A lopsided moon, three-quarters full, rose over the tile roof of the house, and the limestone pavers in the patio glowed in the pale light. It was even bright enough for them to distinguish the cerise color of the bougainvillea.
Céleste pulled her dress into her lap and drew up her legs, her feet on the cushions of the bench. Moonlight fell through the arbor, casting webby shadows over them, and through this dark net he could see a luminous brush stroke of her white panties between her legs.
The pauses between their conversation lengthened as the night grew later.
“Would you lie down with me?” she asked.
They lay together on the wide cushioned bench, and she curled up to him and pulled his arm around her and held it. He couldn’t get enough of the feel of her, and of the gentle movement of her breathing. Whatever she needed from him at that moment, she wanted in silence. They listened to the loping rhythm of the crickets and stared up through the bougainvillea at the broken moon.
Chapter 19
Leda arrived with her pastry box of almond croissants, which they again shared with coffee. He toyed with the idea of asking her more about Céleste’s reluctance to tell him why she remained with Lacan, but he didn’t want to start the sketching session on that note, so he let it go.
She wore a regular dress instead of the shift, and again she wore underwear. This time when she undressed she left the panties on.
“I want you to do a series of sketches of me removing my panties,” she announced.
“Why?”
“It’s a problem of balance,” she said unconvincingly. She removed the panties to demonstrate her point. Naturally there was a problem of balance, but not one that seemed to him to be worthy of a series of sketches. Though, in truth, it didn’t matter. Anything she did would be helpful to him.
For half an hour she posed for him in varying stages of the process of removing her panties. And again he had the uncomfortable sense of seeing her as two completely different women. Though the protrusion on her back was the focal point of difficulty in almost every pose, there were rare angles when the hump played no role at all, and Leda became the most stunning model he had ever drawn.
He doubted that she was even aware of this phenomenon of the disappearing hump. She had been obsessed with her condition for so many years that he suspected she couldn’t look at herself without seeing it. And he guessed, too, that sometimes when she looked at herself she saw nothing but the hump, so that her personality and all that she was disappeared underneath that cartilaginous monstrosity until she became, only, the Deformity.
When she took her break, Leda collapsed on the bed and lighted her first cigarette. The panty-removing poses had, understandably, exhausted her. While he continued to fine-tune the last sketch, he asked her—he tried to make it sound offhanded, incidental—if Céleste was doing anything to extricate herself from the situation with Lacan. What, in the long run, was she going to do?
“Ah, that again,” Leda said with bored indifference, blowing smoke into the air. “Well, I suppose she’s doing what she’s going to do. What’s the matter, are you finding it . . . disgusting . . . to have to rub against Lacan’s snail trails every time you make love to her?”
It was an unexpectedly brutal question made all the more repellent by the grain of truthful insight that it contained. Had he been younger, he would have lashed back at her with his own bit of civilized cruelty. But he let it go, more saddened for both of them than angry.
She must have seen how it affected him and regretted it. Her tone changed, but what she said next was even more shocking.
“We’ve talked of killing him.”
He looked up from the sketchbook but couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Really,” she said, looking at him with blank innocence. “Actually, Céleste has talked about it.”
Was she joking?
“She’s talked of ways of doing it,” Leda added.
“What? You’re kidding.”
“No, I’m not.”
“When?” He didn’t believe her.
“What, when did she talk about it? Or when did she talk about doing it?”
He shook his head.
“Often, off and on. Any time.”
He got up from the far edge of the model’s platform where he had been sitting, tossed down the sketchbook, and walked toward the nearest window and looked out, hands in his pockets.
“You’re surprised?” she said as if she were surprised that he was surprised. “Really, are you? Wouldn’t you think about killing him too if you were in her situation?”
He turned around. “When did you last talk about this with her?”
“Oh, relax. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that we fantasized about it together.”
What the hell was this? Was she telling the truth or what? Or was she wildly exaggerating just to provoke him?
“It’s only talk, Ross,” she said dismissively. “I’m showing off. I wouldn’t have told you if I’d thought it would immobilize you.”
She looked at him, finishing her cigarette. Then she mashed it out in the ashtray. He could tell that his silence was having its own sort of effect on her, just as her brutal words affected him. He waited to see what she would say next.
“We should get started,” she said, and she straightened up on the bed and swung her feet to the floor. “Look, I was just jabbering away. For Christ’s sake, don’t tell Céleste I said anything about this. We were fantasizing, just messing around. Céleste is a very burdened woman. Fragile, even, in her own way. She would die if she knew I’d told you this.”
With some effort she stood. He had noticed that she grew increasingly stiff during the course of their sessions.
“The truth is,” she went on, “we don’t share all that much with each other. When she does confide in me, even if it’s a silly fantasy, well, I don’t want her to think she can’t do that without me blabbing to someone about it.”
She paused, cutting her eyes around at him.
