“If this weren’t true, why doesn’t this”—she raised her hands and held them slightly away from either side of her face as though to frame it—“cancel this?” She rolled the hummock of her back to him in profile.
It seemed larger, more gross, than only a few moments before. Then she turned her head to him and smiled flirtatiously over her shoulder.
Chapter 33
By the end of the third week he was getting only a few hours’ sleep a night and was beginning to feel the stress of Céleste’s absence. After a month of wanting to be constantly within arm’s reach of him, she had inexplicably dropped out of sight.
As for Leda, after her blissful behavior during the first session following her crude seduction game, she began to exhibit an increasing agitation. Her mood swings began to look less like quirks of eccentricity than symptoms of instability.
“They look like insects,” Leda said. “Beetles.” She was smoking, taking a break, sitting on the model’s bed, one leg crossed over the other. There were now nearly a dozen small clay maquettes of her, all of them lined up along the workbench where he had set up the armature on which he constructed the models.
“Not to me.” He was sitting on his stool, misting the maquette to keep the clay workable.
“What do they look like to you?”
“You,” he said, putting down the mister bottle and looking at her.
Silence. She shifted her eyes from the maquettes to him, and they studied each other in a long stare.
Leda said, “You haven’t even tried to call her, have you?”
“I can understand if she needs to be alone.”
“What if there’s something wrong? Ever think about that?”
“You’d tell me.”
“What if she told me not to?”
“Are you saying there’s something wrong?”
Pause.
“We should’ve talked about this, Ross,” she said, an edge of uneasiness creeping into her voice. “The three of us. We should’ve talked about it a lot.”
“What’s the matter?”
She waggled her dangling foot and regarded him seriously.
“She’s been locked in her room.” She smoked. “I think she’s having some kind of nervous breakdown.”
“What?”
“Yeah. We’re living in that big old house like a couple of weird sisters. Sometimes I don’t see her for several days at a time. We don’t eat together. We don’t talk.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“You’ve been acting strange, too. I don’t know what you’re thinking, what you want.”
Strange? Weird? Leda was the only one who didn’t seem to be affected at all by what they had done. How strange was that?
Something changed in Leda’s face. She put out the cigarette and stood and got her panties from the chair and put them on, steadying herself on the bed. She got her dress from the chair, too, and he watched her awkward struggle with the common task of dressing. She was fighting back tears. Buttoning the dress, she came off the platform, her careful descent, her constant effort not to lose her balance, a poignant maneuver that was as much of her reality as was her beauty.
She came over to the workbench and stood on the other side of it, looking at him across the miniature replications of herself, her eyes sagging with secrets.
“I didn’t kill Lacan,” she said flatly.
He actually felt his face go rigid.
“She did it. Céleste killed him.”
His heart stuttered. He didn’t doubt her, and it anguished him that he didn’t.
“How . . .”
“He was asleep.” She spoke from tightly coiled emotions. “She went out and got the pipe . . . and came back and did it. I heard something. I walked in while she was doing it.”
He put his hand on the workbench to steady himself. “Why did you—”
“Because she thought you would insist on going to the police. She thought I’d get more sympathy from them . . . less likely to be convicted . . . in the long run . . . maybe not even charged . . . a better chance . . .”
He swallowed.
She turned away, stopped, then made her way to the old sofa and sat down. The tears had broken now, and she let them spill over her high cheekbones.
“I needed to tell you,” she said. “It isn’t right for you to hate me for something like that, something I didn’t really do. I know she’s made sacrifices for me . . . but, God, to ask me to do this . . .”
He felt nauseated.
“And something else.” She fought for breath, for control of her voice. “She . . . we . . . came here . . . to get money from you. Neither of us . . . we couldn’t endure any more of it. We couldn’t . . . We knew you had money.”
“Jesus,” he said.
“The original plan was . . . that she’d seduce you . . . you’d eventually take Lacan’s place. You can’t blame her. It was horrible, what was happening. No hope, no end in sight. She made hard choices . . . impossible choices . . . survival choices.”
He stood, dumbfounded. His mind faltered. In a fog he went to the modeling platform and sat on the edge of it, facing Leda’s profile.
“So, that’s . . . what all this has been about?” he asked.
“That’s how it began,” she said. “I don’t know . . . I can’t know what’s happened between you. Céleste and I don’t talk about . . . I told you.” She hesitated. “Actually, we hardly know each other.”
His mind was tumbling with questions, but he couldn’t bring himself to articulate them. They sat there together, Leda looking at him with concerned care. He was staring at some crumbles of clay on the floor underneath the stool where he had been sitting.
“Killing him,” he said, not taking his eyes off the crumbs. “She didn’t have to do it, then. He wasn’t really threatening her at the time. Good God, she just decided to do it. She murdered him.”
“I don’t know that.” Leda squirmed on the settee, her hump looming above her ridiculously. “You know, I think that’s what she said. I just can’t remember the details. I’m sure that’s what she said, but . . . really, does it matter?”
“What?”
