What in the hell could he say at this point? What did one say to such an idea?
“And there’s another reason,” she added. “I also want to do this because I want to see myself in three dimensions instead of the one dimension of me I see in mirrors. I want to be able to touch myself in places I can’t touch now. I want to see what others see.”
She paused and held out her hands, palms facing him, and when she spoke she spoke slowly and her voice was richly soft and lovely and seductive.
“I want to walk around myself and put my own hands on this goddamned thing . . . and feel it, feel the whole . . . ugly . . . mass . . . of it.”
She concluded in a husky whisper as if she had recited a tender declamation of affection, and her eyes rested in the mid-distance as if in a reverie.
Silence.
Then suddenly she moved her shoulders with a subtle shiver, like an actress snapping out of a trance induced by immersing herself in her character’s long soliloquy.
“How’s that for an answer?” she asked brightly with a soft, innocent smile on her beautiful mouth.
Had that really been her answer, or was it merely a smart-aleck performance? He didn’t have any idea what she might be thinking or feeling, but he was dealing with a dozen different thoughts at once. What an incredible proposition she was offering him. It was crazy. Nearly everyone would find the completed sculpture controversial. Some would see beauty, some the poignant riddle of Leda’s unique reality, some would see only the grotesque. There was no doubt that it would be disturbing. And it could prove to be emotionally unsettling for him, too, as well as for Leda. What would he uncover, literally and psychologically, even spiritually? He looked at her, her youthful, extraordinary face waiting for his response with a wan, angelic smile of anticipation. Was she emotionally unstable? If she was, would that matter?
Seeing that he wasn’t going to respond, she elaborated.
“This idea has preoccupied me for a long time, Ross,” she said, apparently unafraid of the familiarity that her sister had carefully avoided. “I will do it.” She paused for emphasis. “I need you for this. Specifically you.”
“Specifically me?”
Leda raised one hand near her face to hold his attention. It was a beautiful hand, he now noticed, and he recalled the feel of its narrow shape in his own.
“Please,” she said. “Céleste has been holding me back, convincing me to wait until we found the right sculptor. Not just anyone, she said, should do this. She’s talked to others, in Paris, in London. To be honest, you’re the first sculptor she’s agreed to let me speak to.”
Céleste seemed to be more involved in this process than she had led him to believe. He wanted to say something about that, but it seemed nitpicky. It was a bizarre commission, and he could understand the two sisters being nervous about it. He was even a little flattered that he had been “selected,” whatever the hell the criteria were, and especially that it had been Céleste who had made the decision. He could see her in his peripheral vision, as quiet as a basilisk, apparently feeling no obligation to smooth over the differences in their stories.
In an instant he knew he was going to do it.
Chapter 9
“This isn’t going to be an easy thing to do,” he said. “For either of us. It’s going to require long hours. It can be physically numbing.”
“I know that.”
“And it’ll be intimate,” he said. “I’ll have to take measurements of you, detailed measurements with calipers.”
“I told you, I’m used to being looked at.”
Céleste dropped her eyes as if she knew what was coming. Leda went on.
“Up to now,” she said, “only children have had the innocence to give me a good long stare. You’ll be the first adult ever—aside from doctors—to get a proper eyeful of me, to look at all of me, all that you want. God, it’ll be a relief to have you take your time with me.”
These last words were spoken with a kind of passion that made him uncomfortable. It wasn’t said with bitterness, but with an enthusiasm that seemed inappropriate. Would he have preferred bitterness from her? Would he have preferred her to be as emotionally distorted as she was physically? What did he expect from her?
“What do you want from this?” he asked. “I mean ultimately, once the sculpture is completed, and people are able to do as you wish, to touch, to feel, to see from every conceivable angle, what do you expect to happen?”
“You mean, do I expect it to be an exorcism?” She lowered her chin and furrowed her brow in theatrical gravitas. “A release from the . . . ‘spiritual agony of this body’?”
Her self-mockery was biting, but at the same time he thought he sensed that an exorcism was exactly what she was hoping to experience in the process. But she gave him a flip response.
“Look, I just want to do it. I don’t want to analyze it.”
“Your body has a mind attached to it,” he said. “I don’t have any interest in sculpting just the bones and muscles. Ideally, at least, there’s more to it than that.”
“Ohhhhh,” she purred, “that’s awfully highbrow. Were you able to capture the mind of the woman you just finished sculpting in Paris?”
If Ross had been ten years younger, he would have flushed at this impudence. But he had developed calluses. The flick of the scorpion’s tail had to hit him harder than that.
“Have you seen that sculpture?” he asked.
“Actually, I have. I went to look at it.”
“Her husband didn’t want to see any more than what he got,” he said.
“Then he wasn’t disappointed, was he?”
“No.”
“I don’t want to see any more than that, either.”
“But I do,” he said.
She shrugged indifferently.
“In your case,” he said, returning Leda’s penchant for bluntness, “we have a mixed bag. Beauty isn’t the only thing we’re dealing with here. There’s something else, isn’t there? Inevitably this will be controversial. Believe me, I can live without the disputation this is likely to create. If I’m going to have to put up with that, I want to make it worth my while. For me it’s got to be more than just another commission.”
