Animosity Read online

  • • •

  When he got back he went to the kiln and rolled out the gurney. Only gray crumbles of Lacan’s bones were still there, not entirely consumed. He pulverized them easily with the end of a small log from the woodpile. He used a flat shovel to scoop up the drab ash and then scattered it in the brush behind the kiln. Lacan was gone.

  * * *

  He lay in his bed, his arms behind his head, his eyes dreaming at the ceiling. Outside, the hard-driving drone of cicadas lifted him from the bed, and the warm afternoon breeze flowed around him.

  He had left Céleste sitting on the sofa. The day was odd. The way he felt, he had never felt before.

  Chapter 29

  “What’s this? Something different?”

  She was standing in the opened doorway of the studio. It was two days later.

  “Yeah, something different,” he said. It was the first time they had spoken since the night of Lacan’s death. He was standing at one of the workbenches where he had set up a modeling stand and was beginning to lay out his tools, which he kept in drawers and shelves underneath the benches.

  “A maquette?” she asked, coming into the studio. “Is that it? You’re going to be doing clay?”

  He turned around and looked at her. He had barely been able to keep food in his stomach for two days, and although he knew they had to get on with their routine, he hardly expected a perky attitude to be part of it.

  She came up and leaned her forearms on the opposite end of the workbench to watch him. Her face, her incredible face, was as fresh as if her life had been carefree and blessed. She wore a yellow sundress, cut low in front, an undeniably sexy style. The lump of her back was shockingly discordant.

  “A rough maquette,” he said. “I’m just going to experiment.”

  “But it’s what you usually do, isn’t it?” She reached across and picked up one of his rosewood modeling tools and began toying with it.

  “I guess. For the most part.”

  He bent down and pulled a five-pound box of Colorado Red terra-cotta clay off the shelf, hoisted it onto the bench, and began pulling out chunks of clay from the plastic bag inside.

  While he prepared the armature on the modeling stand to take the clay, Leda wandered over to the opened windows. She stood at one of them and looked outside, at the kiln shed. She said nothing, but he was afraid she would. She stared at the kiln a long time. He kept working.

  “We ought to talk about it,” she said, still staring out the window, tapping the smooth, curved end of the tool against her lips.

  “No, we ought not to talk about it.” He stayed busy, not looking at her.

  “Why?”

  “Dumb question, Leda.”

  She turned around to look at him. “Maybe dumb to you, but I need to deal with this.”

  She sounded embarrassingly insincere, as if she were quoting from a pop psychology advice column on “closure.”

  “You seem to be dealing with it quite well as it is,” he said.

  “Do you believe that things are always the way they ‘seem’?”

  “Aren’t you and Céleste sick of it by now?”

  “What do you know about it? Nothing. We haven’t said a single sentence to each other about it.”

  “Why?” He found that hard to believe.

  “She won’t. I’ve tried. She won’t.”

  “Well, I won’t, either, so it looks like you’re out of luck.” He looked at her. “You’d better get your clothes off.”

  “Yes. Céleste told me that was our big plan, ‘business as usual.’ Sounds like a shrewd scheme to me.”

  He ignored her sarcasm as she went to the modeling platform and began to undress.

  “Get comfortable,” he said, “this’ll take longer than the sketching poses. You’ll be there awhile.”

  She tried several positions, then settled into one, and he began to work. After anchoring a ball of clay to the armature for the core of the figure, he flattened a pad for the base and rolled lengths of clay between his hands to get the solid coils for the legs.

  He worked in silence, and though Leda honored it, he could tell from her face that she was doing plenty of thinking. He didn’t care. He wasn’t going to tell her that he was still too shaken to continue sketching. Drawing required a kind and degree of concentration that he couldn’t muster anymore. He didn’t know how to analyze it, he just knew that the thought of drawing was unnerving. At least modeling clay had a therapeutic quality to it.

