Canvas of the Unsaid

The call came on a Tuesday in March, right when I was scraping old varnish off a church mural in Bywater and thinking hard about quitting the whole business.

"Lena Duval?" a man's voice asked.

"Speaking."

"My name is Diego, I work for Ms. Karla Ashford. She owns the Orpheum on Rampart. She's seen your restoration work at St. Roch and she wants to meet you. Tomorrow, if you're free."

I almost said no. I was thirty-four, newly divorced, tired, and the church job was already more than I wanted. But a private commission meant money, and money meant I could stop taking jobs that paid in gratitude.

"Tomorrow works," I said.

* * *

The Orpheum had been shut for years. I'd walked past it a hundred times and assumed it was dead. When Diego met me at the stage door at ten the next morning, he let us in with a brass key the size of my hand.

"She's upstairs in the box seats," he said. "Third floor. Don't touch anything on the way up, she'll know."

"Thanks for the warm welcome."

He almost smiled. Almost.

The inside of the theater was dark and smelled like dust and old velvet. I picked my way up the stairs by my phone flashlight, and when I got to the box level there she was, sitting alone in the dark with her legs crossed, looking at the ceiling.

Karla Ashford. I knew the name from the society pages, which I read mostly for the obituaries of people I'd worked for. Heiress to something or other. Thirty-one years old, three years younger than me, though she carried it like she'd been thirty for a while and had decided it suited her.

"You're the restorer," she said, without turning around.

"Lena Duval. And you're the ceiling."

That got her to turn. She looked me over the way you look at a painting you're thinking of buying.

"You have a mouth on you," she said. "Good. The last two men my lawyer sent me wouldn't say anything I didn't pay them to say."

"What do you want restored?"

"Come here and look up."

I stepped into the box and looked up. The ceiling over the orchestra was a mess of water stains and cracked plaster, but under the grime there was something. A sky. A big painted sky with clouds and, near the center, a figure that might have been Apollo or might have been nobody at all.

"Eighteen eighty-two," she said. "The original crew signed the scaffold boards and nobody has touched it since 1915. I want it back."

"That's most of a year if it's a week."

"I have a year. And money." She said it flat, no apology in it. "What I don't have is somebody who'll look at it and tell me the truth about what's possible."

I looked at the sky a while longer. The clouds were good. Whoever painted them knew what they were doing.

"Whoever did this was trained in Italy," I said. "The grime is hiding most of it. Give me a month of cleaning tests before I promise anything."

"Done." She stood and straightened her coat. "Come on. I'll show you the rest of the building, since you'll be living in it."

"Living in it?"

"There's an apartment over the carriage house. It has a bed, a hot plate, and a window on the courtyard. You can have it while you work. I find clients do better when they don't commute."

* * *

She walked me through the theater for over an hour. Dressing rooms with mirrors cracked like river ice. The fly loft with its ropes and sandbags. A basement full of rolled backdrops that smelled like mildew and old glue, some of them beautiful, some of them just painted ads for hair tonic.

She talked the whole time, and I noticed she talked about the building the way other people talk about an ex. With grievance, and with love, and like she'd never fully be free of it.

"My grandfather bought this in 1948 and let it rot," she said. "My mother let it rot worse. I'm the first one of us who ever wanted anything from it except the rent."

"Why now?"

"Because I'm thirty-one and I've spent my whole life watching things fall apart politely. I wanted to fix one thing before I got old like them."

I didn't have anything to say to that, so I said nothing, and she seemed fine with that.

Near the end of the tour she stopped at a door off the second balcony corridor. Plain door, painted over so many times the panels were soft-edged.

"That stays locked," she said.

"What is it?"

"Old boxes from when the theater had other uses. Boxes and the rooms they sat in. Nothing you need."

"Rooms," I said. "Plural."

She looked at me, and for a second the whole polished thing slipped and something else looked out. Something that was deciding.

"There are rooms under the balcony," she said. "The Orpheum had a private club on the books from about 1901 to 1931. Candles, low ceilings, that sort of thing. I found them when I was twenty-five and I've kept them to myself. You'll see them eventually anyway, since the plaster up there is worse than the ceiling. But not today."

"Fine by me," I said, and I meant it, though I wrote the door down in my notebook anyway. Habit.

