Animosity Page 13

  “I contacted my friend in Paris. You know, just to get a little background on Céleste.”

  She examined the labels again. He noted her choreography, the casual segue into the point of her story. She looked up at him.

  “It turned out,” she concluded with a little lift of her shoulders and raised eyebrows, “that she didn’t really know anything about her. She was doing a favor for a friend of a friend, too. It seems Céleste’s connection is so far removed from any of us that no one really knows where she came from.”

  “Nope. No more. I’m sorry.” Rinser was standing with his hands on hips, his smudged glasses a little crooked on his nose, the tuft of his widow’s peak out of control. “You got the absolute last case of it, Ross.”

  “Well, it was good stuff,” he said. “Too bad.”

  “Karl is on the Internet,” Rinser added. “If something turns up, I’ll call you, okay?”

  “That’ll be fine.”

  Rinser looked at Anita and dusted his hands together.

  “Oh, no thanks,” she said, sliding toward the door. “I was just . . . looking around.” She glared at Ross. “It was good chatting with you.”

  Chapter 21

  The days fell into a pattern. In the mornings Leda arrived with her almond croissants, which they ate while sitting on the modeling platform, drinking coffee from the thermos that he brought from the house. The sketching sessions themselves were increasingly experimental affairs.

  Leda’s remarkable performance with the mirrors was not repeated again, at least not in precisely that same way. She continued to use the mirrors, but her repertoire of poses was more selective, fewer at each session, though often no less outrageous. She held the poses longer, gazing at herself to the point of distraction, lost in self-fascination. He often had to remind her to change positions. Leda, it became evident, had a fetish for her own reflection.

  One day he brought out some glass cleaner from the storeroom in the back of the studio with the intention of cleaning the mirrors. She quickly stopped him, very agitated. She did not want the mirrors cleaned. And so the sessions continued as before while she communicated with herself in her own strange way through the blotchy haze of neglect.

  During their breaks they continued to talk about whatever was on Leda’s mind, and in these conversations her mercurial nature was increasingly evident. She was moody, sometimes euphoric, sometimes depressed, alternately loquacious and taciturn.

  He wanted to use these opportunities to learn more about Céleste, but Leda was far too clever to be finessed into discussing her sister. No matter how innocent the approach, any query about Céleste would provoke a sharp response from Leda, often one that took a nasty turn toward cruelty. He learned that Leda considered questions about Céleste to be distractions from Leda’s rightful ownership of these few hours with him and during which she felt that all of his attention should be focused on her. During these few hours every day she wanted his world to contain only her. Everything else should be insignificant.

  Increasingly Leda would sit down after their sessions and study his sketchbook. As was his habit, the better he got to know his model’s body, the more effort he put into the sketches, adding shading and texture, isolating small details of anatomy, and working them thoroughly, incorporating subtleties.

  As the drawings became more refined and began to look more “real” to her, Leda grew more serious about studying them. For the most part, he had left the length of the sketching sessions up to her. He learned that she tired easily, so he let her set the pace. As she became more interested in what he was producing, she grew less patient with posing. By now he had filled several notebooks with drawings of her, and after she had finished posing for the day she would take one of these sketchbooks and go to a corner of the studio and settle in to look at it for another half hour before she dressed and left. She began to take the whole exercise of the drawing sessions more seriously.

  Though he continued to ask her to stay for a light lunch, she never accepted his invitations. Their relationship remained, at Leda’s insistence, that of artist and model, limited to the confines of his studio. He never saw her in any other context. And he certainly never saw her with her sister again after that day Céleste had brought her to meet him for the first time.

  The afternoons belonged to Céleste.

  She didn’t come every day, but she came most days, arriving late when the bright summer light was just beginning to soften. She, too, wanted to look at his latest renderings of Leda, and they often went over the sketches together in the studio while sharing a bottle of wine. She would ask questions: Why did he focus on this part of the anatomy with such fine rendering? Why did he choose to study so many instances of foreshortening? The questions were detailed, and she listened carefully to his explanations.

  But Céleste didn’t come to see him in the afternoons in order to ask him questions about his progress on Leda’s drawings. She came because they couldn’t get enough of each other’s company. Sometimes they made love in the studio, but they always ended up in his bed, and she always stayed the night.

  From the beginning, his interest in Céleste had been as unusual in its progression as he had felt she was unusual in her appearance and behavior. For him, at least, it was an association permeated as much with what was absent as with what was present.

  He was powerfully attracted to her, but more than that, he felt an equally powerful kinship. This was a different ingredient, one that had not been present in any of his other relationships with women. In the past the women with whom he had become seriously involved had personalities and natures that were complementary to his own by virtue of their disparity. They most often possessed attributes that counterbalanced his own personality: white to his black, yin to his yang, light to his shadow, smooth to his rough, quick to his slow. They were, in effect, women who provided opposition to his own essential qualities, enabling their relationship to achieve a degree of equilibrium.

  But Céleste, far from being his opposite, was like him in so many respects that it was magnetic being with her, as if his personality, in confronting hers, met no significant resistance at all. He didn’t have to make allowances for her, nor did she seem to make any for him. She was, of course, a mystery to him, the way one human being is always a mystery to another. But at the same time they were kindred souls, and it didn’t take either of them long to recognize this. It wasn’t dissimilarity that drew them together, but a preternatural understanding of each other that was almost umbilical in its intuition.

