Then she lowered her arms slowly and turned so that she observed herself in profile. Slowly she bent forward, crossing her arms and tucking them under her, once again creating an image that was truncated, limbless. The hump on her shoulders rose up in sharp profile and blended into the rest of her back all the way to the crevice of her buttocks. Now her calm gave way to a nervous but contained excitement, and he could see her eyes darting about her body, devouring her image as she assayed the unidentifiable shape that she had become by this contorted posturing.
As he looked at her she reminded him of nothing so much as a monstrous, humpbacked, black fly, stopped in the sunlight, mindless, hardly even an insect. Her face, framed by her jet hair, was unrecognizable, her features having been washed away to nothing by the brilliant light. As she held this posture, straining, her concentration on herself exceeding obsession, she lost all human resemblance. She became a stooping, faceless thing that defied any phylum of identity.
Appalled, he turned away.
Chapter 17
“I’d like to meet her,” Amado said. “When would be a good time?”
“Leda?”
“Yes, Leda.”
He hadn’t expected this, and he hesitated, frowning at the distant summer sky above the valley that fell away in front of them.
They were sitting at an outside table at La Residencia, the health spa on the eastern slope of the hills overlooking San Rafael. Amado had suggested they meet there for lunch instead of at Graber’s because he was picking up a friend there at three o’clock.
Ross didn’t like the place much. It was the fanciest commercial operation in San Rafael, and even though from the outside it blended in with the laid-back ethos of the town, inside its grounds it dripped ostentatious indulgence. If he couldn’t be critical of the indulgence—he was guilty of his own varieties of it—he sure as hell objected to the peacockery of it all.
The spa complex was large. Behind the main hacienda, which was flanked on both sides by a score of secluded bungalows tucked into the wooded hillside, was a central sprawling lawn that descended in gentle terraces that overlooked San Rafael and the valley below the town. Small patios were scattered along the terraces, each accommodating one or two tables shaded by arbors and palms and umbrellas. Meals were served on the patios twenty-four hours a day.
“What’s the matter?” Amado asked.
Ross had finished his lunch, but Amado was still eating the last of a mango torte and sipping coffee.
“I don’t know how she’d feel about that,” he said.
“Oh.”
He heard the quick retreat in Amado’s monosyllable. This was different. Amado was alert.
“I don’t know her well enough to know how she feels about meeting people.”
“Is she reclusive?”
“I’ve just met her, Amado.”
Amado pushed away the last few bites of the torte and pulled his coffee closer. “Then, this . . . thing, this is her life.”
“I think so. But you’re never really sure with her.”
“What’s she like?”
“Mercurial. Moody. Likable. But she can be mean.” And unbelievably strange, he thought to himself. He was still troubled by what he had seen a few hours before.
He watched the clouds drifting northwestward over the valley. The day had the look of summer. Spring was relinquishing her delicate moments to the longer, sterner hours of a more serious season.
“It’s hard to explain,” he said as if he were making an admission. “To be honest, I’ve found Leda’s appearance more . . . disconcerting than I’d imagined.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, when she first took off her clothes, I thought, Oh, this isn’t so extraordinary. I can do this. But, actually, the . . . oddness of her body increases with exposure. Sometimes I’m looking at her, sketching, studying an angle, and suddenly it’s as if . . . as if I don’t recognize the shape at all. It’s like seeing a common word while you’re reading and all of a sudden it doesn’t look right . . . it looks as if it might be spelled wrong . . . and then it looks only remotely familiar.”
Amado didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he finished his coffee.
“Well, maybe later,” he said. “Maybe something will seem natural to you later, and I can meet her.”
“Yeah, give us a little time.”
The truth was he couldn’t be at all sure what Leda might say in Amado’s presence, or even do. Céleste could be trusted to be discreet, but Leda was unpredictable. He and Amado had talked about women over the years, but they had never talked about the women with whom they were living, not of their intimacies, anyway.
But now he found himself not wanting to reveal anything at all about his deepening involvement with Leda and Céleste. There was a distinct sense in which he felt that these two women were living on the edge of something, something slightly foreboding. He couldn’t explain why, but there was even a feeling of the illicit in his dealings with them. He could always walk away, he told himself, but not just yet. In the meantime, whatever it was that was happening between himself and these two strange women, he wanted to keep it among the three of them.
“What about Céleste? What’s she like?”
“Tough. Insightful.” He looked at Amado. “Guarded. And barely holding things together.”
“Ah, now that’s what I would be afraid of.”
“I think ‘tough’ trumps that last observation,” he said. “If she’s just barely holding things together, she also seems to be quite capable of doing it indefinitely.”
“No, that’s not what I meant,” Amado said, shaking his head. “I meant I would be afraid of whatever the things are that she’s trying to hold together.”
Chapter 18
When he got home from La Residencia he changed into old jeans and a threadbare khaki shirt and walked down the path to the kiln shed next to the studio. He wanted to think about the conversation he had just had with Amado.
