because the shell was home but because the shell was protection.

Each section of the New York figure had to be sprued and invested separately.

The torso section was the largest and the most complex, with undercuts and hollows that required a sprue system of unusual intricacy, and Oren designed it over two days, sketching the flow paths on paper and then building them in wax, attaching rod after rod to the surface of the torso section with a heated spatula, each rod placed at the angle and the diameter that would ensure complete fill, and the design was a kind of sculpture in itself, the sprue system as beautiful as the form it served, the plumbing as carefully considered as the art.

He worked twelve-hour days.

He left the apartment at six in the morning, before Lina woke, and he returned at six in the evening, after the light in the studio had shifted from useful to useless, and between these hours he was at the foundry or in the studio, mixing slurry, dipping shells, cutting sprues, grinding wax, the tasks of the process absorbing him the way the slurry absorbed the wax, completely, leaving no surface exposed.

Lina noticed.

She noticed the way she noticed everything, which was quietly, observationally, without immediate comment, the way a scientist notices a change in an experiment — recording the data, reserving judgment, waiting for the pattern to emerge — and the pattern that emerged was this: Oren was working more and being present less, and the working was not normal working but flight-working, the kind of working that was not about the work but about the not-being-somewhere-else.

She said nothing about it for a week.

On the eighth day she said, over breakfast, in the tone she used for observations that were also corrections, You have not been to the market in two weeks.

Oren said, I have been busy with the New York commission.

She said, You have been busy with the New York commission the way a person is busy with a bunker.

He did not respond because the observation was accurate and accuracy was not something you could argue with, and Lina did not press it because pressing was not her method, her method was the single observation placed precisely, like a void filler placed by a TIG welder, small and accurate and left to cure.

That evening he went to the market.

The market was the Friday evening market, smaller than the Wednesday market, mostly food — the fishmonger from Viareggio with his display of the day's catch arranged on ice, the eyes of the fish still clear, the bodies still iridescent with the scales' structural color, which was not pigment but geometry, the scale's surface reflecting light in a way that produced color the way a soap bubble produced color, through interference rather than chemistry, and Oren had always found this beautiful, this color that was architecture rather than substance, and he bought two sea bream and a bag of clams and he carried them home and he cooked them himself.

The sea bream he grilled on the stovetop grill pan with olive oil and rosemary.

The clams he steamed in white wine and garlic.

The cooking was not good — the fish was slightly overdone, the clams slightly underdone — but the attempt was the point, the attempt was the surface he was applying to the evening, the patina of normalcy, of domesticity, of a husband cooking for his wife on a Friday evening, and the patina was thin but it held, and Lina ate more than she had eaten in a week, and the eating was its own kind of evidence, evidence that the surface still mattered, that the effort of maintaining it was not wasted.

After dinner they walked.

Not far, because Lina's energy did not extend far in the evenings, but to the Piazza del Duomo and back, a walk of perhaps twenty minutes, and the piazza was alive with the Friday evening passeggiata, the Italian social ritual of walking and being seen, the families and the couples and the old men and the teenagers all circulating through the piazza in a slow human current that moved in one direction on one side and the other direction on the other side, and Oren and Lina joined this current and walked among the citizens of their adopted town and the town held them the way the piazza held the walkers, loosely, openly, without possessiveness, and this holding was what Oren had loved about Pietrasanta from the beginning, the town's willingness to accommodate strangers, to let the foreigners in without requiring them to become Italian, to accept the alloy, the mixture, the combination of unlike elements that produced something the town had not been before.

They passed the bronze by the Polish sculptor, the reclining figure that was developing its double patina, and Oren saw that the verdigris had advanced in the weeks since he had last looked at it, the green spreading from the nose and the breasts to the shoulders and the chin, and this advancement was both natural and inevitable and beautiful in the way that all natural patinas were beautiful, which was to say imperfectly, accidentally, without the control and the intention that Oren applied to his own patinas, and he thought that there was something to be learned from this, from the uncontrolled patina, from the surface that the world made without the intervention of the maker.