  Time passed quickly. Leda was stoic, but after a while he noticed her trembling slightly, and he knew he had taken her as far as she could go without a break.

  “Smoke a cigarette,” he said, standing and going to the sink at the back of the studio. He washed the clay off his hands, dampened a rag, returned with it, and draped it over the developing maquette.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked, lighting a cigarette.

  “I’m just keeping the clay wet. You want to see it?”

  She shrugged. “Sure.”

  She came off the platform with her cigarette, as comfortable without clothes as she had always been. He didn’t know why that was unsettling to him, but it was. Should she be more modest now that she had clubbed a man to death? What was the protocol for behavior after such a thing?

  He took the damp rag off the maquette, and she stood beside him and looked at it, smoking. She moved around to the other side of the worktable and looked at it. She went to the other end of the bench and looked, and then she came back on the other side of him and stood close to him. She was very close. Closer than she needed to be. He moved over a step. She moved closer to him again, bending to one side to look at the maquette. He could smell her, the fragrance of her, despite the cigarette.

  She put out the cigarette on the rough corner of the workbench and turned to him, letting the last wisps of smoke snake out of her parted lips.

  They looked at each other, and she reached down and took his hand. She took the damp rag out of it and put his hand on one of her breasts. He recognized the shape of it, knew it, the perfect, conical shape of the Esquiline Venus.

  She was staring at him so hard that all he saw was her face, nothing else. He examined every angle of it, every rise and fall of its small planes, every subtle blue vein that floated just below the surface of her youthful skin.

  She guided his hand over her breast, lightly, softly, so that he could feel the change of texture when it passed over her nipple. He concentrated on the planes of her cheekbones as she took his hand lower, circled his fingers around her navel so that he felt the smooth gradations of the muscles of her abdomen, floated them over the contour that fell toward her pubis so that he felt the line of her groin reaching in from her hip. He studied her brow, her temple, the margins of her hair, as she took his hand between her legs.

  She tucked it there, held it with her thighs, and then she put her own hand on his crotch. Her smile confirmed what she thought she would find there.

  There was a moment when he didn’t know what was happening, didn’t allow himself to recognize what he was feeling.

  Suddenly she spun around. Instinctively he raised his arm, and in an instant he found himself embracing the swollen, cartilaginous hump, a feeling so unnatural, so far beyond his experience, that he couldn’t react at all. He stood there, holding Leda in an embrace that pressed his face against a form of anatomy that he never in his life imagined he would see, much less touch, much less embrace.

  He didn’t know what made him do it, or rather not do it, but he didn’t recoil. In that moment he knew that that was exactly what she had expected him to do. He knew that she had tried to seduce him, but only so that she could shock him, to repulse him, and to have him experience all those emotions in the turning of a few seconds.

  But he just stood there holding her. She began to laugh, thinking he was stunned, too stunned to move. He continued to hold her. Her laughter started to build, then faltered. The longer he held her, the less sure she was of wha
t was happening. His shock should have been quickly followed by a recoil, but it wasn’t. Her laughter died in the silence of his refusal to release her.

  What was he doing? He didn’t know. They stood there in stupid silence, he refusing to withdraw his awkward embrace, she suddenly discombobulated, her cruel intentions baffled by his unwillingness to behave predictably.

  Suddenly he was astonished at the intensity and the nature of his emotions, as his embrace became an enfolding act of compassion. He had recognized her derisive laughter, had felt her uncertain reaction to his immobility, had understood her withering confusion. And now, in an unbelievable reversal of everything either of them had expected, he found himself holding her because he wanted to comfort her, to comfort the anguished child who had watched in horror as her body began to swell like some unimaginable creature in a cruel fairy tale, to comfort the young woman who dreaded the recoil in the eyes of men and who must have lived with a sense of isolation that was far beyond anything he could even have understood.

  She began to weep. In silence at first, then softly, then openly, then uncontrollably.