* * *

She asked me to dinner that first night, which surprised me, since she struck me as somebody who ate alone on principle. There was a restaurant two blocks away with courtyard tables and a waiter who clearly knew her, because he brought her a glass of wine without her ordering.

"So," she said, when he'd gone. "Tell me what you saw up there."

"A sky worth saving. A painter who was better than the job he was given. And about four hundred square feet of plaster that wants to kill somebody."

"Which part did you like best?"

"The sky," I said. "You don't see skies like that anymore. Everything now is either ironic or photoreal. Nobody just paints a sky because the room deserves one."

She turned her glass by the stem and watched the candle.

"That's exactly why I called you," she said. "Light and shadow. Do you know the old painters' rule about it?"

"Chiaroscuro. You need the dark for the light to mean anything."

"Yes!" She leaned forward a little. "Everyone I know is terrified of the dark. They light every corner of their lives and then wonder why nothing looks real. I've been thinking a lot about that. About how the parts you keep in shadow are the parts that make the rest worth looking at."

"Is that a philosophy or a warning?"

"Both, probably." She smiled for real then, the first one I'd seen, and it changed her whole face. "You're divorced."

It wasn't a question.

"Two years ago," I said. "She's remarried now, lives in Baton Rouge, sends me a Christmas card with her husband's dog on it. We're civilized about it. Mostly."

"I was married at twenty-three," she said. "Widowed at twenty-six. He wanted a wife who went to parties and I wanted somebody who fixed ceilings, and neither of us got one."

"Somebody who fixed ceilings?"

"I wanted a lot of things."

She said it lightly, but she was watching me when she said it. "Anyway. The point is I know what it is to keep a thing running that everybody else has given up on. It makes you strange. You're strange too, Lena Duval. I can tell."

"People keep telling me that."

"Are they wrong?"

"No," I said. "They're not wrong."

She laughed, a short real laugh, and finished her wine.

"Here's how this goes," she said. "You start Monday. You live in the studio. You bill monthly, in advance, no games with the invoices, I've had enough of that. And you have dinner with me twice a week, because I'll go crazy otherwise and you're the first person in a year who argued with me about plaster."

"Is the dinner part of the job?"

"No!" She set the glass down. "The job is the job. The dinner is because I want to. Two different things, and I keep them separate. That matters to me."

"Okay," I said. "Twice a week."

"Good." She signaled for the check, then paused. "One more thing. Diego will tell you the housekeeper schedule and the locked doors and all of that. But if you hear music coming from under the balcony some nights, that's me. I play the piano in one of the old rooms when I can't sleep. Don't come looking."

"Didn't plan to."

"You will," she said. "Everybody does, eventually."

She paid and stood and put her coat on, and at the courtyard gate she stopped.

"Lights and shadows, Lena," she said. "Think about which one you are."

Then she walked off toward Rampart and I sat there with the last of the wine, thinking I had maybe gotten in over my head, and thinking I didn't much mind.

Monday I moved into the studio apartment over the carriage house. It had a bed, a hot plate, and a window that looked out on the courtyard, and I figured I'd spent worse springs in worse places. Karla left a note on the table that said the scaffold was already set up and that if I died up there she'd be very annoyed about the paperwork. I took that as a welcome.

The prop room happened on Thursday of the second week. I would claim it was an accident, because it was, mostly. The old theater had a storage room off the stage left wing, full of scenery flats and dusty mannequins and a stuffed heron that scared me half to death in the dark. I was dragging a ladder through there because the main corridor was blocked with Diego's cleaning, and Karla was in the room already, holding up a mask to the light.

I'm thirty-four. She's thirty-one, which she told me the second dinner, like she was correcting a file somewhere. The week before I'd asked her what was behind the walls of this place, and she'd said nothing I needed.

"You weren't hired to think about walls," she said now, not turning around. "You were hired to think about ceilings."

The ladder caught on a flat, the flat rocked, and I grabbed for it. She grabbed for me. We ended up with the flat propped against us and her hand flat on my chest and both of us holding still, the way you do when a thing could go either way.

"Sorry," I said.

"It's fine." She didn't move her hand. "Lena. I'm going to ask you something and you