Animosity

by David Lindsey

  God, why didn’t he understand more about them? The way he had handled the two sisters—the two women—had been nothing short of stupid. For whatever reason, they had decided not to spend time with him together. He was either with Céleste or Leda, but never with both of them. That is, not until the night of the killing, and then it was too late. And even after Lacan’s death—he still couldn’t bring himself to think of it as murder—when they most needed to talk, they reverted to their former pattern. And he let it happen, even encouraged it. He didn’t want to talk about it, either.

  No drinking. He was afraid to drink. But again the sleepless nights ate into the days, and the days folded into the nights until he was exhausted, and the divisions of time melted together in a marginless sweep of darkness and light.

  When Amado returned from London he brought Ross up-to-date on all the people he had met who had known Eva and Sylvie and Céleste. Almost all of them had lost touch with the two sisters after Eva’s death.

  In turn, he told Amado a cobbled-together, lie-ridden story about his last few weeks with Céleste and Leda, leaving out completely, of course, the recent bizarre turn of Leda’s sick sense of irony. As on the telephone from London, Amado saw through the distortions but was a gentleman about it and let the stories stand. The look of feigned acceptance on his face was painful to see.

  The truth was, Ross was scared witless and wanted someone to talk to even though he couldn’t have the conversation he needed to have. In the worst way he wanted to spill his guts to Amado, but it would have been a selfish indulgence. To tell Amado what had really happened would drag him into an affair in which, if given a choice, he would certainly have had no desire to be involved.

  It was a hot night in Graber’s garden. Amado sat across from him in a baggy white linen shirt, studying him with a grave countenance as he nursed his maduro cigar and took slow drinks from his bottle of Pacifico. He knew Ross was in trouble, some kind of trouble, and Ross felt like a heel for being coy and cryptic with him. Still, by being so, he knew that Amado understood the trouble was serious.

  “Do you see any end in sight for this?” Amado asked softly, as if he were cutting through the layers of vague explanations that Ross had piled on over the last few weeks.

  “This what?”

  “I don’t know. Whatever it is.”

  He took a drink of beer to cover his reluctance. But he had to answer.

  “No.”

  “Good God, man!” Amado stared at him with a mixture of sadness and incredulity. “How bad can it be?”

  Ross hesitated. “Grim,” he said.

  “And what I’m looking at”—Amado nodded at him—“this is the new Ross Marteau? This morose, brooding man?”

  “Come on, Amado,” he said, “what am I supposed to say to a question like that?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know what questions to ask. What’s right? What’s not right? What’s appropriate?” He smoked, squinting at Ross. “I’ll tell you this, my friend, if you don’t do something about this—I don’t know what you must do because I don’t know what in the hell is going on—but if you don’t do something about this, you’re going to go mad. Huh? That’s right. A man can’t live the way you’re living for very long. Something inside him breaks. And when that happens to you, your life has changed forever.”

  “I told you, I’m already past those kinds of warnings.”

  “What kind of fatalism is this?” Amado asked, sitting back in his chair again. “I don’t understand this kind of talk from you.”

  “It’s not fatalism, Amado. I didn’t say I was ruined. I just said . . . things have changed for me. It’s not ever going to be the same.”

  “Your life is over?”

  “It’s different,” he said stiffly. “That’s all. I don’t know what else to say. There’s nothing else I can say about it.”

  “Are you working again?”

  “Yeah, I’m working again. There’s nothing I can do about what’s already happened. I’ve got to get back to . . . what’s left.”

  Amado’s eyes were fixed on him. Ross could smell the rich, dark tobacco of his cigar, which seemed to be the perfect incense for his dilemma. As he looked at Amado, in the corners of his peripheral view he could see the pools of the amber lanterns in the patio disappearing into a vague infinity and, closer, in the near shadows the fronds of the palms, their deep green on the verge of darkness, their feathered patterns forming a contemplative background for Amado’s puzzled melancholy.

