“Take care,” he said.
She stood and walked away, past the honeysuckle and the parrots, past the random tables of others, through the sun-dappled shade of the garden. He watched her until she disappeared into the tavern.
At dusk he ordered half a roasted chicken, black beans, grilled green onions, and fresh corn tortillas. It was dark by the time he finished, and the parrots had fallen silent, and the mumble of human voices took over the evening.
When he stopped by the bar inside to settle his tab, Nata had some information for him.
“I see she finally found you,” she said, taking his money and ringing up the change.
“What?”
“That woman—she’s got some Mexican in her, huh?”
Nata herself was a small wiry Indian from Sonora who had never been seen by either lover or confessor without her silver earrings, little hands from whose fingertips dangled oval medallions engraved with scorpions.
“What do you mean she finally found me?”
Nata counted out his change into his hand with a smirk. She crossed her arms on the bar and leaned toward him.
“She’s coming in here four or five times a week for a month now. Same time. Your time. She has only one beer the whole time. I don’t know why she gets it. She don’t seem to like it. She don’t talk to nobody. You’re the first one she says anything to.” Nata grinned. “I think that woman has been waiting for you.”
Chapter 6
He spent the next couple of days concentrating on Mrs. Gerald Beach’s body. Her name was Lily, an old-fashioned diminutive for a thoroughly modern woman with a thoroughly modern body.
The images his photographer had sent him were clinical in detail. She knew exactly what he wanted, and what he wanted was no surprises. When his client showed up for her live sketching sessions, he wanted to know the architecture of her body as if he’d built it himself. If there was an odd wrinkle in her groin, he wanted the photographer to show it to him. If there was a thickness at her waist, he wanted to see it and he wanted to know how it behaved when she squatted. If her buttocks were uneven, he wanted to know to what degree and how they behaved when she took a step or turned at the waist. If her breasts didn’t match, he wanted to know so he could decide which poses presented them to their best advantage.
The more he knew about his subject’s anatomy before she showed up for her live sketching sessions, the less time the sessions would require. And the more accomplished he would look at the end of each day when she would inevitably want to see what he had done. He could fudge, but he had to be clever about it. These women knew very well what they looked like, and his flattery had to be subtle enough to avoid outright embarrassment at the fact that what he was drawing was not exactly what he or they were seeing.
Lily Beach, however, was genetically lucky and too young to have to worry about discordant tissue. After several days of sketching isolated parts of her body from the photographs in which she had posed standing, sitting, kneeling, bending, reclining, leaning, crouching, stretching, reaching, and sprawling, lighted six different ways and from a dozen different angles, he was finally getting to know the essential peculiarities of her anatomy, such as they were.
More than a few times during these days his mind wandered to Céleste Lacan. She was poles apart from Lily Beach in appearance and, he guessed, in personality, too. She kept breaking into his thoughts entirely unbidden: the empathy in her face when she realized that she had touched upon the tender subject of his critics, the way she straightened her back, the flash of hesitation in her eyes, and her decision not to say whatever it was she had started to say before she stood to leave. He thought of her, and wondered about her, sometimes forgetting altogether the very fine musculature of Gerald Beach’s wife.
One afternoon, relieved by the noon Angelus bells, he drove his Jeep down the hill into town to a shoe shop on Morelos Street, where he dropped off a favorite pair of old work shoes that he wanted to have resoled. On the way back he stopped by a barrio taco stand in Rincon and grabbed a couple of tacos that he ate right there, sitting in the Jeep under the shade of a mesquite tree.
By one-thirty he was back in the studio, settled into his old leather armchair, his feet resting on a worn-out ottoman, and his sketchbook propped on the incline of his thighs. Lily Beach’s photographs were scattered all about him as he worried with one of his drawings in an effort to get the correct angle of her neck. He had been at this a little more than an hour when he heard footsteps on the stones in the courtyard. He looked up just as Céleste Lacan stepped through the opened door.
“Hello,” she said simply. The light that fell in through the door illuminated the right one-third of her body, leaving the rest of her in the shadow.
“I guess you didn’t need any directions after all,” he said, taking his feet off the ottoman and standing. She’d caught him by surprise again. Could she even see him there in the relative darkness? He closed the sketchbook and tossed it into his chair behind him.
“I know, I told you I’d call,” she said, coming toward him, passing through one of the shafts of light. “I’m sorry. I just came by on an impulse.” She stopped halfway to him. “If this is a bad time, I certainly understand—”
“No, no,” he interrupted her. “It’s not a bad time at all. I could use a break.”
“It’s not what I said I’d do, so—”
“No, really. Believe me, I’d tell you if it was a problem for me.”
“Okay, good, then.” She smiled, accepting his assurances. She came on toward him, surveying the studio as she approached. She wore a dark long skirt with a tan short-sleeved blouse tucked into the waist. Her hair was hastily gathered at the nape of her neck in a careless chignon. She held an oak twig with a cluster of leaves still attached that she must’ve picked off a tree along the path from the house.