“I mean, just half an hour before, he’d been beating the shit out of her, for God’s sake.”
Silence.
“I’ve got to think,” he said, his eyes fixed on the floor.
Leda waited. Outside, in the brightness, the grasshoppers and cicadas railed in the noonday heat. She stood laboriously, gripping her purse, and walked out of the studio. He didn’t even look up.
• • •
He wanted a drink, but he didn’t get one. He was suffocating. He went outside and walked to the house, went into his bedroom, and changed into his work clothes. Then he went back to the studio, to the kiln shed. He took off his shirt, grabbed a sledgehammer from the corner of the shed, and began breaking the limestone blocks he was going to use for small carvings.
He didn’t fight it. He went about it methodically, paying attention to where he was hitting the blocks, trying to break them evenly, trying, for some inexplicable reason, to be efficient about it, splitting the blocks into smaller blocks rather than crushing them to dust.
Could he believe anything that had happened between him and Céleste? Could she have been that perverse, really? And if she had been, could he have been so gullible, so imperceptive, that he had misread her completely?
He couldn’t believe that. He had to trust himself more than that. Whatever Céleste had set out to do, she must have changed her mind as she got to know him. If she had fallen in love with him, then he knew that she was haunted by guilt and shame over her original intentions. He could understand that she would be depressed.
But the murder itself was another issue. Why hadn’t she told him the truth about it? And how could she—it seemed so out of character for her—how could she have asked Leda to take the responsibility for it? It was as shocking as Leda asking Céleste to endure the beatings from
Lacan on her behalf. God. These sisters. Sylvie. All of them were strange women.
He broke limestone blocks until he couldn’t even swing the sledgehammer anymore, couldn’t even bring the thing up in the air. He sat on the stones, his arms trembling, his body slick with sweat, his chest sucking the hot summer air for oxygen. The cicadas whined in the brush and in the wild grass that was turning brown in the sun. He itched from the limestone grit and dust that was stuck to the sweat in the hair on his arms and chest.
As he stared out into the bright light of July, he made up his mind that he wasn’t going to believe everything Leda had told him—at least, not in exactly the way she had told it. He was going to talk to Céleste. He wanted to hear about it from her own lips.
• • •
The night was worse than sleepless. Questions and doubts blew about in his mind like ashes on a whorling wind.
Chapter 34
He overslept the next morning, and as he stood at the kitchen sink waiting for the coffee to finish brewing, he saw Leda come around the edge of the house and start down the path to the studio. It was open, and she would go in and wait for him. He wouldn’t be able to work, anyway, not until he talked to Céleste and settled some of the questions eating at him.
He poured the coffee into the thermos and followed her to the studio.
“A lousy night?” she asked as he came into the studio door.
“Yes, it was,” he said. He walked past her to the sink at the back of the studio and got two cups off the shelf and poured two cups of coffee. He went back to the modeling platform where Leda was sitting on the edge of the stage and handed her one of the cups.
He stood beside her and took his first sip of coffee, feeling as if he hadn’t slept for a week.
“I can’t work this morning,” he said. “I can’t even think until I talk to her.” He looked at his watch. “I’m going over there.”
Leda gave him a horrified look. “That would be a . . . terrible mistake,” she said.
“I don’t think so.”
“She doesn’t want to see you.”
“I’ll believe that when she tells me.”
“If she had wanted to see you, Ross, do you think she would’ve stayed away for so long?”
“I just want to hear her say it.”
Leda stared at him in silence, and then she put her cup on the stage beside her and struggled to her feet. She paused and then took a few steps away from him, then turned and looked at him, the monkey skeleton dangling behind her. She crossed her arms.
“If you do that,” she said, “you’ll regret it.”
They measured each other. He knew she had more to say. “Go ahead,” he said.
“Céleste may be the most levelheaded of the three of us,” she said, talking about the sisters, “but that doesn’t mean there’s no limit to her . . . sanity.” She stopped, seemed to be having second thoughts about what she wanted to say. Her demeanor was suddenly more brittle, her tone growing edgy. “She’s hanging on by a thread, Ross. It won’t take much to snap it.” She looked as if she were about to snap herself. “I don’t want to see that happen. She . . . she’s the only thing I have left, for God’s sake. The only thing . . . I don’t want to lose her.” She looked at him, her crossed arms pulled in tightly as if she were physically holding herself together. “You understand that, don’t you?”
He did understand that. He thought. Maybe that was all he understood.
An odd turn had taken place. Now rather than Céleste looking after Leda’s interests, Leda was looking after hers. It was almost as if the two sisters were reinventing themselves right in front of him. And maybe they were. At one time or another each of them had said they were practically strangers. Maybe what he was watching here was the birth of a relationship that even these two women had never believed would be possible. Long separated, they were coming together at last, in spite of themselves, in spite of a nightmare even worse than the ones they already had lived through.
It was his awareness that they, too, must be slowly realizing they had been thrown into an unlikely alliance that prompted his next remark.
“The ‘original plan,’” he said.
“What?”