  He had no idea what made him hold her in that way, what compelled him to commiserate with her, but he did. He did.

  She seemed to weep forever. He stood there, holding this naked, strange, beautiful, undeniably unattractive woman while she cried as he had never heard another woman cry in all his life.

  And then she ferociously tore herself away from him. She ran—staggered—to the modeling platform and stumbled onto it and grabbed her dress off the chair, her face averted. She pulled on the dress, struggling, fumbling unsuccessfully, sounds coming from her that he could compare only to squeals. She fought the dress with such futility that he was about to go up and help her when she finally got it on in some fashion of disarray, and then she left the platform, avoiding the steps—and him—by crouching down and sitting on the edge of it and finding the floor with her feet as she held the dress on her with her hands and arms.

  Stifling sobs and clutching awkwardly at her dress, she fled, bumping into workbenches as she contorted her body to keep her face turned away from him. She disappeared through the door into the sunlight.

  He stood alone next to the workbench like a slow-witted adolescent who has just misunderstood an encounter with a woman. Yet he did understand, all too well, profoundly, deep within himself.

  Chapter 30

  He wasn’t able to keep his mind on anything at all in the afternoon, and the empty minutes piled up against each other in drifts.

  He stared out the windows; he stared at the walls; he stared at the ceiling; but most of all he stared at Leda’s unfinished maquette. He wondered why in the hell she had done that. Was it a reaction to the maquette? Had she planned it before she came? Why, to either question? If yes to the first: Then she must have been disturbed by the appearance of the maquette. If yes to the second: Then . . . then what?

  His mind rammed up against the question again and again, but each time it was repelled by his own lack of insight. He wasn’t even sure that he was involved in what she had done at all, except as a convenient tool for her assault on her abyss of frustrations. Did she want to know if she could arouse him sexually? She had. Then why the cruelty that followed? Maybe she sensed that he wasn’t going to allow it to go beyond that point. Or was she angry at herself for not having the guts to push it all the way and find out?

  Maybe it was for all of those reasons. And for far more than he would ever know or could understand.

  He waited for Céleste all through the hot afternoon. Sunset turned the summer clouds bloody orange and laced their margins with gold. Then the shadows crept in, and dusk sucked away the color until it was dark.

  • • •

  When the telephone rang it woke him. The second and third rings echoed in the high ceiling of the studio.

  “Hello.” He knew it was going to be Céleste.

  “How about a Pacifico at Graber’s?”

  “Amado.”

  “Yes.”

  He didn’t want to. He really didn’t want to. “Okay,” he said. “When?”

  “I’m walking out the door right now.”

  He started to take the Mercedes. He already had the keys in his hands before he stopped. The Mercedes? He wouldn’t do that. Why was he avoiding the Jeep? Shit. That’s how easy it was. Just like that. He went back and got the Jeep keys and drove off.

  He stopped at the bar—he didn’t want to, but that’s what he always did—and got a Pacifico from Nata, who said that Amado was already waiting in the patio.

  The place was full. He didn’t look at anyone as he made his way through the tables to Amado, who was already smoking a fresh cigar. He liked the smell of it. But he didn’t look forward to the conversation. He just wasn’t up to it. He didn’t want to do it.

  “So you’ve been busy, then?” Amado asked with unsuspicious cheerfulness as he sat down.

  “Why?”

  “It’s been a couple of weeks.”

  “Oh, yeah. Yeah, I’ve been busy.”

  “How’s the commission going?”

  It was an innocent question . . . and it wasn’t. Amado knew damn well he was working with Leda. Why did he pretend he’d forgotten that? What was it about someone acting innocent that gave them away? Was Amado being too casual? And how did one describe too casual? It was all in the infinitesimal degrees of subtlety. If he had to write it out in a paragraph, describe what he saw in Amado’s demeanor, it would be impossible to express.

  “What do you think?”

  Amado looked guilty. “Really, then. You’re still working with Leda?”

