Celine

by Peter Heller

  At the scarred wood booth where they ordered burgers, the young waiter told them that Celine looked like an old-time movie star. Was she? No, she was not.

  “Dude, you could be,” he said. “And I mean that as a compliment. We have a bunch in town.”

  “So I hear.”

  “Harrison Ford was in the other day.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “He’s a regular guy. He was even on the ski patrol.”

  Celine really could have used an ice tea. But the kid was warming to his subject. He told them that a skier from Texas or somewhere ran into a tree and was knocked out pretty bad, and when he woke up he saw Harrison Ford leaning over him, strapping him into a sled. The man began to cry because he knew he was dead. The kid thought it was so funny.

  The burgers were excellent. The bar in the center of the restaurant was packed with locals drinking beer like it was a job, and Randy Travis sang about how his love was deeper than the holler. The din was so loud that Pete might as well have been legally deaf. Perfect.

  Celine leaned forward and nearly shouted in his amplified ear: “Pete, we’re being followed. I’m sure of it. FYI.” She tipped her head toward a young man in a baseball cap and week-old dark beard at the bar. Pete nodded. Only she would have known that the bare twitch of his lip was a smile: He had come to the same conclusion.

  Celine wanted to see Lamont’s portraits. Pete had brought in his laptop, and after he’d eaten half his burger he scooted around to her side of the booth and opened it up, and using just the bar’s open Wi-Fi network he found the first archive of Lamont’s photos of Amana.

  The first black-and-white portrait filled the screen. What struck Celine right away was the calm. A distilled calm radiated from the woman and formed a pool of quiet in the boisterous clamor all around them. It was a profile shot, slender neck and naked shoulders, head inclined, black hair tied back.

  Where was the beauty, where did it begin? Celine, who understood the necessity and power of mystery, wouldn’t know where to start.

  It could have begun in the tilt of her head, the angle, the light tension it put on the neck so that she seemed at once poised and relaxed, the way a violin can look—or a bird. Celine thought of the great blue heron in Baboo’s cattails, just below the porch. How the bird would stand, it seemed, for hours, neck stretched over the shallows in effortless balance between stillness and strike. Because the strike would inevitably come. Celine used to think that if eternity was anywhere it was somehow contained in the attitude of this bird. Everything the heron had done, and would do, and was now so perfectly not doing, was contained in her bearing. And so Amana. As she tipped her head she was both bowing to time—there is no mercy there, that is clear—but she was also gathering herself, her focus, for something that went beyond acceptance: She had acted and she would act, and there would be love in the action, and imagination. In whatever she did. That was also clear.

  So that in a world whose onslaught was barely bearable there would be something new and lovely. The angle of her head suggested a promise.

  Then there was the plane of her cheek and where it softened and yielded to meet her eye, her temple. Her cheek was high but not severe. Pronounced but not insensitive to the soft skin below it. It suggested self-discipline and submission to duty—if she were asked to be a warrior, she would be a warrior—but also compassion and tolerance. Am I reading too much? Celine thought. No. This is what I do. I am not always right but usually I am.

  Her mouth, the half that Celine could see, was relaxed, closed. Celine might have stayed right there. Made camp, so to speak, and dwelled on this aspect of the woman’s glory. From the slightest downturn at the corner, her upper lip rose through a long double bow and into a fullness at the crest that was sensuous but held the faintest humor, too. There were many serious pleasures the mouth had tasted, but its favorite may have been laughter. The lower lip seemed like the serious younger sister—she was resolved to follow along and join the fun but was willing to stay back a little, and to be bitten. One wanted to kiss that mouth. To reach down and kiss even the edge. But it was Amana’s eye that kept drawing the viewer: The intelligence there and the stillness. The relaxed concentration. The sense that whatever was seen and decided would be acted on swiftly. The photos were black-and-white, but Celine imagined that her eyes were a smoky green.

