He told no one what he was doing. Amado knew he was working on something, but he was sensitive to Ross’s reluctance to talk about it, and he asked no questions. He even stopped coming by the studio.
Ross drove himself without stint. There were no more evenings at Graber’s, and he stopped working only at night when he was too exhausted to bring his mind to focus or make his hands obey. Time spooled out in an endless string behind him. There were no tomorrows, only the present moment, only the idea and the clay.
One night late he came into his bedroom from the outdoor shower dripping and weary and glanced over to the small desk at the edge of one of the screened panels where he kept his computer and a fax machine. He could see paper in the “in” tray of the fax machine. First he checked his e-mail. Nothing. Then he picked up the paper from the fax tray.
There was a single sheet. It had no return address other than a commercial photocopy shop . . . in Paris.
I have heard from the police. We must talk. Cimetière du Père Lachaise, 8th division, Avenue Feuillant, #68.
There were two dates, one four days away, another a week away. Both for two o’clock in the afternoon. It had begun.
• • •
“You’re going to see her, is that it?” Amado gave him a look of impatience across the table. Graber’s lanterns hung listlessly in the night heat. At this time of the year summer seemed interminable, as if San Rafael were on the equator, locked in a perpetual swelter. Beer was brought to the tables ice cold and sweaty and quickly consumed. The patrons who favored the patio no matter how hot it was wore thin clothes or little clothes at all. By the end of September the nights at Graber’s became very bohemian.
“I might see her.”
“Come on, Ross. Who are you talking to here?”
Amado guzzled his Pacifico. His white linen shirt was wilted, the sleeves rolled to his elbows, the front sagging open in the heat.
“Blackmail,” Amado said. “She’s blackmailing you.”
“Jesus.”
“Jesus indeed.”
“Does it matter?”
“Is it something you can ever get away from?”
“No.”
“Never?”
“No.”
“What can be that embarrassing?”
“If it were only embarrassing, I wouldn’t put up with it. I’ve dealt with embarrassing before.”
A dark look of renewed understanding moved under the surface of Amado’s impatience.
“Oh, no. What do you mean?”
“I’m not ever going to tell you, Amado. Ever.” He paused for emphasis. “And I’m going to expect you to take the little bit that I’ve just told you to your grave.”
Amado leaned forward across the table. “Ross,” he said in a hoarse whisper, “this is a criminal thing?”
“Blackmailing is criminal.”
“No, no. The thing she is blackmailing you about . . . it’s a criminal thing?”
He drank his beer, staring back at Amado until Amado’s face caught up with his thinking and he slumped back in his chair, dismayed.
“What in God’s name—”
“It’s too damned complex even to begin with it,” he said.
“And so you’re going to Paris to talk about this?”
He sipped his beer.
“Is she going to ruin you?”
“I don’t know. I doubt it. She’d be ruining her livelihood.”
“Her livelihood? What about Lacan? Did he kick her out after Céleste’s suicide?”
“Something like that, I think. I don’t really know anything for sure.”
Amado was holding back a flood of questions.
“This . . . thing . . . ,” he stammered, “it was . . . while they were here?”
“Of course it was.” He was irritated.
“Céleste was in on it, too?”
“I don’t know.”
Amado shook his head in disbelief. “Goddamn . . . I knew . . . I knew . . .”
“Don’t go into that, Amado,” he said. “You’ll get it wrong, and I’m not going to be able to tell you enough to straighten you out. I won’t.”
“I’ve never stayed at your place before when you’ve been gone . . . why now?”
“Just . . . will you do it or not?”
“Of course I’ll do it, but why?”
“I don’t want the place empty.”
Amado nodded in resignation.
“And I want to keep the studio locked. I don’t want . . . anyone in there yet.” He paused. “Anyone.”
“Christ. I’m not going to look in the studio,” Amado said impatiently. “When are you leaving?”
“Tomorrow, maybe. Or the next day.”
Amado nodded again. “This is bizarre,” he said.
“I know.”
“So, what’s . . . what’s the long-term situation here?”
“I don’t have any idea.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No.”
“You’ve got to know. Good Lord, Ross, if she’s blackmailing you about a criminal matter . . . I mean, you’ve got to know how serious a . . . criminal matter.”
“You’ve misunderstood me,” he said evenly. He glared across the table. “You realize that, don’t you, that you’ve misunderstood me and you’re getting this all wrong.”
Amado was confused.
“You need to forget that, Amado. It would be a mistake to speculate.”
Neither of them spoke for a while. Amado moved his beer bottle around on the table in a circular motion and looked around the patio. No one was eating outside tonight, everyone was drinking, trying to cool a heat wave that had settled over the Hill Country like the doldrums. Ross wondered about Graber’s birds, silent in the black greenness of the palms, where they slept or gazed down sleepily into the lake of lanterns below them. It had been a good while since he had been here in the afternoon to see them in all their gaudy resplendence. At this moment he missed that enormously, as if it were a pleasure of central importance in his life.
