Animosity Read online

  Also by David Lindsey

  The Color of Night

  Requiem for a Glass Heart

  An Absence of Light

  Body of Truth

  Mercy

  In the Lake of the Moon

  Spiral

  Heat from Another Sun

  A Cold Mind

  Black Gold, Red Death

  ANIMOSITY. Copyright © 2001 by David L. Lindsey. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  For information address Warner Books, Hachette Book Group, USA, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017, Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com.

  A Time Warner Company

  ISBN: 978-0-7595-2338-8

  A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2001 by Warner Books.

  First eBook Edition: May 2001

  For Joyce,

  my second self,

  ex dono Dei.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 1

  He watched the rain on the night street from his second-floor window. It was only a mizzle, gathering on the broad leaves of the linden trees along the narrow street until the leaves sagged under its weight and shed the huge, spattering drops. It had been a cold winter in Paris, but spring came early and wet.

  Ross Marteau turned and went to a workbench in his studio. He picked up the last slice of apple from the plate where he had cut it up with a paring knife and put it into his mouth as he looked around. The bronze sculpture of a nude woman, posed walking away and turning in a backward glance, was gone. But there were small clay maquettes of it everywhere. He had overseen the installation of the Turning Woman commission two weeks earlier. The client was thrilled. There was a party in the elegant conservatory of his home in St.-Germain-des-Prés where the sculpture was the center of attention. Champagne. Friends and sycophants cooed in admiration. The woman, the client’s young wife, was flattered. Everything her husband was proud of, her taut flesh and firm musculature (his), her high-riding breasts (his), her entire, finely distributed anatomy (his), was there to stay. In thirty years if people forgot, or if they never knew her, they could look into the lush light of the conservatory and see what a fine thing she had once been.

  So the studio was dormant. Job done. The dust had settled for good. The tools and paraphernalia of clay modeling were scattered about, waiting to be organized and put away. He would do that, later. The place needed sweeping. It had been weeks since he’d bothered with it. This morning’s coffee sat in a cold pot on a hot plate near the back of the studio, where there was an open shower, a toilet behind a muslin curtain, a rust-stained porcelain sink.

  Chewing the slice of apple, he walked back to the window, leaned against the frame, and looked out again. And there she was, under her umbrella, gliding along beneath the dripping lindens, her raincoat glistening, her stride strong and quick. She turned without looking and crossed the wet street to the sidewalk below him, then disappeared into the foyer below.

  He looked toward the door and waited. He heard her coming up the turning stairs, quick, impatient steps. No hesitation on the landing as she reached the last stair, and then the studio door flung open. There she stood, holding her dripping umbrella, her creamy face and a sheaf of auburn hair pulled to one side and falling over the front of one shoulder, making her seem as though she were the only thing in color, a pastel woman in a black-and-white world.

  “Goddamn you,” she said. “You son of a bitch.”

  She looked around the studio, her hazel-eyed glare slicing around the space until she found his things piled in a corner.

  “God,” she said, looking at his clothes hanging on a makeshift wooden rod underneath the long slanting skylight.

  “You knew I was going to,” he said. “You knew.”

  “We’d talked about it.”

  “That’s right. Exactly.”

  “You didn’t say when. You didn’t say today.” She was furious.

  “I didn’t really have to, did I?”

  “We didn’t agree it was final.”

  “Agree? Christ, Marian, we haven’t agreed on anything for a year now, longer. As for final, it’s been final for six months. We’ve just never had the guts to admit it to each other.”

  She was trembling.

  She dropped the umbrella and fought off her raincoat, threw it over one of the maquettes. She was poured into black tights, from ankles to waist. She wore a white blouse with a pleated front, its long tail gathered under her rib cage and tied in a knot. Her sandals were wet. Her hands were wet, and she wiped them on her blouse to dry them. Strands of auburn hair hovered in agitation around her face. She was breathing heavily, having quick-walked from their flat near Métro Raspail.

  She put a long hand on one hip, wrist up, and looked around, searching for the next thing to say, and then snapped her eyes on him.

  “This is . . . vicious,” she said.

  Vicious. She liked that word. Ironically.

  “It’s over.” He paused. “It’s over for me.”

  She glared at him. He imagined her hair, hot with her anger, heating like the coils on his hot plate in the corner. He imagined the auburn strands beginning to glow.

  Abruptly she turned her back on him, hand on hip, the other cupping her forehead, a gesture of wild distress. He looked at her tight buttocks as she stood with one leg cocked at the knee. The woman had a beautiful body, that was all you could say about it. He was ashamed to admit that it was harder to leave a body like that than one that was less stunning. How long had he stayed with her just because of the body?

  She spun around.

  “What . . . are we going to do?”