  While Leda seemed to be retreating deeper within herself as his drawings of her became more realistic, his relationship with Céleste deepened in another way altogether. It grew richer, and her arrival nearly every day became the central event of his life, the one thing around which everything else revolved. He was content only when she was there with him, and the time when she wasn’t with him became little more than time in transition, that which happened in between her departures and her arrivals.

  And for the time being, they tacitly agreed to ignore the presence of dread. They neither spoke of it nor even acknowledged its silent patience in the wings.

  Chapter 22

  It was dusk, and he was sitting alone at the kitchen table, eating dinner. Looking out through the screen door into the patio, he watched as the indigo light of evening deepened and the arbor and the clay pots scattered about the courtyard were gradually swallowed by the hungering shadows. He was listening to Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Insensatez” on the CD.

  It had been several days since he had seen Céleste, and even Leda hadn’t shown up for her sketching sessions the last two days. They were the first sessions she had missed. He wanted to call them to see if they were all right, but it seemed somehow inappropriate. The strict separation between himself and the two sisters was something they seemed to have wanted, and he was reluctant to breach intent. He didn’t have to have it spelled out for him. If they wanted it that way, he didn’t feel compelle
d to disrupt their logic.

  Still, he missed Céleste, and he was curious why she hadn’t called him. As he was thinking about this, the telephone rang. He got up and went to the counter and answered.

  “Ross! Ross!” It was Leda. “God! . . . God!”

  A cold wave washed over his face.

  “Leda? What’s the matter?” He could hear her trying to get her breath. Was she crying?

  “My God, Ross . . . come . . . please . . . Oh, God!”

  “Listen . . . Leda, listen to me!”

  “Oh . . . oh . . .”

  “Leda! Stop!” He could hear her weeping hysterically, and he knew that she wasn’t listening to him, that no matter what he said to her she wasn’t going to hear him. Suddenly he panicked, thinking of Céleste. Why wasn’t Céleste on the telephone?

  “Leda . . . listen to me . . . Leda, are you . . . is Céleste hurt?!” He was suddenly furious with her for being hysterical. Goddamn her!

  Suddenly Céleste was on the telephone.

  “Ross.” Her voice was flat, chillingly calm. “Get over here. Now.”

  The telephone went dead.

  He started to dial back, then something told him not to do it, and he grabbed the Jeep keys off a hook by the telephone and ran out the front door to the driveway. In moments he was roaring down the gravel drive and then out onto Las Lomitas, turning down the hill toward the river.

  San Rafael was not a busy place at night, but the streets were far from empty. As he negotiated the crooked course that fell toward the river, he imagined catastrophes. Leda had cut herself. Or it was something horrible like a hemorrhage, something to do with her physical condition. But why was Leda talking to him herself? And why were they calling him instead of an ambulance? He told himself to slow down. Be careful. No police. Why?

  He crossed the river at Los Ciprés bridge and followed Rio Encinal to Rambach’s Mill, where he turned up into the foothills on the other side of the valley. He was in Palm Heights within minutes, pulling up to the front of the old Victorian home that sat slightly above him off the street.

  He yanked the emergency brake and clambered out of the Jeep, taking the steps two at a time as he came to them on the rising sidewalk. The lights were out in the house, at least in the front rooms, except in the entry and the living room. He bounded up the front steps to the porch, and just as he reached for the doorknob the door opened, and he was inside.

  It was the first time he’d ever been in the house. The owners, whoever they were, had restored the place immaculately. But he was only subliminally aware of this and only instantly. After that, the shock of seeing the two sisters obliterated everything else.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said.

  Both women were in their dressing gowns. Leda sat on an upholstered bench in the entry hall, her feet and knees together submissively, looking at him from under a Medusa-like tangle of jet hair. Céleste had backed away from the door and was leaning against the framed opening into the living room, her arms crossed over her stomach, her shoulders huddled. Both were smeared and spattered with blood. Leda hadn’t even tried to wipe it off, the spatters still dotting her face like scarlet freckles, the front of her gown blotched with what appeared to be spurts of it. Céleste at least had wiped her face and gotten much of it off, but she’d managed mostly to smear it. If anything, her gown seemed to have more blood on it than Leda’s.

  His eyes stopped on Céleste.

  “We’re okay,” she said hypnotically. “We’re not hurt.”

  Leda lurched to her feet and flung herself at Ross, embracing him, weeping, distraught. He looked at Céleste for an explanation, but she simply stared back at him, nothing in her face. Leda’s bloody face was buried in his neck as she wept, and he could feel tears and mucus against his neck. Reflexively he started to put his hand on her head to comfort her when his eyes caught something in her hair just inches from his face. It was a grape-size gobbet of viscous, near fleshy something tangled in the snarl of strands. It no longer glistened but was now going smoky, congealing.

