Animosity

by David Lindsey

  He had intended to walk from Pont Neuf to Pont de l’Archeveché, but turned back at Petit Pont, his self-indulgent reverie turning cold and misbegotten in the chilly night. His heart wasn’t in it. There was too much to resurrect. In years past, sorrowful reveries were a nice evening’s sentimental amusement. Regardless of how dispirited he might become, he knew he could always escape the doleful aftertaste by looking to the ever-hopeful future, where, no doubt, new memories were waiting to be lived.

  But time was out of balance now. The past weighed heavy on the scales, and the future was so light that it hardly made itself felt at all. And what future there was, Leda held ransomed, and Céleste’s death made him question whether it was even worth redeeming.

  On Rue Christine he stepped into a brasserie for dinner. He was the only one in the brasserie eating alone, and he hardly tasted the food. He was desolate. This was the last time he would come to Paris. He couldn’t do it anymore. If he could make it through the night and tomorrow’s meeting, he would never return.

  He walked back to Relais Geneviève and let himself into his darkened room. He went to the windows and looked out. There were trees along the sidewalks and a small café on the other side. He could see a few tables, a few patrons. It had gotten damper, and the streets were glistening.

  Turning away, he went into the bath and turned on the hot water, then came back into the room and took his time unpacking the rest of the suitcase. When he was through, he went back to the bathroom, which was now filled with churning clouds of steam. He checked the suits, pulled the pocket flaps out of the pockets, smoothed the drape of the jackets. He turned off the water and left the suits where they were.

  Later, in bed, he watched the splayed shadows on the windowpanes. It was a quiet street, not even the swishing sound of passing cars or the occasional voice to accompany him to unconsciousness. The sheets smelled lightly of Geneviéve. Her room, her bed, her sheets. He imagined her. He turned over on his side, facing the windows. Behind him he could hear her moving about in the room, tending to the small personal things, combing her hair a few strokes, lotion, a fragrant cream. Soon he would feel the bed move ever so slightly as she crawled between her sheets and drew next to him. She could comfort, she could soothe, and she was generous with all she had to offer.

  • • •

  He slept hardly at all until just before dawn, when he slipped into a dark unconsciousness. Then he slept late.

  It was a bright, crisp morning. After a croissant and coffee in a small café off Rue de Buci, he headed for the antique shops on Rue Jacob. He was desperate not to think about the meeting with Leda. If he went to a museum, he would lose track of time. Besides, he didn’t want to concentrate; he wanted distraction. Thus Rue Jacob, where he could divert his mind with just the right amount of preoccupation to carry him through the long minutes of the next few hours.

  The time passed quickly. At one o’clock he hailed a taxi and headed across the Seine to Cimetière du Père Lachaise.

  He left the taxi at the Boulevard de Ménilmontant entrance of the cemetery and walked in through the imposing gates of the Avenue Principale. He knew the layout of this famous and beautiful cemetery where for two hundred years the famous and beautiful people, the great and obscure, had been buried. Death’s judicious hand had gathered a strange mélange, Balzac and Chopin, Jim Morrison and Edith Piaf, Proust, Bernhardt, Oscar Wilde, Simone Signoret, and Yves Montand. Many of the avenues were completely canopied by the gilded leaves of maples and chestnuts and lindens in full autumn color. The cinder paths and lanes were littered with fallen gold.

  He was early. He thought he would locate the meeting place and then retreat a little distance to watch Leda arrive. That appealed to him, watching her from a distance, watching her come and wait and fret when he was late.

  But something stronger pulled at him. Knowing Leda, the location to which she had directed him was not an accident. He wanted to see Céleste’s grave.

  He meandered among the lanes, past crypts and mausoleums, monuments, and gravestones. Some were well maintained, some had surrendered to the persistence of brambles, some had been freshly cleaned, most were stained with mildew and time.