“You see what I mean, don’t you?” She thought a moment. “Actually, the same thing applies with you and me. I’d like to think I could talk to you, tell you things that, well, like that . . . that are personal. And I’d like to think that we could keep them just between ourselves. Everyone needs someone to talk to in that way. Céleste and I, we’re rarely—almost never—open to each other like that.”
She walked over to the sketchbook lying on the edge of the platform and looked down at the last drawing he had made.
“Demons,” she said, not to him, not to anyone. “Everyone has demons.” She twisted her head to see the drawing better. “Every single person. Céleste has memories from Lacan. Lacan, his own sick mind. Me, well . . .” She looked up at him. “And, you . . .”
He didn’t say anything.
“Really?” She pretended confusion. “You don’t know? Or maybe you believe that nothing is stalking you? We’re all stalked by something, don’t you think? Something we’re born with, maybe. Something inside us.”
She looked down at the drawing again and studied it a moment.
“We have to struggle with them,” she went on in a distracted fashion, almost inaudible, “incessantly. If we don’t, they will gnaw at us and gnaw at us . . .”
She slid one leg forward, and with her toe she moved the sketchbook around so that she could see the drawing of herself from another angle. She studied it.
“The only thing more dangerous than our demons,” she said pensively, nearly whispering, “is refusing to believe that we have them.”
There was silence in the studio except for the throaty buzzing of cicadas outside in the morning heat. She stood with her hands on the back side of her hips, fingers down, staring at the drawing.
Again, as she had done the day before, she grew weirdly still. He noticed and watched her with new interest. Her complete immobility was something he sensed as much as he actually observed. He stared at her rib cage, wanting to see the rise and fa
ll of her breathing. There was none. Frustratingly, he wasn’t in a position to see her face, but her rigidity was more than an absence of physical motion. It was as if her mind had stopped, not as if her thoughts were elsewhere, but as if the hummock-burdened body before him had no mind.
By the time he decided to go over to her, she began to recover. She did so in minute increments, not all at once as if she were “snapping” out of it. A finger on her hip moved a little, a twitch, then a shoulder returned to life, and then her rib cage began a measured rise and fall, shallow, not energetically as if she had been holding her breath. Her face was the last to return to animation, and she turned to him.
“Do you have mirrors here?”
She showed no signs of knowing, or at least acknowledging, that she had been “absent.”
“Yeah,” he said, “a couple.”
“I want to use them for the next series of poses.”
“Now?”
“No? You don’t want me to?”
“No, that’s fine,” he said. “Let me get them.” At this point he was curious.
He went to the two mirrors she had used the previous day—she had pushed them back in place—and hauled them out from the corner and set them up on the platform. Leda helped him adjust them at particular angles to the bed. When they had been positioned as she wanted, she said that she was ready to begin the second session.
He stepped off the platform, got his sketchbook and pencils, and they began.
By this time, sketching Leda had become secondary to his immediate interest. He didn’t know whether Leda was acting more peculiarly now than she had at the beginning or whether he simply had begun to be more aware of her eccentricities as time went by. Whatever the reasons, he was increasingly intrigued by her unpredictable behavior.
As soon as she began to “pose” in front of the mirrors, a major change took place in the dynamics of the session. Now that she was confronted with the contemplation of her own reflection, Leda largely forgot about him. As she went about the business of positioning herself on the bed in relation to her own view of her reflection, she moved with a tai chi grace and concentration. Just as quickly, and thoroughly, as she had lost herself in her queer cataleptic departures, she now flew away into the world of her own reflection.
As she gazed at her smutched image through the begrimed and dusty double lenses of the old mirrors, she was transported to another place. Ross quickly began sketching, but it was rather less an academic exercise than it was a futile effort to capture the dazzling transformation of a chrysalis.
Leda vamped for her own reflection as if she were dancing before Herod. It was an immoderate performance. Ignoring any pretense of posing for the purpose of benefiting his sketching, she struck seductive and erotic postures, her eyes sometimes locked on to her own eyes, sometimes rolling this way and that on the bed with lupine restlessness. Abruptly she shifted to deliberately crude postures, attitudes that she held—completely still—for minutes at a time despite their obvious difficulty for her, and which, performed by a woman of such extraordinary beauty, seemed grotesque in the extreme. And then just as quickly she assumed clinical positions, even gynecological contortions, postures that must surely have echoed the medical examinations she had had to endure since she was a child.
All of this was done with an earnestness that had been entirely absent in her poses before. It was a performance that seemed to be for no one so much as the other two women who looked back at her from the grime-glazed mirrors. For approximately half an hour she focused on herself with an intensity that was remarkable, and which disregarded him completely. When she finally managed to break her concentration and stopped and turned to him, she was glistening with perspiration.
When she did that, and he had stopped, too, he realized that he had covered page after page in his sketchbook with fast, furious drawings, many of them reflecting the energy she had invested in her fierce interaction with her own image. Both of them were drained.
