To The Bone

by Neil Mcmahon

  "With her? Or to her? Your idea of beauty goes as deep as a magazine cover. You've never understood the first thing about real art. It celebrates flaws."

  D'Anton grimaced impatiently. "Let's not forget who has the world-class reputation."

  "Thanks to my family's influence. Your steel mill worker father didn't help much, did he?"

  "What a shame your family's influence couldn't buy you any talent," D'Anton said, with cold pity. "All that schooling in Europe, and still the only people who'll buy your work are your friends."

  "And you've never dared risk pushing for something more than nice tits and a pretty smile." She slapped her trembling palm down flat on a workbench.

  D'Anton moved toward her again. His face had gone rigid, his eyes very intense.

  "Julia," he said, speaking very quietly now. "Did you – interfere with Eden somehow? After the surgery?"

  Her eyes widened in outrage. "What are you saying?"

  "Out of jealousy? Revenge, because she left you?"

  Her hand scuttled across the workbench and tightened around an iron mallet. D' Anton stopped walking.

  "I have ignored – certain things," he said, almost whispering. "But I can't continue. You'll destroy us both."

  He turned abruptly and hurried out of the studio, fumbling to close the door behind him.

  Julia stood with the mallet clenched in her shaking hand, aware of his fading footsteps, then the silence around her. A sudden spasm wracked her body, chattering her teeth and bending her over, with her muscles clenching in spastic contortions.

  Panting, she walked swiftly to a large, canvas-draped marble in the studio's far corner. She yanked off the cover and raised the mallet, willing herself to smash it, to exorcise Eden Hale from her memory.

  But her arm dropped to her side. This was all there was left of that passion.

  She let the cover fall back into place and put down the mallet.

  There would be others, she told herself again. There were always plenty of others.

  Chapter 8

  Monks pulled the Bronco into his own driveway just after five p.m., sweaty and gritty. His place was in the coastal mountains of Marin County – a few acres of redwoods with a cabin that he had bought in the '70s and ended up with after his divorce. It was still rudimentary, with woodstove heat and plank floors. But it was quiet, private, and you could glimpse the Pacific on clear days.

  He cut the Bronco's engine, got out, and walked to one of the giant redwoods. He squatted down with his back against it, then leaned his head back, too, and closed his eyes. It was something he had learned to do years ago, when he was feeling drained. Here, the afternoon sunlight was dappled through the thick foliage, a friendly warmth instead of a glaring blast. The tree's shaggy bark was sun-warm, too, and he imagined that a deeper healing force radiated from within its thick trunk. Monks basked in between, like a baby wrapped in a comforting blanket, until he heard the house's screen door open and close.

  Martine Rostanov came out onto the deck. She was a slight woman with a mop of dark hair and a metal-braced left leg, the result of a childhood horse-riding accident, which she swung from the hip when she walked.

  "You all right?" she called. Her forehead was creased with worry.

  Monks nodded. He got to his feet and climbed the deck stairs into her embrace. Now her warmth flowed into him, strong and sweet.

  "Did something happen?" she said.

  "I lost a patient last night."

  "Oh, hon. I'm so sorry." She pressed harder against him. "Can I get you a drink?"

  "I'm going to work out for a few minutes," Monks said. "After that, I'd kill for one."

  "I'll have it ready."

  He changed quickly into sweats, assessing his physical condition for the first time in a long while. He had the coloration of the black Irish, green eyes and wiry black hair that was starting to gray, but was still mostly there. His face was craggy and pitted with old acne scars, his once aquiline nose getting thicker. Wild bushy eyebrows had earned him the nickname Rasp, for Rasputin, in the navy. Officially he stood six foot one, although he suspected that he was starting to shrink. But his wind was good, and his chest and gut were tight. After almost getting hamstrung by a psychopath with a grape-picker's knife, he had never let himself get badly out of shape again.

  He walked to the old garage that he had outfitted as a gym. It was one of the original structures on the place, good-sized – intended for working on vehicles, not just housing them – with bare frame walls and roof. Monks had rebuilt the floor with pressure-treated two-by-ten joists and plywood. He had installed a Vitamax weight machine in one corner and hung a heavy bag in the room's center Most days, he spent fifteen minutes doing sit-ups and weights, then another twenty of hammering the bag. It was not a thorough workout, but it kept his body toned, and on a day like this it offered release.

