Animosity Read online

  Without intending to, he fell into a routine, spending his mornings at a table that he informally appropriated in the hotel’s garden. The kitchen brought him light lunches. In the afternoons he roamed St.-Germain-des-Prés, rummaging through its antique shops, stopping into cafés and wine bars whenever he felt like it. Discipline was studiously avoided.

  A month passed in this way. His shoulder recovered well enough, but he took note of the slowness with which he regained his complete use of it. His body wasn’t bouncing back from the wound with quite the same nonchalance that his mind had accepted it. His muscles protested and refused to let him ignore what they had been subjected to. He was strong in his upper body. A thick chest and hefty shoulders were genetic bequests that he had always taken for granted. This little acquaintance with disability, however slight it might be, was something new for him.

  Another month of idleness drifted by before he began thinking of going home. As healing as the two months of loafing had been, he was not made for a life dedicated to it. The Beach commission began worming its way into his daydreams, gradually occupying more and more of his thinking until he finally had to admit that he was itching to get on with it. He needed to be back in his own studio, surrounded by the clutter of all the things that made him comfortable.

  He called Beach in San Francisco and arranged to have his wife photographed by a woman who for years had provided him with the kind of images of his subjects that he needed. It was the first step in beginning the new commission. By the time he got home the photographs would be waiting for him. After spending a few weeks studying these, he would have Beach and his wife fly to San Rafael for several weeks of live sketching.

  Two and a half months to the day after his last encounter with Marian, he flew home.

  Chapter 3

  Texas

  He landed at Austin’s Bergstrom International Airport, took a taxi to the charter hangars, hired a small plane, and headed west. Instead of going directly to San Rafael, he asked the pilot to swing south for half an hour and then bank northward again and snake his way up through the beautifully rugged Balcones Escarpment. It was this terrain—marked by high, rolling hills wooded with oak and juniper, which the locals call cedar, and mountain laurel and mesquite, and veined by several small chalky jade rivers—that Texans knew affectionately as the Hill Country.

  As they flew low through the valleys, he could clearly see the limestone outcroppings of the old Mesozoic reefs that ran a ragged course from southwest to northeast, their beamy gray ledges presenting a monolithic ridge along the shoulders of the hills. When the early Spaniards first came into central Texas while establishing their network of trails known as the Camino Real, they thought the old limestone escarpment resembled the balconies of Spanish architecture and began referring to the region as los balcónes.

  From the air, the explosion of flowers that attracted caravans of tourists to the Hill Country every spring looked like pastel powder strewn down the hills and across the meadows and out onto the roadsides, a bright scatter-fall of coral and canary and heliotrope, shades of orange, white and cream, amethyst, and scarlet. It was a hell of a thing to see from the vantage point of the low-flying plane, an unexpectedly colorful welcome home.

  Eventually he nodded to the pilot, and they turned back over another ridge of hills and another series of valleys, humming on beneath dazzling white cirrus clouds. As they drifted upward to clear a ridge, San Rafael suddenly appeared below them, dark patches of shadows from the clouds mottling the town that straddled the green intestine passage of the Rio Encinal and crawled up out of the long narrowing valley onto the surrounding wooded hillsides.

  San Rafael was a jewel of a town established by Spanish friars as a mission in the eighteenth century. It grew slowly as a community gathered around the mission, then burgeoned and flourished during the latter half of the nineteenth century when the hillside streets of the town began to fill with block after block of Victorian homes.

  With the advent of World War I, the town’s fortunes turned and San Rafael languished for decades, almost becoming a ghost town, isolated from the clock and the calendar.

  Then in the early 1970s visitors from Austin suddenly recognized the old historic town for being the sleeping architectural prize that it was and began to take the town’s future into consideration.

  Soon serious preservationists founded the San Rafael Historical Association, and the architecture of the community was documented. Developmental restrictions were put into place and stringently enforced. The hippie tribes that had drifted into town during the sixties were gradually supplanted by artists, writers, and artisans who were drawn to San Rafael by its history and beauty and isolation and, initially, its inexpensive real estate.

  The town didn’t grow so much as it rejuvenated itself. New construction was obsessively limited and regulated. Every old building, however humble or derelict, became a target for preservation. The old became—without appearing to be—new, and everything new was strictly required to adhere to the architectural milieu that was already there. Access to San Rafael was deliberately restricted. The highway leading to it remained the same small, two-lane paved road that had wound through the valleys of the Hill Country in the 1930s.

  By the time Ross bought his place there, the new San Rafael was still discovering the place it would become. During the course of the following twenty years, however, it not only found itself, but was reincarnated: It thrived; it prospered; it became a retreat colony for the artistic cognoscente. Then, magically, it became chic. Art galleries and antique shops moved into old historic buildings, the famous and wealthy bought summer homes there, a spa nestled into one of its hillsides, and an amphitheater sprang up in a neighboring valley. Stylish, intimate restaurants served much-fussed-over southwestern cuisine in rustic but well-appointed settings. The price of real estate was now out of sight, and if you weren’t already a resident, you had to stand in line to become one.