  “I’m through here,” he said. “I’m going home.”

  She looked as if he’d slapped her. With these seemingly innocuous words he had locked her out of his house, and out of his life.

  “No,” she said.

  “Marian, I can’t do this anymore. This past year’s been excruciating. There’s nothing left . . . between us.” Pause. “Not for me.”

  “You think I’m going to just let you walk away from three years together?”

  “Nearly.”

  “What?”

  “Nearly three years.”

  “Goddamn you! It’s three years of my life, too.”

  “Look, we gave it ou
r best shot—”

  “Shot! That’s what you call three years together . . . a ‘shot’?”

  “Okay, wrong choice of words. You’re right. But I can’t do this anymore. I’m weary of insults, weary of grievances, weary of accusations of wrongs, imagined or real.”

  “Weary of me.”

  He didn’t say anything, an insulting silence.

  “What’s your record with a woman, Ross? This it? Three years? I think it is, isn’t it? Was it always their fault, too, Ross? Did you lecture them, too . . . tell them how you couldn’t take it anymore? Tell them how weary you were . . . of them? You arrogant son of a bitch!”

  He was exhausted. They had just been through two days of this, a marathon siege of verbal hostilities that had bloodied their souls and murdered the last simulacrum of caring that might have remained between them. It had all been said in those forty-eight hours, words long held in check, words oft repeated, words that should never have passed their lips or even left the mean corners of their hearts.

  “I can’t be with you anymore,” he said, “and I don’t want to be.”

  She looked at him, stricken. The expression on her face was wrenching, and it shocked him. What constitutes a mortal wound to the heart? What does it look like, looking back at you? It really was the end for them. And now—at this moment—she knew it, too.

  There was a partition of free-standing wooden shelves near the doorway where he kept a mélange of junk that he had gathered in the flea markets during the past year. He was an incurable collector of stuff, and wherever he traveled and stayed for any length of time he accumulated the priceless and the worthless together, its commercial value having no bearing on his desire to have it.

  Marian leaped at the shelf and snatched a vase from it. It was a pottery vase with a crazed turquoise glaze that Marian herself had made in the first year of their relationship. He loved the piece and carried it with him whenever he had to relocate for any length of time. He put it on a shelf or a mantel or a ledge, and all the other things that he collected while he was there were gradually drawn to the vase as if it were the magnetic hub of their cumulation.

  In one quick sweep of her body she wheeled around and flung the vase with all her might against the largest of the Turning Woman maquettes. The vase exploded, blowing green shards into the air in a radiant burst of turquoise fireworks. He heard the pieces falling all around him like hail and saw them skittering across the rough wooden floor.

  Marian was in a rage, hyperventilating. He saw what happened next before it happened, as if he were watching a play he had seen before. He knew the script, saw it in an instant, whole, complete, though he was incapable of doing anything about it.

  Eyes swollen in wrath, Marian lunged at the table where he had been eating the apple and grabbed the paring knife. He remembered her posture in that instant as if he had sculpted her: long body stretched out, right arm reaching for the paring knife, one black-tighted leg extended behind, the other bent for support, buttocks compacted with tension, a flame of auburn hair falling across her right eye. It was a narrative posture of aggression.

  He didn’t remember how she gained her balance to throw the knife, but he remembered her hand outstretched toward him, almost as if reaching for him. But she wasn’t reaching. She had released the knife. It tumbled sloppily through the air toward him because she didn’t know what she was doing, didn’t know how to do it properly, just slung it somehow in his direction. There are scientific odds to tumbling. When the knife reached him, what would those odds be that it would hit him handle first? Or blade first? Or flat? Or any one of the 360 degrees of angles in between?

  He put up his hands and turned to the side.

  The blade went into his right deltoid muscle as straight and smooth as a bullet. And buried to the hilt.

  Chapter 2

  He took a taxi to Val de Grâce, a hospital not too far off Boulevard Saint Michel. He left the paring knife in his shoulder, figuring that if they took it out themselves, it would give them a better knowledge of the internal damage. He knew it wasn’t serious, but by the time he got to the hospital it was hurting like hell, and he was feeling a little queasy. He’d thrown a sports jacket over his shoulder to hide the damn thing.

  When Marian recovered from the shock of what she’d done and realized she hadn’t killed him, her anger resurged, and she grabbed her raincoat and umbrella and stormed out of the studio, screaming that she wished it had gone into his throat.

  He was surprised at how long he had to wait at the hospital with a knife in his shoulder. Eventually they took him into an emergency room, removed the knife, cleaned the wound, applied four stitches, and gave him some pain reliever. They said that because the wound was deep the pain was going to be significant, and the danger of infection was a concern. They wanted to see him again the next evening.