“Yesterday when you were telling me about your conspiracy to have Céleste seduce me for my money, you said that was your ‘original plan.’ Has that changed?”
She was instantly flummoxed. Already wound so tight that she was almost trembling, she now literally couldn’t find the words to speak. What the hell was this? Something more? Was there something more?
“Leda!”
She flinched. She gathered her courage. Uncharacteristically, there didn’t seem to be very much of it now.
“A few days ago . . . ,” she said, and stopped. With the delicate fingers of one hand she lightly covered her mouth, touching her cheeks softly as if blotting away the perspiration. She was using the time to compose herself.
Jesus Christ, he thought.
“She was outside, in the garden,” she went on, “just sitting there. She goes out sometimes, it’s the only place out of the house she goes. I wanted her sewing kit, I had a button coming off . . . it doesn’t matter . . . so I went into her room . . . into her closet.” Pause. “I found . . . videocameras . . . and tripods . . . three, three of them.”
He was stone.
“I found cassettes. I thought Lacan, you know, had . . . I got one of them and put it in the VCR in her room.” She looked as if she had quit breathing. Her voice squeezed to a whisper. “It was you . . . wrestling Lacan’s body off the bed, wrapping it in the sheets . . . telling us what to do.”
He was struck dumb.
“I think there are others,” she said.
He sat on the edge of the platform where she had been earlier. He couldn’t think, and he didn’t see anything with his eyes. Or he wasn’t aware of seeing anything. He started to speak. Couldn’t. Swallowed.
“She could’ve . . . I would’ve . . . helped her . . . you.” He thought he was going to black out, nothing in his lungs. “You saw the tape?”
She nodded fast, nervously. “Only a minute . . .” Her voice quavered. “Less than that.”
“There were others?”
“I don’t know,” she said quickly. “I’m guessing . . . the three cameras.”
“You said there were cassettes.”
“Yes, there were other cassettes.”
“I’ve got to talk to her.”
“No!” she almost shrieked. “God, no. She’s . . . I don’t know how to explain it . . . let her get through another day . . . two days . . . just two days.”
“What’s the matter? What’s wrong with her?”
“I don’t know.” She was fighting tears again. She turned from where she was standing and moved jerkily to one of the shorter stools and sat down. “She’s . . . she’s stressed, unraveling . . . she killed a man, for God’s sake. She—”
“Shit!” he exploded. “She’s stressed! She taped me. . . . What am I . . . what am I supposed to think about that? Stressed! What was she doing? What is this? . . .”
Leda was crying, breathing in heaves, her face reflecting a frantic mind. “Please, let her . . . she’s got to have some time . . . get control . . . she’s, I think she’s suicidal.”
“Goddamn it, Leda. What do you expect me to do?”
“Give me a few days,” she pleaded. “A week. No, three days. Give me four days to get her. . . . I’ll find out about the tapes . . . confront her. Find out what’s really going on. But if I do it too soon . . . I have to be careful.”
He was incredulous. He couldn’t believe this. He couldn’t believe how quickly everything had begun to fly apart. And Leda didn’t seem to be in any shape at all to help anyone.
• • •
That night when the fireflies came out and the brush around the house was filled with their glimmering, he took a glass of Scotch and made his way shirtless and barefoot to the kiln. He lighted the kiln, opened its door,
and sat back against the cool millstone. No good reason for it, he just did it.
While the kiln slowly grew to a shuddering roar, he stared into its opened belly where it had digested Lacan and went over the painful conversations with Leda as if he were picking pox scabs. Then he replayed every distressing conversation or incident that he had experienced with Céleste and Leda, examining every nuance and implication again and again. If there were answers to any of this, he believed, he would find them in the pain. Anything of fondness he avoided. He didn’t want to be reminded, and most of all he didn’t want to be deluded by the saccharine emotion of fond memory. He sought clarity of thought staring into the thudding roar of the fire.
The following days were barren. He slept so little at night that by dawn he collapsed into a comatose slumber from which he did not recover until noon. He ate and then went straight to the studio and plunged into another maquette of Leda. During these hours of intense concentration the panic subsided and his mind worked in a mostly coherent fashion. He could think of Céleste then, but not without anguish, not without an aching wish for the lies to be undone, for the truth to be different. He worked through dusk and into the night and exhaustion.
He didn’t stop to think why he would obey Leda’s demented request to stay away from Céleste. He didn’t wonder how cowardly it was not to hurry to her and help her get through whatever it was she needed to get through. He didn’t admit to himself that he didn’t really have the guts to ask the questions he needed to ask and to listen to the answers he needed to hear.
Four days passed in this way, an undulating and seamless passage of nights and days. He lost track.
• • •
The ringing was part of a dream, and then the dream dissolved, and he was left staring at the ceiling, feeling as heavy as lead. The ringing belonged to the telephone on the nightstand beside his bed.
He wallowed on the sweat-stained sheets and picked up the telephone, dropped it, and picked it up again.
His throat wouldn’t produce a voice. He whispered, “Yes.”
“Were you asleep?” It was Amado.
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