He stopped to let this sink in a moment, and then he added, “If I can’t do it the way I want to do it, then I won’t do it.”
He could see her simmering. It was a puzzling standoff. After all, he had asked her only a relatively innocent question, an effort to get a little deeper into an understanding of how she felt about her body. Her response could have been finessed in a dozen different ways, yet she chose to make a confrontation out of it.
Céleste hadn’t moved. He couldn’t have guessed what she was thinking in a thousand years. He continued to look at Leda.
“Okay,” she relented, though she was clearly resentful, “I’ll get into that, but can we save it until later? I’ll give you plenty of insight, if that’s what you want.”
“Fine.”
“Then you’ll do it?”
“Yes, if we can work out the other arrangements.”
“Can we start immediately?”
“No, that’s not possible.”
“What’s the matter?” she snapped before he could explain. “Was all that pompous talk just the peacock shimmering his tail?”
If he had had any doubts left, this last taunt wiped them away. Leda was a deeply bitter woman, and working with her would require a patience he didn’t usually allow his often pampered clients. The distortions in Leda’s life went far deeper than flesh and bone.
He ignored her wisecrack and told her about the Beach commission, the deadline, the obligation to honor a commitment.
“Okay, what about a compromise,” Leda offered. “I understand that you can’t just drop what you’re doing, but I’m going to be here for a few months, and then I have to go back to Paris. It seems a shame to waste the time. I know you usually begin with photographs, but if I’m going to be right here in
San Rafael anyway, why don’t you just start sketching me as a diversion from your other commission? You can’t work on the other thing all the time, can you?”
As he looked at the two women sitting across from him, it struck him how dramatically different they were from his usual clients. Most people came to him because they wanted something beautiful, something quickly recognizable as beautiful without any need for laborious interpretation by the viewer. Not so here. Nor was vanity a factor here. Neither of them was looking for approval or acceptance from a particular crowd. Rather than simply wanting a trophy that they hoped would also have an aura of sophistication attached to it, Leda was passionately tied to the commission, even though she hated to admit it.
Leda wanted something honest—or so she had said before she decided to deny it—and in pursuing this, she had provided him with a gift of occasion, a chance to reach for something deeper, something greater, than a mere facile copy of a beautiful body.
“Okay,” he said, “you’re right. I think we can do that.”
Her face was instantly transformed by a glowing smile, a beautiful thing to see, and she literally squirmed on the settee.
“I promise,” she exuded with gratitude, “that you’ll regret this.”
She was so excited, she didn’t even notice the unfortunate misstatement, and then she was pressing him about when they could begin. He finally agreed to start the next morning. She would need to be at the studio at ten o’clock.
“Okay, that’s settled, then,” Céleste said, uncrossing her legs and sitting up. “Now Ross and I have to talk about the terms of the agreement, about the finances. You can stay or not.”
It seemed an unnecessarily abrupt change in the direction of the conversation, but Leda didn’t even appear to notice.
“No, I don’t want to stay for that,” she said, suddenly disinterested.
“You can take the car back,” Céleste suggested. “Ross can drive me home when we’re through.”
Leda looked at him.
“That’s no problem,” he said. “I’ll be glad to.”
Leda held out her hands for the keys, and Céleste gave them to her. They took a few moments to go over the directions back to Céleste’s house in Palm Heights. When she had it straight, Leda stood, avoiding his eyes as she got to her feet with a kind of rolling, heaving effort. Her hulking back was so dominant, he wondered how he had missed seeing it the very first instant she arrived. He stood also, and she said good-bye and walked away toward the door.
Though her mobility was strong and sure, her hips were noticeably canted, her center of balance difficult for him to locate. The hump on her back made her seem shorter, thicker, even, strangely, powerful. She walked out of the studio without looking back or saying another word.
After she had crossed the courtyard, he looked at Céleste, who was now sitting up straight on the settee, her legs together, forearms resting on her knees, looking at him.
“There you have it,” she said.
“I should’ve known not to push her,” he said, sitting down again. “She’d already said more than she would’ve liked.”
“You won’t have any trouble learning more about her,” Céleste assured him.
“Is she concerned about taking off her clothes?”
“She hasn’t said anything to me about it.”
“Do you think she is?”
“Frankly, I doubt it.” She sighed. “Let’s do settle the final business with the agreement. If you’re going to begin tomorrow, then let’s tie together the loose ends.”
“There aren’t any loose ends,” he said. “We’ll settle everything later. We’ll just consider the early sessions as exploratory efforts. We’ll see how it goes.”
She nodded, looking at him. “You wanted to do it the minute you recovered from the shock of seeing her, didn’t you?” she observed.
“How about a glass of wine?” he said.
• • •
He got a bottle of Barbera d’Asti from a cool bin in the stone wall at the rear of the studio and brought it back with a couple of glasses. She was standing by one of his several worktables, looking at a maquette, a reclining nude. He put the glasses on the table and began opening the wine.