They walked home and Lina went to bed and Oren went downstairs.

The memorial bronze sat on his workbench under its cloth, and the New York commission sections sat on the foundry floor at Fonderia Mariani under their growing ceramic shells, and the work was everywhere, surrounding him the way the town surrounded him, the way the marriage surrounded him, and the work was what he had, the thing he could do, the skill that was relevant, and he sat in the studio and did not uncover the memorial and did not work on anything and simply sat, in the quiet, in the chemical-smelling air, and let the evening settle around him like the last coat of slurry on a shell, thin and final and necessary.

The second chemotherapy infusion was on a Monday.

He drove Lina to Pisa and sat beside her in the infusion room and the routine was already a routine, which was itself a kind of patina, the repetition wearing a path through the unfamiliar until it became familiar, and the nurse inserted the IV and the bags went up on the pole and the chemicals dripped and the hours passed and Lina read and Oren sat and the other patients in the room underwent their own infusions and the room had the communal quality of a place where people suffered together, not loudly, not dramatically, but quietly, patiently, in the reclining chairs with their IV poles and their books and their blankets.

Oren went to the bar across the street at noon and ate a tramezzino and drank a coffee and came back.

In the afternoon the infusion finished and they drove home and Lina went to bed at four and Oren went to the studio and stood at the workbench and thought about the second infusion and the third infusion that would come in two weeks and the fourth infusion that would come in two weeks after that and the infusions stretching forward into the future like the coats of a ceramic shell, each one adding something, each one changing the interior, each one bringing the process closer to its conclusion.

The following week he invested the torso section of the New York commission.

The shell took seven coats, each one dried and inspected before the next was applied, and the shell was heavy because the torso section was large, and the shell required a steel frame to support it during the drying process, the frame cradling the shell the way the armature cradled the wax, an infrastructure of support that was invisible in the finished product.

He worked on the head section simultaneously, spruing it and beginning the investment, and the two shells dried side by side in the foundry's drying room, which was a separate space with controlled temperature and humidity, the conditions calibrated to produce even drying, because uneven drying caused uneven shrinkage and uneven shrinkage caused cracks, and cracks in the shell were catastrophic, were the thing that woke Oren up at night sometimes, the foundry worker's nightmare, the shell cracking in the kiln, the bronze escaping, the work lost.

He did not dream about cracking shells anymore.

He dreamed about Lina.

The dreams were not dramatic. They were ordinary dreams, dreams of ordinary life — Lina in the kitchen, Lina in the market, Lina reading in the chair by the window — but the ordinariness was the horror, because the dreams presented a world in which the ordinary continued and this continuation was a lie, was the dream's patina, the surface the unconscious applied to the truth, and underneath the surface the truth was the envelope and the oncologist and the twelve to eighteen months and the FOLFIRINOX dripping into the vein in the back of her hand.

He woke from these dreams and lay in the dark and listened to Lina breathe and the breathing was there, was present, was real, and the realness of the breathing was the most important fact in the world.

Three weeks after the second infusion, Lina's hair began to thin.

It did not fall out dramatically, in clumps, the way the movies showed it. It thinned gradually, the way a patina thins when the wax sealant wears away, the underlying surface becoming visible through the diminishing cover, and Lina found hairs on her pillow and in the shower drain and on the back of the kitchen chair where she rested her head while reading, and she did not comment on this, did not draw attention to it, but she went to the hairdresser on Via Mazzini and had her hair cut shorter, preemptively, taking it from the practical bob she had worn for years to something closer to a crop, and this pre-emptive cutting was Lina's way, the way of a woman who would rather make the change herself than have the change made for her, who would rather apply her own patina than let the disease apply its.

Oren noticed the new haircut.

He said, It looks good.

