Celine

by Peter Heller

  “Why am I not surprised,” Pete said.

  “It’s true,” she said. “Imagine! You can view all those fish while you eat their cousins. Seems to me it would be nerve-racking for the permanent residents, don’t you think? Here.” She wormed a hand into the bag between them on the front seat and pulled out a plastic cylinder filled with strips of beef jerky. “Could you hand me one, please? Pete?”

  Jerky was her favorite road-trip food. Maybe her favorite staple, period. If she had to live on jerky and marzipan she’d be totally happy.

  Pete asked her if she’d like him to figure out the navigation screen on the dash of the truck and Celine waved her hand no. “They make me nervous,” she said.

  “Really?”

  She bit off a hunk of dried beef. “I think it’s a terrible invention. Nobody knows how to read a map anymore. You chase down a blue line but you have no idea where you are in the world. Like a rat in a maze. How do I ever know where I am in relation to Pikes Peak, or the South Platte? Or God?”

  Pa had grown up on an island in Penobscot Bay, Maine, where everyone knew where they were in relation to God pretty much all the time; he saw her point.

  “With regards to the wider context,” Pa said, “do you think we should talk about what we’re doing?”

  Celine allowed her eyes to leave the road and to appraise her husband for a full beat. To continue the conceit: For twenty years now he had been spreading these maps on her table, always reminding her of the wider territory. When she lost her bearings he helped her find them, and gently suggested that there were probably many ways to move forward. Pete was a very rare bird.

  “Okay,” Celine said. She loved this part. Pete would lay out the facts of the case. His mind was particularly well disciplined and she loved how he chose to organize everything, whether they be the chisels and hand planers he used in the shop in the basement at home, or the threads and stray leads of a case.

  Pete took out his reporter’s notebook and hooked his grandpa half-glasses over his ears. “Well, we don’t have much. But then…” He frowned.

  But then they never did. Have much. Celine was most happy when they had close to nothing. They had solved dozens of cases when a young adult came to them seeking a birth parent and had nothing but the name of an adoption agency, a town where the handoff had occurred, and perhaps one shred of maybe false information—the rumor, say, that the mother had been a lounge singer. Nothing but sealed records and a young life clouded by questions.

  Pete cleared his throat. “Gabriela’s father was Paul Jean-Claude Lamont, born 1931 Sausalito—” Pete rarely editorialized during these recitations but now he did: “That might explain some things.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He took off his glasses and wiped them on the white handkerchief he always kept in one pocket of his vest. “It’s just a hunch. At the time, Sausalito was a hotbed of smugglers and rumrunners. It faced San Francisco across the bay, but it was isolated. The Golden Gate Bridge wasn’t completed until 1937. Trawlers loaded with liquor would come in through the Gate at night and unload their ‘catch’ and fast boats would cross early the same night or the next. It was dangerous work in the dark, in the fog. The crossing could be very rough and the currents are wicked. A lot of men died. Other things came in that way, too. Guns, opium, even fast women.”

  “You mean sad, desperate, exploited prostitutes.”

  “What I meant to say.”

  “And so?”

  “I’m not sure. It was a town full of adventurers and adrenaline. Pretty tough. A lot of traffic moving through, too. There was a big ferry that brought cars across to continue north and south on old 101. We’ll have to ask Gabriela if she knows anything about her paternal grandparents. They might have been schoolteachers for all we know.”

  “How does it bear, though? On the case?”

  “Well, I just think if there was any town in the country that was truly Out of the Box, it was here. Constant movement, danger. A place perched between the wild sea and the civilized world, a portal. Some people lived on houseboats as early as the twenties. Nobody really did anything the way they were supposed to do it. That’s the feeling I get. They had one of the world’s great cities facing them across the bay, with all its riches and allure, a usually easy boat ride, and yet, here, there was this sense that nothing could touch them, they could play by their own rules. If an impressionable kid grew up there, he probably wouldn’t do anything the way anyone else did either. He might march to his own drum. Have you seen Lamont’s photographs?”