  The room was hot, with the faint good smell of the redwood it had been built from, back when that was cheap lumber. He went through a quick routine on the machine – fifty sit-ups with a ten-pound weight behind his head, sets of bench and military presses, butterflies, and pull-downs – then put on his bag gloves. Usually he started by standing still, throwing controlled left jabs at the bag to get his distance, then stepping in with right crosses and follow-up left hooks. Soon, his feet would start moving by themselves, and he would circle the bag, gathering speed and force.

  But today, for no reason he was aware of, he unhooked the bag and set it aside. He started doing footwork, very slowly at first – the gliding step of the left moving forward with the jab, then the right catching up and planting itself to give power to the cross. The left foot stayed put but pivoted with the hook, the third punch in the classic combination, hip reversing at the moment of impact to give it extra snap. The importance of footwork could not be overestimated; placement of inches could make the difference. Rocky Marciano had been one of the all-time great punchers, but his trainers had to tie his ankles together with string to keep him from extending his left foot too far and losing power from his right.

  Monks kept his hands at his sides, his gaze on the center of his invisible opponent's chest, concentrating just on his feet. A step forward with the left, quick catch-up with the right, left pivoting on the ball, hip swinging with it, then snapping back. Again, a little faster. Then again, and again. He shuffled his way around the room's perimeter as if it were a ring and the walls were the ropes.

  But you could not always advance. The other man in the ring was going to punch you back. Retreating, with minimum damage to yourself, was the other half of footwork. Monks reversed his direction – not with the same steps, but more with side-to-side dancing, as if he were jitterbugging or skating backward. Now he raised his hands defensively, fists protecting his face but just low enough to see over, elbows close in to his ribs.

  Monks started circling, combining advance and retreat with unplanted pivots, either foot leaving the floor to gain him a quarter or half turn. He concentrated on moving to his left, trying to herd his spectral partner into a right cross. But the partner had other ideas, and Monks swung the other way, spinning to his right, leaping clear of the swift straight blows coming at him. He changed directions again and again, ducking, weaving, his feet dancing across the floor in a dizzying intricate pattern that could only ever make sense during the few moments it existed.

  He slowed, like a toy with its battery running down. He stopped, and let his hands fall to his waist. He was panting and streaming with sweat. Outside, a Steller's jay screeched, nervous from the commotion, or maybe mocking him.

  He pulled off the gloves and set them on the sill of the garage's single crude window so they would dry. He pulled off his sweatshirt, too, then kicked off shoes and socks and stepped out of his sweatpants and jock. Barefoot, naked, he walked along the hard dirt path back to the house, inside, and down the hall to the shower.

  Martine, standing in the kitchen, watched him pass, without saying a word.

  Chap
ter 9

  They're like deer on two legs, graceful creatures that prance not through the woods but along the sidewalks. They stream in and out of the Haight's little bar-cafes in tight jeans and short skirts, tossing their hair and smiling. Their earrings shimmer and you can see the ridges of cartilage in their throats, delicate as eggshell. Perspiration glistens on their skin. You walk among them, brush against them. They don't pay any attention. You look like one of their kind.

  The street you're on is a blue-black tunnel of sky, slashed by car headlights. Music spills through the hot air, red electric and easy violet and the misty rose of an alto sax. It all blends together like voices, lifting the crowd's feet on an invisible cushion and moving them along. The shop windows are filled with bright tinsel. But the open doorways are like caves, with the glow of fires inside and figures eating and drinking and mating.

  She's here somewhere, in one of those caves.

  Her voice sings in your head, calling you. Sometimes it gets lost in the other noise, but if you close your eyes you can hear it clearly. It leads you into a doorway. There's a live band at the far end of the room, with a crowd dancing. Lots of tattoos and colored hair. Not really your kind of place.

  But that could be her at the bar, sitting alone.

  You take the empty seat next to her. She moves her purse over a little, to give you more room. The top of the wine list is a Mondavi Reserve cabernet at twenty-four dollars a glass. You order it, and listen hard to the voice inside.