He wished it were the afternoon now and that everything that had happened during the past three months had never happened. Almost everything. Céleste he did not wish to lose, not even for the blessing of making all the horror go away. The memories of holding her were more lovely than the horrors were horrible. He did not want to lose the memory of Céleste, even to save himself from whatever distasteful thing was waiting for him in Paris. God, how he had loved her. And how foolishly he had handled everything. It was his fault if the memory of her was all that he had left of her. He could not blame anyone else for that, not even fate or chance.
Chapter 39
Now that he had Amado’s commitment to stay in the house while he was gone, he concentrated on trying to make sure he was thinking straight. He had to consider the possibility that Leda and Céleste’s trip to San Rafael would eventually come under suspicion in the police investigation of Lacan’s disappearance. He didn’t know why that might be, but he had to consider it. And if their stay in San Rafael was going to be part of an inquiry, his association with the two women would be discovered immediately. If investigators came by his compound, he wanted to know it. And he wanted to know if they looked around the property. They couldn’t do that legally, of course, without a warrant, but they might just walk around the place “out of curiosity” to see the famous sculptor’s workplace. If they did, he wanted to know that. Amado would let him know immediately and be discreet about it.
He hoped that the investigation into Lacan’s disappearance did not sweep wide enough to include him. If it did, it couldn’t reflect well on him that his inability to continue with the Beach commission had coincided with the period of time during which Lacan had vanished. That would seem more than curious, considering his relationship with Céleste. It would seem suspicious.
He booked a flight out of Austin’s Bergstrom International, then spent the next two days deliberately concentrating on Leda’s new maquette. Refusing
to let his mind wander to the meeting in Paris, he refined the drawings for it beyond what was necessary, beyond what he normally would have done. He lost himself in the shadow and light of it, and the days and nights rippled by with time-lapse swiftness. The night before he was to leave, Amado came over and they talked while he packed.
Amado lounged in a leather armchair, his feet on an ottoman, well into a slow-burning maduro. A warm breeze wandered aimlessly through the bedroom, moving back and forth through the screened walls, mixing in its variation the smoke from Amado’s cigar.
A large clamshell suitcase was open on the bed, and he was tossing things into it, unable to concentrate well on either the packing or the conversation, which was not much of a conversation anyway. A nightjar called from the darkness with such clarity that it sounded as if it were in the bedroom with them.
“I love those things,” Amado said, the first words spoken for the past fifteen minutes. “Which one is it?”
“Poorwill.” He tossed a razor into a pile of underwear in the suitcase.
He felt Amado watching him as he made his way from closet to chest to bathroom to bed, grabbing clothes and miscellany in no particular order. He was an indifferent packer, which often meant he’d have to find a pharmacy as soon as he arrived wherever he was going to get the toothpaste or toothbrush or shaving cream he had forgotten.
“How do you think it’ll be,” Amado asked, blowing a blue stream into the dull light of the bedroom, “seeing her again? How do you behave . . . now?”
“Now?” He stared into the suitcase, hands on his hips.
“Considering . . . what she’s doing.”
He looked into the suitcase. He wasn’t thinking about what he was looking at.
“You know”—he turned and sat on the edge of the bed—“I’m only guessing she’s going to blackmail me. It’s logical. But she’s not a logical woman, so I could be surprised. In fact, she’s managed to surprise me more than not. I don’t even know why I think I could guess what she’s got in mind.” He looked at his bare feet on the tile floor. “And, most of the time, she’s lied to me.”
Amado regarded him. “How do you feel?” he asked. “I mean, are you apprehensive . . . resigned . . . angry?”
Ross looked up at him. Amado was tranquil, his eyes heavy, the way they got when he was thinking way past his questions.
“Yes,” he said, “and five or six more adjectives on top of those.” He looked toward the sound of the poorwill. “You know, I can’t shake the feeling that this . . . well, that it’ll be over, that this is something that I’ll pass through, come out the other side all right, and then think back on it . . . with whatever attitude survives. But, at the same time, I know that’s not realistic.”
He listened to the poorwill lilting along in the monotony of his low, crippled piping. Occasionally the breeze would gust through the room, and he could hear it hissing through the screens.
Amado was loyal to him, but Ross could sense his concern that maybe he had gone beyond a point at which a friend ought to be loyal. There was a line one didn’t cross. It wasn’t a textbook line, it was a heart line. You would know it when you saw it. Only in Amado’s case, to know where he stood in relationship to that line made Amado more knowledgeable about the situation than was good for him. In order for him to know for sure, he would have to become a part of it. And that was too late. It was a hell of a position in which to put his friend, he knew, and he was sorry for it.
“It’s one of those situations with extenuating circumstances,” he said. “I guess they all are, aren’t they?”
Amado waited.
“It’s not clear-cut.” He shook his head. “Once you’re into it, you realize it’s not something that can be resolved with any real satisfaction.”
He stood and went to a chest of drawers and took out some socks and came back and dropped them into the suitcase.