  “Have you?”

  “Well.” Pete kept farmer’s if not fisherman’s hours. He usually woke in the dark a little before five. At home in Maine he might have milked the family cow or tossed chunks of firewood from the woodshed to a pile outside the kitchen door. Now in Brooklyn, in their high-ceilinged quiet studio with the bellied cable lights of the Brooklyn Bridge stringing their windows and a tugboat with barge gliding silently beneath it—maybe a foghorn blowing from over near the Battery—then, while Celine slept up in the aerie of their loft, in what he considered the very beating heart of the day he would sit at his computer beneath the big window and lit only by the blue screen of the laptop he’d pull up a current case and follow leads through one improbable leap to another, browsing the Web the whole time. He would let his imagination soar. Sometimes, on these flights of speculation, he would come upon something that would crack a case. The other night he had been perusing Paul Lamont’s impressive catalogue—photographs of wild nature, animals unaware that they were subjects, expeditioners under extreme pressure, earthquake survivors, even war pictures. In the photographs, there was a sensitivity and a rare tenderness, a hewing to beauty that was remarkable.

  Celine reached out and put a hand on Pete’s leg. His private world—the one before daybreak that she would never witness—was one of the things she loved and treasured about the man. For Celine, love, the love of a partner, was impossible without mystery. “It’s okay,” she said. “I know you cheat on me early in the morning.”

  “Think about it,” Pete said. “Lamont is scarily smart. We know because he came out of public high school and attended my alma mater in Cambridge for a year and a half before dropping out. I called your cousin at the Peabody Museum—”

  Celine lifted her hand and waved with excitement. “Rodney!” He was her favorite first cousin. Another Out of the Boxer: the curator of manuscripts at Harvard’s Houghton Library and a consultant at the Peabody—one of the great curating jobs in the world—who received his bachelor’s degree from the Manhattan School of Music and never earned a graduate degree. Unheard of in his position. A passionate viola player and amateur composer. And wonderful wit. Celine adored him. He came to Fishers Island for a few weeks every summer when she was growing up, and he acted very well as a surrogate older brother. He was one of those people who just seemed to make magical things happen. Once, just after Celine graduated from Putney, and during her particularly painful summer romance with a known cad, Rodney drove up island on an August night and convinced the miscreant to give Celine a station wagon. Signed title and all. She cried with delight and threw herself on her cousin’s neck and declared the car much much better than the man. Of course Rodney would do anything for her, and to have a leading research librarian at her pleasure proved at times invaluable in her work.

  “Rodney,” Pete repeated, with no outward signs of jealousy. “And he got ahold of young Mr. Lamont’s Harvard transcript.”

  “And?”

  “He received straight As, three with honors.”

  “What were they?”

  “Eastern Religions, Introduction to Ancient Chinese Literature with your old friend Lattimore, and Art History. He wrote an honors paper on Hiroshige.”

  “How does it bear?” On the case, she meant. Celine was tenacious.

  “Well, think about the mind-set of the man. Not just mind-set but M.O., even spiritual orientation. He comes from a rowdy defiantly counterc
ulture town, a place a little like a Dr. Seuss village where everyone lives in a crazy sand castle. On the edge of the sea, where everything feels possible. He goes to Harvard, probably the first from his school, and he doesn’t concentrate on anything practical like premed or engineering or even political science, he studies a range of humanities with a bent toward the Eastern and the exotic. But even that is too staid. He drops out. Three years later he marries a Brazilian woman. She is from an aristocratic family, the daughter of a respected landowner in Mato Grosso, a father with a serious ancestry stretching back to the Reconquista. A self-styled anthropologist and thus the poetic Guarani name Amana. But still—Creole and Asian had mixed in over the centuries. She was a great beauty, very quiet and reserved, and an olive shade of brown. Imagine the stigma. Or, at the very least, the unwanted curiosity and attention. His marriage seems to express more of the Fuck-Off attitude, he was going to do things his way.” Pete hummed a short bar. It was one of his ticks, something just shy of a laugh. He said, “He was in love, no doubt about it, this wasn’t simply a political statement. The portraits are, again, extraordinary.”

