Pause.
“I used the belief that I was like my father as a talisman to ward off those weak moments when I was afraid of being like her. It got me through some hard times, but I sometimes wonder if I was only deceiving myself.”
“Can’t you just admit the marriage was a mistake and walk away from it?”
“Oh, I admit the mistake.”
She left the second part of his question hanging there between them. This time he didn’t want to let it go.
“And what about walking away?”
The light beyond the doorway was ripening into sunset.
“It’s . . . just complicated,” she repeated, unwilling or, perhaps, unable to go on.
Suddenly he saw resolution struggling with genuine anguish. He could see her determination to avoid the appearance of being a martyr. He didn’t know what was going on, but he guessed she was in a lousy situation or, worse, maybe even a horrible situation, and she would rather leave him with a wrong impression than let him glimpse her closely guarded yearning for simple companionship. He was sorry for his carelessness with her feelings, that it had been so easy for him to be insensitive.
“I understand complicated,” he said.
“Do you?”
“I understand . . . that complicated doesn’t always make sense. I understand that it can be hypnotic . . . that you can endure more than you could ever have imagined, for reasons you could never have imagined.”
He unfolded his arms and turned to her.
“I understand,” he said, “the loneliness of complicated.” He reached out and put his hand on her bare arm and gently moved his finger over the smoothness of it. She let him touch her, and then she turned her eyes from the doorway and looked at his hand on her arm. At first she watched him stroke her as if she were observing it happening to someone else. He had the sense that she had forsworn her own feelings for so long that she was accustomed to standing at a distance from her own emotions.
But then she turned to him and tentatively placed a hand flat on his chest. Slowly, as if she were unsure of the effect, she gently laid her face beside her hand. It was a natural thing for him to put his arms around her. He could feel her breasts, could feel the rise and fall of them as she breathed, could feel their warmth through the thin summer cotton. He imagined the shape of them, the shape of their nipples, and their color.
He held her for a quiet moment before he slowly dropped his hands down to her sides and, moving only his fingers, gradually began gathering the skirt of her dress. She didn’t stop him. Bending down, he touched his lips to the side of her neck, which she tilted away to accept his kiss. He felt her stomach tighten. They kissed hesitantly, softly.
When her skirt was gathered around her waist, he lifted her onto the worktable and slipped her panties from her hips and down her long legs. With her eyes open now, watching him, she lay back on the table as the last of the amber light sliced through a narrow angle of the deep window casement and cut across her stomach. He kissed her there, below her navel, his lips moving down and into the gilded crease of her groin.
It was a willful and reckless thing they were doing, troubled by entanglements on both sides that were unresolved and unforgettable. Even as it was happening, he knew that what they were starting was as fragile as the fading light around them.
• • •
His bedroom jutted out from the original stone-and-stucco house in a long pentagonal footprint sheltered by the heavy canopies of old oaks. The bed sat in the outermost extension of the room, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling screened panels that allowed the southeasterly cross breeze to drift over the bed.
They talked aimlessly about art and themselves, of people they had known, and of places they had been, and of certain disparate memories that came randomly to mind, recalled by some word or thought expressed by the other. They were naked and perspiring slightly, and every cool waft of breeze prickled their skin.
“I remember this kind of heat from Mexico,” she said, lying next to him. “For a while I lived in the Yucatán, and the nights were like this.”
“Memorable.”
“Oh, Christ, I’ll never forget them. I was so young . . . and the nights were so . . . old. It was perfect, and I knew it was perfect, and I knew it wouldn’t last.”
They were sharing a single tall glass of gin and tonic with ice. A saucer of sliced limes rested on his stomach, and they were eating them as they talked.
“What happened?”
“Oh . . . nothing dramatic. Life. It was the first time that I realized—that I knew—that really special things in life wouldn’t be allowed to last forever. It was such a grown-up realization for a little girl.”
In the silence between their thoughts and their words, cicadas and crickets throbbed and whirred in overlapping rhythms, and on the other side of the screens fireflies floated up and down like sparks in the dark heat.
She reached over and got several of the lime slices in one hand and held her hand above her and squeezed, letting the juice drizzle over her breasts and stomach. He heard her take in a quick breath, and then he smelled the clean, citrus fragrance.
They finished the gin and dozed off and awoke sometime in the long darkness, and he tenderly began to lick the lime from her breasts and stomach until they were once more caught up in a single hectic emotion. Later, exhausted again, they slept.
The next time he woke she wasn’t in bed. He heard water running in the bathroom, splashing softly in the sink. He waited, but when she returned in the darkness she didn’t come back to bed. She went to the screened wall and looked out. He watched her dusky silhouette for a moment, and then he thought he heard her crying. He sat up.
“Céleste?”
His voice startled her; she was still.
“Are you all right?”
She cleared her throat. “I’m fine.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Bad dream.”