“The thing is,” he said, turning to Amado again but looking into the darkness past him, “Céleste . . . she was like Saleh. Once I reached a certain point with her, I wasn’t much interested in life without her. With other women, over the years, there was something inherent within them, or within me, that let me know deep down that I wasn’t ever going to find any peace with them. I knew that about each of them after a while. Marian’s a good example. She was a storm, and I knew all along that we’d never survive the turbulence together. There was an undercurrent of something wild there that I knew in my gut would eventually rip us apart. And it did.
“With Saleh, and then Céleste—it’s true, our relationships were doomed, but not because of anything having to do with either of the two women. Or, I think, with me. Saleh had a husband. Her drowning was tragic, but her death didn’t separate us any more than reality already had.
“And Céleste . . . she came with so much mystery and history. Too much of it. I didn’t realize it then, but I think she did. Her family, her life. It didn’t have anything to do with her. It was all the baggage of life that she had to drag around with her. Lacan. Her mother. Her sister. Leda, whoever she is and whatever her claim was on Céleste.”
He stopped and shifted his eyes at Amado, who was sitting in a cloud of blue smoke that he had just created.
“I forgot where I was going with this,” he said.
“I don’t think it matters.” Amado dropped his feet on either side of the ottoman and leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees, his cigar in his right hand. He had taken the paper band off his cigar and was folding and unfolding it with his fingers.
“I understand why you’re being so . . . enigmatic, Ross,” Amado said, “and I appreciate your wanting to keep me at a distance. But, are you sure you’re seeing clearly? Are so confident . . .”
“I’m anything but confident.”
“What if you’re going to walk into a big mistake here?” Amado persisted. “What if, afterward, you say, ‘If I’d only said something to Amado . . .’”
“I know, I’ve thought of that.”
“Well, then?”
“You don’t know what you’re asking.”
“Can it be that bad?”
He headed for the closet. “Yes.”
The poorwill stopped, and Amado looked toward the screened darkness as he came back with a handful of suits. He tossed them on the bed and began taking them off the hangers. The nightjar started again, and they both listened to him in silence as he continued to pack and Amado smoked, thinking.
Ross didn’t look at him, but as he packed he knew what Amado was wrestling with. Should he insist that Ross tell him what was going on? Should he volunteer to step into a conspiracy that involved a risk of such magnitude that his best friend chose not to disclose it to him? Suddenly he didn’t want Amado to have to answer the question.
“Amado . . .” He turned to him, holding a suit. “I need you here, and I need you dumb.” They looked at each other. “That’s what I need most of all. It’s the honest truth. You’re the only person who can do this for me, and do it in just exactly this way. I’ve got to have that.” He turned back and finished folding the suit. “Any other way, and you wouldn’t be any good to me at all.”
That was all there was said about that. The hot breeze swelled through the room again, whispering through the screens. The poorwill resumed its odd, arrhythmic fluting. The two men continued in silence, one smoking, keeping his own counsel, the other feeling desperate, as if this warm, companionable evening would be the last of his life that he could spend in just this way. Uncertainty had never seemed so distasteful to him.
Chapter 40
The next morning he got up just before daylight, threw his suitcase into the back of the Jeep, and drove down Lomitas into town. It was still dark as he parked in front of Kirchner’s Bakery, its bright storefront window the only place awake on the street. He sat at a window table with an almond croissant and a cup of coffee and watched the gray light rise. In the pale dawn, before the sunrise, Rio Encinal came into view as if in a moody bla
ck-and-white photograph, a thin sheet of fog settled over the surface of the water like a visible breath. As the light rose and the gray slowly came to life, revealing faded pastels, the fog on the river turned white, and he could see a subtle movement where the sluggish stream pushed the underside of the fog along with it.
When the first honey light of sunrise touched the crest of the hills above Palm Heights, he took one more sip of coffee and left.
He drove to the airstrip south of town, where he parked his Jeep in a corner of the hangar where the charter pilot kept his plane, an arrangement he often used, and boarded the small plane for Austin. He was landing at Bergstrom International about an hour later, and then waited another hour before his flight to Paris departed.
Paris
He arrived at the secluded Relais Geneviève in St.-Germain-des-Prés in the evening and checked into a suite. He unpacked, knowing his suits would be a mess, which they were. He hung them in the bathroom. Later, when he returned, he would turn on the hot water and steam up the bathroom and let the wrinkles hang out. But for now, he wanted to walk off the stiffness and lethargy of the long flight. And he wanted to see the Seine and the city before it changed, as everything would change, after the unimaginable events of the next day.
The evening was full of autumn. It was at least thirty degrees cooler than the nights in San Rafael, and the damp in the air coming off the Seine carried the smells of a changing season. As he walked the small streets, working his way toward the quay, he opened himself to the peculiar feelings Paris engendered.
There was always nostalgia for a time that he would not want to live again even if given the opportunity but which, nevertheless, held the disturbing memories of his self-centered youth, recollections mixed with the contradictory emotions of regret and the undeniable pleasures of a heedless life.
And, always, there was a tender sadness for sentiments forever lost, a separate sort of thing, inexplicable and gratifying in its own paradoxical way, for time past and times past, for faces and voices and moments never to be known again.
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