  “I’ve always said you’ve had bad luck with women,” Amado observed. “But there’s bad luck, and then there’s tragedy.”

  Chapter 37

  Summer entered its harshest season. The flourishing and bright green vegetation that had been born in the wake of the spring rains had long since deepened into summer shades, then dried and slowly turned brown in the daily, rainless scorch of August. In the Hill Country September was often nothing more than a lengthening August, autumn a distant wish. Grasshoppers flicked about in the dry grass, and the heat was so intense that it pulled the resin from the cedars and their fragrance hung in the sweltering heat and glare of cloudless afternoons.

  He was walking back from the mailbox, which sat just outside the front wall near the pillars of the gate, and was listlessly flipping through the catalogs and magazines and correspondence, none of which he bothered reading anymore. All of it piled up in an armchair in his living room where he tossed it every day when he returned from the mailbox. Bills and checks alike went unopened.

  He flipped past it at first, the words registering late. Then he stopped in the middle of the cinder drive, and his thumb retreated back through the envelopes. There it was. Typed. Addressed to him. A return address in Paris.

  Everything but the envelope fell in a fluttering shambles at his feet, and he stood there looking at the return address with an alternating and wavering sense of trepidation and hope. He tore it open.

  It was a single sheet, a photocopied document in French. He couldn’t read French well, but he scanned it for recognizable words, something that would convey its meaning and content:

  Certificat de Mort . . . Morgue Municipal de Paris de 16th Arrondisement . . . Madame Célestine Denise Lacan . . . Suicide . . .

  • • •

  The days stumbled by. He didn’t know how many. He didn’t even bother to dress or bathe or shave anymore and wandered back and forth between the house and the studio in his underwear, leaving the doors open at both places, coming and going like an animal traveling between dens. He came into the shade to get out of the sun, but that was about all he had the presence of mind to do. He ate very little, and what he did eat he carried around with him, leaving parts of it strewn around the grounds whenever and wherever he lost interest in it. He left Scotch bottles the same way, sometimes discovering a formerly abandoned and partially consumed bottle, which he would pick up and carry with him until he absently mislaid it again.

  One afternoon he woke up under the spray of the outdoor shower. He must’ve tried to wake himself and had passed out again. Once the morning sun woke him. He was lying in the tall muhly grass near the front gate, his head in the gravel drive. One day at dusk he fled from Lacan’s charred, flame-spewing body and fell against a shovel in the kiln shed, gashing his forehead. He passed out. When he woke his hair and clothes were saturated and stiffening with caking blood. He made it to the shower again and lectured himself as he leaned back against the tile bench in the pelting water.

  • • •

  He sat at an isolated table at the far back of Graber’s patio. It was late, nearly closing time. People had drifted away. He didn’t see the waitresses eyeing him from the back door. Nata came out and looked at him awhile and then went back inside and made a telephone call.

  He was a sober drunk. He didn’t slur his speech or fumble, but his reactions were slow, and he sometimes turned acerbic.

  Amado didn’t turn acerbic. Amado didn’t get drunk, though. And he al
ways looked nice. Always dressed handsomely. Always had impeccable manners. Amado smiled a lot because it was an expression that suited him and looked handsome on him and because it was his nature.

  “¿Tú eres borracho?”

  “I think so,” he said. Amado was smiling at him, sadly. “Sit down.”

  Amado pulled out a chair from the other side of the table and sat down. He was smoking a cigar.

  “Just luck, you happening in,” he said.

  “Nata called me.”

  “Oh. Good.”

  “It looks like you’ve been at this a long time.”

  “Not goddamn long enough.”

  “Mmmm.” Amado nodded at the information and continued looking at him. “You stink, my friend. Who put those filthy clothes on you?”

  “Hell, I did.”

  “Mmmm.” Amado seemed to be thinking about something in particular.