She stopped in front of him but looked up at the high ceiling and drew in a slow, deep breath. “I love the smell of the stones.” Her eyes roamed the studio. “It’s an old place, isn’t it?”
He told her briefly about the compound, what it had been, how he’d got it, and what he’d done to it. When he stopped she began to wander in no particular direction, stopping to look at old maquettes of various sizes that lay scattered about from former commissions, a dusty monkey skeleton dangling from a wire on a wooden stand, the model of an arm or foot. She paused and smiled at a vitrine that contained a collection of outspread birds’ wings, and she lingered over a framed display of obsidian insect carvings.
“You’re a gatherer,” she said, her back to him as she examined a tray of feather-light cicada husks arranged in diagonal rows. Not a collector, a gatherer. That was a nice distinction. And she seemed to be pleased at the idea.
“I like stuff,” he said. “Sometimes you can just pick it up for nothing, wonderful stuff, and sometimes you have to pay for it. But it’s all interesting . . . and it’s all . . . stuff.”
He saw her smile to herself as she turned and moved on, and he moved along with her, watching her. She said nothing else to him, and he was content to observe her in silence as she continued prowling among his workbenches and cluttered tables. He knew what she was doing because he had done it himself in the studios of other artists. She was indulging in a kind of intellectual scopophilia, spying on the minutiae of nonessentials with which he liked to surround himself on a daily basis, curious to know if these secret singularities could somehow reveal to her his personality in a way that nothing else could. That was fine with him. He had the feeling—based on nothing more than gut instinct—that this woman was going to glean a lot more from what she saw than most people. He felt oddly stirred, as if he were allowing her to glimpse him naked through the narrow opening of a door slightly ajar.
It struck him how peculiar it was that they were meandering around the studio together in silence. But he rather liked the idea of them doing it, and he liked it that she didn’t feel obligated to fill the silence. She seemed comfortable am
ong the things that made him comfortable, too, and he was secretly gratified when she stopped to examine with obvious appreciation some small thing that he had acquired for no other reason than that it gave him a simple or indefinable pleasure. As he accompanied her and watched as she paused at some artifact or trifle—and often he was surprised at the minutiae that caught her attention—he felt a growing responsiveness to her. It was easy enough to explain: Like most people, he found her tastes and curiosity most attractive when they confirmed and coincided with his own.
Occasionally he caught a waft of faint fragrance. It wasn’t perfume.
At one point she stopped and looked in silence at the wooden modeling platform that stood in the center of the studio. It was two feet high and twelve feet square, large enough for several models at once. Only an uncovered daybed and a straight-backed chair occupied the bare boards. The empty stage contrasted sharply with the rest of the cluttered studio, but she gave the stark platform more time than anything else. She stood still, looking at it, lost in thought. Then she moved on without comment.
When she found herself back at the chair where he had been sitting, she bent and picked up a couple of Lily Beach’s photographs. She held one in each hand and looked at them, her eyes taking in the whole of the long, pale, privileged body of his client. She dwelled on the pictures longer than he would have expected—and this time he really wished he knew exactly what she was thinking—and then she bent and dropped them on the floor where she had found them. She scanned the other pictures from where she stood, and as she turned away he saw her take note of the sketchbook in his chair.
“Lovely,” she said to him, but he didn’t know whether she was referring to the studio or to Lily Beach. She cast her gaze about the studio once again, then stopped her eyes on him.
“Do . . . do you have a little while to talk?” she asked.
• • •
She sat on one of the high wooden stools, the heels of her sandals hooked on the bottom rung, her back nearly touching the bench, and he sat on the top of a wooden cabinet of flat files, facing her. She almost seemed as if she wanted to confide in him.
The sunlight reflected off the deep stone window casement beside her and washed into the room between them. They looked at each other across a span of brightness in which an occasional gnat drifted about in disoriented vacillation, like an animated mote.
“I need to be honest with you about something,” she said, reaching up and tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “I would have come here sooner, but I knew I had to do this and . . . well . . . I wasn’t looking forward to it.”
She was uncomfortable, maybe even embarrassed, but not upset. He waited.
“I’m not here out of simple curiosity,” she began, “there’s another reason.”
“Which is . . .”
“I want to commission you to do a sculpture.”
He waited a beat for that to soak in.
“You mean that’s why you came to San Rafael, to see me about this?”
“Yes.”
“Not looking for a summer home.”
“No.”
This was pretty unorthodox, but it explained a lot.
“Why didn’t you just tell me this at Graber’s the other day?”
“It would be a sculpture of my sister,” she said, ignoring his question.
Her sister?
“What kind of sculpture?”
She flicked her eyes toward the photographs of Lily Beach. “A full-length nude.”
The sister was younger, then? How much younger?
As if she knew what he was thinking, she reached into the pocket of her skirt and pulled out a photograph, looked at it, and then handed it to him.
“This is Leda,” she said.