  “Did you think I wouldn’t be?”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Do you think I’d change my mind?”

  Amado didn’t say anything.

  “Did you think I should change my mind?”

  “Ross—”

  “Why didn’t you just ask me?”

  “Ross, I could tell you felt strangely about it.”

  “Oh. You were being careful with me?”

  “Well, yes, damn it, I was,” Amado said, almost losing his equanimity.

  He cringed inside. He wasn’t acting right. Already he was acting “different.”

  “Are you still seeing Céleste?” Amado asked.

  “Not in a while.”

  Amado nodded and pulled on his cigar. He wasn’t going to follow up on that one, and Ross was glad.

  “What about the sketching, then? How is that going?”

  He did his best to talk about Leda’s sketches as he usually talked about his work with Amado. It required unbelievable discipline. If Amado was too casual, Ross couldn’t be casual enough. He didn’t know how to act, and he was afraid his confusion was all too clear to Amado. And normally Amado would have been curious about everything having to do with so unusual a project. He would have been overflowing with questions. Specific questions, detailed questions about Leda’s appearance. He never stinted or gave short shrift to his curiosity.

  But now he listened to Ross with an expression that told Ross he wasn’t going to ask a single one of those questions that were so typical of him. And he didn’t.

  “Well, it sounds fascinating,” Amado said when he stopped. “You seem to be enjoying it.”

  It was a blatant lie, and this time he was aware of Amado studying him closely. They both knew it was a lie, and Amado wanted to see his reaction to it. For all his understanding of what was going on, he couldn’t bring himself to react at all, not with honesty, not with a lame response, not with . . . anything at all.

  Silence fell between them. They looked around the patio. He felt oddly detached. He couldn’t even muster enough care to pretend with his old friend. His emotions were cauterized, as if a thick scab had grown around his heart.

  “Ross.”

  He looked at Amado.

  “I’m going back to London in a few days,” Amado said. “For a couple of weeks, I think. Have to check in on
the house, catch up on some business there. Why don’t you come with me? Not for the whole time. Four or five days. We’ll look up old friends, dine at our favorite restaurants . . .”

  Ross was already shaking his head. “Can’t.”

  “A few days? You’re not into the full swing of anything yet. And we haven’t done that in a long while.”

  “I can’t, Amado.” Did he say that too abruptly? Did he sound impatient? “Look,” he added quickly, “I’m . . . just starting a series of maquettes. I’ve got to keep my mind on that. I just can’t leave now.”

  Amado held up both hands and turned his head, making a calming motion. “No problema. I understand that,” he said. “Work is work. It was just a thought.” He softened his tone, as if he were a humoring physician trying to sound reasonable with an unreasonable patient. “If you want to, if it happens that you could come for a few days later on, then come on. It would be good to have you there.”

  Ross quickly took a swig of beer to cover his discomfort. He was botching this. Amado knew something was terribly wrong, and what was worse, he wasn’t quizzing Ross about it. Something was telling him to be solicitous, to back away.

  Another awkward silence. Ross turned away, pretended to be looking around the patio, but he wasn’t seeing anything. His heart was slugging away, and he could feel Amado’s eyes on him. Goddamn. He felt transparent, as if his heart and mind were made of cellophane, and Amado could see the cause of his symptoms.

  Shit. He had burned a man to cinders in his kiln. How in God’s name could that be? How the hell could he have done that?

  “I don’t know . . . ,” Amado said.

  Ross jerked his head around, gaping at Amado.

  “I don’t know, but I have to be honest with you, my friend, you seem to me to be under a lot of pressure.” He puffed on his cigar. “I know you well enough to know that now is not the time to inquire of your private affairs, Ross, but, you know, I don’t have to remind you that I am a man of discretion. I can keep secrets.”

  He paused.

  He stared at Amado in surprise . . . expecting him to say he knew about the murder . . . about the kiln . . . about everything.