Heat

June in Pietrasanta was an argument between the mountains and the sea, the cold air descending from the Apuan Alps and the warm air rising from the Ligurian coast meeting in the plain where the town sat, and the argument produced a heat that was not the dry heat of the interior or the wet heat of the coast but something between, a heat with weight, a heat that settled on the body like a garment and that could not be removed by shade or wind or the cold water that Oren drank constantly, glass after glass, the water running through him the way the bronze ran through the sprues, filling the void, displacing the air, and never quite enough.

The foundry in June was close to unbearable.

The furnace added its heat to the ambient heat and the corrugated steel walls absorbed the sun's heat and radiated it inward and the floor retained the heat of the previous day's pours, the concrete storing thermal energy the way the ceramic shells stored the wax's shape, and by noon the interior of Fonderia Mariani reached temperatures that would have been illegal in most workplaces but that were accepted here because the work demanded it and because the workers were Italians who had a relationship with heat that was cultural and ancient and that manifested as a philosophical acceptance rather than a practical objection, the heat being simply another element of the work, like the weight of the bronze or the sharpness of the tools, something to be managed rather than eliminated.

Oren worked through the heat.

He was investing the remaining sections of the New York commission — the left leg-and-base and the right leg-and-base — and the investment process required the controlled environment of the drying room, which was air-conditioned, mercifully, but the dipping and stuccoing had to be done in the main foundry space, and each dip-and-stucco cycle meant twenty minutes in the heat, lifting the heavy shell, rotating it in the slurry, sifting the stucco, setting it on the rack, and then retreating to the drying room to wait for the coat to set.

The routine was physical and repetitive and Oren was grateful for both qualities.

Physical because the body's engagement left the mind less room to wander, and repetitive because repetition was a form of meditation, the same gestures performed over and over until they became automatic and the hands worked without the mind's supervision and the mind could rest, or if not rest then at least not think about the specific things it did not want to think about, which were the things that occupied it at every other moment — Lina's treatment, Lina's side effects, Lina's thinning hair, Lina's careful eating, Lina's afternoon fatigue, Lina, Lina, Lina, the syllables of her name a pulse beneath everything.

The fourth infusion had been the previous week.

The side effects were establishing a pattern now, a predictable sequence that Oren could map the way he mapped a sprue system — days one through three, nausea and fatigue; days four and five, the nadir, the lowest point, when Lina stayed in bed and ate almost nothing and the apartment was quiet in a way that made Oren's chest tight; days six through ten, the slow recovery, the gradual return of appetite and energy, the surface rebuilding itself the way a patina rebuilt after being disturbed; days eleven through fourteen, something approaching normalcy, the two good weeks before the next infusion, the reprieve, the interval of relative health that was precious precisely because it was bounded, and the bounding was the next infusion, always the next infusion, the calendar marked with the dates in Lina's precise handwriting, the Mondays circled in blue pen.

During the good weeks Lina was herself.

She cooked. She walked. She read. She went to the market and selected tomatoes by touch and argued with the fishmonger about the freshness of the branzino and carried her shopping bags home through the narrow streets and the carrying was slower than before but the carrying happened and the happening was the point. She sat in the chair by the window and read her books — she had moved on from Solstad to Tove Jansson, the Moomin books, which Oren found surprising until she explained that she was rereading them because they were books about small creatures in large landscapes who built shelters against the cold and the dark, and the building of shelters was what interested her now, the way small things protected themselves against large things, and Oren understood this because building shelters was what he did too, the patina being a shelter, the surface being a shelter, the work being a shelter.

During the bad weeks Lina was a different version of herself.

Not a lesser version — Oren rejected this formulation because it implied a hierarchy, a ranking of Linas from best to worst, and Lina was not rankable, was not a bronze that could be assessed for defects — but a version that was further from the surface, deeper inside herself, the way the bronze was inside the ceramic shell, present but not visible, the form intact but covered, and during these days Oren moved through the apartment with a quietness that was not caution but respect, the respect of a person in the presence of something private, something that was happening between Lina and her body in a conversation to which he was not a party.

He cooked during the bad weeks.

His repertoire had expanded from spaghetti aglio e olio to include three other dishes: a vegetable soup that was mostly zucchini and potatoes and that Lina could eat even on the worst days; a frittata with whatever vegetables were in the refrigerator; and a roast chicken that he made on Sundays with lemon and rosemary and that was, he thought, the best thing he cooked, the chicken skin crisp and golden, the meat tender, the rosemary fragrant, and Lina said it was good, said it was very good, said he had hidden talents, and the saying of this was part of the surface they maintained, the domestic patina, the coating of normalcy over the abnormal.

In the second week of June he poured the left leg-and-base section.

