Sitting in the bathroom watching him shave is a religious experience. His ritual. He is thin, skeletal, and wears only a towel tightly wrapped around his waist. His skin is a constellation map of scars. I touch them and he makes a slight hiss, pulls the straight edge razor from his face, “Not while I’m holding something so sharp,” he says.
“Where did you get these?” I’ve never asked him before.
“Lead type.”
“What?”
“In another life I was a typositer, then I operated the lead type machine. It was volatile, it exploded sending slivers of molten lead type in to me. It was an article about shirt collars. It’s imbedded in me. You can ink me and roll me on paper if you’d like to read it.” He goes back to shaving. We are in the hotel bathroom, sitting in a cloud of steam. He stands before the fogged-over mirror with his eyes closed and continues. It sounds like buttering toast, his chorographed movements.
“Would you like to go to Antwerp today?” he asks.
“What’s there?”
“Diamonds, prostitutes, a friend I’d like you to meet and my most favourite painting.”
“Of course,” I say, and step in to the bath.

There is a long hall bisected with edges, the edges of galleries. One looks down and sees a thousand possibilities. Gallery after gallery, the edge of a gilded frame, the shoulder of a guard, a tourist, a bizarre play of spatiality and light. At the very end of the hall, facing you is her. He suddenly puts his hands over my eyes, “wait” he says, “you have to prepare.” He is warm for once and smells of the lemons of his shaving soap. He presses his body to me. I am conscious of being in the middle of a public gallery, being held by this skeletal man. We are trailing our winter coats, his long black and white striped scarf dragging on the ground. “Agnes Sorel. Every story is different,” he begins in a whisper, “she was twenty, she was fourteen. She was the mistress of France, the mistress of Charles VII, the weak chinned, opportunist dauphine. Joan of Arc crowned him, and he betrayed her to the English. Her beauty is legendary. She rallied the troupes. And, as she had three children and was expecting her fourth, she rallied the king. She was hated at court for being too smart, too pretty, having too much the ear of the king. Expecting her fouth child, she died on her way to see him. Only recently it was discovered she was poisoned.’ He takes away his hands. ‘Focus and walk towards her.”

La vierge a l’enfant entoures d’anges by Jean Fouquet, painted in 1452. A very young, long dead Agnes Sorel, with an exposed, unsinkable, perfectly symmetrical breast surrounded by terrifying seemingly made of plastic blue and red baby angels. And the Christ child looking about to die of lung cancer. Agnes looks down, lost in thoughts eternal.

We have tea in a café which smells of roasted coffee beans and cigarettes. Little sugar cubes wrapped in paper. The floor is littered with paper. Tiny cookies on the plate. He looks at me, “what did you think?”
“I love how modern art here starts hundreds of years ago.”
“That’s not really true, but really, do you have anything but modern art in Canada?”
Sound of lottery machines plinking and cars driving by.

We stand in the middle of two intersecting cobblestone streets. “We could ask someone.” I say.
“I don’t know the address, and its not that I’m lost, it’s that I only know my way at night. For some reason I am always here at night and my direction is based on street lights and shadows.” He pauses, “I know that lamp” and moves forward.

We come to a huge, gray, splintered, wooden door, so large it could let a carriage in. A smaller door has been cut in to the side with ancient rusted hinges and lock as complicated as an aorta. There is a rope which comes out of a hole drilled near the top. He pulls it and somewhere a bell rings. Two heads pop out of the window above, “oh my god!” they shout and a key falls to the wet pavement.
“I should warn you,” he says, unlocking the door, “we were lovers once, they are Siamese twins.”