  One of the nurses recognized him from the Paris Match article of two months before. It was embarrassing because the article had been one of those “Personality” shorts recounting the continued rumors of his rather noisy breakup with Marian. The gossipy copy was accompanied by two photographs of him and Marian outside Brasserie Femme one night as they stopped all pedestrian traffic by giving each other a thorough tongue-lashing, their posture aggressive, their faces contorted, no shame in thrall to their self-centered hostilities.

  The nurse was far too interested, and Ross guessed that she’d make a telephone call after he was gone. Another little something for the media.

  When he got back to the studio around midnight, he swallowed one of the pills the doctor had given him, turned out the lights, and lay down on the bed. The city glow came in from the skylight, and he could see the drifting mist.

  He had forgotten to ask the doctor if the painkiller would make him sleepy, but he lay there and stared at the ceiling, waiting to feel it. He wasn’t sleepy otherwise, too much adrenaline.

  Ross Marteau had made a comfortable living as a sculptor for nearly twenty years now. He’d traveled all over the world, knew extraordinary people, acquired a respectable renown. As a sculptor, critical acclaim had eluded him and probably would continue to, but success certainly had not. He worked hard and depended on discipline to accomplish what his talents allowed.

  But he wasn’t driven to soul-rending struggles of angst in pursuit of art in the way that he understood great men were often driven. He ardently loved sculpture and considered himself a craftsman, even a master craftsman, but he had fallen in love with success from the very first moment he’d encountered it as a young sculptor. As a result, he had abandoned his early ideals and built a lucrative career on the smarmy nudes and busts of rich women and of rich men’s wives and mistresses. A Marteau nude provided a flawless classical technique, a keen eye for anatomy, and a wise sense of balance between near genius and flattery. It was the gift of subtlety in flattery that had kept his commissions schedule full. It was his near genius—his recreant decision always to sell out for the big money rather than to plunge fervently into the deep well of his latent gifts—that made him bury his self-loathing behind a crust of cynicism and restless discontent.

  Nor had he had any more integrity in committing his loyalty to a single woman than he had in accepting the responsibilities of his neglected talent, as Marian had so quickly pointed out. In the past several months, as it had become increasingly clear to him that his relationship with Marian had deteriorated beyond repair, he had begun to think about the fact that he had never married or had a lasting relationship. He didn’t so much worry about it as wonder about it.

  He had always been a serial monogamist. He didn’t like being alone. Or rather, he preferred being alone with someone. His work required a certain amount of solitude, with necessary bursts of gregariousness, but in the long haul he wanted the company of a woman. Not, usually, just any woman. He had never been like that. Well, when he was younger there had been a time when he couldn’t get enough of the models who paraded through his studios, but those days were long ago
and in another world. And models, he had soon learned, were another world all their own.

  He woke up during the night with his shoulder throbbing so intensely that he could feel the reverberations all the way down the right side of his body. He pulled himself up and sat on the edge of the bed and realized he was still dressed. Wearily he took off his clothes. Without even looking at his watch to see if it was permissible to take another pill, he opened the amber plastic bottle, took out another one, and swallowed it. Then he lay down again and passed out.

  • • •

  He didn’t fly home immediately. It was spring in Paris, the sweetest of all seasons in the sweetest of all cities, and he hated to leave. He spent a week feverishly cleaning out the studio that he had leased for the year. His shoulder proved to be a greater disability than he had anticipated. Eventually he had to hire a couple of men to come in and help him. When he had packed all of his tools and crated the maquettes, he shipped everything home. He settled with his landlord and moved out. Marian hadn’t contacted him since the stabbing, but he knew she would. He didn’t want to have anything else to do with her.

  He moved across the Seine to St.-Germain-des-Prés. He got a suite in the small, secluded Relais Geneviève near the Seine and convinced the hotel management to let him stay under an assumed name. He slept for the greater part of two days.

  The weeks that followed were the first genuine vacation that he had had in years. Though he had never really thought about it until now, he realized that he had worked on back-to-back commissions for nearly eight years. He decided that as long as he was making major changes in his life, now was the time to interrupt that hectic pace.

  He called Gerald Beach, his client in San Francisco who had commissioned him to do yet another nude. Back-to-back young wives for older men. God, there was no end to pride and desire. He told Beach that there would be a delay of a couple of months before he could begin but promised him that he would still have plenty of time to bring the project in on schedule.

  Then he deliberately devoted himself to idleness.

  He browsed the Left Bank bookstores and bought whatever caught his curiosity, books on ancient history and psychology and religion, a how-to book on building stone walls, a biography of a lesbian abbess in Renaissance Florence, the complete poetical works of e. e. cummings, a basic history of illuminated manuscripts.