He started to get out of bed, and she heard him.
“Please,” she said, “I’ll be there in a minute.”
He waited, looking at her form against the slaty blue darkness. After a while she came back and crawled onto the bed. She came over next to him and put her arm around him and pulled herself close. She kissed the side of his neck softly and was quiet.
He stared into what was left of the still hour before dawn.
Chapter 11
The morning light hit him obliquely across one eye, and he felt the warmth of it on the side of his face. His first reaction was surprise that he had fallen asleep. He looked over at Céleste, who was on her stomach, turned away from him so that he could see only the outline of her cheek and chin. Her hair was pulled to the side, leaving her shoulders and back bare, a glance of sun picking up the striations of silver in the spirals of chestnut. The deep fluting of mourning doves nearby carried through the screen walls on a soft breeze.
He carefully got out of bed and slipped on a pair of pants and went into the kitchen. When he returned to the bedroom with two cups of fresh coffee, the bed was empty. The bathroom door was open, and he could hear the faint splash of water.
Carrying the coffee, he went into the bathroom, a big, square white room flooded with light, and saw the door to the outside open. Just outside the bathroom door he had built an outdoor shower, a generous tiled alcove where he bathed most of the year. Céleste was under the spray, her back to him. He stood looking through the screen door at her, a saucy cerise bougainvillea hanging down over the tiled wall above her. It was a beautiful thing to see and to keep.
Then he saw the bruises on her back, two distinct smears just above her kidneys, another one on her right buttock, another below it on the outside of her upper thigh.
She turned off the water and turned around in one smooth motion and saw him standing there.
Their eyes met and stopped, and he saw the calm resignation in her look and the water beading her face, her hands paused flat against her temples in the process of clearing h
er hair from her face.
“Coffee,” he said, breaking the spell.
“Great,” she said, and completed the motion of her arms and reached for the towel hanging on the tiled wall. She dried her face, patted her hair, and wrapped the towel around her. He handed her one of the cups of coffee.
“Let’s sit under the arbor,” he said.
They walked around the corner of the shower and onto the patio and sat on the wooden bench that followed the arc of the arbor. For ten or fifteen minutes they made small talk, but what he had seen in that moment in the shower—and what she knew he had seen—had now stolen between them like a solemn cloud passing in front of the moon.
“You’re going to find makeup on your sheets,” she said finally. “I cover them with that.”
He didn’t rush her.
“My husband lost interest in me,” she said simply. “Then he reinvented himself, reinvented me, too, discovered me all over again. These, the bruises, they’re the color of the new relationship.”
“Jesus Christ. I thought you were estranged.”
“I would call this estrangement, wouldn’t you?”
“How long has this been going on?”
“It started, I don’t know, a year ago. But I don’t see him often. We do live apart.”
“Some of those are recent.”
She didn’t say anything. There was something about her bare shoulders that made him think of a girl, not a woman. He didn’t know why, but she just seemed young, sitting there, wearing the towel that way. The mockingbird began gabbling in the bougainvillea above them, her strong, clear voice a painful apposition of storybook morning cheer and depressing reality.
“I told you it was complicated,” she said, still not looking at him. She put down the coffee on the bench and tilted her head to one side and wrung water from her hair.
“Do you like it?” The words were out before he even knew he wanted to ask them, and he regretted them even before his voice died.
She stopped, her face turned away, her head tilted, her dripping hair in her hands.
“God . . .” She sighed with a tone of weary disappointment.
“I’m sorry,” he said instantly, “that was . . . that was dumb.” He felt like an idiot.
She straightened up without looking at him.
“You know, I’ve got to go,” she said. “It’s getting late.”
“Wait—” He reached out and touched her bare shoulder. “Céleste, look at me.” She turned to him. “I am sorry for that. I’m sorry that it even entered my mind, and that I was so stupid.”
The look of disconsolation in her eyes was heartbreaking, and he felt as if his brutal remark had inflicted its own bruises, the kind that would not heal as easily as the ones on her body.
“No, it’s all right,” she said softly, “I understand.”
After she dressed, he gave her the keys to his car and walked with her through the house and breezeway to the garage. He had to move the Jeep out of the way, and when he walked back to the car she kissed him, a gentle but heavy-laden good-bye, after which she avoided his eyes. Then she got in the car and drove away along the gravel drive.
But there was something sad between them now, a disturbing dissonance that he had introduced along with his insensitive question. The single word regret hardly expressed all that he felt by what he had done.
Chapter 12
When Leda arrived at the studio alone less than half an hour later, she was wearing a lemon yellow two-piece dress, a fashionable style that had required special tailoring for her. Her abundant hair was worn full and wavy, a dark loop of which fell vampishly over one eye, a conceit that was adolescent in its notion of sexiness and at the same time oddly attractive.
He deliberately hadn’t prepared anything for the session, thinking it might set a more relaxed mood if they talked while he went about the mundane preparations of getting together his materials.