  "What kind of music do you call that?" you ask her.

  She shrugs. "Mostly hip-hop, I guess," she says uncomfortably, and she turns to watch the dance floor. She's young, twenty-two or -three, and to her, you seem old.

  You know by now that she's not the one.

  The band quits. Another girl her age, who's been dancing, comes and sits on her other side. They start talking immediately, chattering like birds.

  You pocket your change and slip away.

  Outside, you find a quiet spot and lean against a wall, close your eyes, and shut everything else out. The voice in your head is a blur of echoes hammering around.

  But her song will start again sweet and clear, and lead you to her. It always has.

  Chapter 10

  When Monks came out of the shower, Martine was waiting on the deck with an old-fashioned glass of cold clean Finlandia vodka, touched with fresh lemon. It hurt his teeth and brought a sharp pleasant ache to his throat.

  "You're an angel of mercy," he said, and sank into a chair.

  She sat beside him. "Tell me what happened."

  He went through the story tersely – the ugly death of a pretty young woman, and the waves that had risen in its wake.

  "Baird suggested, with his usual tact, that I'm getting old," he finished. He took another long drink. "Maybe he's right."

  "That's ridiculous. You know it and so does he. He's just upset."

  "He sure doesn't want any dust settling on Welles D'Anton's halo."

  "I used to hear that name a lot," she said. "When I was working for those big-shot executives. Their wives were crazy about D'Anton. It was a status thing, like driving a Rolls. They'd pay a fortune for a Botox injection."

  Monks recalled Larrabee's question about how a struggling actress like Eden Hale had been able to afford the surgeon to the rich and famous.

  "He's got his own style, that's for sure," Monks said. "That clinic had the feel of a French whorehouse."

  "Really?" she said archly. "You know that from experience?"

  Only once, Monks thought, and it was true, the place hadn't been anything like D'Anton's clinic. He decided not to elaborate.

  "Just a figure of speech," he said.

  "He's supposed to have a magic touch," Martine said. "Fountain of youth, you know? But from what I could tell, his results were pretty much the same as any other decent plastic surgeon's. I think he's just managed to develop that mystique."

  Monks drank again. "Why'd she have to get her breasts done anyway?" he growled, suddenly, unreasonably, angry about it. "They looked fine."

  Martine shot a glance at him, swift and cool.

  "You must have watched those movies very closely."

  "Sorry," he said. "I mean – you know what I mean."

  "Women are all wrapped up about beauty, Carroll. All the time and money we spend on hair, skin care, clothes. Look through a Victoria's Secret catalog some time. That's a zillion-dollar market, and those aren't even things that most other people see. It has everything to do with how we think of ourselves. Like me. After my accident, I knew I'd never be beautiful."

  He slipped his arm around her waist, pulling her close. "You're a vision," he said.

  "Not like what you think is beautiful when you're ten. Baywatch babes in bikinis, bouncing down the beach. It was something about myself I never trusted. I never believed any man would really want me." She shrugged. "Of course, women who are beautiful probably figure that's the only reason men want them."

  Monks had never thought of it quite like that. Women were damned either way.

  "There's an endless supply of pretty girls," he said. "They're being born every minute. Delectable fruit on the great tree of life. But youth and beauty fade away and pass on, even as the morning dew evaporateth in the sunlight."

  She smiled wryly. "Sounds like you didn't get any sleep."

  "What I'm trying to tell you is, you're not just a knockout. There's a lot more to you."

  "I know a line when I hear one. You must be wiped out."

  "Pretty much," he admitted.

  "Did you eat, at least?"

  "Coffee."

  "Idiot. I bought steaks. Start the grill when you're ready."

  He nodded, but went into the kitchen first and refilled his glass with vodka. He knew he had to be careful. Tomorrow was going to be bad enough in many ways, without the crippling burden of a hangover. One or two drinks would not hurt.

  The problem was that one or two had never done him any good.

  He got the grill going and the thick steaks cooking. He fed choice bits to the three cats who prowled like thugs demanding tribute – Felicity, the neurotic calico; Cesare Borgia, black, scarred, and streetwise; and Omar, the eighteen-pound blue Persian.