  Celine had not even considered the fine nose, the smooth shoulders, or ever realized that a jawline could evoke such purity. Amana’s temple slayed her. The vulnerability there, the stray hairs just before the perfect and odd nautilus of the ear. Remember that Celine had been a painter. She had been drawing and painting figures since soon after she could walk. When had she ever felt that a face could so effortlessly hold all her attention?

  She was reluctant to leave the image but she nodded to Pete and the next came up, and the next. Portraits of Amana looking straight into the camera—the same distilled serenity but full face, the beauty now full bore, both barrels, the wide-set eyes looking straight at the viewer, who catches her breath—or Amana contemplating something humorous or faintly sad, or something inward and distant, the pictures almost hard to look at, not because they demanded some recalibration by the viewer, or obeisance, or envy, or anything at all, but just because simple beauty can be hard to bear. There were nudes, Amana stretched on her back and shot from behind her head, seeing almost what she might have seen. Or on her side, one knee almost to her chest, or the woman bending to test the water in a tub like a Degas. But these were not by Degas, the framing was not meant to flatter. These were transparent statements of awe. A few times Celine had to remember to breathe.

  She found herself forgiving Paul Lamont a little. Good God. Whatever the man had done after the death of his wife, she could more than understand. A weaker man would have simply offed himself. And these were moments with Amana captured in relative stillness. What would it have been like to make love to such a woman? To receive her kisses? To taste her skin? To make her laugh? To listen to her tell stories to the child you had given her? To take the child from her arms? To share a meal? To hold hands and walk the neighborhood late on an August night, the light clapping of your sandals the closest sound? To watch her shed her clothes and dive into a lake and swim, steadily outward—she was a trained and strong swimmer, that was evident from many shots of her at a pool, a pond—leaving behind a spreading wake and tiny wavelets that touched the pilings and the shore long after? Celine could not conceive it. For Lamont, who clearly was so sensitive to beauty, it may have been like experiencing some kind of afterlife while he was still alive. Certainly it would not have been easy.

  He would have wondered often if he were dreaming. And if the dream would one day vanish.

  She closed the laptop herself. It was enough.

  In the World According to Celine and Pete the very best part of every town was the library. And then the historical society, if there was one. Unless, of course, there was a discount gun shop (Celine), or a woodworking store (Pete) that sold fine hand planes and chisels. Jackson’s library was just a mile down the road. They’d passed it on the way in and Celine had remarked the hand-drawn sandwich board that said BOOK SALE TODAY! MAGAZINES!

  Now, as they walked to the truck, Celine popped in a stick of Juicy Fruit and said, “Pete, I’d like to see more of young Paul Lamont’s photographs. I had an idea—just a sec.” On a bench outside an art gallery crouched an athletic girl in running tights and training top. Celine had a hunch she was pretty but couldn’t be sure because her face was in her hands and her very red shoulders were shaking. Celine stood over her and touched her heaving back. The girl’s head jerked up. Her eyes were swimming in tears and they were confused and angry now and they tried to focus.

  “Breakup?” Celine said. She had lived long enough to know that the tenor of the girl’s sobs could only be one thing.

  The girl wavered. The more she registered the handsome older woman, the less angry she became. She nodded.

  �
��May I?” Celine said.

  The girl hesitated, nodded, and Celine sat.

  “You have the kind of loveliness that comes from inside,” Celine said. The girl almost smiled. “Which means he is a complete fool, don’t you think?”

  The smile broke through, quivering. What the hell, was she dreaming?

  Celine reached for the girl’s wet hand, held it. “You know, I have lost three great loves. Loves that could knock the earth off its axis. Truly. Each time I thought my life was over.” The girl was very still, she was listening. “I have finally found the one I am meant to die with. It’s a love so deep I cannot attempt to fathom it, and I don’t want to. I wish I could have told that to my younger heartbroken self. That everything would work out, more than work out, it would be glorious. So I am telling it to you. One day you will be grateful for this new chapter.”