  He jerked his face back—he couldn’t help it—and gasped, swore. Leda yanked her head up in surprise, saw his face, and shrieked, pushing, stumbling away from him screaming, shaking her bent head in a wild jig, flinging herself about clumsily like a crazed buffalo-thing, slapping at her tangles in a frenzy.

  Instantly Céleste was grabbing her, holding her, calming her. Wrestling with Leda, she threw a look at him.

  “Upstairs—my room—end of the hall.” And with her arms around Leda, they went down the entry hall, he guessed to a bathroom, Leda weeping, whooping in a queer, silly way.

  Wanting to get away from them, away from the out-of-control feeling of them, he turned quickly toward the stairs that ascended to his right off the hallway. They were wooden stairs, the wall and banisters painted white. A carpet runner covered the dark, wood-stained treads. When he put his hand on the newel to start up, he put it in something sticky. Blood. Jesus. He looked, and it was everywhere, against the sides of the wall, on the white balusters, smeared, streaked. Swirled palm prints. Tracky finger drags.

  He froze, unable to imagine what she was sending him up the stairs to see. Looking up the stairwell ahead of him, he took his handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his hands. Then he started up, deciding in an instant to get it over with. He couldn’t imagine . . . he couldn’t imagine . . . he couldn’t imagine what was up there.

  At the landing the banister that overlooked the entry hall below was on his left, and on the right were two closed doors that he supposed led to other bedrooms. At the end of the hall in front of him, he saw an opened door to a dark room.

  He went straight for it, the shortest trip of his life, and suddenly he was reaching around the door into the darkness, groping for the light switch on the wall.

  The lights.

  The bedroom was large. The bed was in the center of the far wall, and everything in the room led to it or came from it: bedclothes streaming off the bed toward him, strewn underwear, a container of spilled powder spattered away from it, a stipple of red black blood sprayed through the powder, an upturned slipper pointing toward the bed, a leather belt stretched out like a dead snake, buckle toward him. The body was on the bed, a man, and even his legs pointed toward the door, the soles of his feet fish-belly white, exposed in a visual alignment with his doughy buttocks.

  He went straight to the bed.

  All he could think of was that the blood was excessive. Gratuitous. Plethoric.

  The white sheets were coiled about the man in a hasty manner that revealed his naked body in spiraled strips, his putty gray flesh visible between the angled ropes of twisted material. His head was completely swaddled in sheeting that was supersaturated, spongy with blood. The shape of one ear was visible through the material. His shoulders were bare. And hairy. A strip of sheet went around his midriff and under him. His buttocks were bare. Black hair crawled up his inner thighs and into the crevice of his anus. A strip of sheet went under one leg, over the other. His lower legs were bare. As he looked at this dead flesh with an uninvited gaze, he realized that nothing he saw gave him any clue to what this man looked like. He could have been any man. Everyman. Humanity.

  In Céleste’s bed. He retched, fought it, held it. He was grief-stricken. Appalled. Sickened. Above the headboard of the bed a spurt of blood had hit the wall and squirted upward. Then the stuff had dripped down of its own weight. Chairs were overturned. Only the chair where the man had put his clothes was upright. A bedside radio was on the floor. A picture frame was facedown on the floor, as was a whiskey glass. The room smelled puggy, and he could taste the rancid sweetness of copious blood.

  He felt the nausea begin deep in his bowels, a twisting, folding sensation that crept up through him. Afraid of vomiting, he stood there like a little boy, dreading it. Just when he thought he was going to be sick, he coughed up bile. That was all. It stung his throat. He swallowed and began to perspire. He stared at the body.

  T
he man was repulsive. It was Michel Lacan, he knew. He was slightly overweight. There were gentle bulges on his sides above his hips. He hated the look of the guy’s buttocks, but he was grateful that he was on his stomach. He would have hated it worse to see his face and his penis.

  He turned around and looked out of the room from the foot of the bed. The strew of debris—it had been possessions before this, things belonging to Lacan or Céleste, but now, in this postchaotic wake, it was just debris—looked different from this angle. The opened door and the long empty hallway brought back the nausea, and he felt his bowels crawling again. Christ, he did not want to vomit.

  He walked out of the room as fast as he could, not looking at anything but his feet, swallowing, swallowing the rising in his stomach, wiping his damp face with his hand, hating the feel of cold sweat around his mouth.

  The descent down the stairs was very near an out-of-body experience. His life had changed. He saw himself, face drawn, going down into a different world from the one from which he had ascended. This was not something that would happen to him. He didn’t know people who got involved in things like this, or who did things like this, or who suffered things like this. This was not his métier. This was not his world. Yet here he was. Or here was someone very much like him.

  The sense of dread weighed on him with such oppressive density that he thought he might black out from his inability to draw enough breath. He gripped the banister with his right hand and concentrated on getting air, forgetting the blood that he smeared along behind him.

  Chapter 23

  When he reached the bottom of the stairs, Céleste and Leda had returned to the same places they had been when he’d first entered the house, Leda sitting on the upholstered bench in a taut, mindless daze; Céleste standing in the doorway to the living room, her arms folded across her stomach as if she had a stomachache.

  “What in the hell happened?” he asked hoarsely, looking at Céleste. There was a kind of crazy vibration in his sternum, a submerged excitement.