  He turned a corner, entered a smaller path. He found the numbers and counted. Walking slowly, he felt his heart begin to race as he reached the number in Leda’s note. And then he was there. His mind lurched to keep up with his searching eyes. A grave, above it a sculpture of a nude, swooning woman, weeping. An inscription that read “Sylvie Verret.” Jesus. He hadn’t thought . . . he . . . Next to it, a newer stone. A simple marker. “Leda Verret.”

  His heart stopped.

  “I’m sorry,” she said behind him.

  He spun around.

  “Jesus! . . . God!” He staggered, caught himself on the iron railing around the graves.

  “I’m sorry,” she repeated.

  He thought he was going to faint. Jesus, he was going to faint. But he didn’t, he fought it, willing himself not to abandon this miraculous moment. His eyes clung to her face with the desperation of a dying man who believed that if he could only keep his eyes open upon this last lovely thing that he saw, then he could hold in abeyance this last lonely thing required of him.

  “Jesus God,” he said.

  Chapter 41

  Céleste was surrounded, but not touched, by a honey light that fell through an allée of chestnuts behind her that seemed to stretch into eternity. The sun filtered through them in broken streams while, scattered in the receding distance, glitters of amber foil fell rippling through the light. It was easier to believe she was an illusion.

  He couldn’t speak. His throat thickened; he swallowed, almost sobbed, swallowed again. She was more real than real, as if she existed in another, more heightened dimension all her own, a breathing hallucination, a reincarnation that had not yet lost its celestial traces. All that had been lovely about her was more lovely still. He could hardly bear it.

  “Ross,” she said, and the sound of her voice startled him, as if he hadn’t heard her apologies a few moments before, “please.”

  “What in God’s name is this?” he asked. Neither of them moved.

  “I had to do it this way,” she said. “Or, I thought I had to.”

  “Do what?”

  “End it.”

  “End what!” He was, suddenly, furious. He was trembling with adrenaline and gratitude and anger. “What, goddamn it?”

  She didn’t move.

  “When Sylvie was with you in Paris,” she said, “I was in London. All of this . . . goes back to Paris.”

  “Jesus.” He swallowed again just to steady his voice. “What is ‘all of this’?”

  “Can we . . . sit down”—she looked around—“over there?” She motioned to a bench across the pathway.

  She moved sideways toward it, and he followed her, aware of the unsteadiness in his legs, aware of the jittery agitation in his stomach.

  They sat at opposite ends of the bench. He noticed now that she was holding a large chestnut leaf, the only thing she had with her. She looked at it as she flattened it on her thigh, pressing it with strokes of her fingers.

  “It . . . all of this started when you broke up with her.”

  “Sylvie?”

  She nodded.

  “Twenty . . . this goes back twenty-five years?”

  “Yes, Ross, it does.”

  He was dumbfounded. She was nervous, but determined. It was taking a lot out of her.

  “When you broke up with her, you kept her on, working with you in the kilns—”

  “I didn’t ‘keep her on,’” he snapped. “I was finishing a commission, she threatened to raise hell with the client if I didn’t let her stay. I needed that commission. So she stayed.”

  “When she finally left you, do you know why?”

  “No, but it was a load off my mind.”

  “She was four months pregnant . . . beginning to show.”

  He looked at her coldly. “No.
I didn’t know that.” Jesus, Sylvie. She was an enigma. She was an abyss.

  “Five months after she left she had Leda.”

  “God . . . damn.”

  “That’s right, Ross. Leda was your daughter.”

  “What! Wait!” He almost came off the bench. He could hardly get the words out. “How could you think that? Why would you think that?”

  Céleste was looking at him with an obstinate expression, waiting.

  “She told you that,” he said flatly. He was stunned. “Sylvie told you that I was Leda’s father.”

  “She always blamed you for Leda’s deformity . . . for making her work around the gases from the kilns while she was pregnant.”

  “‘Making’ her? I just told you, she threatened to scuttle the project if I didn’t let her stay. And how could I have known she was pregnant?”

  Céleste gave him a cold glance at the lameness of his remark.

  “Jesus,” he said, “this is all a horrible deception.” It was beginning to come into focus, what Sylvie had done, the enormity of her lies.