  Cats were like creatures in dreams, operating with a logic that seemed to make perfect sense to them, although it was mostly impenetrable to humans. Monks was convinced that the real reason cats had become domesticated – or more probably, deigned to start hanging out with people – had nothing to do with anything so mundane as food or safety. It was because they had discovered the pleasures of hand and lap. The two males would stalk him, trying to trip him into sitting, then leap on him and pin him down by assuming a gravity of several times their actual weight. The calico would shamelessly offer her belly to be petted, then clasp his hand with her forepaws, licking it and drooling. He speculated that instinct told her it was the butting heads of the kittens she had never had.

  He had brought several women to the house over the years since his divorce. The cats had treated them with a mixture of jealousy and contempt – with Felicity going so far as to burrow between the two humans in bed, trying to literally kick the intruding female out – and had outlasted them all. But they had loved Martine immediately. Now Monks was the one who felt their cold stares, particularly after he had been gone working for a night. He remembered that the first emotion he had felt about her was an urge to protect. Maybe it was the same with the cats.

  Three or four drinks would be okay, he decided. But not five or six.

  By the time the steaks were done, the knots in his brain were dissolving. He went into the kitchen to fill his glass one last time. Martine was putting together linguine with Parmesan and garlic.

  'Tell me the truth," Monks said. "Are you getting bored with me?"

  She looked surprised. "Don't be silly." Then she glanced at his glass. "How many of those have you had?"

  This irritated Monks. "I'm doing fine," he said, careful to
enunciate the words precisely.

  "On an empty stomach, with no sleep?"

  "If you want to play nurse, why don't you put on a uniform?"

  She turned away stiffly. He had meant it as a joke, or at least he thought he had. He had been told that sometimes there was an edge to his voice that he himself did not hear. The edge tended to sharpen, and his hearing to dim, with alcohol.

  "What makes you think I'm getting bored?" she said.

  "The way you've been talking about getting back into practice."

  "What's the matter with that? I spend half my life becoming a doctor, and I'm not supposed to practice?"

  "Of course you are," he said. "I'm just wondering, you know, where. When. All that."

  She turned to face him full on, holding a long wooden spoon like a fencing sword. "Why's this coming up now?"

  "Well, it has to sooner or later. Don't you think I deserve to know?"

  "Know what? I haven't decided anything yet."

  "Know what you haven't decided, then."

  "You're a little drunk, Carroll. This isn't funny."

  "'Drunk' is a relative term, Martine. Strictly speaking, you have never seen me drunk. Drunk is a fifth or two of liquor in a day, and that's really only the beginning of drunk, because it can be sustained indefinitely."

  "Do you turn into a different person?" In his brain flared a dizzy, fragmented memory of a night when he had looped a black silk scarf around the slender neck of Alison Chapley – a sexual game, one that she had initiated – and barely caught himself before she had stopped breathing for good.

  "In vino, Veritas" he said.

  "My lowbrow education didn't include Latin."

  "There is truth in wine.' Are you moving out?"

  There was a longish hesitation before she answered. "I never really moved in."

  Monks nodded. "It's been seeming more and more like that."

  He walked back outside and leaned his forearms on the deck railing. The creek at the bottom of his sloping property was silent now, the last sluggish rivulets from the winter rains dried into a few scattered pools. They would be gone, too, soon. Evening came early up here in the woods, and jays flitted through the thick madrone foliage on their last errands, big birds that crashed around like vandals, flashes of iridescent blue that appeared with jarring swiftness at the corners of your vision and left again by the time you turned your head. They usually woke him at first light, seeming to take malicious pleasure in perching outside his window and screeching until he hauled himself to his feet. Martine Rostanov had been with him for more than a year – since the two of them had nearly been killed together. She had uncovered the fact that a giant software corporation, getting into the business of genetic manipulation, was using fetuses that were deliberately aborted for the purpose. Monks had gotten caught up with her in exposing this. When it was over, on a foggy March dawn, they had stumbled back to this house, singed, shocked, and exhausted, and made love right here on the deck.