  But San Rafael was still a small town, too, and all the simple pleasures of a small town were still there in the quiet streets, the mom-and-pop cafés, the occasional neighborhood icehouse, and the dim, quiet bars. Real life still existed there, it was just in the background.

  While the plane taxied to the small terminal office of the airstrip south of town, Ross surveyed the private planes of the summer society nosed into the new hangars along the asphalt runway. There were more than ever, it seemed. Every year there were more than ever.

  • • •

  The cab pulled through the wrought-iron gates into his property and crept along the gravel drive that led to the house. He rolled down his window and took a deep breath of the warm spring air. The resinous fragrance of cedars hung like musk in the building heat of the afternoon, and the ratcheting burr of cicadas throbbed sonorously, resembling the deep-throated drone of Tibetan monks.

  For years an old German couple had served as caretakers of the house and grounds while he was away on trips, and as the cab pulled up to the low-slung Spanish-style house with its thick stone walls and mottled tile roof, he saw that they had already unlocked the place and left the windows open.

  The cabbie helped him unload his bags, then drove away, leaving him standing on the galería that ran the length of the house. In front of him the lawn, the only “kept” part of the property, sprawled out from the house like an irregular green pool, shaded by the broad reach of old oaks that covered much of the entire three-acre compound. Beyond the lawn, he had let native brush grow dense and natural over the whole property, all of which was enclosed by a stone wall dating from the late eighteenth century.

  He turned and propped open the screen door with a river rock that sat on the edge of the porch, then carried his bags into the house. The low ceilings and thick, plastered stone walls retained a surprising amount of coolness even late into the day, as well as a faint, lingering sweetness of the mesquite wood he burned in the fireplaces during the mild southwestern winters. He wandered slowly through the silent
rooms, reacquainting himself with the shape and color of things, with the way the light came into the house through the deep casements of the windows and played on the dun-colored walls. He stopped here and there, noticing little things forgotten and confirming the presence of things he had missed.

  He went into the kitchen, which was redolent with the sweetness of fresh, ripe peaches from Mrs. Scherz’s orchard that she had left heaped high in a crockery bowl in the middle of the kitchen table as a welcome home gift. He took one of the fat peaches and went out through the back screened door to the patio. The mockingbird was the first thing he heard, still and always at her perch on the very top of a resplendent bougainvillea, its cerise bracts tumbling over the arbor bordering the courtyard. He bit into the peach and crossed the patio to a path that cut through the brush to his studio a short distance away.

  When he bought the property and its three derelict stone buildings in the oldest, historic part of town, research revealed that the land had once been part of Mission San Rafael, which still occupied a five-acre enclosure on the adjacent property and still shared a common rear wall with his compound. He wasn’t able to identify the original use of the ruins he purchased, but the largest of the three buildings became his studio,

  An old, rough-barked mesquite threw a lacy shade over the studio’s courtyard and heavy wooden door, to the left of which was a niche in the stone wall where a marigold grew from a clay pot. He retrieved a key from behind the pot and unlocked the door.

  The place was quiet, beshadowed, and slightly musty; its cavernous height and thick walls made the slightest sounds echo, and the strike of his own footsteps hung in the air of the high space. Coarse, natural muslin drapes covered the tall windows on both sides of the room, and Ross went to the first window on his left and threw back the drapes. A steep shaft of light plummeted to the limestone floor in sudden, brilliant silence, and dust from the long-closed curtains floated and swirled in the brightness. He made his way around the room, throwing open the drapes on each of the eight towering windows.

  When the room was lighted, he walked slowly from one end of the studio to the other, eating his peach, surveying the clutter he had left behind a year ago, and savoring the peculiar pleasures of returning home after a long absence. It wasn’t until he made his way back to the front door that he noticed the crates he had sent from Paris. There was a lot to do before he could even begin thinking about the new commission.

  • • •

  The very next day after arriving he got an e-mail from Marian demanding that he pack up everything she had left there and send it to her immediately. He was relieved that she hadn’t insisted on coming over to get the stuff herself.

  So he spent the better part of the first week searching for the remains of Marian’s presence. It was like cleaning up shattered glass. Everything had been shared for so long that it was easy to overlook the things that were exclusively hers. He went through the rooms again and again, finding pieces of Marian’s life that stubbornly persisted in hiding from him in plain sight.

  When that was done and the crates were shipped off, he began on the studio. Mrs. Scherz had kept the house in good shape, but the studio had remained closed, waiting for him. So he pitched in to put things in order, unpacking the Paris crates in the process. Another three days were consumed by these chores. With all of this tended to, he allowed himself a couple of days to simply wander around the compound and assess the condition of things.

  He was surprised to find that despite his relief at having freed himself from Marian, the house and the studio felt different to him from when he’d left them. There was a sense, almost a smell, of absence that hadn’t been there before. He tried to put it out of his mind.

  One afternoon he picked up the telephone and called Amado to tell him he was home.