Chapter 20
In the afternoon he drove down the hill to Rinser’s Cellars on Bodet, a steeply sloping street that ran into Buena Vista above the river. He was looking for another case of a particular red wine from a small château near St.-Émilion that Rinser had got for him a few months earlier.
While Rinser and his owlish son disappeared into their maze of passages dug into the hillside to check their inventory, he leaned against the counter in the front room and looked out the windows to the river.
“Ross Marteau.”
He recognized her voice instantly, but before he could even turn around, Anita Beaton slipped her arm through his and held him.
“Is it true what I hear?” she asked, standing beside him as if they were two strollers, arm in arm. She reeked of gardenias, a perfume he detested. Anita had a genius for irritating him. He guessed that even the kind of underwear she wore and the kind of breakfast cereal she ate were precisely the style and kind he would find ridiculous.
“I seriously doubt it,” he said. He had no idea why he bothered being polite to her.
She grinned, her thin lips peeling back from her teeth in an unintended fleer. “I’m hearing that you’re quite good friends with Céleste Lacan’s sister, Leda.”
He looked at her, astonished, and she saw it in his face.
“Jesus,” he said, shaking his head in annoyance.
He pulled away from her and turned and leaned back against the walnut counter, his elbows resting on the dark wood. He had had the impression, obviously the wrong impression, that Leda kept very much to herself.
“Oh, really, Ross,” she said, “what do you expect? If you weren’t so . . . reserved—I didn’t say reclusive—maybe people wouldn’t wonder what in the hell you were doing all the time. And then you start something with a woman like that . . . such a strange girl, and you’re surprised that people know about it. Surely not.” She leaned her long, angular frame back from her waist, regarding him skeptically. “Surely not.”
She was trolling. She had suspicions, but she didn’t really know anything. In a moment of weakness he wondered how accurate her information was. She was studying him with a vague smile.
“What do you mean, ‘start something’?” he asked.
“Life in this town is absurdly simple,” she said with the condescending tone of a cosmopolitan. “The maid of a friend of mine was in Kirchner’s the other morning when Leda was in there. They both left about the same time. Naturally the maid noticed her. When the maid drove away it happened that Leda followed her in her own car. The maid works for a woman who lives past you on Las Lomitas, farther up in the hills. In her rearview mirror the maid saw Leda turn into your gates. Naturally I got a phone call about that. And then the exact same thing happened again this morning.”
“She’s come to see me a few times,” he said, “and you conclude I’ve ‘started something’ with her?”
“Maybe my phrasing could have been refined a little.”
“It could have been refined a lot.”
She glanced back toward the passages, past the stacks of wine and racks of liquor, as if to make sure they weren’t being overheard.
“Céleste created something of a stir when she first arrived,” she said, “but she didn’t cause this much talk. I hear she has an extraordinarily beautiful face.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Did you know those two women in Paris?”
“No.”
She looked at him, trying to sense if he was lying.
“You know,” she said, “a friend of mine in Paris gave Céleste my name. When she came to see me I thought she was captivating. She could be aloof, though, which was a little off-putting to some people. But then when she did pay attention to you, when she did turn her eyes and mind on you, you felt so special that all was instantly forgiven her.
“I saw right away that she wasn’t really the social sort at all,” Anita said, looking around the store. “Which was odd, I mean, why did she come to me? I tr
ied to introduce her to people I thought she would find interesting. I gave her plenty of opportunities to branch out. But she didn’t seem to particularly want to. I know she turned down a number of invitations to dinner parties.
“You know”—she looked down at a case of wine beside her and bent to examine the label of a green bottle in a bed of straw—“you’re the first person she’s had anything to do with at all. She just sort of went right straight to you, didn’t she?”
“I wouldn’t say that. She’d been here more than a month before I got back.”
“She’s quite attractive, Céleste is, but there’s nothing rare about being handsome these days. What’s different about Céleste’s beauty is that it’s a beauty . . . of its own kind. Nothing else quite like it in this age of dreadful sameness.”
He didn’t say anything.
“I imagine you like that about her.”
He glanced toward the passages. Where the hell was Rinser?
“You have to admit, Ross, that it’s all happened very quickly between you and these two women. That’s why I wondered if you’d known them in Paris.”
Again she studied him, but he didn’t say anything.
“In the first couple of weeks Céleste was here,” Anita continued, “she and I spent a good bit of time together. I took her on a grand tour of San Rafael, you know, pointing out the homes of famous people. She asked, quite innocently, it seemed, ‘Doesn’t the sculptor Ross Marteau live here?’ And we drove by your place. I didn’t think anything about it at the time.”
He didn’t much like the flavor of this. It sounded as if she were piecing together the movements of the suspects in a murder plot.
“I think you’re working too hard on this one, Anita.”
“It’s all very fascinating,” she said. “Have they commissioned you to do something?”
“No.”
“Just friends.”
“That’s right.”
Anita stepped over to another opened crate of wine displayed in straw with plastic grapes.
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