She said, It looks like what it is, and what it was was a woman managing the evidence, controlling the surface, applying the patina of choice to the reality of loss, and Oren understood this because managing the evidence was his profession, his daily practice, and he saw in Lina's haircut the same impulse that drove him to make new bronze look old — the desire to control the narrative of the surface, to decide what the viewer saw, to choose the lie.

The burnout for the New York torso section was scheduled for the following week.

The shell was complete — eight coats, tapped and tested, the sound of a good pot — and it would go into the kiln at Fonderia Mariani on Tuesday and the wax would burn out over twelve hours and the shell would emerge hollow and ready, and the pour would happen on Thursday, and the pour for a section this large would be serious, would require two crucibles and six men on the shanks, and the bronze would be bright and the heat would be enormous and the risk would be real, because large pours were always riskier than small ones, the volume of metal magnifying every variable, every potential for error, and Roberto would manage the pour with the calm competence of a man who had been managing pours for forty years and who treated each one with the same respect, the same caution, the same understanding that two thousand degrees of liquid metal was always two thousand degrees of liquid metal, regardless of how many times you had poured it.

Oren looked forward to the pour.

He looked forward to it the way he looked forward to all the irreversible moments in the process — the cutting of the wax, the burnout, the pour — because irreversibility was a relief, was the end of possibility and the beginning of actuality, and he lived in a world of too much possibility now, the possibility of the treatment working and the possibility of the treatment not working and the possibility of the tumor shrinking and the possibility of the tumor not shrinking and the possibilities stretched out in every direction like the paths in a maze and he could not see where any of them led.

The pour, at least, led somewhere. The pour led to bronze.

On the evening before the burnout, Oren uncovered the memorial bronze.

He had not looked at it in two weeks. He had covered it after Giuseppe's chasing and he had left it covered, had worked on the New York commission instead, had let the memorial wait, and now he lifted the cloth and the bronze was there, unchanged, the raw penny-colored surface that Giuseppe had chased to perfection, and the sight of it struck Oren with an emotion he did not expect, an emotion that was not pride or satisfaction or professional assessment but something simpler, something that felt like recognition, like seeing a face he had forgotten in a crowd.

The memorial was waiting for its patina.

The patina was waiting for Oren.

He put his hand on the bronze and the bronze was cool, room temperature, and the surface was smooth under his palm, the smoothness of Giuseppe's three-twenty grit emery cloth, and he could feel, very faintly, the form underneath the surface, the curves and hollows of the vessel he had shaped in wax and that the bronze had remembered, and this tactile encounter — his hand on the bronze, the bronze cool under his hand — was the most intimate moment of the process, the moment before the patina, the last moment of the raw, and Oren stood in the studio with his hand on the memorial and thought about Lina upstairs with her shortened hair and her careful eating and her composed face and her hoarseness and her fatigue, and he thought that she was in her own last moment of the raw, the last weeks or months before the treatment and the disease changed her surface beyond the point of concealment, before the patina of illness became the dominant surface, and he wanted to remember her like this, before the green, before the age, before the beauty that was also decay.

He covered the bronze again.

He went upstairs and Lina was reading in the chair by the window and the lamp made its circle of warm light and the rest of the room was in shadow and she looked up when he came in and she said, You uncovered it.

He said, How did you know.

She said, You have bronze on your hands, and she held up her own hand and there was a faint copper smudge on her palm from where he had touched the doorframe on the way in, and the smudge was the color of the raw bronze, the color of the memorial before the patina, and Lina looked at the smudge and then looked at him and said, The bronze leaves its mark.

He said, Everything leaves its mark.

She said, Yes.

And they sat in the room, in the lamplight, with the copper smudge on her palm and the work waiting downstairs and the treatment waiting in Pisa and the pour waiting at the foundry and the patina waiting for the memorial and the summer advancing and the days counting themselves out one by one, the way the drips of the IV counted themselves, the way the coats of the shell counted themselves, the way everything in their lives had become a count, a sequence, a number with an end that was known but not yet reached.