“I hope you had a good night’s sleep,” he said, bringing his sketching stool over from a corner of the room.
“Apparently I got more sleep than Céleste did,” she said pointedly.
He ignored the remark as he got a fresh sketchpad from the cabinets and selected a variety of pencils from the drawers.
“We won’t be at it too long today,” he said, bringing everything over to a modeling platform.
“Is that where you want me?” she asked, regarding the platform and the daybed, which he had covered with a vermilion damask spread.
“Eventually.”
The space around the platform was open so that he could move his small bench entirely around it, choosing an infinite variety of angles for sketching. He straddled the short bench, put the pencils in the wooden tray, and attached his sketchpad to an easel mounted on the end of the bench.
“You can choose any position you like to begin with,” he said, starting to sharpen his pencils, “I can move this thing around you for different views. That way you don’t have to change positions so much. Less tiring.”
“I don’t need any special accommodations,” she said.
“This is the way I work with all my models. Same process.”
She walked slowly around the platform. He continued with the pencils, deliberately tending to the business of sharpening, not looking at her. He thought she glanced at him frequently as she casually circumnavigated the stage, looking at the bed and the chair in the center of it, eventually returning to where she had begun.
She dropped her shoulder bag on the edge of the platform and sat beside it, both feet on the floor. A row of quarter-size white shell buttons marched up the center of her lemon dress from hem to waist.
“Did you talk about me after I left yesterday?” she asked.
“No,” he lied.
She smiled an “I know damn well you did” smile but let it go.
“Have you been curious about what you’re going to see when I take off my clothes?”
“Of course.” He was whittling a point on the last pencil, his lap scattered with shavings. “Why?”
“I just wanted to see if you’d lie about that, too.”
“I choose my lies carefully,” he said, tossing the last pencil into the tray in front of him. He crossed his arms and looked at her. “Let’s talk about how to get started.”
“I take off my clothes.”
“There’s a screen back there,” he said, nodding toward the rear of the studio. “Hangers for your clothes, a bathroom, a new robe.”
She turned to look at the bed in the center of the platform.
“Why don’t I just undress there,” she said, turning back to him. “I want you to watch me undress.”
“It’s not necessary.”
“I think it is. I want you to see me move. How I move. Why I move the way I do. I want you to understand the mechanics of it, where my center of balance is.”
It was a remarkably perceptive suggestion. Eventually he would have asked for all of this anyway, for just the exact reasons she stated. Eventually she would have to do these things over and over. She obviously knew this. She didn’t want to be humored. He had the feeling that she had been waiting for this moment for years, and she wanted to get right to it.
“Fine,” he said. “I don’t have to have anything particular. Not yet, anyway.”
“Good. Then let’s get started.”
Taking her shoulder bag, she stood and walked to the corner of the platform where there was a step. She went carefully up the step and walked to the bed. She put her handbag on the chair and got a rubber band from inside it and pulled back her thick hair and fastened it in place.
“I want you to see my neck,” she explained.
Nine women out of ten, when undressing, begin with their blouses. Not Leda. She sat on the bed facing him, kicked off her sandals, and bent over and picked up the hem of her skirt and began with the bottom button. This particular maneuver emphasized the hump on her back, and he had the feeling she did it deliberately for that reason, s
o that he would see it at its most grotesque angle.
When she got to her crotch she threw open the sides of her skirt, revealing her bare legs and her butter yellow panties. He was surprised by their color and by their delicate cut and lace panels. Her skin was a lighter shade of olive than Céleste’s. She sucked in her stomach to get the waist buttons, and then she stood and removed the skirt. As she turned to the side to lay it over the chair, he could see the odd angle of her hips.
Now he expected her to begin removing her blouse, but instead she put her fingers inside her panties and pushed them down, reaching out with one hand to steady herself on the bed as she stepped out of them.
“I can wear regular panties,” she said, squaring around to face him. Her pubic hair was closely clipped, her vulva clearly visible.
Next she began with the bottom button of her blouse and went up rapidly. To take off the blouse she had to remove one arm from its sleeve and then use the loose material made available by this gesture to flip the blouse over her hump and then off the other arm. Again she turned to put the blouse over the chair, and as she bent slightly in profile he got his first clear view of her naked hump. It seemed enormous, far larger than it appeared to be clothed. The pitch at which it protruded from the body was much more acute than he had imagined, and the flesh covering it appeared to be stretched to the point of splitting open. It was immediately apparent also that she had to compensate for it with every move she made in order to maintain any grace of motion at all.
She wore no bra, which would have to have been custom-made to accommodate the hump and would surely have been a medieval-looking contraption. But she hardly needed one. Her breasts were the classic shape of the Esquiline Venus, high, strictly conical with no globular roundness toward the undersides, nipples centered and facing straight forward.
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