It was a color snapshot of a young woman sitting at a table on a terrace. A section of the terrace balustrade was visible in the background, and beyond that the sea, unmistakably the Mediterranean. If Céleste possessed an appeal that some people might have found difficult to appreciate, her sister’s beauty was indisputable. It really was the sort, as the cliché had it, that made careers and wrecked lives. He had seen a lot of beautiful women, and this one was, by just about anybody’s standards, drop-dead gorgeous. The only thing anyone might find difficult about her appearance would be turning away from it.
Her dark hair fell over her shoulders, and her complexion was the same rich olive of Céleste’s. But it was the structure of her face that immediately caught his experienced appraisal: It was startlingly symmetrical, so balanced that a mirror image of either half would exactly match its original. A rare attribute. There were no flaws in her features, and Ross thought it would be difficult for anyone to suggest an improvement.
“She’s beautiful,” he said.
“Yes,” she agreed, “but Leda’s . . . not like any other beautiful woman you’ve ever seen.”
He felt a pang of disappointment at this remark. He’d heard something like it, variations of it, so many times over the years that it rang empty and silly in his head. Beautiful people, and the people who loved them, always thought they were special. Even if they had the good sense to hide this conceit, it was still there, embedded within them, feeding their self-regard, informing their own belief in the blind magic of a genetic accident. But it hadn’t been his experience that they were indeed special. Gorgeous young women, most specifically those who wanted to have their bodies sculpted, were all too dreadfully similar.
“That must’ve sounded trite to you,” she said. There was no hint of apology.
“What makes you say that?”
She held him with a look. “Surely you don’t think you’re the only one capable of reading other people?”
“Was I that transparent?”
“I’m that observant,” she said.
The retort caught him by surprise, and he felt an unaccustomed twinge of uncertainty.
“I realize you’ve seen a lot of beautiful women in your career,” she went on, “and I guess you’ve formed some pretty strong opinions about what’s ‘typical’ about them. They must bore you now.” She paused. “I doubt if you see anything special in them anymore.”
“Special,” he said, recovering his thoughts. “That’s an idea that tends to lose its meaning in certain circumstances, doesn’t it?”
“Does it?”
He wanted to make his point without sounding sardonic.
“Imagine,” he said, “that there’s a room where a thousand women have been gathered because their beauty has distinguished them, made them special. In the context of that group, ‘special’ begins to lose its meaning. Because they’re all special, each of them ceases to be special. To be ‘special’ in that room, you’d have to possess a quality defined by a completely different set of criteria.”
She thought about this a moment. She looked at the twig as she twirled it in her fingers. When she lifted her head again, they looked at each other from shadow to shadow through the shaft of light.
“In that room,” she said, “Leda not only would still warrant your new definition of special, she would easily qualify as exceptional. A rarity, in fact.”
Chapter 7
It was a remarkable thing to say, and she must have seen the skepticism in his face.
“You find that hard to believe?” she asked.
“It sure as hell raises expectations,” he said.
There was a small change in the shape of her eyes, a smile in her mind.
“What if I told you,” she said, “that you could still learn something new about beauty.”
“Something you could teach me?”
“No, I think you could learn from Leda.”
“Then I’d say I can’t wait to meet her.”
The twig stopped twirling, and she looked away toward the window. Nearby, in one of the oaks, a mockingbird gabbled to herself in a low, ruminative voice. He studied Céleste’s profile. Though she sat in shadow, the next window beyond her provided a backdrop of oblique, h
azy brightness. She seemed, suddenly, enormously intelligent, as if she possessed a powerful secret and were trying to decide how to convey it gently to an uninitiated intellect.
“You’re cynical about it,” she said, still looking out the window. “About beauty, I mean.” Her tone was neither challenging nor accusatory. It was thoughtful—almost, even, understanding.
“I’m not cynical about it,” he said. “You can’t be cynical about an amoral thing like that. It just exists, all by itself. The fact that we find it in this thing or that person, and not in that thing or another person, is amoral, too. It just happens. Like thunderstorms. The reasons for it, the deeper reasons for it—beyond atmospheric conditions, beyond DNA—remain a mystery. I have a lot of respect for mystery. I’m not cynical about that.”
Outside, the sun was burning in a cloudless sky, and the broad depth of the windowsill was at its most brilliant point because of the angle of the sun. In contrast with the sharp light, they sat in the darkest shadow. A warm breath of the afternoon moved in through the opened windows, occasionally displacing the cool from the stone walls.
She turned to him. “But there’s something derisory in your attitude about—”
“Human nature, not beauty.”
She waited. Suddenly he saw her in extraordinarily sharp focus, even through the shadow. He could see the moisture in her eyes, not tears, but the viscous liquid environment of her sight.
“And you include yourself in that harsh assessment?” she asked pointedly.
“Especially myself.”
This seemed to be a new thought to her. Though she had been insightful about him, even eerily intuitive, she hadn’t expected he would include himself in his own cynical philosophy.
“You’ll talk to Leda, then,” she said, shifting abruptly back to her sister and the subject of the commission.
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