“If you want to talk to me, my friend, I will happily listen.” He smiled, a genuine, warm Amado smile, not a tense, not a calculated smile. “And I can give you good, free Mexican advice.”
He nodded. He couldn’t speak. He drank some beer and nodded while he swallowed.
“Everything’s fine,” he said, trying to sound grateful, trying to sound genuinely grateful, which he was. “Everything’s fine.”
He knew that Amado knew it was a lie. And he also knew that Amado understood that that would have to do for now.
Chapter 31
Leda didn’t come the next morning.
He forced himself to work on the maquette, which he finished out to the extent that he wanted to develop it. Then he began another. These were not detailed works, but something equivalent to the quick sketches in his notebook. The idea was to get fixed in his head the volume of her body, with the additional complication her slanted pelvis added to the overall irregularity . . . all of which was married to other features that were exemplary in their beauty.
It was no small problem to bring together all these discordant anatomical differences, and the difficulty of it was something that fascinated him in spite of all the other distractions pulling at him.
After a lunch of cold grilled chicken, olives, and onions and a glass of Barbaresco, he returned to the studio and yet another rough maquette.
By four o’clock his mind was wandering to Céleste to the point of distraction, and he was beginning to make stupid mistakes with the clay. He quit, not even bothering to cover the clay to keep it damp, and washed up in the sink. He opened a bottle of Barbaresco from the stash in the wall at the back of the studio, rinsed a glass at the sink, and took both up on the modeling platform. He sat in the chair there, poured the wine, put the bottle on the floor beside him, and propped his feet up on the bed.
From where he sat the three maquettes on the workbench were silhouetted against one of the tall, opened windows. They were strange images, their shapes unfamiliar at first glance, requiring some study to understand. In a queer way they were more difficult to apprehend with a quick look than if they had been pure fantasy creatures. A completely alien form would have been immediately recognizable as such; the mind would immediately comprehend the disconnect from reality. But here, much to his surprise, a partial deformity of the normal was far more difficult to grasp than complete fantasy. He hadn’t expected that.
His mind wandered, moved this way and that by the sounds of the doves in the mesquite trees and by the changing light of the summer sun picking up momentum in its descent. As the light failed, the shadows that lived in the corners of the studio began to move out into the open like timid creatures growing bold with time. He had watched this phenomenon so often over the years that the shadows themselves almost acquired personalities. He knew which ones grew longest with the changing seasons and angles of the sun; he knew the darkest ones and where they met as they converged in the dying light.
And then he was aware of someone standing in the opened doorway. He looked around and saw Céleste’s silhouette framed in the pale light.
“Ross?”
She didn’t see him in the shadowed spaces of the great room. Perversely he didn’t answer. She stood in the rectangle of blue light, her posture hesitant, tentative.
“Ross?”
“Where have you been?” he asked.
She looked in his direction, and he could tell by her posture that she was gradually making out his form on the platform. Without responding, she came into the studio, walking toward the platform. When she got to the edge of it, she stopped and they looked at each other, their features now visible to one another in the blue light of evening. Neither of them spoke.
She turned and went to the steps and came up on the platform and approached him. He put his glass on the floor, and when she got to him he embraced her hips and laid his head against her stomach. She put her hands in his hair and caressed him.
God, he didn’t know why, he didn’t know what it was about this woman, that made him feel as though he needed her so much. She let him hold her as if she understood and was giving herself to him, letting him get what he could from her. It wasn’t something she could explain to him; it wasn’t something he wanted her to explain, but he knew by the way she behaved that it was true and that they both knew it.
His hands followed her legs down to the hem of her dress and under, coming up her naked thighs to her hips. He found the ribbed band at the top of her panties and began pulling them down as she shifted her weight to allow them to come away from her, down her long legs to the floor, where she stepped out of them.
He returned one hand to her crotch, and he felt her hips shifting again as her legs parted slightly to accommodate his fingers. She unbuttoned the top of her dress down to her waist, and they let it fall to the floor. He stood, and she slowly helped him take off his clothes.
The light through which he saw her breasts as he kissed them had become a sharp amethyst, a damascene shade that turned the red of the model’s bed a saturated purple. His mouth descended to her stomach, past her navel, and he could feel the muscles of her abdomen twitching against his lips and tongue. She opened her legs to him and reclined back on the bed, and he could feel her reaching for the back of the chair to steady herself. He looked up; she was watching.
• • •
“Everything’s changed,” she said.
They were lying on the model’s bed, and night was coming in through the tall, opened windows, creating a backdrop of sapphire columns along the dark walls. They had been awake, but quiet, looking toward the windows.
“I know.”
“But what we did, that will never change.”
“No.”
Silence. Only the pulsing of the crickets in the weeds.
“I have so many regrets,” she said. “I used to say I didn’t, but I do. Even before this, long before this.”
He said, “Regrets . . . I don’t know . . .”
“Can we . . . do you think we can regret the future?”