  The girl was listening. Her hand rested in Celine’s now like a bird that had nowhere else it would rather be. “Here,” Celine said. She rummaged in her purse with her free hand and found a small tube of SPF 50. “Will you please wear some of this so you make it to a ripe old age. You look like a very lovely lobster.” She gave the hand a squeeze and returned to Pete. She did not see, but Pete did, that the girl looked like she’d been hit on the head by a lily—or struck by an angel. A Day in the Life, Pete thought. He had long ago admitted that when one moved through the world with Celine, well—it was simply more fun. A giddy concept for a seventh-generation Mainer.

  “Where were we?” Celine said. “Oh, I had an idea. We passed the library just a mile back. Looks like they’re having a cleanout. They would have old copies of National Geographic, don’t you think? Maybe we can even buy some.”

  The Teton County Library was a long low building with log walls that looked a little like a ranch house. Don’t let that fool you, thought Celine. This was one of the richest counties in the country and the inside did not disappoint: the computer area, the children’s room, the Calder mobile hanging in the lobby would have been the envy of any city. It reminded them of the very fancy high schools on Fishers and North Haven: Where there are many rich folks “from away,” their property taxes have to go somewhere. In the courtyard in back, in the dappled shade of an aspen grove, were tables and tables of old books and taped paper signs that said $2 EACH. They passed them with barely a glance. The farthest folding tables, beside a venerable old blue spruce and not far from the chortle of a small creek, held stacks of donated magazines.

  Many were so old the covers were marbled by wear. There were the expected Popular Mechanics and Better Homes and Gardens. The Modern Architectures and Flyfish Journals. Celine glided by them without a twinge of remorse, but had to make herself ignore the surprising edifice of Soldier of Fortunes. Well, actually she couldn’t. She stopped and pondered the issue on top with a picture of a commando in a floppy jungle hat and face paint emerging from a twilit river holding a camoed rifle with a double scope and the headline: NIGHT VISION LIKE NEVER BEFORE. Pete nudged her. “It’s a very small camper.” “But, Pete, just one?” His eyebrow did something minute, which was Pete’s version of a shrug, and she picked up the magazine. What they were looking for was in boxes on the grass. Boxes and boxes. Clearly, the local Brahmins were drowning in National Geographics.

  It took them all of ten minutes to locate the dozen years Paul Lamont was active, and to skim the tables of contents and pull out the issues in which he had stories. Celine decided it would be a good idea to jot down the dates of the ones in this period that they left behind. They grabbed a few more from later years for good measure and came away with an armful of thirty-one magazines, fifty cents apiece. The docent with the cash box by the glass doors wore almost as many gold bracelets as Celine. She looked up over her half-rim glasses and, recognizing one of her own, visibly relaxed, smiled, said, “Oh, don’t you just love these? We wallpapered the ski room with old covers. Five dollars will do, take as many as you like.” Absently she flipped through the old magazines and stopped cold at Soldier of Fortune. “Oh!” she peeped. “How did that get in here? I’m so sorry, I can put that one back if you’d like—”

  “We’ll take it,” Celine said, smiling brightly. “You never know when you might need a nightscope.” She gathered up the magazines and they left.

  They drove north along Jackson Lake, through the National Park. Blowdown wracked the banks, piles of tangled driftwood logs silvered in the sun. Pink fireweed flushed the meadows and the mountains stood above their own reflections in the dark water. Celine wondered again what it was about beauty, and what it had to do with love. She thought that she was probably as sensible to its intoxications as Lamont. Artists, as a tribe, tend to share this dangerous susceptibility. She could sympathize. She would have gone crazy, too. The man had roamed the earth bearing witness to beauty through the lens of his camera, and Amana was maybe the most exquisite thing he had ever beheld. More even than those two horses pawing the sky at sunrise. She was more glorious than his famous ship cresting what looked to be a tsunami. Easy to love someone that beautiful. Easy to be obsessed.

  And when Amana was being pulled by the current out to sea, he turned his back on her and swept up his daughter and ran with her up the trail.

  To Celine, that was the bravest act of true love. It might seem contrary, mightn’t it? She might have asked that of someone listening to her story. No, not to me, she would answer. Because he made himself an extension of his wife’s will. Counter to his every screaming instinct, he did what she would have wanted, insisted, he do. And he did it in a selfless instant, without hesitation. Celine could not think of an act more truly heroic.