It was nearly four o’clock when he finally got to the shed. It was approaching the hottest part of the day, but the kiln faced east so that the front of it, where he had to work, was already in the shade.
The kiln was a hulking brick affair next to the studio, the two buildings being separated by a shed where there were worktables and where he did much of his stone carving. It was here that he fired his smaller maquettes and where Marian had fired her pottery, including the turquoise vase she had shattered in Paris a few months ago. Cleaning out a kiln was a job that’s always there to do, like taking out the garbage. When he left for Paris over a year ago, it was already past its cleaning time. Now was as good a time as any to get it done.
The kiln had been specially made for him with a section of rail that ran into it the length of its interior and extended out its door an additional ten feet. An iron flatbed cart sat on the rail and could be rolled completely out of the kiln and loaded with its cargo, a maquette or pottery, and then rolled back into the center of the kiln so that the door could be closed and locked down for firing. Firing was a messy process that threw off debris, necessitating the frequent cleanings.
He had worked for nearly two hours and was just finishing when he looked up from closing the kiln door one last time and saw Céleste. She was sitting on the massive millstone that lay in the shade of a palm at the edge of the woods twenty yards away. Her legs were extended out in front of her, ankles crossed, her arms straight down at her sides, hands braced on the surface of the stone. Her sandaled feet emerged from the shade into the sun.
Neither of them spoke as they looked at each other. Sweat was pouring down his face. He had shed his shirt and was covered with dust and cinder streaked with sweat.
“How long have you been here?” he asked. She seemed preoccupied, as if she had been watching him only because he was in front of her.
“Only a little while,” she said. “Go ahead and finish.”
“That was the last of it,” he said. “I’m through.�
� He reached for his shirt, which was hanging on a corner of the kiln, and glanced at her as he wiped his face with it. Something told him she hadn’t come by just to look at the sketches he’d made of Leda that morning.
“Let’s go to the house, and I’ll clean up,” he said, walking over to her. “I’ll make some iced tea.”
He bathed in the outdoor shower and put on clean clothes. When he went into the kitchen Céleste was already there, and two glasses of iced tea with lime slices floating in them were sitting in front of her on the table. She was cutting up one of the fat peaches and putting the small wedges on a saucer of brightly painted Mexican pottery.
“These looked good,” she said.
She pushed the saucer toward him as he sat down, and they ate the peach together in a silence broken only by the smooth cooing of a mourning dove that floated through the screen door. Whatever her intentions, he was going to let her do it however she wished. He wasn’t going to initiate the conversation. He watched her putting the half-moon slices into her mouth, her eyes dwelling absently on the colorful pattern on the little plate. She seemed to belong there, sitting across the table from him as if they had done this a thousand afternoons together. Despite her preoccupation, she appeared to be relaxed; the disquiet of the previous afternoon had disappeared. But she had brought a solemnity with her, too, and he was eager to know what it meant.
When they had eaten the last of the peach, she got up and rinsed the saucer and knife and left them on the draining board beside the sink, then washed her hands. He watched her back, her stomach against the sink, as she gazed out the window, drying her hands.
“Could we sit outside, under the arbor?” she asked, turning to him.
They took their glasses of iced tea and went out the screened door to the courtyard.
The arbor bench was dappled in shade, and he leaned against one of the stone pillars that supported the arbor beams and crossed his legs. Céleste sat near the next pillar, her profile to him, outlined against the stones. The ice sounded friendly and cold when they drank from their glasses.
“I wasn’t sure I wanted to see you again,” she said after a moment. She was holding her glass in her lap, her eyes fixed on a clay pot of geraniums near the edge of the sun.
He was surprised. Had his remark been that devastating to her? “What do you mean?”
She didn’t say anything.
“Céleste?”
“I think we’ve got ahead of ourselves,” she said, starting to run a middle finger around the rim of her glass.
“It’s all seemed natural enough to me.”
“Yes, I’m afraid it’s seemed natural to me, too.”
“‘Afraid’? I don’t understand why you’re so . . . I don’t know, apprehensive about what’s happened. Maybe we shouldn’t have done that. I told you, I’m sorry if . . . if it seems wrong to you now, but I don’t under—”
“The other night,” she said, interrupting him, concentrating on the rim of her glass, her finger going round and round it, “was very strange . . . strange because I began to feel as if I had known you before. It was as if we had been separated for years and years, and finally”—she looked up at him—“we were together . . . again.”
It was incredible how similar their feelings about that night had been, how similarly they had reacted to each other.
She returned her eyes to her glass.
“It was an incredibly vivid sense,” she said, “even disturbingly vivid. I felt disoriented, adrift. When you woke up and found me standing in the dark, by the windows, I was trying to calm down, trying to understand what was going on.”
God, he could hardly believe what she was saying.