The pour was clean, the bronze filling the mold completely, and when the shell was broken away the bronze was sound, minimal voids, no cracks, and Giuseppe began chasing it immediately, the die grinder singing its high-pitched song in the studio while Oren started the investment of the right leg-and-base, and the two processes overlapped, the chasing of one section proceeding while the shelling of the next section built up coat by coat, and the overlap was the rhythm of foundry work, the staggered sequence of tasks that kept the process moving forward without pause, each step beginning before the previous step was complete, the way notes in a musical phrase overlapped, each one sustaining while the next one sounded.

In the evenings Oren sat with Lina in the kitchen.

The evenings were long now, the June light lasting until nine, the sky going through its sequence of colors — blue to gold to orange to pink to purple to the deep blue-black that was not quite night but was the memory of night, the last residue of darkness that the summer could not entirely dispel — and they sat at the table with the windows open and the warm air coming in and the sounds of the town coming in with it, and they talked and did not talk, the conversation flowing and pooling and flowing again like the bronze in the sprues, following the channels they had built over twenty-six years.

Lina said, I spoke to Katla today.

Oren said, How is she.

Lina said, She is working on the lamp. The one that is also a sculpture. She says it is going well.

Oren said, Good.

Lina said, She is coming in two weeks. She wants to be here for the next infusion.

Oren said, She does not need to come for every infusion.

Lina said, She is not coming for the infusion. She is coming for me.

The distinction was precise and Oren accepted it because precision was Lina's language, was the way she said what she meant without saying more than she meant, and the distinction between coming for the infusion and coming for her was the distinction between the process and the person, between the medical event and the human need, and Katla was coming for the human need, and this was correct, and Oren felt the relief of the correct thing being done, the way he felt relief after a clean pour.

The heat continued.

July approached and with it the time Oren had designated for the memorial's patina, the final surface, the green that Valentina Conti had requested and that Oren had been thinking about for months, not constantly but persistently, the way a problem stays in the back of the mind while the front of the mind works on other things, and the thinking had produced a plan, a sequence of chemicals and applications and temperatures that he had refined in his head the way he refined a sprue design, adjusting the variables, anticipating the problems, building the path that the chemistry would follow.

The plan was this.

First, degrease the bronze with acetone to remove any oils from handling. Then heat the entire surface with the torch to open the pores of the metal, to make it receptive. Then the base coat: liver of sulfur, applied hot, in four or five coats, building the dark undercolor that would give the subsequent layers depth, the way an oil painter builds a dark ground beneath the colors, the darkness creating a visual depth that the viewer reads as age. Then the green: cupric nitrate in solution, sprayed and brushed and dabbed and stippled, built up in layers of varying concentration and temperature, the green emerging not as a uniform color but as a complex field of blues and greens and blue-greens, the variation of color creating the illusion of natural oxidation, of decades of exposure, of weather and time and the slow chemistry of the atmosphere acting on the metal. Then the warm accents: ferric nitrate, applied sparingly to specific areas — the high points, the edges, the places where the eye landed first — creating a brown-orange warmth that would contrast with the green and that would read as the bronze showing through the patina, the original surface asserting itself through the acquired surface, the way the bronze asserted itself through wear in a genuinely old piece. Then the fuming: ammonia, applied in a sealed container, the fumes reacting with the still-wet chemicals on the surface to produce the deep verdigris, the dark green-black of old copper, the color of rooftops in Paris and Statue of Liberty and the doors of Florentine palazzi. And finally the seal: paste wax, Oren's own formulation, brushed on and buffed until the surface had the low sheen of something that had been cared for, had been touched, had been lived with.

This was the plan.

The plan was also a timeline, because each step required drying time and each drying time had to be calibrated to the temperature and the humidity and the size of the piece, and the total timeline for the memorial's patina would be, Oren estimated, five days of active work spread over two weeks, the working days interspersed with drying days, the rhythm of application and waiting, of doing and not-doing, that was the patinator's particular form of patience.

He would begin in July.

First, the last section of the New York commission had to be poured, and all four sections had to be welded together, and the welding seams had to be chased, and the entire figure had to be prepared for patina, and the patina for the New York figure would be its own project, a large-scale patina that would take two weeks and that would require different chemistry than the memorial because David Hersh wanted not green but brown, a deep chocolate brown with warm highlights, and brown was a different process, a different set of chemicals, a different temperature range, and Oren would do the New York patina first, in early July, and then do the memorial patina in late July, and then August would be curing time, and September would be installation, and the schedule was tight but achievable if nothing went wrong.

Things went wrong.

On the fourteenth of June, two days before the pour of the right leg-and-base section, Roberto called Oren at the studio and said that the shell had cracked.

