There was an inexplicable familiarity about Céleste that made him like being with her. It was as if she were a piece of himself that he hadn’t realized was missing until he met her. Realizing this made him feel all the more remorseful for the hurt he had inflicted on her that morning.
When she closed the sketchbook, she put it on the platform beside her and stood. She crossed her bare arms and took a few steps in his direction.
“What did she think of those?” she asked.
He told her of Leda’s reaction, and she listened intently as if she were mining each sentence, every phrase, for an ore of meaning that lay deeper than the obvious.
“What did you think about while you were sketching her?”
It was a peculiar and unexpected question, but after jumping to his disastrous conclusion that morning, he decided to answer it straight on, without reading any implications into it.
“Mostly I was thinking about how to get her on paper, how to locate her center of gravity, which wasn’t easy.”
She didn’t seem to be satisfied with his answer, and she studied him as if she were looking for something hidden in what he had just said.
“Did you notice anything—not to do with her deformity—anything that . . . anything about her that you’ve seen before?”
“That I’d seen before?” What was she getting at?
She looked away for a moment, collecting herself, then she turned back to him with an air of resignation.
“There’s something here, Ross, something that’s going to startle you, but you’ve got to know. Leda and I are Sylvie Verret’s sisters.”
For an instant the name didn’t register with him. Then, suddenly, Sylvie’s face rushed up from the long sloping darkness of the past. Good God. What the hell was going on here? Suspicion bloomed like a drop of dye falling into clear water.
As he stared at her he could indeed see the resemblance through the years, the mouth set firmer, the jawline grown heavier, the eyes—still warm, still seductive—grown sadder. Yes, he saw Sylvie, and in his numb surprise Sylvie’s face was slowly superimposed over Céleste’s until she became neither of them and both of them, a new woman. This was an incredible turn of events.
“Jesus . . . Christ,” he said softly.
He had lived with Sylvie when he was a young sculptor in Paris in his late twenties. She was his model first and then, eventually, his lover. It was a combination that he learned to avoid as he grew older and more sensible, but Sylvie was his first great lesson in the dangers of confusing the two roles.
Sylvie was a quiet young woman with a beautiful body of olive complexion. She was unabashedly sensual in a brooding way. She felt passionately about many things, about most things, actually, but she never displayed her emotions in front of others. Always quiet, she was demonstratively passionate only in her sexuality. In all other things her emotions were entirely internal, rigidly constrained.
But Sylvie’s reserve, which at first was magnetic in its ability to draw you to her, proved to be the weight that kept a smoldering anger in check. She never lost her reserve in the presence of others, but when she was alone she exploded. When their affair began to disintegrate, he would come home to the studio to find his models and maquettes shattered, his drawings shredded, their apartment destroyed.
When he confronted her she fell into an intractable silence. She never, not once, admitted what she had done, never acknowledged her secret eruptions of destructive wrath. When confronted with the damage, she simply stared at it, mute.
Then, at night, she would come to him with sexual offerings freighted with implicit apologies and remorse. It was a tornadic relationship with wrenching, and ultimately calamitous, emotional storms.
It ended badly for them, the first really disturbing breakup of his life.
“What’s going on here?” he asked. He couldn’t fathom it.
“I know this looks suspect,” she said, “but when you look at it from our point of view it’s not really so mysterious. In the years after your breakup, as you became famous, Sylvie would talk about you a lot. You know, what might have been . . . if things had been different between you. Leda and I heard a lot about you.”
“Where is she?”
“Sylvie’s dead. Too much cocaine, finally. Three years ago.”
It startled him that she no longer existed.
“To tell you the truth, I guess I’m surprised she lasted that long.”
“So was I.”
He felt sad for Sylvie. The poor, beautiful thing was born for tragedy.
“Three years ago,” he said. “Wasn’t that about the time your mother was killed?”
“Actually, a couple of months before. It would have been a traumatic few months if any of us had cared for each other. As it was, it was just all bitterness and inconvenience.”
He thought a moment. “You say she talked about me a lot?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
She looked at him blankly. “What?”
“I thought the four of you were alienated from each other, your mother leading her own life in Rome, Leda isolated in Switzerland, you in London. But just then you said that over the years Sylvie talked about me a lot to you and Leda.”
“Yes . . .” She hesitated.
Was the look on her face reluctance? Or confusion? He frowned at her.
“Sylvie . . . she was . . . she kept in touch with all of us,” she stammered. “She was, I guess you could say she was nomadic. Always just having come from somewhere or about to leave for somewhere. She saw all of us from time to time. She was pretty much the only thing that tied us together over those years.”
This didn’t sound like the Sylvie he remembered. The Sylvie he knew was very much a loner and wouldn’t have been the kind of woman who nurtured fractured relationships and served as the family’s binding center. She simply wasn’t capable of that kind of stability.
Before he could follow up on that, Céleste quickly went on.