“But later,” she went on, “when I had some time, some distance, from it and had time to reflect, I realized I’d . . . just got carried away, like a schoolgirl. I guess it’s been so long since I’ve felt like that . . . I just didn’t recognize what was happening.” She paused. “And that’s where we got ahead of ourselves. This is a terrible mistake.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We’re starting something here that’s not going to work. Nothing good is going to come of this. It’s an illusion.”
“I just don’t understand why you’ve got such a dark view of what’s going on here,” he said, frustrated. “Maybe we got a little ahead of ourselves, should’ve gone slower. I accept that. We could’ve done it differently. But I don’t understand why you’re painting such a grim picture of what did happen. Maybe it was a mistake, happened too fast, but that doesn’t make it tragedy.”
“Your . . . impulsive question, Ross,” she said, looking at him. “You asked me: ‘Do you like it?’ and it was out of your mouth before you even knew you were going to say it, wasn’t it?”
She didn’t want an answer. She was making a point.
“Well, that question is the serpent in the garden,” she went on. “It’s never going to go away, and it will eventually destroy this illusion. This has been unusual from the beginning, wonderful, but strange. But now it’s going to be even more complicated . . . because you’re not going to be able to forget these bruises . . . or how I got them. You’re going to find that impossible to live with. And I’m going to find that impossible to live with.”
He knew she was right. But he didn’t want to believe it.
“It doesn’t have to be like that,” he said. “It’s not inevitable, for God’s sake.”
She shook her head and stared at the ground. When she spoke, the tone of fatalism in her voice was chilling.
“You don’t know anything,” she said, “about what’s inevitable in my life. Or even in yours.”
It was a statement of clarity that shocked him and cut through the obfuscation that had been gradually affecting his own thinking during the last ten days. It made him aware that somehow he had actually been losing sight of his own vaunted cynicism. They were both too practical to believe in romantic notions that offered cloudy explanations for whatever it was that was happening between them, but neither of them could deny that something was happening. They just understood it in dramatically different ways.
He hesitated, didn’t know what to say.
She gave him a knowing look and turned away, staring at the shadows stretching out from the arbor into the courtyard.
“It doesn’t matter how I met him,” she began. “At an exhibition. This was a few months before Eva died. I’d never been married. It was never a consideration. Then the car crash, and I took on the responsibility of Leda, and . . . there was . . . everything changed dramatically and quickly. I simply didn’t see him for what he was. I wasn’t an inexperienced girl. . . .”
She shrugged.
“It was never a marriage, not from the first week, even. I won’t go into it. His money comes from an inherited family industry, construction materials of some sort. He has no real involvement himself. Proxies run everything for him. He simply spends the money.”
She sipped her iced tea as if to give herself time to think.
“He travels incessantly. He owns a home in Antibes and another in Strasbourg. I live in the home in Paris. He lives in a hotel in Paris. I see him, maybe, once every three weeks. It’s irregular. I never know when he’ll show up. He just appears. When we were first married, and I was still stupid enough to think there was some hope of normalcy, I used to try to keep up with him. Was he in Antibes? In Paris? But he got furious with me. . . .
“It’s embarrassing, to have been such a fool. . . .” She stopped again and swallowed. “You know, I don’t . . . I thought I could talk about this, I wanted to, for your sake, to help you understand, and maybe accept. But I can’t. I just . . . can’t do this.
“Why in the hell don’t you leave him?”
She turned to him. “Ross, no, let’s don’t.”
“You started this, Céleste.”
The tormented look on her face was wrenching and stopped him. She was right, he did want her to talk about it. The thought o
f Lacan inflicting those bruises, the whole scene in his mind, her submission, all of it was excruciating to him. He wanted to probe the abscess of that sick arrangement until it was lanced of all its poison and destruction and Céleste could see her way to be free of it. But the look on her face told him that the words that would take them through that grueling discussion were too mean and too many. He didn’t have the heart to do that to her.
They were both silent, looking at each other. The long shadows of late afternoon were beginning to blend together in the surrounding woods, and the bench under the arbor was drawn into a deeper shade. The sun had set, but the sky was rich in its reflected glow and threw a blush onto the rear of the stone house. Céleste’s face caught the last moments of the faint, fading color.
“When will you see him again?” he asked.
Her eyes glittered suddenly with a dense, fierce emotion.
“You must never—ever—ask me that again.”
He said nothing, but he agreed, and in that moment the serpent glided silently between them and stopped, comfortable in their warmth, content in their weakness.
For a time they continued in silence as the evening surrounded them, each trying to calm the turmoil within. They knew the night would be over soon, and they wanted to stem the tension, to dissolve the distance between them before it turned to regret.
After a while he got up and went inside and mixed a gin and tonic for each of them and returned. They took off their shoes and leaned back against the rock pillars and stretched their legs toward each other on the arbor bench, their feet almost touching.
They began to talk, and after a while the awkwardness between them melted in the warm night. The feeling of old familiarity that was so new to them returned as easily as their own breathing and seemed as natural to them as the crickets in the darkness.
Animosity Page 11