A crack in the ceramic shell was the foundry worker's catastrophe.

It meant that the shell could not hold the bronze, that the pour could not proceed, that the weeks of investment — the seven or eight coats of slurry and stucco, each one dried and inspected, each one applied with the care and the patience that the process demanded — were wasted, and the shell would have to be broken away and the wax inside it re-sprued and re-invested, and the timeline would shift by three weeks, minimum, and the schedule that had been tight would become impossible.

Oren drove to the foundry.

The crack ran along the bottom of the shell, where the base met the leg, a clean fracture line that extended perhaps eight inches and that had been caused, Roberto said, by a flaw in the face coat, a thin spot where the slurry had not covered the wax evenly and that had not been caught during inspection, and the thin spot had become a crack during the final drying, the uneven thickness creating uneven stress that the ceramic could not distribute, and the crack was fatal, was not repairable, the shell's integrity compromised beyond what any patching could restore.

Oren looked at the cracked shell and felt the specific despair of the craftsman who has done good work that has been undone by a single flaw, a flaw that could have been prevented by closer attention, by another inspection, by the paranoia that was the craftsman's most useful trait, and he had not been paranoid enough, had not inspected closely enough, had been distracted by the heat and the schedule and Lina and the memorial and the accumulating weight of the summer, and the shell had cracked and the work was lost.

Not the wax. The wax was intact inside the cracked shell, could be recovered, cleaned, re-sprued, re-invested. The wax was not lost.

The time was lost.

Three weeks. The schedule shifted. The New York patina moved to late July. The memorial patina moved to August. The curing time shrank. The September installation became uncertain.

He called David Hersh in Brooklyn and explained the situation and David said what experienced sculptors said when shells cracked, which was, These things happen, and, The bronze will be better for the extra time, and these were the right things to say and they were also true, because these things did happen and the bronze would be better, because the re-investment would be more careful, more inspected, more paranoid, and the shell would be stronger and the pour would be cleaner and the final casting would be better for having been delayed by failure.

But the time.

Three weeks was three weeks, was six percent of the year, was one and a half infusion cycles, was an increment of Lina's life that had a weight it would not have had before the diagnosis, and Oren felt the loss of the three weeks the way he felt all losses now, disproportionately, each lost hour heavier than it should be because the total number of hours was finite and known and diminishing.

He drove home in the heat.

The Fiat Panda's engine labored in the June afternoon and the road shimmered and the mountains were hazy and the sea was invisible behind the heat and the coastal buildings and the day was the hottest day so far and the heat was everywhere, inside the car and outside the car and inside Oren and outside Oren, the heat of the season and the heat of the furnace and the heat of the chemicals and the heat of the anger that he could not express because the anger had no target, because the crack in the shell was not anyone's fault, was the result of a thin spot in a slurry coat applied weeks ago, a flaw so small that it was invisible until it became catastrophic, and this was how flaws worked, in shells and in bodies, invisible until they cracked.

At the apartment Lina was making dinner.

It was a good week, the second week after the fourth infusion, the week of relative normalcy, and she was at the stove making the pasta with anchovies and breadcrumbs and she turned when he came in and saw his face and said, What happened.

He said, The shell cracked. The right leg section. Three weeks lost.

She said, Three weeks.

He said, Three weeks.

She said, and there was in her voice the quality that Oren had come to recognize as the quality of a person who was re-calibrating, adjusting the internal model to accommodate new information, the way a navigator adjusts the course when the wind changes, Three weeks is three weeks. It is not the end. It is a delay. Delays are not losses. Losses are losses. Delays are temporary. Come and eat.

He came and ate.

The pasta was good. The anchovies were salty and pungent and the breadcrumbs were golden and crisp and the combination was Sicilian and ancient and perfect in the way that simple food made well was perfect, and Oren ate and the eating was an anchor, was a thing that pulled him back from the place where the anger and the fear and the heat had taken him, back to the kitchen and the table and the woman across from him who was making pasta with anchovies despite the chemicals in her bloodstream and the tumor in her pancreas, who was making dinner the way she had always made dinner, with precision and care and the understanding that the act of making dinner was not about the dinner but about the making, the insistence that the ordinary continue, that the rituals hold, that the surface not crack.

The shell had cracked.

But the surface of the dinner held. The surface of the evening held. The surface of the marriage held.

And the heat continued, and the summer continued, and the work continued, and the treatment continued, and everything continued in the way that everything continued, which was relentlessly, without pause, without mercy, without regard for the cracks in the shell or the flaws in the plan or the thin spots in the surface where the slurry had not covered evenly, the places where the underlying fragility was visible, where the armature showed through the wax, where the bronze showed through the patina, where the person showed through the composure.

The heat continued.

And Oren worked through it.