“The future? God . . . I think just about anything’s possible now.”
“We can,” she said. “I know we can.”
Silence again. He could smell her, that faint sachet that he always wanted more of, its elusiveness being a great part of its poignancy. He had a hand on her stomach, and he could feel her pubic hair with his little finger.
He said, “I thought you weren’t going to come back.”
She waited. Then, “I almost didn’t.”
Her words stung him. He realized, and it shocked him to realize it, that it would have killed him if she hadn’t.
“But I had to see you, Ross,” she said. “I didn’t know what was going to happen. Please believe that.”
It seemed an odd thing to say, as if she were saying she didn’t know that lightning was going to strike or that a gust of breeze would blow out a candle. One couldn’t know those things.
He said, “No, of course not. How could you?”
But she didn’t answer. Then she said, “What do you think will happen, eventually?”
“I’ve decided I’d go crazy if I tried to figure it out. So I’m not doing that anymore. How the hell do you try to figure this out?”
“But you’ve got to try.”
“We can’t even figure out what will happen tomorrow . . . or an hour from now.”
“But that’s a philosophical . . . we don’t live like that. We make plans, we speculate . . .”
“I’m going to treat our situation philosophically . . . for now, anyway.”
“Why?”
He got up on his elbow and looked at her.
“Because I can’t figure out the ‘How am I going to live with this?’ part of it. I can’t even get a grip on that yet. So I’ll live tonight . . . tomorrow . . . tomorrow night . . . just as they come to me, one at a time. I don’t know how to handle it any differently right now.”
She looked up at him, and he
thought she was trying to see something, looking for something.
“But, in the meantime,” she said, “we’re not going to talk about . . . us . . . are we?”
“Should we?”
There was a long silence, and he thought, or did he imagine, he could feel her emotion stirring down the long length of their touching bodies.
“No,” she said. “We shouldn’t.”
She turned her face toward the blue columns of the windows, and he looked at her. In the sapphire light he saw her blink a couple of times, saw glistening in her eyes. And then she closed them.
Chapter 32
Leda came the next morning and acted as if nothing had happened two days before. So did he. She undressed, and he asked her to take a particular pose, helped her to get comfortable with it, and began another maquette. When break time came she lighted a cigarette, and they talked about the maquette. He explained why he had chosen the pose and showed her what he was trying to do. After she finished her cigarette they went back to work. When he noticed her growing tired again, he said he had gone as far as he could for the day. She dressed, took another look at the new changes he had made in the maquette since the break, and left, saying she would be back the next morning.
She had remained perfectly relaxed throughout, never once appearing to be self-conscious. She was genuinely relaxed and genuinely seemed to have no memory of anything unpleasant having happened at their last session.
Céleste didn’t come in the afternoon.
In the following days a monotonous routine evolved that Ross found petrifying in its slowly building portention. Leda was an ideal model, no outbursts, cooperative, polite, accommodating. She reined in her tendency toward outrageousness and desire to shock and simply helped him do the best he could with the maquettes.
Céleste didn’t come in the afternoons.
Two weeks passed in this way. Ross battled depression, a sense of loss that increased with the coming of each night without Céleste. The afternoons alone seemed interminable, the nights almost unbearable.
“You know what we’ve never talked about?” Leda asked one morning when she was halfway through the first cigarette of her break.
“No.” He was using a modeling tool to redefine the angle of a shoulder. He wasn’t much listening to her.
“Sylvie.”
He looked up, the end of his wire loop tool just touching the surface of the clay.
Leda was twisted around on the bed, regarding him with an open-faced innocence, knowing damn well she was broaching a subject he wouldn’t want to talk about. He lifted the wire loop from the clay and smoothed the place in the clay that he had been about to shave, making a more subtle adjustment than he had intended.
“What was she like back then?” she asked. “Physically. More like Céleste, or more like me . . . I mean, without the hump, naturally.”
“You know the answer to that, Leda.”
“I knew she was smaller than Céleste, but, well, it was years later when I knew her. She’d had a hard life by then. There wasn’t much left of the Sylvie you knew.”
She shifted her position, ready to listen. He hesitated, but he really didn’t know why. It had been a long time ago. Still, Sylvie was as real to him as Leda. He hadn’t forgotten anything about her, good or bad.
“Her eyes were like yours,” he remembered, looking at her. “And her mouth was like yours. Breasts too. Neck too. You’re taller than she was, but your proportions are the same. Maybe she was a little heavier in the hips.”
“She was about the same age then as I am now, wasn’t she?”
“Yeah,” he said, “I guess she was.”
“How else am I like her?”
He studied her. Actually, it was odd that they had never talked about Sylvie. It would seem that she would have been a natural subject for conversation, but she had never even been mentioned since Céleste revealed their relationship.
“The texture of your hair,” he said, one memory reviving another. “Sylvie had beautiful hair. Sometimes the way you look at me when you’re thinking, not saying what you’re thinking, not even going to say, that’s like her, quite a lot like her, actually.”
