Chasing

Giuseppe worked with a die grinder the way a cellist worked with a bow, which was to say with the entire body, not just the hands, the tool an extension of the arm and the arm an extension of the torso and the torso an extension of the intention, the whole organism engaged in the single task of removing metal from a surface with a precision that was measurable in hundredths of a millimeter and that was, at the same time, not measurable at all, because the final arbiter was not the caliper but the fingertip, the pad of the index finger drawn across the ground surface to feel for the ridge, the bump, the discontinuity that the eye could not see but that the skin could feel.

He had been chasing the memorial bronze for four days.

The first day was the sprues. He cut them with a reciprocating saw, the blade moving back and forth through the bronze stubs with a high-pitched whine that set Oren's teeth on edge in the way that only the sound of metal cutting metal could, and the sprues fell away one by one, leaving stubs that protruded from the surface of the bronze like the stems of cut flowers, and then he ground the stubs down with the die grinder, the carbide burr spinning at twenty thousand revolutions per minute, removing the bronze in a spray of fine particles that hung in the air of the studio like gold dust and that settled on every surface — the workbench, the tools, Giuseppe's face shield, Oren's coffee cup — and that would remain in the studio's crevices for weeks despite sweeping and vacuuming, because bronze dust was persistent, was as fine as talcum powder and as pervasive as weather.

The second day was the seam. The memorial had been cast in a single pour, which meant there were no section welds to contend with, but there was the seam where the two halves of the wax had been joined, and this seam had transferred to the bronze as a faint ridge line that ran around the circumference of the vessel like an equator, and Giuseppe ground this ridge with the die grinder and then filed it with a flat file and then sanded it with progressively finer grits of emery cloth — eighty, then one-twenty, then two-twenty, then three-twenty — and by the end of the second day the seam was gone, not hidden but gone, the surface continuous and uninterrupted, as though the bronze had been born in one piece, which in a sense it had, the two halves of the wax having been rejoined before the shell was applied, but the casting process had remembered the joint the way the body remembered a wound, as a line of weakness, a place where the integrity had been interrupted and restored.

The third day was the voids. Every casting had voids — small pockets where the bronze had failed to reach, where an air bubble had formed and held its ground against the incoming metal, creating a pinhole or a dimple or, in bad castings, a crater that went all the way through the wall — and the memorial had fewer voids than most castings, which was a testament to Oren's sprue design and the quality of the pour, but it had some, a dozen or so, most of them smaller than a pinhead, scattered across the interior surface where the bronze had met the most complex contours of the original wax.

Giuseppe repaired each void individually.

He used a TIG welder, the most precise of the welding processes, the one that used a tungsten electrode and an argon gas shield to create a tiny pool of molten metal that could be directed with the accuracy of a pen, and he filled each void with a bead of silicon bronze welding rod, melting the rod into the void until the void was full and the bead stood slightly proud of the surface, and then he ground the bead flush with the die grinder and filed it and sanded it, and the void was gone, the surface healed, the bronze whole again.

Oren watched Giuseppe work and thought about healing.

The word was the same in English and in the language of bronze — healing, the restoration of a surface that had been damaged, the filling of a void that should not be there — and the process was the same too, the application of new material to the site of the damage, the blending of the new into the old until the boundary between them was undetectable, and Oren thought that this was what the chemotherapy was trying to do with Lina, was trying to heal the void, the place where the cells had gone wrong, but the chemotherapy was not a TIG welder, was not precise, was not directed, was instead a flood, a wash of chemicals that covered everything, the damaged and the undamaged alike, and the side effects were the side effects of this indiscrimacy, the collateral damage of a healing process that could not tell the difference between the wound and the tissue around it.

The side effects had begun.

Not dramatically, not suddenly, but in the way that a patina began, gradually, one reaction at a time, the surface changing in small increments that were individually negligible but cumulatively transformative, and the changes in Lina were these: a fatigue that was different from ordinary tiredness, a fatigue that seemed to originate not in the muscles but in the cells themselves, as though each cell had been asked to do something additional — fight, resist, repair — and the energy required for this additional task was being diverted from the tasks that had previously seemed automatic, like walking up stairs, like carrying a bag of groceries, like standing at the kitchen counter long enough to prepare a meal.

She still prepared meals.

She prepared them with the same attention and the same skill but with a new economy of motion, eliminating unnecessary steps, sitting when she could, resting her weight against the counter in a way that was so subtle that only Oren would notice, and he noticed because noticing surfaces was his life's work, and Lina's surface was the surface he knew best, better than any bronze, and the changes on it registered with him the way changes on a bronze registered, as information, as data about what was happening underneath.

There was also the nausea.