  “Portraits?” Celine passed a VW Vanagon with Minnesota plates and mountain bikes and the young couple smiled and waved—camper to camper. Celine waved back. Midwesterners were so friendly.

  “There is an archive of some two hundred nudes he took of Amana. And dozens of portraits—just a face, hands, ears, the back of her head. As I said, she was very beautiful. Dozens more shots of her arranging flowers. She was a master at flower arrangement, an art she learned from friends of Japanese ancestry when she was studying in São Paulo.”

  “Hmm.” Celine was traveling now, he could see it. When she got caught up in a story she let her imagination range in much the way Pete did early in the morning. Their minds were quite different—very—in how they approached a problem: He was analytical. She could be, too, but she trusted most her intuition, her sense of smell, which were almost infallible. She saw the peculiar, the motive no one else could see, the odd touch of grace; he followed the trend lines of certain behaviors, the probabilities of effects leading to further causes. But they both thought creatively and let their imaginations roam.

  “I know a little about her, too, you know,” Celine said.

  Pete raised one bushy eyebrow.

  “While you were cheating on me with your sources, I called Cece. Remember, she lived in the Richmond District and sent her son to the French American School? We often talked in those early days, because Saint Ann’s was just starting, too. She said Amana came to a parents’ meeting. It had to be her—a stunning Brazilian with green eyes, very reserved, with a daughter in second grade. Everyone was excited about this experiment in education. The feeling was that they were giving the benefit of the doubt to their children, to an extent that perhaps had not been tried before, while also giving them a fully cross-cultural education. They would all share in the excitement of them revealing themselves, while at the same time immersing them in French language and culture and being careful to train them in the expected disciplines—math, science, history, English.”

  “And she remembered her?” Pete leaned forward. His interest, too, was piqued.

  “She remembers that she sat very straight.”

  “And?”

  “She had a vivid picture of the sweep of her dark hair. It was all of a piece, like a curve of the richest wood. She seemed like that—almost sculptural. Very refined. And Cece thought she detected a nearly concealed skepticism. Her education, of course, would have been the polar opposite of what was then being celebrated.”

  “Anything else?”

  Celine shook her head. “Not really. She had green eyes, as I said, and she was very quiet. She doesn’t remember her saying more than two words. She remembers a smile. Shy but sincere. Some kind of purity there. It struck Cece that she was one of the most beautiful women she’d ever seen. Not just her looks but her bearing, the hint of what one saw inside when she smiled. She must have died a few months after that meeting.”

  They drove in silence for a minute or two, ruminating probably on the resounding properties of fate. They were in the open-range country north of Denver, running parallel to the mountains off to their left, the piled ranges of Rocky Mountain National Park dusted with new September snow. The hayfields were brown and stubbled after the last cutting, the ranch ponds a dark, cold blue. The hedgerows and windbreaks of the old cottonwoods were just starting to turn the tenderest of greens. In another month they would be the color of flames. Celine pushed the truck past the seventy-five-mile-an-hour speed limit. Traffic was now sparse.

  “And so what were you thinking, Pete?” Celine said finally.

  “Well, imagine it. This man who refuses to do anything conventional. He marries a refined and shy South American beauty who excites attention and speaks English more properly than any of his friends. He worships her as only an artist can, as only a lover with a fierce eye for beauty. He earns a living as a freelance photographer—no surprise there—and travels to the most exotic distant places and puts himself in extremely dangerous situations—again no surprise—in order to bring back award-winning photographs. They have a child. Whom he esteems just as beautiful. There are almost as many pictures of Amana with Gabriela and Gabriela alone as of his stunning wife. When the child is old enough they enroll her in a brand-new experimental school—knowing what we know of the man, how could he resist it? And then Amana dies. Sudden and unexpected. The one thing aside from his young daughter that he has loved unequivocally, without reserve.”