  “Listen. Céleste. Listen to me. Sylvie and I had not had sexual relations for six months—Christ, longer than that. Céleste, I caught her having an affair with another sculptor. Her affair, it wasn’t even . . . discreet. A lot of people knew. I was too stupid to see it until I actually walked in on it. I went berserk. Beat the shit out of the guy. Almost . . . killed him. I didn’t touch her after that.”

  “She said—”

  “Stop! I’ll tell you what happened. I don’t give a damn what Sylvie said. After that she . . . she threatened to kill herself if I kicked her out. I let her stay for another two months. I wasn’t living at the studio, so she moved in there. It was okay for a while, a month, two. But when it was clear to her that I wouldn’t have anything more to do with her, when she couldn’t reignite the relationship, she started going crazy. She destroyed a couple of maquettes. I kicked her out. She threatened to make a scene with the client . . . ruin things. We compromised. I’d let her help me to the end of the project. She thought if she stayed around, she could change my mind about her. It was a stupid thing to hope for, only showed how unrealistic she was. She was always . . . just on the edges of reality.”

  “If this is true . . .”

  “It’s true,” he said. “It’s the truth. Leda is not my daughter. It’s not possible. It’s not true.”

  Céleste looked away. She stared down the allée of chestnuts and maples. She didn’t look at him when she spoke.

  “Sylvie . . . when Leda . . . when the deformity began to develop,” she said, “Sylvie was beside herself. She began obsessing over the ‘reason’ for what was happening. You . . . she said you had forced her to work with the kilns with you. It was your fault.”

  “Céleste, even if that had been true, it would have affected the fetus, for God’s sake. Leda would have been born with some kind of deformity. It wouldn’t have been something that would have developed in adolescence.”

  “Always,” she said, “all I’d ever heard from her were stories about how selfish you were, how cruel. You impregnated her, made promises to her, kicked her out. You abandoned her and Leda. You . . .”

  She stopped and put a hand on her forehead as if she were feeling to see if she had a fever.

  “Leda was thirteen. She wanted a reason for it, too. She wanted something to blame. She believed her mother. She was easily convinced. And I . . . I had heard these stories all these years. I believed her, too, I needed to believe, I needed to hate you to justify what Leda wanted us to do.”

  He was appalled. None of them, himself included, had taken a lot of convincing to do what they had done. He was no wiser than they were. But he was still shocked at what she had been willing to do.

  “That’s a lot of hate,” he said, “to frame me for murder.”

  Céleste turned to him. “What?”

  “What have you done with the videotapes?” It made him queasy to ask that, but he had to know.

  “Videotapes?”

  “Do you want me to ‘buy’ them from you, is that it?”

  “What are you talking about, videotapes?”

  “She told me you’d made videotapes of me getting rid of Lacan’s body. You were going to use them to blackmail me. That’s what this is all about.”

  “Oh . . . God . . .” She gaped at him. “Oh . . . Ross. There are no videotapes. There’s nothing like that.”

  “She said the plan was yours.”

  “No! She came to me. I was desperate to get away from Michel . . . I had to get away from him. She knew. She knew how I felt, that I couldn’t do it anymore, not for her, not for anything. God help me, I agreed to go along. I’m ashamed of it, Ross, but I did it. I wanted to get away from him so desperately. And I . . . I used what Sylvie had said all these years . . . I used all of that to justify what I was going to do.”

  He was skeptical.

  “How was she going to blackmail me? What was Leda going to use?”

  “She wouldn’t tell me. She said she knew something, something from your past that you’d pay a ‘fortune’ to keep quiet. I assumed she knew something from Sylvie.”

  “No,” he said. “There was nothing. Nothing like that. The only thing I’ve ever done in my life that I could be blackmailed for . . . is what I did for you.”

  Céleste turned away again and buried her face in her hands, but only for a moment.

  “God,” she said, looking up, “what has happened here? What have we done?”

  “She told me . . . she said that you were the one who killed Lacan.”