She did not vomit — the anti-nausea drugs prevented that — but she lived with a constant low-grade queasiness that was, she said, like being on a boat in a mild swell, the horizon tilting slightly and then righting itself and then tilting again, and this was funny, she said, because the memorial sculpture looked like a boat, and perhaps she was becoming the sculpture, hollowed out and rocking, and Oren did not laugh at this joke because it was not a joke but a description, and descriptions of what was happening to Lina were not things he could laugh at yet, though he suspected that the time would come when laughter was the only available response.

The fourth day Giuseppe finished the chasing with a final pass of three-twenty grit emery cloth over the entire surface of the memorial, inside and out, bringing the bronze to a uniform matte finish that was clean and smooth and ready for the patina, and when he was done he set down the emery cloth and removed his face shield and looked at the piece and said, She is good.

He always referred to sculptures as she.

Oren examined the chasing.

He ran his fingers over the surface, feeling for the things the eye could not see — the ridge of an incompletely ground sprue stub, the depression of an underfilled void, the texture of a grinder mark that had not been fully sanded — and the surface was flawless, which was to say it was Giuseppe's work, which was to say it was the best chasing that Oren had ever had the privilege of working with, and this was not flattery but fact, and the fact was confirmed by thirty years of other sculptors who had used Giuseppe's services and who all said the same thing, which was that Giuseppe's chasing was invisible, was the best kind of craft, the kind that erased itself, that left no evidence of the intervention, only the result.

Oren said, It is perfect.

Giuseppe said, It is bronze. Bronze is not perfect. Perfect is for mathematics. This is close enough.

This was Giuseppe's philosophy of craft — not the pursuit of perfection but the pursuit of close enough, which sounded like compromise but was not, because Giuseppe's close enough was closer than most people's perfect, the way a master musician's casual playing was better than a student's best effort, the skill so internalized that it produced excellence without striving.

Oren thanked him and Giuseppe waved the thanks away and began cleaning up, sweeping the bronze dust from the workbench with a short-bristled brush, collecting the sprue stubs and the emery cloths and the used welding rod into a bin, returning the die grinder to its case with the care of a surgeon returning instruments to a tray, and Oren carried the memorial bronze to his own workbench and set it down and looked at it.

It was ready for patina.

The bronze sat on the workbench in the afternoon light that came through the studio window, and it was the color of a new penny, the color of copper with a faint yellowish warmth from the silicon, and it was clean and smooth and it looked, Oren thought, like something newborn, something that had just entered the world and that had not yet been touched by the world, and this newness was the quality that the patina would remove, or rather would replace, substituting the appearance of age for the reality of newness, and this substitution was the patinator's art, the controlled deception that made the new look old and the raw look weathered and the fresh look ancient.

But the patina would not happen yet.

The patina was the last step, the final surface, and between now and the patina there were other tasks — the New York commission, which required his attention, and the regular patina work for the foundry's clients, which paid the bills, and the continuing management of Lina's treatment, which was not a task but a condition, a permanent state of alert that underlay everything else the way the armature underlay the wax — and the memorial would wait, on the workbench, in its raw state, until Oren was ready to give it the surface it deserved.

He covered it with a cloth.

The cloth was a piece of clean cotton muslin, the kind he used for buffing wax, and he draped it over the bronze the way you drape a cloth over a sleeping body, gently, to protect it from the dust and the light, and the covered bronze sat on the workbench like a small monument under a veil, waiting to be unveiled, and the unveiling would come when the patina was applied and the surface was complete and the memorial was ready to be installed in the garden of Valentina Conti's family house in the Castelli Romani, among the lemon trees and the rosemary and the jasmine, in the place where Margherita had spent her hours.

That evening Oren cooked dinner.

This was unusual. Oren did not cook often, did not cook well, did not have the instinct for it that Lina had, the ability to taste a sauce and know what it needed, to feel the dough and know when it was ready, and his cooking was the cooking of a craftsman rather than an artist — precise, methodical, following the recipe with the literalness of a person who understood formulas — but tonight Lina was in bed, resting, the fatigue having settled over her at four o'clock like a weight, and Oren had said, I will make dinner, and she had said, Do not burn the house down, and this was a joke and he had smiled at it because it was a joke he could smile at, a joke about his incompetence in the kitchen rather than about the disease.

He made spaghetti aglio e olio.

It was the simplest of the Italian pastas — garlic, olive oil, chili flake, parsley, and the pasta itself — and it was the dish that Italian men made when they did not know what else to make, the default, the fallback, the dish that required no skill beyond the ability to boil water and heat oil and slice garlic, and Oren performed these tasks with the same care he brought to mixing a patina solution, measuring the garlic, timing the pasta, heating the oil to the correct temperature, and the result was edible, was more than edible, was good, in the way that simple things done carefully were always good, and he brought a plate to Lina in the bedroom and she ate a small amount and said, This is good, and he was pleased out of all proportion to the accomplishment.