  Pete paused. The import of what he had just told seemed to stop him in his tracks. He took a second to clear his throat, regain his composure. Celine glanced over. Beneath Pa’s Old Mainer reserve was an impressionable soul.

  “So.” Pete cleared his throat. “What does he do? He is, literally, at a loss. He can’t do anything but drink, which, by the way, he is especially good at. He is so overwhelmed with loss and grief he can no longer keep track of the one other thing he loves. Imagine the terror of that. He loves Gabriela, he loves her. But his faculties—the ones we use for day-to-day survival—are broken. I tracked down Miss Lough, the third-grade teacher—” Now Celine turned her head in surprise. Her lips tightened.

  “I was going to tell you, but you were in one of your states getting ready for this trip. I thought I’d better wait until you could really hear it.”

  Celine’s face relaxed. She forgave him. Phew.

  “The former teacher told me that he often forgot to pick Gabriela up at school, that she would call him at home and if she reached him he was often slurred with drink and that when he did show up to get her he hugged and gripped Gabriela like a life ring. Her words: ‘He held her like one of those life rings you throw to a drowning man. And sometimes I could see he was crying, though he tried to hide it.’ Think of the nightmare, the loss he could not abide and the confusion and self-hatred caused by his own incapacity as a father. Miss Lough, now Mrs. Khidriskaya, said that she kept food in the classroom because Gabriela often showed up hungry. He must have seen in flashes of clarity the harm he was doing to the only other thing he cherished. It may have only been Gabriela that kept him from suicide. So what else does he do, a man desperately clutching a life ring? He scrambles into the first lifeboat that comes along. Danette Rogers. ICU nurse. Specializing in bringing patients back from the precipice of death. Certified sexpot. I also talked to her supervisor at San Francisco General”—Pete held up a hand (peace!) and chuckled—“just day before yesterday. Marie St. Juste told me that Nurse Rogers had a reputation for putting powerful doctors into situations they could not easily wriggle out of. ‘She was a man-eater!’ Marie said in a baffled Haitian accent. ‘I can’t count the doctors, good Lord!’ I recorded the conversation, it was wonderful, you can listen to it later.”

  Celine could only forage in her bag for another piece of jerky. This was too good.

  “Danette bragged one afternoon that she had met a National
Geographic photographer at a bar on Haight Street. She lived in the Mission but came into the Haight to hunt, I guess. When she was tired of doctors and wanted a big strong free-loving hippie.” Pete managed to look bemused. “She said Lamont was the most charismatic man she had ever met, one of the most handsome, too, and the saddest. And drunk. She bragged that she screwed him in the telephone booth in back of the bar. But she couldn’t stop thinking about him. Marie St. Juste said that she was really bothered about this man. ‘She could forget anyone!’ Marie declared. ‘Drop him like a Kleenex, you know? But this man, he really bothered her. Every day she went on about this photographer. One day she told us she was going to have to marry him! Ayee, imagine! Well, you should have seen our faces!’ ” Pa smiled an inward smile. He always took delight in the pure souls of the earth, wherever they shone.

  “They married at city hall—”

  “You found the marriage certificate,” Celine said tartly.

  “Well.” Pa cleared his throat. His investigation partner really had been in a state the last few days. She always was before a trip.

  “Continue, please.”

  “Well, Gabriela told you about living in her own apartment when she talked to you. How Danette couldn’t stand the sight of her almost from the beginning and banished her and the photographs.”

  “You talked to Gabriela!”

  “I was going to tell you last night but you kept asking me where the recording wire was and dropping shoes off the loft railing.”

  “Ha, wow. I guess I did. She told me about one photograph of her mother on a ferry.”