  “I can’t talk about it,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I can’t figure it out.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

  “Really.”

  “But she’s a goddamn millipede . . . I don’t know how many shoes . . .” His train of thought drifted.

  “What do you expect next?” Amado was patient. Relaxed.

  “She’s going to ruin me . . . can’t fucking figure it out, either.”

  “Leda?”

  “Leda.”

  “You want to tell me about it?”

  “Yeah.”

  Amado dragged on his cigar, waiting.

  “But I can’t. No way in hell.”

  Amado studied him from behind a wreath of smoke.

  “What about the Beach commission?” Amado asked.

  “What?”

  “I got a telephone call from Jack Brewer.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah. He wanted to know where the hell you were. The Beaches have been trying to get in touch with you. Apparently you’re not answering your telephone, your e-mail, or responding to written communication, either.”

  “No. Haven’t had time for that.”

  “Brewer’s in a panic. If I were you, I’d let my agent know what I was doing.”

  “I’m behind on the Beach thing. Way behind. Brewer’s going to be pissed.”

  “He’s already pissed. He says you’re on the verge of losing the commission.”

  “Really.”

  “Yes. And he said you’ve missed a deadline for a competition for a big Chicago commission, too. You missed the deadline for the entrance sketches.”

  “I must’ve. Yeah, I did. I missed that.”

  Amado smoked. The patio was empty now. The girls were cleaning up, leaning the backs of the chairs forward against the tables as they worked their way through the garden.

  “This doesn’t look good, Ross,” Amado said softly. “You know? You’re going to have to resolve this. Your career’s taking a beating here. This is killing you.”

  “That’s an odd choice of words.”

  “You’ve got to straighten this out,” Amado said. “It’s like you’re deliberately letting the whole thing go up in smoke.”

  “That’s an odd choice of words, too.” He sat forward in his chair, suspicious. What was Amado doing?

  “What’s the matter, are you burned out?” Amado asked.

  “What . . . you know about something?”

  “You’re beating yourself bloody here,” Amado said, “killing your career. You’re burning it up, cremating it. There’s not going to be anything left but ashes.”

  “You son of a bitch.”

  “You might as well crawl into that kiln of yours and turn on the gas,” Amado said. “You know how effective that can be, don’t you? Everything’s going up in smoke anyway. It’s a bloody shame.”

  Horrified, he tried to get to his feet. The garden tilted and the lanterns flew out to one side and stayed there, hanging upward.

  Amado smoked and the smoke drifted laterally, traveling horizontally out of sight.

  “Like Lacan,” Amado wheezed, “beaten, bloody, sent to hell on a fiery horse, his hair flaming, galloping like a highwayman, straight to hell. And somebody’s got to pay for it. You don’t burn people alive and go on with your life as if nothing’s happened. It doesn’t work that way . . . never has, never will. Somebody’s got to pay. Burning a man to ashes . . . that’s unforgivable.”

  He put all of his weight on his hands on the top of the table until he felt as if his wrists were going to snap, and he leaned toward Amado, stared him in his dark eyes where the smoke had mixed with the pigment until the pigment was gone. The whites of his eyes, smoky iris, black dot of a pupil. As he stared the irises turned pale, too. The pupil began to smoke, and then the pupil was ash white, too. Jesus Christ, what a horrible sight it was, Amado going ghoul.

  Amado laughed at his expression, he threw back his head and laughed. His teeth were black, Jesus, and he could see smoke in Amado’s throat, and deep into the smoke there were flames. When he laughed the flames flared and licked at the edges of his mouth, and his throat rumbled like the kiln, howling and hot.

  • • •

  He remembered the doctor coming to the house. Dr. Henry Schein, tall, thin, hawk nosed, and sharp tongued. He had been in San Rafael for a dozen years now, and he saw a lot of rich people destroying themselves with exotic indulgences, and he saw a lot of locals growing old and others having babies. Ross remembered a long, serene sleep, a morning, an evening, a dusk, a night. There were terrible dreams. Then, more serene sleep.