“What’s the story behind this one? She looks Middle Eastern.”
“Egyptian. It never got past the maquette.”
“Why?”
“Well, it was odd,” he said, pouring the wine and handing her a glass. “Her husband commissioned it. He was a businessman in Alexandria. The woman died in a swimming accident just after I finished this. He was devastated. He didn’t want the bronze casting completed. After he paid me, I offered to send him the maquette, but he didn’t want it. He made me promise to destroy it. I promised.”
She was surprised. “You like it that much?”
He looked at the maquette, every millimeter of which he had memorized and could easily re-create again by closing his eyes.
“I liked her that much,” he said.
She regarded him over the top of her glass as she took her first sip of wine. “You didn’t feel bad about lying to him?”
“He was grieving,” he said matter-of-factly. “He didn’t know what he was saying. It would have been a mistake.”
“That’s a decision you can make?”
“I did.”
She turned back to the maquette. It was a large one, one-half life size, which took up the entire end of the table. She cupped the curve of the woman’s hip in the palm of her hand, feeling the shape of it with her fingers, sliding her hand down the slope of her hips to the figure’s waist.
“That wasn’t the lie that mattered to him anyway, was it?” she said.
“No,” he said, looking into his glass, “it wasn’t.”
Chapter 10
She had an uncanny ability to go right to the heart of things, and more than that, she seemed to understand what she was dealing with. What was there about this particular maquette that had attracted her? There were other nude maquettes and sculptures around the studio, and Saleh had been dead nearly six years. He had long since learned the art of hiding his feelings, of concealing the gall of remorse. And the painful chapter with Marian had intervened, too, obscuring the personal connection even more. But Céleste had known, by whatever sense within her, she had known.
Yet when he acknowledged that her intuition had been correct, she let the subject drop. She had simply wanted a confirmation. He wondered what she would have done if he’d denied any connection to this model other than the relationship of client and sculptor.
She turned away from the maquette and moved to the other end of the workbench, leaving her glass with a last sip of wine in it sitting against one of Saleh’s thighs. She leaned the back of her hips against the heavy table and rested her hands on the table’s edge. Looking toward the doorway, where the afternoon light had moved the shadow of the studio across the courtyard, she stared out at the coppery light of late afternoon.
“The other day when I came over,” she said, “your house was open. I knocked and went in.”
“And you looked around.”
“I did,” she said without embarrassment, “but I didn’t see any evidence of a woman there, aside from paintings and sculptures of them. I didn’t see anything of the woman you left in Paris.”
“How do you know I ‘left’ her in Paris?”
“Because I didn’t see any sign of her.”
He told her briefly about Marian, about their struggle to keep what they had had alive, about their failure to do so. He even told her the way it ended. She listened, her eyes lost in a gaze toward the dying light.
“You’ve not been married, then?”
“No.” He thought he would leave it at that, and then he changed his mind. “When I was younger, ambition got in the way. Then it was selfishness. And, later, bad luck—or maybe stupidity. The only woman who could have made all those excuses evaporate was already married.”
He finished the wi
ne in his glass and put it down beside Céleste’s. He stepped over and stood beside her and leaned back against the table, too. He crossed his arms, and both of them looked toward the opened studio door and the changing light.
“Do you ever wonder about growing old this way?”
“Yes.”
She looked at him. “And what do you think about it?”
“Sometimes I don’t much like the idea.”
“And other times?”
“At other times it seems to be all for the best.”
“Why?”
“Well, it might be lonely, but there’s probably less grief in it, too.”
“And less joy.”
“Maybe.”
“I’m not sure I can separate the two so easily,” she said, “grief and loneliness.”
“What about your marriage?” he asked, deciding not to avoid it any longer. “What went wrong?”
She made no immediate response, but he sensed a cold change in her. He watched her as she forced herself to back off, to try to be at least as revealing about herself as he had been. It didn’t appear to be easy for her.
The luminance outside was fading quickly, and colors, often subtle in the studio anyway because of the cavernous interior, were leaking away with the light.
“I don’t know why I married him,” she said. “I find it extraordinary that I did. I didn’t have the excuse of youth. I wasn’t even ‘blinded’ by love. I swear to you, I can’t explain it to this day.”
“Maybe you were that afraid.”
“Loneliness,” she said. “That’s pitiful, but it may be true.”
“Why haven’t you gotten out of it?”
“Well,” she said flatly, “that’s even more complicated.”
She made no effort to explain, and he had enough sense not to press her on it. He simply waited, and in a moment she went on.
“When it comes right down to it,” she said, “in my weakest moments, I sometimes wonder if there’s not more of Eva in me than I’ve wanted to believe. I’d always claimed my father’s sentiments and temperament. I watched Eva hurl disastrously through life, and I told myself that my father and I were wiser than that. I told myself that he and I understood dimensions of life that she didn’t even know existed. When we reached a precipice in life, we calculated the risks and stepped back. But not Eva. She plunged over, just for the thrill of falling. She and Leda.”
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