“But I talk more than she does.”
He thought of Sylvie in his Paris studio of those days and was surprised at how vividly he could resurrect her once he began to remember. She was the first model he’d ever had who posed with complete indifference. Even models who were entirely comfortable with their bodies were at least moderately self-conscious. They cared how they looked. They wanted to look nice, even when that wasn’t the point of what you wanted from them.
But Sylvie was completely oblivious of being posed in unflattering positions. Once she took her position to pose, she went into her own world. But besides that, though she was an extraordinarily handsome woman, she possessed no vanity whatsoever, and how other people saw her was irrelevant to her. She put no value in her physical beauty. That was one of the oddest things about her.
“Don’t I?”
“What?”
“I talk more than she does.”
“Yeah,” he said, “Sylvie was a sphinx.”
“Tell me about the fight that split the two of you.”
“She’s already told you. Céleste said she had.”
“She told me her side of the story.”
He stood and picked up a rag from the workbench and dipped it into a can of water. He wrung it out and draped it over the maquette.
“You were lovers,” Leda prompted him.
“We weren’t. And then we were. And then we weren’t.”
“That’s not what she said.”
“I imagine not.”
“She said—”
“Leda, I’m not going to do this. You wanted to know about her physical description. I told you.”
“I don’t know why we can’t talk about the relationship.”
“Because I say we can’t.”
“It was twenty-three years ago.”
“That’s right. And it was an ugly ending. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“An ugly ending.”
“Yeah.”
“Ugly. We haven’t talked about ugly, either,” she said, mashing out her cigarette as though she had made a decision. She got up like a rhino rising to its feet and took her dress from the chair beside the bed. She hadn’t worn any underwear. She steadied herself against the bed and stepped into the dress. She pulled it up over her hips and then slipped her arms into the sleeves as she made a series of little hunching jerks with her shoulders to work it up over the hump. He had watched her do that scores of times now.
She looked down as she buttoned the front of the dress.
“Sometimes,” she said, “when I was a girl, I’d catch my mother looking at me when I was dressing. She never said anything, of course, but I could see the disgust.”
She buttoned the last button and sat on the edge of the bed.
“Actually, that’s not exactly true,” she said. “It may have been a subtle look of disgust, but to me, I mean, when you’re the object of a subtle look of disgust . . . there’s no such thing, is there?” She paused, looking down at the floor as she remembered. “She might as well have vomited.”
She reached out and smoothed the coverlet on the bed, her hands making slow, stroking motions away from her over the cloth.
“I remember the first time that happened,” she said, “the very first time. I was twelve. The onset of the kyphosis had begun. They told us it was impossible to know the extent to which it might develop. So we watched its progress with obsessive attention. I’d dream that it became gargantuan, bigger than me, so big that I became its appendage. I’d wake up sick . . . I’d actually wake up vomiting. I’d turn on the light and go to the mirror and look at it. A little twelve-year-old girl, looking at the gristly hump on her back in the mirror in the middle of the night.”
She paused, watching her hand smoothing the scarlet fabric.
“The damn
ed thing just grew and grew,” she said, “until it looked like a mammoth boil that was about to pop. It just got so big neither of us could believe it. It was a horror story.”
She paused again.
“I got pubic hair and breasts and a hump all in the same year. And then I began menstruating.”
Silence. She stopped smoothing the fabric and looked at him.
“I was already a pretty girl. Boys liked me, and I knew why. I loved beautiful clothes. I flirted. I imagined . . . I imagined a wonderful life, that I would become a beautiful woman. I would charm myself into a beautiful life with my beautiful face and body. I had dreams. Dreams are important in a little girl’s life.”
She stared into space.
“And then, along with puberty came ugly. I was introduced to ugly. Ugly came and stayed.”
She looked at him. “Don’t you think . . . that whatever causes ugly is evil?”
He was caught off guard. She saw it in his face and grinned.
“It was just a thought,” she said. “Still, it is a thought.” She took her hand off the bed and put it in her lap with the other one. Long, pretty fingers.
“Do you know Tiresias?” she asked, going on without waiting for an answer. “The blind seer of Thebes. One day he was walking along a road and came upon two snakes having intercourse. He struck the female on the head and killed her. Instantly he was changed into a woman. Seven years later, as a woman, he again came upon two snakes copulating, and he did the same thing again, and was changed back into a man. Because he had been both man and woman, Zeus and Hera called on him to settle a dispute about which of the sexes enjoyed intercourse more, man or woman. He said woman, nine to one.
“I feel like Tiresias,” she went on. “If the gods called on me to settle the dispute: Which is the more powerful, that which is beautiful or that which is ugly? . . .” She paused and looked at him with a sour smile. “I would have to say, in my wisdom that I’ve acquired from having been both: Ugly, nine to one.”
There was a long silence.
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