  For several days Amado was there, gliding in and out of the bedroom. And a Mexican woman he didn’t recognize was there, too, and she brought to him small bowls of bland tortilla soup on a tray with a cluster of bougainvillea. He heard Amado in another room, talking on the telephone.

  Time passed. Not a lot of time, but dense time. One day his appetite returned. In a few more days the Mexican woman was gone. Amado stayed a day or two more, cooked simple meals, and they talked. But he never asked about what had happened. They talked as they talked before Céleste and Leda, as if the two sisters had been a time divide that no longer divided them.

  Amado never referred to the drinking binge. It was never mentioned. Sometimes he would catch Amado looking at him from across the room, but nothing was ever said. It was worse than if he had lectured him for hours every day. The rebuke of silence cut deeply.

  Then late one afternoon they sat on the front porch watching a paisano hunting for lizards in the margins of the dead grass and rocks, and he told Amado about Céleste. He was too preoccupied with his grief even to notice Amado’s reaction. He told Amado about the photocopy twice. He told him twice, as if he still couldn’t believe it, and Amado listened in silence. He talked about Céleste for nearly two hours, until well after dark and they could no longer see each other’s face. He had never been so honest about a woman, and it made him bitter with himself that it had taken her death for him to be able to understand so deeply how he felt and for him finally to be able to say about her all the things that he should have said to her.

  In another couple of days Amado moved out, and he was alone and began to regain his equilibrium for solitude. As soon as he was able to think coherently, he got back to his agent. Brewer had already gone into salvage mode with the Beaches, claiming Ross had fallen ill and no one had known about it. But now he was recovered completely and was ready to get to work.

  And that was the way it would have played out under normal circumstances. Only these weren’t normal circumstances. To Brewer’s dismay, Ross pulled out of the Beach project. He talked to Gerald Beach himself and told him he was going to take a year off, pleading exhaustion from having kept such a grueling schedule for so many years. He apologized and told Beach he would be available in a year’s time if Beach still wanted him for the project. Beach was more understanding than he had expected, and the parting was amicable.

  Chapter 38


  For reasons that he deliberately did not stop to analyze, he felt compelled to turn back to Leda’s sculpture. Though he didn’t realize it at the time, the process of working on the series of maquettes one at a time in rapid succession had given him a renewed enthusiasm for the challenges that had attracted him to the project in the first place. Despite the appalling emotions that were inextricably bound up in the idea of Leda herself, the artistic riddle her body brought to him was impossible to escape. He couldn’t forget it, and now he decided that he would no longer even try. He would begin the sculpture.

  He plunged into the project, rethinking his original concept on which the maquette had been based and pushing himself from early in the day and on into the night. He worked feverishly, partly because his new ideas for the sculpture were coming quickly and were exciting and partly because he didn’t want to think of anything else. But in the back of his mind the silent discoveries to be made in Paris were always there, pending, threatening to unhinge his life.

  The guilt of having contributed to Céleste’s despairing state of mind was even more difficult to handle. Not even the diversion of a self-imposed, grueling schedule or exhaustion could rid him of it. It wasn’t a weight, rather it was an absence of something, a restless emptiness that prevented him from recovering even a small measure of joy in his excitement for the new project.

  The temperatures remained in the mid-nineties, and the September rains had not materialized. Two months of record high temperatures without a drop of rain had turned the country into a hard landscape. Grass and brush fires flared up here and there on the Hill Country ranches, and the threat of a major conflagration had everyone nervous.

  Along the highways the grasses that extended from the edge of the roadway and into the fields and pastures had withered to a dusty dun. Even some of the rugged cedars were looking parched, and the rolling hillsides were dotted with trees that simply didn’t have the stamina to withstand the harsh conditions of a Texas drought and were dropping their leaves as if it were winter. The country was burning up.