He sat on the edge of the bed and watched her eat.

She ate slowly, in small bites, and the nausea was visible in the way she paused between bites, assessing, waiting for the wave to pass before taking the next forkful, and this careful eating was new, was part of the new Lina that the treatment was creating, the Lina who moved carefully and ate carefully and breathed with a new hoarseness and who still, despite all of this, maintained the surface, the composure, the expression of competence and warmth that was her face's default setting and that Oren loved with a love that was so familiar it was invisible, the way a patina was invisible when you had seen it every day for twenty-six years.

She said, How is the memorial.

He said, Giuseppe finished the chasing today. It is ready for patina.

She said, When will you do the patina.

He said, After the New York commission is further along. Maybe three weeks. Maybe a month.

She said, I want to watch you do the patina.

He said, The chemicals are bad for you. The liver of sulfur. The ferric nitrate. You should not be near them while you are in treatment.

She said, I have spent twenty-three years living above a studio full of those chemicals. A few more hours will not change anything.

He said, The oncologist said to avoid chemical exposure.

She said, The oncologist says many things. Some of them I listen to. This one I will not.

And he knew that she would not be moved, that she had decided, and he accepted her decision the way he accepted the properties of the materials he worked with — the melting point of bronze, the reactivity of copper, the stubbornness of Lina — as facts that could not be changed but only worked with, incorporated into the process, accounted for in the formula.

He took the plate and went to the kitchen and washed the dishes and put them away and wiped the counter and swept the floor and performed all the small tasks that Lina had performed every evening for twenty-three years in this apartment and that he was now performing in her place, and the performing of these tasks was its own kind of chasing, the removal of the evidence of the meal, the restoration of the kitchen to its pre-dinner state, the smoothing and cleaning and filing of the domestic surface until it was continuous and uninterrupted, as though the meal had not happened, as though the evening had not happened, as though everything were as it had always been.

He went downstairs to the studio.

He lifted the cloth from the memorial bronze and looked at it in the electric light, which was harsh and unflattering and which showed every imperfection that the natural light had softened, and the bronze looked, under this light, exactly like what it was — a metal object, manufactured, cast, chased, sanded, waiting — and it did not look like a boat or a hand or a vessel or a memorial, it looked like bronze, like copper and silicon and manganese and iron fused in heat and poured into a void and cooled and cleaned and finished, and this was the truth of the object, the truth that the patina would cover, the truth that only the maker saw, and the maker's job was to see this truth and then to cover it with a beautiful lie.

He replaced the cloth.

He stood in the studio and listened to the silence of the apartment above him, the silence that contained Lina sleeping and the remnants of the dinner he had made and the clean kitchen and the folder labeled TUTTO and the marble fragment from the quarry and the books she was reading and the drugs in her bloodstream and the tumor in her pancreas and the twenty-six years of their marriage, and the silence held all of these things the way the ceramic shell had held the void, completely, structurally, in the shape of what was there and what was no longer there and what would be there soon.

He turned off the light and went upstairs and got into bed beside Lina and her breathing was even, with the hoarseness, and outside the window the mountains were dark and the town was quiet and the foundries on Via Aurelia were still and the marble quarries above Carrara were dark and the stone was waiting as it had been waiting for two hundred million years, patiently, without complaint, for someone to come and cut it and shape it and give it a surface that was not the surface it had made for itself but the surface that someone else decided it should have.

Oren lay in the dark and thought about Giuseppe's chasing, the invisible craft, the removal of evidence, the smooth surface where the seam had been, and he thought that this was what he was trying to do with the days — chase them, smooth them, remove the evidence of the interruption, make the surface continuous — and that this was both necessary and futile, necessary because the surface was how they lived, how they got through the days, and futile because the seam was always there, underneath, felt by the fingertip even when invisible to the eye, and the fingertip never lied, and the body never lied, and Lina's body was telling the truth that the surface denied, and the truth was the hoarseness and the fatigue and the nausea and the careful eating and the sleeping at four in the afternoon, and the truth was also the risotto and the composure and the insistence on watching the patina and the refusal to be moved, and these truths were not contradictory but were the same truth seen from different distances, the way a chased surface was both seamless and seamed depending on whether you looked with your eyes or felt with your hands.

He closed his eyes.

The bronze was ready for patina. The bronze would wait. Everything would wait except the thing that would not wait, the thing that was happening inside Lina at the cellular level, the thing that no chasing could reach, the void that no welding rod could fill, the seam that no die grinder could smooth, and this thing continued in the dark, in the silence, in the space between his body and hers, irreversible and ungovernable and relentless, the way bronze oxidized, the way the earth turned, the way time passed and did not return.