“Anyway, we’d always been aware of your career, noticed where your life was going. There was always Sylvie’s few years with you, a shared history that caused us to pay special attention when we came across the newspaper items, or the magazine articles.”
“Jesus, why didn’t you tell me all this up front?”
“I suppose for much the same reason Leda didn’t want me to tell you about her deformity. We were afraid you’d never even talk to us.”
He looked at her. “Well, I’m . . . I don’t know . . . it’s incredible.” He paused. “I see the similarities now, of course. But I didn’t put it all together.”
“I thought you’d surely see the resemblance in Leda once you began working with her. She’s much more like Sylvie than I am.”
“It was so long ago.”
Silence.
“After last night I thought—” She stopped as if she had decided not to pretend it hadn’t happened. “About that, last night, you know, I couldn’t have imagined that would happen. Ever. I never intended that to happen.”
Before he could say anything she went on. “Anyway, after last night, I thought you needed to know this.”
He nodded. There was nothing more to add to the surprise he still felt. It sure as hell made a difference, though what kind of difference he didn’t know.
Céleste moved a few steps away to Saleh’s maquette. She put her hand on the maquette’s stomach, ran her fingers over its smoothness. There was something else.
“I feel bad about last night,” she said.
“That was my fault,” he said, and then he hesitated and added, “but, to be honest, I don’t wish it hadn’t happened.” He paused. “I hope you don’t regret it. If you do, then I’m sorry for that.”
“No, I don’t, not the way you mean.”
“But you do wish it hadn’t happened.”
“Only because . . .” She closed her eyes and drew in a slow, deep breath. “Only because I think we’ll both regret it later.”
“Why?”
“I don’t . . . I don’t know,” she said impatiently, “the point is, I’m not the business here. Leda is.”
The way she said it, the fact that she felt she had to say it, was a disappointment.
“I didn’t consider last night ‘business,’” he said. “It didn’t have anything to do with anyone else.”
She dropped her eyes to the maquette and took her hand away.
“I think that’s all I should say about it.”
“What does that mean, exactly?”
“It means . . . ,” she said, suddenly irritated, “it means . . . that . . .” She was flustered. “I . . .”
They seemed to be getting it all wrong. Last night they understood each other’s deepest feelings with hardly a word spoken. Now they were talking too much and saying too little.
“Céleste, listen . . .” He wanted to touch her, but he stopped, fearing that he might make matters worse. “Why don’t we just not make anything complicated out of this.”
God, what an understatement. It could hardly be more complicated. Still, he went on with it.
“Last night was an honest thing,” he said. “At least on my part.”
She was silent, but she was looking at him intently, with an anguished expression that told him she had conflicts about what they had done that went far deeper than anything they had talked about or that she was willing to talk about.
“I wasn’t confused about that,” she said, and she swallowed and moved her tongue for moisture and was about to speak again, but then she didn’t. They looked at each other, and he was bewildered to see that she was deeply unnerved, as if something eerie had happened in the last few moments and he simply hadn’t seen it.
“Céleste . . .”
“If”—she started moving, walking past him—“you could just take me home.”
He drove her back in the Mercedes. She hardly spoke a word apart from giving him terse directions, spending most of her time with her head turned away, staring out the window. She was living on the palm-lined Santa Elena Avenue in the exclusive Palm Heights district, a pristine quarter of Victorian homes in the foothills on the western side of town. She was leasing a two-story house that sat up off the avenue on an incline so that the driveway and sidewalk leading from the street ascended the height of a couple of terraces. The front of the house was sheltered by a giant magnolia.
He pulled up into the driveway and stopped at the sidewalk.
She put her hand on the door handle, but before she opened it she looked at him, her emotions now under control.
“We don’t know what we’re doing here,” she said. “We’re taking risks and we don’t even have enough sense to be afraid.”
The dark words caught him by surprise. What was she talking about? Risks? Afraid? Why was she attaching words like that to one night’s passion? Before he could organize his thoughts around a response, she opened the door and got out. She didn’t even glance back at him as she hurried to the sidewalk that led to the house and disappeared under the deep shadow of the magnolia.
Chapter 15
“What?” Amado frowned across the table at him. “This is bloody incredible.”
It was late evening at Graber’s. The sun was well down behind the cypresses, but there was still a frail peach light in the sky, fading quickly. The lanterns had just come on, and here and there people were beginning to order dinner.
Amado’s serene comportment was not often disturbed, but the revelation that Céleste had a sister of such unusual description and that these two women were Sylvie Verret’s sisters, and that Leda wanted a sculpture of herself, all of this seemed too incredible to him.
His surprise brought him up out of his natural lounging posture. He sat up straight in his chair and rested his forearms on either side of his bottle of Pacifico, his cigar in his right hand. He was wearing a loose-fitting white linen shirt, looking very elegant, very tropical.
“You’re not seriously thinking of doing this?”
“We had our first session this morning.”
Amado was aghast. “But what about your commission?”
“I’ll get it done.”
Amado gaped at him. “Why?”
“Why are you so surprised by this?”