  What he did after: disappearing into drink, exiling his little daughter to her own planet, maybe abandoning her completely twelve years later. She almost forgave it. After seeing the photographs of his first wife and the quality of the attention he had given her, she understood.

  Did he finally abandon Gabriela for good, on the border of Wyoming and Montana? Or was he hauled away by a bear? That’s what they had come to find out. Which was the worst outcome? Which would hurt the girl more? The revelations about the missing file pointed to a picture a bit more complicated than a bear attack. And she knew that simple death is sometimes the least painful form of absence.

  TWELVE

  That first summer, when the sisters were finally certain that their father really would not take the three-hour train ride from New York and the forty-five-minute New London ferry to visit them on the island, they began, in adult parlance, to act out. Bobby was the first to go to the hospital. Las Armas, Gaga’s house, was a Spanish villa brought over from the old country brick by brick by Grandfather Charles. It had a courtyard that opened to the sound and an upper gallery that ran around the entire second story and looked down on the central fountain and flower beds. The upper rooms were serviced by two inner staircases—one from the kitchen and service quarters, and one from the main entrance—and two outer sets of steps with heavy, varnished banisters.

  Las Armas ran with a spare summer staff. It was more a matter of aesthetics than economy. Gaga brought with her to Fishers a butler, who functioned also as secretary and valet; a cook; a serving maid, who did housekeeping; and a laundress, a chauffeur, and a gardener. The heavy landscaping and gardening that took place before and after the family left for Manchester were contracted out to an island crew who took care of a number of houses. At home in Connecticut this skeleton staff would be beefed up considerably to a full complement that included two grooms; though they drove everywhere in their Rolls, no one could imagine a house without horses.

  Bobby, being the eldest granddaughter, had her own bedroom on the upper floor, which overlooked the lawns that ran down to the beach. Celine and Mimi shared a bedroom down the hall that looked out on the crushed-seashell driveway and the front gardens.

  The two younger sisters were, as a rule, the first up in the morning. They were two years apart, but like twins, they tended to wake at the same minute, their bare f
eet hit the maple floor in a four-beat tattoo, nighties were shed and shorts and shirts thrown on in a blur, the water tap in the adjacent bathroom ran for twenty-eight seconds, the toilet flushed twice, and they were ready. What would the morning bring? Not that they were “brought” anything. These were not passive creatures. The first order of business was to drag their older sister into the day.

  Bobby was eleven, almost twelve. She was protective of her sisters and the three would circle the wagons in any society outside of family, but she was also a girl on the cusp, and as such she lived in and out of a realm that was remote to the younger girls, and mysterious, and a bit regal, and sort of awe-inspiring; and at times she had little patience for childish enthusiasms. Celine and Mimi sensed the imminent departure of their sister into the mists of womanhood and were determined to keep her in the land of the barefoot and the tomboy as long as they could. Their favorite pre-breakfast sport was to sneak into her room while she slept, approach their prey like two leopards, and pounce.

  The ensuing battle often ended in tears. Someone might go flying off the bed, someone might get tickled to within an inch of peeing, someone’s head might knock someone’s elbow, some other might let out a blood-curdling scream that was instantly muffled by hands or pillow—because the very worst outcome would be to arouse the attentions of an adult.

  So when Celine and Mimi cracked Bobby’s door—she had tried to barricade it with a chair but the two succeeded in sliding it back—and found the bed empty and the window screen propped against the wall, they were shocked, as sisters, but excited, as hunters. They stuck their heads out the window to find the espaliered pear tree forming a perfect leafy ladder, and found it also to be irresistible and they descended it without accident—Mimi could climb trees like a monkey. They ran like escaped convicts down the lawns to the beach where the fog still moved in a living cloud. They thought they would find Bobby collecting sea glass, but she was nowhere in sight. They trotted up the beach and back. They were still in huntress mode and so did not call out, but they didn’t have to: They heard, between the moans of two foghorns on the sound, a softer groaning.