  Chapter 4

  Franz Graber, whose family was among the several large waves of German immigrants to settle in the Texas Hill Country in the mid–nineteenth century, had given his tavern on the river the sentimental name of Mein Paradies. But no one had ever called it that. It was known to all merely as Graber’s. It occupied a rock building on a quiet street sheltered by towering pecan trees that cast a deep, unbroken shade through the long Texas summers.

  It was early evening as Ross approached the tavern along the broken sidewalk. A small green neon sign depicting the disregarded name flanked by a cactus and a palm tree hung above the front door, casting a desultory lime wash upon the stone facade. Twenty steps away a broad concrete staircase turned and descended to the narrow Rio Encinal, which coiled sluggishly through the center of San Rafael, its banks overcast by old cypresses that rose darkly from the embankment. A little farther along the river a scatter of restaurants and bars threw colored lights onto the water. They belonged to the modern town. Graber’s still belonged to the 1940s. It had changed so little over the decades that it continued to be rediscovered by different generations of patrons who developed an affectionate loyalty to it.

  He waited at the bar in the crowded front room while Nata, Graber’s Mexican waitress of most seniority, went out to the courtyard to see if any tables would be available soon. He got a Pacifico, his favorite Mexican beer, from the barmaid and had just turned around to survey the crowd when he saw Nata across the room, raising her chin at him from the doorway that led out to the sprawling patio.

  Every chair and table in the garden was full, and the tin lanterns draped between the palms and pecans and oaks dappled the setting with pools of amber glow. During the day the patio was alive with parakeets and parrots that roamed among the trees and vines, shrieking and whistling and strutting their plumage. But now they were silent in the darkness.

  He sat down at the marble-topped table and took a deep breath of the evening air. It felt vaguely of the river and carried a sweet waft of the honeysuckle that banked up against the stone wall twenty yards away.

  Scanning the courtyard, he nodded at a few familiar faces and sipped his beer. When his eyes reached the back door of the tavern again, Amado was standing there, looking into the patio twilight. Ross raised his hand, and Amado saw him, grinned, and started over.

  Amado Mateos was an elegant man who possessed a tranquil manner that one seldom saw anymore. In an age in which no one had enough time, Amado appeared to have an abundance of it. He dressed with a cavalier carelessness in expensive clothes, and in the torrid summers in San Rafael he wore mostly tropical linens in shades of cream and ivory, all of which set off nicely his longish dark hair that was now graying heavily at the temples.

  “Ross!” Amado approached the table and shook Ross’s hand and slapped him good-naturedly on the back. “Welcome home,” he said, pulling out a chair and sitting down. He nodded at the beer. “The first Pacifico since you’ve been back in the New World, huh?”

  “Hardly.”

  Amado laughed.

  The two men had been close friends since they met as students in Paris. A native Mexican, Amado had spent his entire life in Europe, where his father represented a Mexican corporation. Now he divided his time among his principal home in London, where his novels were published, his family home in Mexico City, and San Rafael.

  For the next half hour they brought each other up-to-date on what had happened in their lives in the past six months since they last met in London. When Amado asked about Marian, Ross said, “Long story.” Amado nodded and let it go at that. He could be patient.

  Nata came to take their orders, and they both chose one of Graber’s serious Mexican dinners. Though always savory, these dishes were notoriously unpredictable. Graber’s cooks were all Mexican nationals, and their interpretations of the advertised dishes could be idiosyncratic, sometimes bearing little resemblance to the descriptions on the menu. If you didn’t like surprises, you didn’t order food at Graber’s.

  They ate slowly and kept talking while the tables around them emptied and filled again. Eventually they finished, their plates were taken away, and they ordered another beer. Amado un
wrapped his cigar and lighted it with a match. As he drew the tobacco to life, smoke billowed and its pungent aroma replaced the light fragrance of honeysuckle, and the mood of the evening changed.

  Finally Ross told him about Marian.

  “Jesus Christ,” Amado said softly, his eyes fixed on Ross from across the table. “Well . . . damn . . .”

  Amado knew Marian about as well as anyone besides Ross, and he was well aware that her outrageous tantrums were always just a flash of the eyes away.

  “You know,” Amado said after some thought, “if a man and a woman hope to have any magic at all between them, they have to be willing to be a little blind about each other.” He paused, drew on the cigar. “Regrettably, that practically invites grief into the equation, doesn’t it? Well. It’s a lovely paradox.”

  He shook his head and smoked, regarding Ross with a languid gaze. “She was handsome, Marian was, but God, she was fierce, a passionate woman.” He paused. “You have a predilection for fierce women.”

  “Sure as hell seems that way.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Maybe.”

  “It’s ironic.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It is, because you’re particularly ill suited to deal with a woman of that kind.”

  “Particularly ill suited.”

  “You’re too self-absorbed,” Amado said flatly.

  He looked at Amado.

  “This isn’t news to you, Ross,” Amado persisted. “You’re brutally honest with yourself, aren’t you? About most things, anyway. It’s your trademark. But, in this one thing you deceive yourself. You don’t want to deal with it.”