  She spun around to him. “You know how it happened. It was the way we told you. How could I have done that?”

  “She said he was asleep.”

  “No . . . no, no, no! I did not kill Michel Lacan.”

  They stared at each other, both of them realizing the magnitude of Leda’s manipulation and deception. They were appalled at their own stupidity and gullibility.

  He saw her disorientation. She was shaken, afraid. Abruptly she stood and started walking, not away, but in a confused, distracted wander. He hesitated, then went to her and took her arm and turned her around. The touch of her felt strange. It was something he thought he would never experience again, the texture of her skin, the living warmth of her.

  She was distracted, as if he had awakened her from a daydream.

  “Go on with it,” he said. “I’ve got to know the rest of it.”

  Chapter 42

  She stood in front of him, speechless. He couldn’t imagine what else she might say. This was turning into a nightmare of another sort, but he believed that if they kept talking, there was a chance they would wake up in a less frightening world.

  “This is unforgivable,” she said.

  “Just finish it.”

  She nodded but looked away from him.

  “I couldn’t go through with it,” she continued. “I mean the blackmailing. I . . . I didn’t have the stomach for it. I didn’t have the heart for it.”

  She was tearing the leaf.

  “You . . . weren’t what I’d expected. At all. I hadn’t expected . . . anything to change. What I found myself . . . what I was beginning to feel for you . . . I didn’t expect any of that. It was outrageous. Inconceivable. Everything, all of it, was flying apart.”

  “You told her this.”

  “I didn’t have to. She saw it happening. But, yes, eventually I said, no more. I was jumping out.”

  “Then Lacan showed up.”

  She nodded.

  “Did you know he was coming?”

  “No. I answered the door and there he was. I told you, I never knew. I had to let him know where I was at all times. He always knew where to find me.”

  “So . . . Leda’s attack . . .”

  “It had to have been spontaneous. I don’t know what she was thinking. She didn’t have anything to gain from it. My arrangements with Lacan are what she told you they were.”

  �
�She saw an opportunity to save her scheme,” he said, “and to ratchet up the stakes. Did you know about the note she left in the bank box?”

  He saw her brace herself, and her reaction answered his question.

  “No . . .”

  He told her what had happened, and she began shaking her head no.

  “No, that’s not true,” she said. “No, he was dead. I know he was dead.” She paused and composed herself. She started talking slowly.

  “When Leda . . . burst into the room she hit . . . him with one violent swing of the pipe. The blood flew everywhere. . . . It didn’t knock him out . . . his eyes flew open and then shut halfway. He just held himself up, his arms straight down on the bed . . . and he seemed as if he were trying to wake up . . . but he . . . but he grabbed me as if . . . as if he were trying to hang on to consciousness. I screamed . . . screamed and fought to get away from him, and Leda swung again and . . . it was only a glancing blow and . . . he nodded over me . . . blood everywhere, and I got clear of him, and she hit him a third time . . . and again . . . pounding at him.”

  She was staring away, her voice growing softer as she went on.

  “Somehow I got across the bed and stopped her. We both stood there . . . dull with shock. Leda was making . . . I don’t know . . . noises . . . verging on hysteria. I grabbed the pipe from her. I thought: If he’s not dead, it’s not murder; if he’s not dead, it’s not murder . . . over and over. I made her sit down and went to the bed and checked him.”

  She looked at him.

  “He was alive. And then he died. I saw him die.”

  She buried her face in her hands again, but this time she didn’t look up. They stood there, alone together in the autumn light. He was close enough to her to see the silver strands in her hair, to see the hollow in her neck where it met her collarbone and where he had kissed her so much, but never enough.

  He reached out and drew her to him and held her. He pulled her hands from her face, but she turned her head away and then embraced him and buried her face in his shoulder. He thought the color of the light coming through the allée of autumn trees and the feel of her body as she cried were too much to bear. He would remember this when age had ravaged everything else from him and left him mute and empty. He would let nothing, not even escaping time, take this memory away from him.