“Ohhh”—Amado gave him a taken-aback look of incredulity—“come on, Ross. Why are you acting as though this is the most normal thing in the world? It’s bizarre! You’re going to do a nude sculpture of a deformed woman who’s the sister of a woman who almost ruined you?”
“That was twenty-five years ago, Amado.”
“Not nearly long enough, I should think. Besides that, this will be enormously controversial, and you know it.”
“Christ, the girl’s situation is genuinely poignant. Can you imagine what it’s like to be in her body? Can you imagine the . . . damn, just the drama of sitting in a restaurant, catching the eye of some man who’s obviously salivating over your incredibly beautiful face—and you know what’s coming next. There’s always going to be that inevitable ‘other’ reaction. She has to dread situations like that. I mean, every single encounter she has with a man has got to be heartbreaking.”
“What about Sylvie? Do you see Sylvie in this girl?”
“I see the similarities, the complexion, the mouth. Her eyes. Her body is like Sylvie’s, aside from the deformity. But Leda’s more beautiful than Sylvie, more beautiful than Céleste. The girl’s extraordinary.”
“You didn’t think of Sylvie when you first saw her?”
“Well, hell no, I didn’t. Leda has the same body type as Sylvie, but so do millions of other women. I’ve seen Sylvie’s type countless times. And Céleste, she has the same coloring as Sylvie, some of the same facial features, but so do millions of other women. You just don’t automatically make all those connections to one woman, especially a woman you haven’t seen in over two decades.”
“But to ‘look like’ someone, that’s different.”
“Yeah,” he conceded. Amado was right. “I don’t know why I didn’t see it. Maybe the deformity was too much of a distraction.”
Amado studied him through a fresh billow of smoke. “What was it like sketching her?”
He thought a moment. “She changed shapes.”
Amado was startled.
“One moment she was simply a normal, beautiful young woman. The next she was . . . surreal. And, oddly, the two views often metamorphosed right in front of me. What I saw as I moved around her changed, and sometimes it caught me by surprise. Which surprised me.”
Amado nodded, listening. “And so you’re going to explore this, is that it?”
“Look, there are genuine aesthetic considerations here,” he said, a little irritated that Amado was pushing him and a little uncomfortable with himself too for feeling as though he had to defend his decision, something he had stoically refused to do for years.
“Aesthetic considerations?”
“Yeah,” he insisted, “things like our attitudes about beauty . . . and repulsion. How does Leda live with both of those things in the same body? How do we live with it? How does society deal with a person whose appearance is dramatically different from the norm? Do we make it impossible for them to be happy? What are the limits of society’s requirements for acceptance? Hell, I don’t know, Amado. Aren’t these questions worth examining?”
“You’ve managed to avoid exploring them for thirty years.”
“What the hell is this? I seem to remember a few times over the years when you’ve pointed out to me that I was too quick to take the easy road—and the good money—that I didn’t take my talent seriously, that I didn’t wrestle with my demons.”
“First of all,” Amado said stiffly, “I never discussed anything like that with you unless you asked my opinion. And then I answered you honestly.”
“But isn’t this exactly the sort of thing you were talking about, seriously confronting the hard questions of aesthetics and art?”
Amado st
ared back at him, the smoke from the cigar twisting between them.
“That could be argued,” he said, “but do you think that’s really what you’re doing here?”
“Why the hell wouldn’t it be?”
“This doesn’t sound like you, Ross. I think you’re reaching for a reason to do this. These ‘questions’ you want to examine, you know very well these things can’t be addressed in a single sculpture. What are you thinking about? Maybe if you’d devoted your career to these questions; maybe a lifetime of sculptural works dedicated to these issues . . . maybe then it would make sense to talk like this. But to do this with a single work? Come on . . . what are you trying to do here?”
Amado’s voice was softly scornful, and Ross was secretly embarrassed. He felt like he’d been caught trying to run a con. Amado let him off the hook.
“What about Céleste?” Amado asked.
“Céleste? You mean, have I found her as beguiling as you did?”
“I think you’ve already answered that question, although I don’t believe you’ve realized it yet.”
He felt a twinge of discomfort, caught in another deception.
“You know what this reminds me of?” Amado mused, nodding to himself as if this idea exactly fit their present discussion. “There’s a quote by Flaubert, I can’t remember if it’s from a letter or what, but I think it describes the way you think about women. He said”—Amado tilted his face toward the darkness, remembering—“‘The contemplation of a naked woman makes me think of her skeleton.’” He dropped his eyes to Ross and raised his eyebrows. “Make sense to you?”
“Not the least bit. Does it make sense to you?”
“Ross, you are being deliberately evasive. Look, you and I approach women in very different ways,” Amado went on. “I react immediately, emotionally. You have a more cerebral approach. I’m swept away by the beauty or the special indefinable something of a particular woman. You’re curious. I see sexuality. You see anatomy.” He squinted in thought. “You work from the outside in, I think, like Flaubert.”
Animosity Page 9
