THE SECOND SITTING

by Apache

Content:
Gen
No Sexual Situations
No Violence

"*Ti recognosce,* said the old man, peering.  "I have seen you..." he began shaking his head gently.  "*No, no, piu posible-- perdoneme, signora.*  It could not be so."

"Si, maestro, e vero," the woman said softly.  "It's true; your eyes are still faithful."

"*La donna della notte* -- the lady of the night-time," he said wonderingly.  "But that was sixty years..."

"Si, maestro," she repeated.

"You made me paint you as if in sunlight," he recalled.  "And with... was it flowers?  It was not what I saw, not the truth.  But you paid so much...."

"*E ancora, e vero,*" she smiled.  "Right again.  It was what the man wanted."

"*Ah, ricordo a lei.  Il bello cavilliere servente*," he smiled too.  "The beautiful young man."  His gaze blinked away from her and his mind summoned the image: the dark beauty posing, the young man pacing around the studio, his golden hair catching glints from the candles. 

"Such a reckless expense, all those candles," he said aloud.  "And beeswax, too, not a single dip of lard.  The smell was so sweet..."  The woman nodded, remembering the same scene.  "So why do you come?  Has the painting...?"

"No, no," she said.  "All is well with it.  But I have come for the truth."

The old man looked at her closely, and she permitted it, allowing herself to compare memory with the man before her now.  The lustrous brown hair was now a wild white fringe; the eyebrows had come out in long, white hairs and sagged over the eyesockets with the laxity of old-age skin.  She disliked seeing mortals at more than one period of their lives; it was too easy to be seduced into sorrow at the failure of their beauty, too dangerous to find oneself moved to pity or, worst of all, a sense of loss, of splendor slipping away.  She was free from time, but it cost her constant care to avoid falling into into the snare of its emotions:  melancholy, wistfulness, despair.

"Yes?" the old man said gently. "Yes, I too will insist on the truth now." 

He stood up, using his hands to help lift himself from the chair.  The woman remembered seeing him spring down from the armature of a sculpture fully seven feet high, and forced herself to focus on the face of the man approaching her now.

He came right up next to her and set his rough, blunt fingertips on her face, used them to lift her chin and tilt her head this way and that, moving different parts of her face into the brightest light from the sconces, dipping his fingers into the lustrous black hair.  She restrained the urge to throw him across the room, but all her muscles tensed with the effort it took her to be still and let these unbidden touches continue.

They were nearly of a height, and he ducked down to look under her chin, at her throat.  He picked up one of her hands and played with it lightly, splaying the fingers, feeling the musculature, the reflexivity.  He tapped the center of her palm hard to set off the clenching reflex, and frowned.  "Si gelato," he murmured to himself.  "So frozen."  She lifted her chin with self-protective arrogance.  "Perfection," he muttered, turning away from her.  "*Santissima madonna,* such a perfection."

He walked back to his table and sat down again, his head lowered in thought.  A long silence passed before he looked up again.  "Not long since, I have opened a lioness and seen her heart and lungs and kidneys," he said.  "What would I find if I opened you?"

She smiled, a wide, genuine smile that had more than a dash of warmth in it.  "A heart," she said easily.  He cocked his head to the side.  She shrugged.  "One that does not beat as hastily as yours, but a heart."  His eyebrows lifted.  "One that feels, maestro," she added, and now he smiled back.

"I believe this," he nodded, looking unblinkingly into her eyes.  "One that feels, but not the same as mine."  A note of humor crept into his voice, an old man's flirtation.

She smiled again.  "No woman's heart has ever felt the same as a man's," she returned lightly.  "Not since time began."

He laughed.  "True enough."  But the laughter did not quite reach his eyes, and the smile folded back into an intent, serious expression.  "Now step further into the light, signora, and we will begin again."

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